The New Republic

I agree that requiring religious truth to be falsifiable places a burden on it, but the reason for requiring falsifiability or testability is to provide some arena for discourse.  If there is no falsifiability to religious truth, then what distinguishes it from pure assertion?  Without evidence (such as miracles), then one person's revelation is just a story to another.  How can a believer convince a nonbeliever of anything without something external to point to to support their claim?

Personal revelation is not something that a non-believer can gainsay, but the problem is not that believers claim a relationship with the divine, it is that (at least in this country) believers are trying to make arguments about how we should live and what policies to adopt based on those revelations.  As a nonbeliever, I would like to have a dialog, but without that handle of falsifiability, there doesn't seem to be any place to start that isn't already a dead end.

- japepper

January 27, 2009 at 5:39pm

When it comes down to it, nothing is provable, not science or faith, in fact about the only thing I am certain that exists is my penis (even my own existence otherwise I am sometimes in doubt). In fact I shall coin a new dictum. My penis exists therefore I am.

- blackton

January 27, 2009 at 5:50pm

Yes, "religious truth is different" in that it's not truth.  I think you need to defend this concept of revelation as a legitimate way of knowing anything outside your head.  Why isn't it merely a profound feeling?  Suppose someone were to say to you, "I spoke with God, and he told me to kill the infidels.  I am certain that that's what he said.  I felt it so strongly in my heart."  I have a response to him.  You don't.  My response is, "That's silly; God doesn't speak to anybody; there's no God anyone knows about; these are just strong feelings that you have.  So, you know, don't be an asshole because you think there's anything out there that wants you to be."  Your response is, "Well, my revelation differs from your revelation."  But both are so "absolute"!  (Indeed, the existence of conflicting revelations is a pretty easy way to pierce the supposed inpenatrable absoluteness, unless, one supposes, there are as many gods as revelations.)

- jhildner

January 27, 2009 at 6:04pm

Yes, we want religion to play by the rules of reason, and, yes, that would quickly produce no religion.  There aren't any other rules.  You artifically limit reason's empire, Damon.  If the question is one of fact, there's only one way of knowing what it is.  What's more, most people, including you, are convinced of that, because when the real way of knowing (reason) conflicts with the made-up way of knowing (faith), you choose reason every time, e.g., when it comes to things like the age of the Earth or evolution or astronomy.  Sure, you work hard to make your religion fit around it, but you are *forced* to make it fit around it.  Only ignoramuses and jackasses do the reverse -- try to fit reason around their religion.  The reason we regard them as ignoramuses and jackasses is because we've already accepted that reason is obviously the superior, legitimate way of knowing anything.

- jhildner

January 27, 2009 at 6:20pm

There's no greater moral value in one epistemic standard than the other.  The reason public discourse hinges on rationality and empiricism is because that's where we can find common ground.  Finding common ground has no point when it comes to private belief so there's no real point in subjecting personal religious belief to standards of falsifiability.

- Simon Greenwood

January 28, 2009 at 9:25am

This whole religion v. science debate has gone off the rails long ago.  Religion already has a limited means of testing it's claims--if a religion claims something that necessarily leads to an absurd conclusion, then that claim is false.

If a religion's central tenets are incompatible with scientific truth, then that religion can't be true.  If a religion's tenet's are compatible with scientific truth, then it might be true.  We can't test, say, Christianity by trying to prove that Jesus was divine, because we can't prove that.  We can judge whether or not the doctrine that Jesus is divine contradicts anything we know by natural reason.  If it does, then Jesus cannot be divine.  If it doesn't, then the belief is not absurd.

