Jon Cogburn's Blog

saving religion from neo-Kantianism

(1) In a recent thread on Leiterreports concerning the philosophical incompetence of Stanley Fish (someone on whom I've published (with Silcox) an article in The British Journal of Aesthetics). Blinn Combs made a really interesting point against my attempt to argue that the contents of religious beliefs (including second order beliefs about the nature and role of religious beliefs themselves) are not determined by a vote of people who claim to be believers, but rather in terms of deference to experts, which can be non-circularly specified (that is, specified without presupposing the truth of religious doctrine) in terms of knowledge of the various languages and relevant history. The point I'd been trying ot make is that most experts in this sense who profess religious belief are not fundamentalists/bigots and realize that there is no sense in which religious texts can be claimed to be inerrant. I don't think his response to my point works (I responded in the thread), but in making his argument Combs says something really interesting:

That said, there's a straightforward explanation for why more vulgar religious beliefs become replaced by a contemplative/mystical streak the more one knows about history--the contents of those (still linguaform)beliefs are often severely undermined by a critical view of that history--not to mention knowledge of the relevant languages and texts. A plausible way to protect the remnants of the original belief will then be simply to compartmentalize it in a way that makes it immune to critique, reconceptualizing it as metaphorical, or mystical, meditative, or "non-linguaform."

What's really interesting to me about this is that Combs' account of the role mysticism plays for intellectuals it is so similar to J.L. Austin's theory of the role sense data played among early analytic philosophers (in my wretched historical ignorance, for all I know, Hegel made the same critique) in Sense and Sensibilia. One realizes at some point during the Cartesian quest for certainty that there is not much to be had, so what one does is move inward, saying that we can't be certain about the fact that there is a table in front of us, but we can be certain that we are experiencing table sense data (again, for all I know, this is strongly analogous to Heidegger's critique of Husserlian "bracketing".).

However, once you render beliefs about something immune from all criticism in this way, you are taking the concepts about it out of the "space of reasons" and Wittgensteinian private language arguments show that your talk lacks content (the theoretical term for this from recent logic-oriented technical philosophy is "bullshit"). In the case of the thing Combs so accurately describes, "God" becomes Wittgenstein's notorious invisible, weightless beetle in the box that would disappear were the box to be opened.

(2) As becomes very clear in different ways from Lee Braver and Graham Priest's work, the Wittgensteinian critique of private languages, as well as the related Sellarsian critique of the "myth of the given," bear a very strong resemblance to the "affection problem" faced by transcendental idealism. The affection problem is the problem of being forced to say things about the noumenal realm (such as that it exists, or that it causes phenomena) in the statement of transcendental idealism that are strictly speaking prohibited from being sayable by transcendental idealism. Ironically (given the animosity of the latter for the former), Hegel and Schopenhauer had the most insightful things to say about what one might do when you honestly face this problem.

As Priest is aware, in the context of religious epistemology, the view that gets critiqued is negative theology, which treats God as the noumenon/content that we cannot talk about, but which nonetheless still talks about God.

But in thinking about these things, I realized that at least the cartoon version of Plantinga's new epistemology is simply the neo-Kantian reverse of intellectual's negative theology, instead of God being the unknowable noumena, he is somehow presupposed by the conceptual scheme that is organizing the phenomena of the believer. But the same thing is happening that Combs asserts with the intellectual mystic, being presupposed by the scheme is the way to protect religious belief from rational criticism. I don't know if this is Plantinga's actual view (I read the stuff fifteen years ago), but I have a distressing number of otherwise smart fundamentalist students who use Plantinga's views in this very way.

And I think one should respond to the Plantingian position with the Hegelian, Austininian, Wittgensteinian, Sellarsian point that the strategy is only successful to the extent that it robs the beliefs in question of meaningful content.

(3) The core error of post-modern negative theology and Plantinganianism (again, possibly to be distinguished from what Plantinga actually says) is accepting the hyper-Protestant idea that religious faith as a kind of belief (this ties to the Cartesian equation of knowledge with propositional certainty), as opposed to the activity of being faithful.

In no way is my love and devotion for my wife representable by a set of beliefs about her (nor by a set of statements listing my behaviors for that matter). Why should love for, and devotion to, incarnations such as Jesus, Krishna, or the Buddha or prophets like Muhammad be different?

Note that this is not Phillips style neo-Wittgensteinian, because I don't think that the cognitive content of religious beliefs is really spelled out in terms of such affective stances and behaviors. I don't want to "leave everything as it is." I'm very happy to put forward views that entail that most religious people, including Saint Paul, have lots of false first and second order religious beliefs.

(4) Psychologically, I find it harder to critique "first-order" religious beliefs for some reason. Maybe because one should sympathize with the fear (fear of being removed from one's community, fear of death, fear of being gay) that leads people to morally and metaphysically problematic first-order religious beliefs and practices. Maybe also because of the danger of becoming a condescending moral scold in a manner inconsistent with Christian love.

