Author: Ophelia Benson

One commenter on Josh’s post asked for just one example of another “way of knowing” and another was ready with an answer.

Let’s see … do you has a “significant other” … a person you love? How do you know that you “love” that person? Note that I am not asking about hormones or brain chemistry (unless, in fact, you have measured your hormone levels or your brain chemistry in order to decide if, in truth, you “love” that person … in which case, I feel very sorry for you). The question is how YOU know you love that person.

So…the claim is that there are “other ways of knowing” and one of them is knowing you love someone.

But there’s so much wrong with that it’s hard to know where to begin, so I won’t bother trying to say all that’s wrong with it. But one thing is that knowledge of one’s own emotions is not automatically or necessarily really knowledge – in other words, we can get our own emotions wrong. Another thing is that it’s not really the kind of knowledge that’s at issue (which is probably why it’s not usually even referred to as knowledge). A more relevant kind of knowledge would be knowledge that a person you love loves you. That’s more relevant because it is knowledge about a part of the world outside the self, so it’s more closely related to science than introspection is. So – the question then becomes ‘how do you know that person loves you?’ Well guess what – sometimes you don’t!

This is not a big news shock, right? We can get these things wrong. It happens. And in any case, we’re not going by some special spooky kind of knowledge – we’re going by various kinds of empirical knowledge. We don’t decide that people love us for no reason – we don’t decide that some random acquaintance loves us just because we have an intuition or an insight. We “know” that particular people love us for reasons – we have reasons for the “knowledge” – and those reasons are hooked up to the world; they’re not weird or special or supernatural. They’re rooted in history and behavior and words and actions.

And even with all that, we can be wrong. We don’t know, and we often know we don’t know. Suppose X starts acting like someone who doesn’t love us a bit – suppose X becomes distant and cold and irritable. We may want to decide that we still “know” X loves us; we may decide that X is acting this way for reasons that are nothing to do with us. We may be right – and we may be wrong. By the same token, we may decide that X does not love us, and there again we may be right or we may be wrong. In other words – we don’t know. Knowledge that people love us isn’t inherently reliable knowledge at all, not of its nature. Of course it’s good to trust people’s love unless there’s a good reason not to, but that’s not because it’s reliable knowledge – it’s for other reasons.

So, no, the ‘love’ answer doesn’t cut it.

Josh Rosenau did a second post about ways of knowing and vampires and knowledge and a whole slew of other things – a very long, tangled, complicated post that still didn’t manage to clarify what he is trying to say, which is why I asked a couple of questions as soon as I’d read the post, but answer came there none. As Josh Slocum pointed out yesterday, trying to get clarification from Rosenau is very like trying to get clarification from Chris Mooney – hopelessly futile. This is especially ironice because he says ‘I think there’s some sort of progress underway in the comments to my original post.’ Well if he thinks that why doesn’t he help out a little more?

It’s hard to find a claim that’s clear enough to dispute – but here is one:

My view is that science has no monopoly on truth claims nor on knowledge, and that other ways of evaluating truth claims are not problematic so long as they are not imposed on others, and don’t interfere with anyone’s ability to pursue their own course.

Since he didn’t bother to limit that very sweeping claim, we might as well assume he really did mean that his view is that all other ways of evaluating truth claims are non-problematic under the stipulated conditions. If that is what he meant, he committed himself to saying that other ways of evaluating truth claims, no matter how ludicrous and incompetent, are okay in schools and universities, in factories and on construction sites, in journalism and scholarship, in hospitals and courtrooms, in government and business, in social life and conversation, in everyday practical problem-solving and grocery shopping. So the idea is that people just getting everything wildly wrong all over the place because they’re using other ways of evaluating truth claims is perfectly all right provided there’s no imposition or interference.

Well, I don’t actually think he does think that – I don’t for a second think he’s that batty. But that is what he said! And that’s the problem with this whole project of his – he seems to be incapable of pinning down his own meaning carefully enough that he can manage to avoid making batty claims. But that is exactly the problem you run into when you start trying to defend “other ways of knowing” – either you’re so vague that no one can figure out what you’re saying or you make claims that are simply ridiculous.