- ryanburke

January 28, 2009 at 10:52am

No, simon, rationality is at the center of our discourse because it's reliable.  If you want to know where the bank is, you can look it up in the phone book.  You don't pray to the sky or bang your head against the wall.  I'm not sure that asserting that the bank is on Elm when it's really on Oak, evidence to the contrary, is *immoral*, but it's certainly not true.  Likewise, and here's where you guys miss the point, it's also not true to say that you *know* that there is an invisible bank on Elm.  Is it possible?  Sure, in the trivial sense that anything is possible.  But faith is not saved by saying that its claims are possible in that way, because you haven't justified the *faith* -- the belief that there actually is an invisible bank on Elm.  The guy who claims, in non-falsifiable fashion, that there's an invisible bank on Elm is crazy, despite the fact that you can't conclusively disprove his assertion.  Meanwhile, simon, your suggestion that there's no point in subjecting private religious belief to rational analysis ignores the occasion of Coyne's article -- the attempt to deny basic scientific understandings of biology in our classrooms.  A ridiculous number of people in this country deny evolution, because they've been brainwashed by irrational private belief.  I think it's a good idea to encourage a reasonable rather than fantastical engagement with the universe.  Why is that wrong?

- jhildner

January 28, 2009 at 11:59am

Put aside the question of religion. Limiting our acceptance of "truth" only to those things that both can be disproven and have been reasonably proven shuts off most of the grounds of human knowledge from knowability. Is it a true statement to say that Grant Wood's landscape "Young Corn" is art or that it is beautiful? Apparently not, because "is art or is not art" and "is endowed with beauty or is not endowed with beauty" are not disprovable statements.

So. Does art exist? Is beauty a true attribute of objects in the world? If so, then valid knowledge does not necessarily depend on the falsifiability of truth claims. If not, then, well, actually there is no "if not." Whether it is a natural attribute of the human mind, or whether it is an inherent attribute of the culture we have created for our minds, art does exist and beauty is a true attribute of objects in the world. To invalidate the possibility of either art or beauty is to demand the wholesale transformation of the human mind as we experience it into something different than what it is and possibly different than what it can be. It is simply to play semantic games with the definition of "knowledge" and declare that the word means something other than what the speakers of the language mean when they use the word.

So. You can keep your Prokofiev and your "New Republic" and your "Deadwood" and your Camus and with them your Pentecostalism and your Sufism, or you can keep none of them. But any claims against the truth value of religious assertions are necessarily equally valid against most cultural, and even a large proportion of scientific, assertions. This line of epistemological reasoning isn't about science versus religion, it's about science versus both culture and the experience of individual human selfhood.

(Conversely, I would suggest that any religious claim that is disprovable is not a true religious claim, but rather a symptom of idolatry. Which is to say, there is a lot of idolatry going on in the religious marketplace. There are a lot of Americans who call themselves Christians but who actually worship the Bible as an idol. And who aren't even good idolators, given how few of them even bother to read the object of their misplaced worship, if surveys of public religious knowledge are to be trusted.)

- rhubarbs

January 28, 2009 at 12:21pm

Rhubarbs:  You're neglecting the difference between facts and feelings.  With respect to facts, their truth is a matter of reasoned inquiry.  It is undeniably a fact that therre are things we call art and things we call beautiful.  In that trivial sense, of course "art" and "beautiful" things exist.  But most people recognize that whether something is art (in the sense of good art) or beautiful is subjective, and largely a matter of taste.  (That doesn't mean we can't disucss it profitably, and perhaps change minds.)  I don't believe that anybody, Rhubarbs, claims that he "knows" that such-and-such is, in an objective sense, actually beautiful.  Sometimes I say about a movie, "That was objectively awful."  That's an example of hyperbole, because a movie can't really be objectively awful (or I can't claim that, anyway).  In the words of Jeff Lebowski, "that's just, like, your opinion, man."  I think you're the one being slippery with words, including such feelings as "most of the grounds for human knowledge."

- jhildner

January 28, 2009 at 12:57pm

I would like to start by attesting to the Truth of Blackton's Penis.  All hail.

