Author: Ophelia Benson

It may be that some of what people mean, when they talk about other ways of knowing and how different they are from science, is that there is a whole range of subjects that are interesting to talk about and think about that are inherently fuzzy – that are not yes or no issues – that are not purely factual – that are not helped or enhanced by experiment or testing (though data may be relevant); and that all that matters because it’s where we live. Stories (or ‘literature’) are about that stuff: they perform, illustrate, enact the iffy quality, the uncertainties, the ambiguities, the negative capability.

None of that is really knowledge – but it rests on a vast amount of background knowledge – including theory of mind. Austistics aren’t good at it, for that reason.

Stories are in a way part of that background knowledge. Our sense of how people behave, how we should behave, how things can go wrong, how quarrels can be fixed, and so on ad infinitum, is woven out of our experience with people and the stories we know; that combines to make up our implicit background knowledge.

In that sense, stories can be seen as a kind of knowledge, but all the same, it’s not the kind of knowledge we cite as we would cite historical or anthropological knowledge. We weave it into our background knowledge but it has a different status, different from experience as well as empirical knowledge. We think or say ‘That happened to me/a friend/my sister’ but we don’t say ‘That happened to Hamlet/Lizzie Bennett/Huck Finn.’ If we refer to stories we say things like ‘It’s like that situation in “King Lear”‘ or ‘This sounds like something from “The Office.””

In any case, all that isn’t a ‘different way of knowing’ – it’s a mixture of the ordinary way of knowing and other kinds of thought and feeling, none of which is weird or spooky or about the supernatural. None of it is particularly relevant to religion. Religion includes some stories…but that’s not spooky, it’s just more stories. It includes some moral talk, but again, that’s not peculiar to religion, and religion doesn’t add anything apart from claims about magical beings, which is fine in fairly tales and magic realism but not to be taken literally.

This does perhaps give a more satisfactory account of literature and stories – they do thicken and enrich our background knowledge: our sense of how people do behave, can behave, might behave.

Gossip is the same thing. Stories are fictional gossip; literature is the higher gossip. Some people perhaps think that religion too is the same kind of thing – but if so they’re dead wrong. Religion imports all sorts of extras that confuse the issues, create new motivations, raise irrelevant fears. The background knowledge is a secular subject or set of subjects, and adding souls and immortality and a deity changes that. We need to know how to behave in this world, the real one, where we’re not immortal and we don’t have souls and there is no god to supervise us.

Oh dear god, oh jeezis, oh hell.

She told me she had given birth in a country convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary on 5 July 1952. She was 18 when she met a young man who bought her a toffee apple on a warm autumn evening at the county fair. “I had just left convent school,” she said with an air of wistful regret. “I went in there when my mother died, when I was six and a half, and I left at 18 not knowing a thing about the facts of life. I didn’t know where babies came from … ” When her pregnancy became obvious, her family had Philomena “put away” with the nuns.

But after that blissful start, things didn’t go so well for Philomena.

After her baby, Anthony, was born, the mother superior threatened Philomena with damnation if ever she breathed a word about her “guilty secret”…Philomena was one of thousands of Irish women sent to convents in the 1950s and 60s, taken away from their homes and families because the Catholic church said single mothers were moral degenerates who could not be allowed to keep their children…After giving birth, the girls were allowed to leave the convent only if they or their family could pay the nuns £100. It was a substantial sum, and those who couldn’t afford it – the vast majority – were kept in the convent for three years, working in kitchens, greenhouses and laundries or making rosary beads and religious artefacts, while the church kept the profits from their labour.

In other words they were arrested, imprisoned, and enslaved by the Catholic church. This is not news, of course, but it’s always useful to be reminded of it. Especially in a world where we keep getting told and told and told by Karen Armstrong and her fans that ‘compassion is at the heart of every great religion.’ If that were even a little bit true, the savage unrelenting brutality of the Irish catholic church would have been impossible.

Even crueller than the work was the fact that mothers had to care for their children, developing maternal ties and affection that were to be torn asunder at the end of their three-year sentence. Like all the other girls, Philomena Lee was made to sign a renunciation document agreeing to give up her three-year-old son and swearing on oath: “I relinquish full claim for ever to my child and surrender him to Sister Barbara.”…Philomena says she fought against signing the terrible undertaking. “Oh God, my heart. I didn’t want him to go. I just craved and begged them to please let me keep him. None of us wanted to give our babies up, none of us. But what else could we do? They just said, ‘You have to sign these papers.’”

Compassion is at the heart of every great religion.

Philomena embarked on a lonely, desperate search to find him. She went back to the convent in Roscrea several times between 1956 and 1989 and asked the nuns to help her. Each time they refused, brandishing her sworn undertaking that she would “never attempt to see” her child…Early on in the search I realised that the Irish Catholic hierarchy had been engaged in what amounted to an illicit baby trade. From the end of the second world war until the 1970s, it considered the thousands of souls born in its care to be the church’s own property. With or without the agreement of their mothers, it sold them to the highest bidder…[H]e was haunted by half-remembered visions of his first three years in Ireland and by a lifelong yearning to find his mother. Separated by fate, mother and child spent decades looking for each other, repeatedly thwarted by the refusal of the nuns to reveal information, each of them unaware that the other was also yearning and searching.

There’s no happy ending. Read the whole thing. Meditate on compassion.

There are a lot of interesting comments on Other ways of evaluating truth claims; be sure to check them out. Josh Rosenau replied a couple of times, and many interesting things came up. In particular, Richard Wein gave us a passage from a statement by the University of New Mexico history department published at the NCSE site:

Science is one way of knowing the world ; it is not the only way of knowing, and it is certainly not the only way of knowing everything. Indeed, in the grand scheme of human thought and action, the domain of science is modest — the realm of natural phenomena. Science, as it has developed historically, will not and can never tell us anything about the nature of beauty, or the attributes of justice, or the qualities of goodness. There are many ideas and many truths (like the belief that all people are created equal, or that they have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) upon which science must remain mute. Supernatural creation stories may, in fact, be true; but science, as only one way of knowing, will never tell us this. Science is simply not equipped to speak on supernatural issues, and it would be a mistake to try to force it to do so.

That’s from a section with a lot of statements, so the NCSE may not endorse every word of every statement…But then as an organization for the promotion of science education maybe it really shouldn’t publish hooey like that at all? Maybe it really shouldn’t publish statements by academics that say ‘Supernatural creation stories may, in fact, be true; but science, as only one way of knowing, will never tell us this’? Because that is ridiculous?

No, supernatural creation stories may not in fact be true. You might as well say that it may be true that I was born of the mating between an alligator and a mushroom four thousand years ago. That may not be true! And science, ‘only one way of knowing’ or not, will indeed tell us this. There are factual claims that can be falsified by science, and supernatural creation stories are that kind of factual claim. All the more so if they are breezily put in the plural! ‘Supernatural creation stories may, in fact, be true’; what, all of them? So the world may have been created by Raven, and also may have been created by JHWH? Sure, sure, everybody’s welcome, all shall have prizes; all the stories are (maybe) true, no stories shall be left out; if they contradict each other they contradict each other; yee-ha. Such is life in the U of New Mexico history department, apparently. But what is that kind of gibberish doing at the NCSE?