One of the stranger things that Saint Paul said (that Heidegger rightfully found philosophically interesting, perhaps in part because it involves informative circularity) is that one of the tests for being a Christian is the ability to recognize Antichrists as Antichrists. In this very respect Christopher Hitchens is a much better Christians than either the vast hoard of people who send money to the likes of Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell, or the minority of academics (for some reason over-represented in Philosophy Departments) who defend a version of Christianity that creates such monstrosities.

That is:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.'

The point isn't that people who succumb to human lizards like Robertson are going to hell, but rather that while succumbing to the conservative "Christian" resentment that Nietzsche persuasively argues is absolutely foreign to Christ but all too typical of Christianity we remove ourselves from being in a state of grace.

Again, this is not a matter of belief (though failure results in false moral beliefs), but a matter of being faithful, being open to grace in the way taught by Jesus and the prophets, whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or aetheist (everyone should read and learn from Hitchens' excellent God is not Great). Islam and some branches of Hinduism are interesting here; the five pillars of Islam mostly concern practical behavior, as does the practice of yoga. Ideally, these are to open the faithful's heart in a way that leads to grace and community with all. This has nothing to do with belief, but is really more akin to a technology of the self (see discussion of Sloterdijk's new book HERE).

Of course, all faith traditions have their Pat Robertsons! But I'm responsible to and for those in mine.

interesting Leiter Reports thread on Stanley Fish

The thread is HERE. My comment is somewhere around #36.

interesting instance of distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility

I was talking about a nice John Hare paper with my metaphysics class yesterday and apparently Presbyterian ministers must in their ordination vows promise to accept damnation if doing so was to the greater glory of God.

I find this moving, but it is interesting and problematic for a lot of reasons. In class, Ben Dubroc noted that on many accounts it would be metaphysically impossible for someone to be damned in this way. So the ministers might be promising to accept something that is metaphysically impossible. That's weird!

I wonder if epistemic possibility helps here. Liberal Presbyterians accept that doubt and religious faith in no way contradict each other. So maybe the claim can be understood as holding that even though, for all we know, we might be wrong about this stuff (even if it's in fact true and metaphysically necessary), we would still be willing to pick up the cross ourselves.

[Some notes: Certain takes on this view are self-interested. My view that belief has nothing to do with faith is to the far, far left on what one could think and still call oneself a Christian (note that I am not a Phillips style Wittgensteinian who takes a non-cognitivist view of religious belief either). I also have pretty severe doubts about the very intelligibility, or the ultimate moral value, of the belief that the human ego survives death. Though that belief is such a consolation to the bereaved that of course I don't insist on this when outside of the philosophy classroom.]

Wheaton College Rescinds Job Offer to Socrates

Wheaton College was going to hire Socrates to be on their philosophy faculty (actually extending a job offer to him), but then someone on the hiring committee read the end of Plato's Charmides.

Charmides said: I am sure that I do not know, Socrates, whether I have or have not this gift of wisdom and temperance; for how can I know whether I have a thing, of which even you and Critias are, as you say, unable to discover the nature?-(not that I believe you.) And further, I am sure, Socrates, that I do need the charm, and as far as I am concerned, I shall be willing to be charmed by you daily, until you say that I have had enough.

Very good, Charmides, said Critias; if you do this I shall have a proof of your temperance, that is, if you allow yourself to be charmed by Socrates, and never desert him at all.

You may depend on my following and not deserting him, said Charmides: if you who are my guardian command me, I should be very wrong not to obey you.

And I do command you, he said.

Then I will do as you say, and begin this very day.

You sirs, I said, what are you conspiring about?

We are not conspiring, said Charmides, we have conspired already.

And are you about to use violence, without even going through the forms of justice?

Yes, I shall use violence, he replied, since he orders me; and therefore you had better consider well.

But the time for consideration has passed, I said, when violence is employed; and you, when you are determined on anything, and in the mood of violence, are irresistible.

Do not you resist me then, he said.

I will not resist you, I replied.

I don't know if the Wheaton hiring committee has gotten to the Symposium yet; that might have further influenced the revocation of the job offer. Poor Socrates.

The fact that Socrates (through Plato and Plotinus and Augustine) is one of the inventors of Christian theology did not tell sufficiently in his favor.

The fact that the Q Gospel (source material for two of the others) is very likely influenced by the traveling Socratic Cynic philosophers that Jesus saw as a child (he lived within walking distance of over twenty Greek communities, and one day's walk from Gadara, a center of Cynic philosophy) did not tell sufficiently in his favor. The professors at Wheaton College obviously know better than Jesus.

Should I Brush the Dust from my Feet?

The following twelve are people I know who have signed the counterpetition to Charles Hermes' original anti-discrimination petition.