As to the rest of it, the question that lies before us, as I think Linker touches on here and elsewhere, is not "Which worldview is true?" but rather "Why do you give a fuck?"  Specifically, why do you give such a fuck about others' beliefs that you feel the need to constantly attack not just the loudmouths on the other side, but normal people who keep their faith to themselves?  

For example, Coyne worries that 75% of Americans reject evolution.  Personally, I think that is a load of shit, because I don't know *anyone* under the age of 60 who is a Creationist, and I live in freakin' Ohio, home of the Creation museum.  But let's say it's true - so what?  Obviously a very large number of those people, possibly even a majority of them, must have voted for the very liberal (and pro-evolution) Mr. Obama, no?  So they seem to be able, contra, for instance, Bill Maher, to dissociate their religious beliefs from their political actions.  So, again, why do you care what they believe about evolution?

If your answer is that they try to legislate their religion, I would agree that might be a problem, but disagree on its prevalence. I think what most of them want to legislate is their morality.  But then, so do I.  So do you, unless you believe we should only have laws about fiscal policy.  And here is the key point about that: the fundamental principals of morality cannot be scientifically proven.  Joe Redneck believes murder is wrong because of the 6th Commandment - do you have a more logical reason?  Oh, we can argue about what *constitutes* murder, but if I don't believe that killing another human is ever wrong, then there is no purely scientific Q.E.D. you can present to me that can logically convince me otherwise.  So if you have no better rationale, why do you feel the need to disparage his?

Of course, most atheists, like most religious, keep their beliefs to themselves.  My own father-in-law, I recently discovered, doesn't believe in "all that God and afterlife stuff", to use his words.  I've known the man for fifteen years, and called him "Dad" for ten, but I never knew that about him until he happened to mention it in a discussion about what to do if and when he dies.  I never knew because I've never tried to convert him and he's never tried to convert me.  It is only the extremely devout that are unable to rest knowing there are those who do not share their beliefs.  So the answer to my original question - why do you give a fuck? - is that most atheists really don't.  Only the most devout, the "fundamentalist sects" of atheists, if you will, feel the need to be so obnoxious about it.  And that is what the Mahers and Dawkins' of the world really are - the fundamentalists, the televangelists, of atheism.  Do not aspire to be like them.

- dhauck

January 28, 2009 at 2:29pm

Rhubarbs cont'd:  "So. You can keep your Prokofiev and your 'New Republic' and your 'Deadwood' and your Camus and with them your Pentecostalism and your Sufism, or you can keep none of them. But any claims against the truth value of religious assertions are necessarily equally valid against most cultural, and even a large proportion of scientific, assertions."

Religious assertions are not the same as opinions about TV shows.  Their difference is key to understanding why religious assertions are wrong.  To say that "Deadwood is a great show" is to express a personal opinon.  To say that "there is a God, the purpose of life is to achieve oneness with Him, and that is objectively true for all humanity," is to express a belief that a divine force outside yourself actually exists and that everyone's supposed to become one with it.  Such expressions are typically accompanied by more specific dictates about the nature and history of the divine force, how you're supposed to interact with it, what happens when you die, and so on.  These are not expressions of personal opinion or viewpoint, cultural or otherwise.  These are not expressions of personal truth -- that is, what's in your head, what you feel.  Rather, they are assertions of fact, purportedly just as true as the fact that the bank is on Oak, and true for everyone.  This is where religious claims -- all religious claims -- go too far.