This is the risk the NCSE takes if it commits itself to claiming that religion and science are epistemically compatible. Either it has to talk meaningless fluff, which seems amateurish and humiliating, or it has to talk plain nonsense, which seems inimical to science education.

It’s B&W’s birthday again. Well actually it was a week ago, but other things were more urgent to post, and I’m always late anyway, so close enough.

Seven years old. Why, when B&W started, there were no proper roads between Missouri and Oregon, and credit default swaps were things that no nice girls would wear after nine in the evening. When B&W started Pepsi hadn’t been invented yet, and dogs still wore corsets, and families still gathered around the radio to listen to Jay Leno make fun of Jerry Seinfeld’s dinner jacket. When B&W started people still thought Cream of Wheat was food, and you could get a pound of assorted chocolates for a penny, and milk arrived at the back door every morning as if by magic. When B&W started Jefferson was in the White House and LaGuardia was mayor of New York. B&W started a loooooooong time ago, man. Many happy returns.

What nice people there are running Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s upper house of Parliament has condemned the presidential pardon of a journalist sentenced to 20 years in prison for downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam…The upper house “expresses its strongest concerns and annoyance and considers this decision contrary to the Islamic values and the laws in place in the country”, said the statement signed by the speaker of the upper house on Monday. It called on Kambakhsh to serve his term, and said that those convicted of apostasy and hatred of Islam must be punished.

So the upper house of Afghanistan’s Parliament thinks apostasy and hatred of Islam in the form of downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam must be punished with 20 years in prison if not execution. So anything short of that, like permanent exile from home and friends and relations, is contrary to Islamic values. Well how horrible Islamic values must be then.

Josh Rosenau talks about ‘ways of knowing’ and the non-empirical nature of the claims made by most religions.

It’s certainly true that the Jewish Bible can be read as making a number of empirical claims, for instance about the timing of human origins…But that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible for the last couple thousand years. Maimonides, writing well before any of the modern squabbles over evolution, explained:

“Ignorant and superficial readers take them [certain obscure passages] in a literal, not in a figurative sense. Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain the figure, or merely suggest that the terms are figurative.”

That won’t work – that quotation doesn’t back up the claim that “that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible,” it backs up a different claim, which is that that’s not how Maimonides understood the Bible. Notice that he’s complaining of all those other fools who understand it the other way! Granted he doesn’t give us a demographic breakdown or an opinion poll – but he does say that both ignorant people and well informed people get it wrong, and he doesn’t sound optimistic about it. Rosenau seems to be doing an Armstrong here – pretending that a minority view of religion is in fact all but universal.

To call these “empirical” claims then seems to miss the point. They are certainly truth claims, but not claims about what literally happened. I like to compare this to the non-literal truth claims of good novels, or good stories more broadly. I think we can all agree that literature offers a different “way of knowing” than science does.

Wait, slow down. One, for a great many believers, yes they are claims about what literally happened – that’s exactly what they are. They are for the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, as he has said very firmly. They are for Albert Mohler of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They are for Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.

Two, yes lots of people like to compare religious truth-claims to the truth-claims of novels, but that doesn’t make the comparison a good one, and it isn’t a good one. Novels aren’t the same kind of thing as religion, and religious truth claims aren’t the same kind of thing as novelistic truth claims, if there even is such a thing.

And three, no actually we can’t all agree that literature offers a different “way of knowing” because I don’t agree that literature offers a way of knowing at all. I think knowledge is the wrong word for what literature offers. I think it offers (sometimes) understanding, including understanding of what it might be like to be a different person, what it might be like to be in a different situation, what other people feel like, and so on – but not really knowledge. Why not knowledge? Because that’s not what it is. It’s speculative. It has to be speculative, and it’s none the worse for that, and it can (sometimes) offer real understanding, but it still amounts to speculation on the part of the author which if good enough is convincing and empathy-inducing in the reader. I don’t think we get to call it knowledge because it’s basically a form of (at best educated) guesswork. It’s imagination. Imagination is a great thing, but what it produces on its own isn’t exactly knowledge(except perhaps knowledge of what the imagination can produce).

