Later On

Without a benchmark for measurement, how does one decide the truth of theological issues? Or is “truth” the wrong word to use for faith-based beliefs? With the common run of statement, one can decide the truth or falsity by observation of the world around us: the method use by science (or, as it is called by those who dislike the approach, “scientism”) But with theological statements, how does one decide?

This article in the NY Times, written by Laurie Goodstein, discusses the issue in the context of the Romney presidential campaign in South Carolina, a hotbed of religious belief.

For example:

On the most fundamental issue, traditional Christians believe in the Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all rolled into one.

Mormons reject this as a non-biblical creed that emerged in the fourth and fifth centuries. They believe that God the Father and Jesus are separate physical beings, and that God has a wife whom they call Heavenly Mother.

Okay, that seems pretty clear cut: Are God and Jesus one? or are they two?

Normally a question like that is resolved by looking to the real world, but that’s no help here. The President of Union Theological Seminary offers, “God and Jesus are not separate physical beings. That would be anathema. At the end of the day, all the other stuff doesn’t matter except the divinity of Jesus.” Well, that’s pretty clear. But the Mormons don’t buy it (nor, for that matter, do the Unitarians, the Muslims, the Jews, and many other religions). And I don’t see any way to reach a decision, other than the usual route the religious follow: kill everyone who does not accept the belief your yourself happen to hold. That does work, to some degree, but not very well: we still have many, many different religions and many, many different views of the same religion (see previous post on the role of women in Israel: the argument seems to be occurring within a relgion).

My view is that, on the whole, it’s easier to advance in arenas in which issues can be settled by reference to an outside benchmark, and external reality turns to work out really well.

The article is interesting, though, and discusses how religions regularly revise their beliefs in order to reduce the shock they present to logic, real-life experience, and current cultural values. For example,

Another big sticking point concerns the afterlife. Early Mormon apostles gave talks asserting that human beings would become like gods and inherit their own planets — language now regularly held up to ridicule by critics of Mormonism.

But Kathleen Flake, a Mormon who is a professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt Divinity School, explained that the planets notion had been de-emphasized in modern times in favor of a less concrete explanation: people who die embark on an “eternal progression” that allows them “to partake in God’s glory.”

“Don’t like that belief? Fine, we’ll just change it until you do like it. It’s all metaphorical anyway.” I imagine that’s the tack they will take. We also see efforts to revise beliefs to make them slightly more sensible (and more acceptable to current context) in the Israel story posted earlier, on the role of women.

I think the real challenge is to find which beliefs to revise readily—as Professor Flake demonstrated—and which to fight to the death: how does the poor religious zealot know which beliefs can just be rewritten wholesale—”It’s just a metaphor, let’s reinterpret in the light modern knowledge and culture”—and which to clutch unrevised, clinging to the literal meaning: “Noah’s ark was 135 m long” is seen as the actual truth—not 134 m, not 136 m. This is generally the position taken by fundamentalists of any religion: sticking to the literal meaning of words, without regard for consistency with daily experience. That approach has the virtue of a kind of consistency, but given the textual history of the ancient documents—the collation from various sources, the interweaving of various legends—that approach also leads to serious logical difficulties, though those have proved not to present a problem insofar as acceptance of the ideas is concerned—though I wonder whether logically contradictory notions warrant the label “ideas”.

This story, like most on Mormonism, avoids the other “translations” Joseph Smith did—those of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. That seems to be rather clear-cut to me; strange that it is so seldom mentioned. Are we not supposed to talk about it?

UPDATE: Still pondering the issues. In shaving, we have the “YMMV” factor: a shaving soap or brush or blade or razor that works well for me may well turn out not to work at all for another shaver: YMMV, so he happily uses the Mühle R41 while I dote on the Slant Bar: no problem. The same approach holds for foods: I love the taste of cilantro, and to you it tastes like soap. So I enjoy and you avoid and life goes on quite well. This same approach could work equally well for religion—YMMV, in religion, shaving, cilantro—except that religions couch their assertions as matters of fact, rather than taste. And they do try to “settle” differences by killing those who disagree—which in a sense does work, in that only one point of view remains. And yet it’s not very satisfactory.

To take an example from math rather than science: Do I really establish that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides by killing anyone who disagrees? Is the truth of the theorem thus established? The problem, you see, is that with the same type of “argument” one can similarly establish that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is NOT equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, but rather that it is larger, or smaller, or any other statement one cares to make about it: that it is cute, in a roguish way. All can be “established” by killing anyone who disagrees.

Doesn’t it seem that there should be a better way? We’ve found better ways in other fields of human endeavor.