It's all well and good to say that you can keep your Deadwood and your Sufism, but Deadwood fans don't claim that their opinion is objectively true.  Believers do.  They have a feeling, and they call it a fact.  But you can't feel a fact, and we all agree on that usually.  The urge to aggrandize one's strong feelings -- to say that they say something about the universe outside our heads -- is something that humans do,  but the fact that humans do it doesn't mean it's not fatuous.  Humans do a lot of dumb things.  That becomes clear when we hear them say things like, "I know in my heart that O.J. is innocent" or "I know in my heart that the Earth is 10,000 years old" or "I know in my heart that that stain on the viaduct that kind of looks like the Virgin Mary is a miraculous message from God."  The response to these confused souls is a simple one:  "Your heart's not a knower; it's a feeler."  I fail to apprehend a bright-line distinction between these somewhat mundane questions of fact and the proposition that, say, that there is an all-powerful, benevolent force we call God who created and governs the universe.  You might say, well, we have answers to the mundane questions, but not to the God question.  (You might also say that we don't have answers to the invisible-pink-unicorn-in-your-living-room question, but, for some reason, nobody asks that question.)  True enough, but we don't usually fill in the blanks with assertions of knowledge we don't have.  Rather, we suppose or speculate or hope.  If I didn't know which street the bank was on, I'd guess, but I wouldn't pretend I knew.  Religious people do more than suppose or speculate or hope.  They claim knowledge of facts that they simply don't have.  Why isn't that obviously the case?

- jhildner

January 28, 2009 at 2:48pm

I truly hope Mr. Linker is reading the comments on his blog and will, either in comments or in subsequent posts, address issues that are raised in them.

There is a problem with the flow of Mr. Linker's thoughts, at least to my mind.  He states, "But isn't (non-watered-down) religious truth essentially different? Isn't religious truth inevitably grounded in a personal revelation whose absoluteness renders it incapable of being disproved?"

Doesn't this simply lead back to Mr. Coyne's deism, though?  A theism -- Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. -- is positing something far more factual than the mere knowledge of a god-figure through revelation.  For Mr. Linker's thought to be true, he must also accept a kind of weak relativism regarding various faiths -- that each one, from his own Catholicism to Hinduism and beyond -- is merely a cultural lens intended to distill and make sense of this revelation.  If the  truth of his religion is not available to all, why does it then occupy an "exalted grandeur" over the more parochial and widely available truths science and reason reveal?  Otherwise, the truth-positive claims his specific faith generates, if they are not taken metaphorically in their entirety, offer no justification for themselves that is at all perceptible to those not already inclined to accept them.

Indeed, I think Mr. Linker utterly fails to grasp Coyne's argument when he states "Or does he [Coyne]  want to insist that religion play by the rules of science (which excludes the possibility of personal revelation a priori) -- a demand that would (in theory) quickly produce a world without religion?"  Personal revelation would be the only currently available evidence that could be accepted as credible under a scientific mindset; the problem there is that it is evidence but not necessarily of something we know (or even can know) for certain.  If we are to accept revelation as evidence of a perceived truth, wholly "other" to empirical evidence, then Mr. Linker must account for how those revelations of that same truth lead to widely variant theisms.  He can't, in any form other than a weak relativism that posits no more truth to the claims of his faith than to any others.

- jfelliott

January 28, 2009 at 3:54pm

dhauck:  I'll get to why I give a fuck in a second, but first, I do *not* want to legislate my morality.  If I did, a much different group of people would be in prison.  For example, I don't want to lock up the merely mean and cruel.  I don't want to make adultery a crime.  I don't want to force the obscenely wealthy to give away most of their money to worthy causes.  I don't want to outlaw the expression of odious opinions or groups dedicated to their expression, such as the KKK or those assholes who disrupt military funerals with their homophobic protests.  What's more, I don't want kids to pledge allegiance to my belief system every morning.  You get the picture.  None of us, in fact, wants to legislate our morality as a general matter, because our concepts of general right and wrong on the one hand and just and efficient government on the other are different quetsions.  When we talk about government, we focus on things like freedom and equality before the law and what's good for society -- personal morality often takes a back seat, and that's true for all of us.  