This is not to denigrate literature, it’s to attempt to be precise about what is what. I just don’t think literature is a “way of knowing” unless we’re broadening the concept of knowledge to fit, in which case we’re talking about something new.

Vampires don’t exist…But telling stories about vampires is a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in. These aren’t truths that science can independently verify, but they are still true in a meaningful way.

Telling stories about anything can be a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in, but conveying truths about the world is not the same thing as being a “way of knowing” and religion is not the same thing as either one. Religion includes stories, but a story is not all it is.

I like novels. I like TV. I like art. I like baseball. I think there is truth to be found in such endeavors, and I think any brush that sweeps away the enterprise of religion as a “way of knowing” must also sweep away art and a host of other human activities.

And that’s where I completely fall off the train. I think that’s an absurd claim, and I can’t see how he got himself there. Can you?

Albert Mohler the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so obliging and has saved us so much trouble – at a stroke he has rid us of the obligation to keep answering the charge that “New” atheists are all wrong because they ignore sophisticated theology and are talking about a crude old version of God that nobody believes in anyway.

Mohler points out that the Wall Street Journal paired articles by Dawkins and Armstrong were not articles by an atheist and a theist but articles by two atheists.

Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our “primitive” belief in his actual existence — thus freeing us to affirm merely a “God beyond God” who exists only as a concept. Along the way, Armstrong offers a superficial and theologically reckless argument that comes down to this: Until the modern age, believers in God were not really believers in a God who was believed to exist…She makes statements that amount to elegant nonsense. Consider this: “In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic…” So she would have us to believe that, in centuries past, cosmology was merely therapy. She simply makes the assertion and moves on. Will anyone believe this nonsense?

Oh yes – lots of people – people of an Armstrongian cast of mind – people who get thrills from talk about an indescribable transcendent. Along with them, people who want religion and science to lie down together like the lion and the kid, and people who want to be able to insist from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn that science and religion are compatible. But they are not everyone, and they are not even most people. In some places they are outnumbered by people who think ‘God’ is just a dead idea and of no interest, and in other places they are outnumbered by people who think God is a really real person with real attributes who does real things and will really give you a big hug and some ice cream when you die.

Armstrong calls for the emergence of “a more authentic notion of God.” Her preferred concept of God would be about aesthetics, not theology. “Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form,” she intones. Interestingly, it is Dawkins, presented as the unbeliever in this exchange, who understands God better than Armstrong. In fact, Richard Dawkins the atheist rightly insists that Karen Armstrong is actually an atheist as well. “God’s Rotweiller” sees through Armstrong’s embrace of a “God beyond God.”

Exactly! This is what we keep saying! This is what we’ve been saying ever since The God Delusion came out and five minutes later people started saying but Dawkins has such an unsophisticated idea of God and what about Tillich and nobody believes in that silly idea of God any more and what about Terry Eagleton’s toaster and God is just a word for all our best impulses and what about apophatic theology and Karen Armstrong could set Dawkins straight in an instant. We’ve been saying what Mohler says – yes but all that is not what most believers mean by ‘God’ so it’s just deceptive to pretend that it is. It’s so helpful of Mohler to corroborate! From now on we can just quote him.

We should at least give Dawkins credit here for knowing what he rejects. Here we meet an atheist who understands the difference between belief and unbelief. As for those, like Armstrong, who try to tell believers that it does not matter if God exists — Dawkins informs them that believers in God will brand them as atheists. “They’ll be right,” Dawkins concludes. So the exchange in The Wall Street Journal turns out to be a meeting of two atheist minds. The difference, of course, is that one knows he is an atheist when the other presumably claims she is not. Dawkins knows a fellow atheist when he sees one. Careful readers of The Wall Street Journal will come to the same conclusion.

You betcha.