Where I disagree with the fundamentlists is that they often *do* want to legislate their personal morality, concepts of decent government be damned.  They're illiberal, and that's the objection.  I place a greater emphasis on the pluralistic nature of our society and the need to be sensitive to that if we're to be true to our notions of freedom and equality and also just get along.  Politics in the U.S. is not merely, as you suggest, a tug of war between competing fascisms.  (This is actually the issue Linker has been talking about in some of his recent posts.  He wonders to what extent liberalism is in fact merely just another fascism -- that is, using fascism hyperbolically, an undue imposition of personal values shared by only some on the public at large.  I don't think it is.  To suggest that denying the power to be authoritarian is itself authoritarian is, I think, merely to posit a cute but unedifying puzzle -- sort of like "we don't tolerate intolerance.")

Okay:  Why do I give a fuck:  First, I find it interesting, and interesting to talk about.  Second, I just like truth and dislike ignorance.  That's true for most people, and it's something we're capable of discussing.  Third, I'm more concerned than you are about the negative influence of religion in the following ways: it can stifle the advancement of science which is key to the advancement of humankind; it can potently justify cruelty, such as homophobia; it can potently justify murder, such as 9/11; it can potently justify a rejection of liberal values, as discussed above.  What's more, it can lead generally to the hardening of hearts and minds, and it's one of the biggest forces of pointless division in our world.  And for what?  Nothing, I argue.  Moreover, my guess is that feelings of morality would survive religious abolition -- that if we stopped teaching our kids about gods and saints and holy books and merely taught them a more-or-less maintream view of right and wrong, morality as we understand it would remain pretty much intact while religion would go away, as it's done in Western Europe to a large extent, and that wouldn't be bad.

Now, I don't claim that religion is the "root of all evil," or that all those who have religious belief are bad people -- of course they aren't.  I don't even know whether the world, as a whole, would be better or worse off without religious belief -- Europe seems to do okay, but I know many who say that they would feel hopeless without it.  (The best arguments for religion are Martin Luther King and Sophie Scholl, but Stalin is not an argument against atheism -- communism as practiced under the cult of Stalin was just another religion.)

Also, I have no desire to be mean to nice, religious people.  I do think, however, that those who focus on supposedly harmless religious moderation neglect the extent to which the religious way of thinking is itself a problem in that it gives room and lends legitimacy to extremism.  The language of faith is very strong.  It's been suggested to me that religious people often don't quite mean all that they say.  They step back from the crazy when appropriate.  But, when you keep saying it, and expressing reverence for it, there's a danger that some nuts will take you seriously, that they won't have the wisdom or judgment to step back.  (Reminds me of the movie Rope, where Jimmy Stewart's professor casually talks at a dinner party about how the world would be better off if we started killing off some folks.  He's doing a cute intellectual exercise, but two of his students decide to strangle someone.)

Okay, maybe you're not convinced by that.  I think it's at least a real question.  Meanwhile, I'm not going up to religious moderates on the street and asking them to give up their religion, even though religious people routinely approach strangers to preach their viewpoint.  I'm not asking that my supposition that there is no God be enshrined in law, even as the belief that there is a God routinely receives official endorsement.  I don't say "I'm not praying for you, because there is no God" or "Nothing bless you."  I don't talk about religious beliefs in contexts where it would be pointless or inappropriate, just as I don't talk about any controversial topic, like politics, in contexts where it would be pointless or inappropriate.

However, there's nothing generally wrong with publicly expressing a controversial viewpoint.  You're applying a standard of what's appropriate to say in certain personal conversations to what's appropriate to put on a TV show or in a book or in a comment to a post that's about the subject.  Those aren't the same contexts.  It's not impolite to write a book advocating atheism any more than its impolite to write a book extolling the virtues of Christianity -- and there are a lot more of those.  (I assure you, they are every bit as "obnoxious"-seeming to the non-believer as, I suppose, a non-believer's tract must seem to a believer.  I try to avoid worrying about tone, though, and go instead for the substance.)

- jhildner

January 28, 2009 at 5:35pm

Test post - is it just not posting on this article?  My response has not posted twice now - let's try it from another computer.

- dhauck

January 31, 2009 at 8:58pm