• Daniel Bonevac (took classes with as an undergraduate)
• William Lane Craig (saw interesting lecture on special relativity)
• Ed Henderson (colleague in my department)
• Robert C. Koons (took classes with as an undergraduate)
• Jeffrey Koperski (went to graduate school with)
• R. Keith Loftin (recently graduated M.A. student of my department)
• Alasdair MacIntyre (a huge fan of his work)
• Roger Scruton (a fan of his work)
• Ed Song (a colleague in my department)
• Alvin Plantinga (ate dinner with once)
• Peter Van Inwagen (ate dinner with and got drinks with once)
• Linda Zagzebski (sat in on a class on her virtue epistemology book)

It's hard for me to be dispassionate about this, and I am in fact very depressed. (1) Among my gay friends, two were bullied sadistically and mercilessly in high school, another one died of AIDS, and another was beaten so bad that he spent days in intensive care. I can't help but to see this as more persecution of these people, as well as the other gay people I know and cherish. (2) I grew up for the most part in Montgomery, Alabama during the final parts of the original civil rights struggle (went to church with Julian McPhillips and was friends with Morris Dees' daughter). My early love of philosophy in part comes from learning it from people like McPhillips and Dees. (3) Hermes' original petition doesn't ask very much. It just says.

We, the undersigned, request that the American Philosophical Association either (1) enforce its policy and prohibit institutions that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation from advertising in 'Jobs for Philosophers' or (2) clearly mark institutions with these policies as institutions that violate our anti-discrimination policy. If the APA is unwilling to take either of these measures, we request that the APA publicly inform its members that it will not protect homosexual philosophers and remove its anti-discrimination policy to end the illusion that a primary function of the APA is to protect the rights of its members.

That is, the petition only asks that the APA honor its explicitly stated anti-discrimination platform, or to change that platform. Why do philosophers oppose a simple demand for consistency (and we're not talking about truth paradoxes and the kinds of thing that animate Graham Priest here)? (4) I see the kind of evangelicalism practiced by the discriminatory institutions (one that absurdly takes the Bible to be literally true, that viciously worships a God who would consign the vast majority of people to eternal perdition because of their metaphysical beliefs, one that persecutes homosexuals) as anti-Christian (and by "Christian" here I don't mean "what most Christians believe" but "what the historical Jesus had in mind"). (5) In pursuing my own salvation, I want to believe that some things (including, and especially, philosophy) are redemptive by their very nature. The manner in which the "Christian" philosophers on the relevant Leiter Reports threads so closely approximate the bigots of my youth has completely disabused me of this. These people have PhDs in philosophy. What a complete drag.

Arguments about Hermes' anti-discrimination petition can be found on Leiter Reports HERE. Arguments about the counter-petition can be found on Leiter Reports HERE. Anyone genuinely interested in philosophical issues concerning homosexuality should order  John Corvino's book. Anyone genuinely interested in the religious issues should order Jack Rogers' book.

thoughts on inerrancy

The chapter on God Games and the Euthyphro Dilemma of me and Mark's maybe released book (the date of release on the Amazon page is December 15th, but it's still only available for pre-order) we discussed a number of clear empirical contradictions in the Bible (e.g. number of generations between David and Jesus, who built the ark of the covenant, who anointed Jesus in Bethany, etc.) to provide some evidence (we have other arguments too) that the Bible also contains ethical contradictions.

I've been re-reading the Bible now and it weirds me out that the first contradiction actually occurs in the very first two chapters, e.g.:

(I) In Genesis 1.26 God creates Adam on the fifth day. In this version God creates, in this order, (1) heavens, earth, light, darkness, (2) water, dry land, vegetation/plants, (3) day, night, the seasons, the sun, the moon, (4) sea monsters, fish, birds, (5) animals, then after that humans (male and female).

(II) But then in Genesis Chapter 2 God creates man on the same day he made the earth and heavens and rain. This is explicitly stated to be before any plants exist ("for the Lord God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth").

So in the first chapter man is created four days after the heavens and earth (two days after plants) are created, and in the second he's created the same day as the heavens earth (and before plants) are created.

I think the composers of the various finished books (and Genesis was certainly an amalgamation of at least two distinct contradictory texts) wanted to start the whole thing off with something equivalent to saying, "IF YOU THINK OR EVEN RATIONALLY PRESUPPOSE THAT ALL OF THE SENTENCES HEREIN ARE LITERALLY TRUE, THEN YOU NEED MEDICAL ATTENTION." Or as an Episcopal Bishop once said, "Anyone who thinks the Bible is literally true, hasn't read it." Why else would you begin with such a clear contradiction?

 To be fair, the educated evangelicals of good will (and I know three very smart, decent, ones) tend to come up with pretty sophisticated accounts of what "literal truth" comes to such that they can affirm as a matter of faith the inerrancy of scripture and still have a pretty good idea of what scripture says. In my heart of hearts I can't help but feel that this is sophistical though. That in an anti-Kierkegaardian sense faith is being equated with belief in certain propositions, and then in an all-too-human sense, belief in certain propositions is being equated with the ability to affirm certain important sentences. So as long as you assert "The Bible is inerrant" with a serious expression, you are O.K. even if you end up adopting a ridiculous theory of truth to save yourself from the facts that: (1) empirical contradictions cannot be true, and (2) the Bible contains empirical contradictions.

I think this tendency goes way back in Christianity. The earliest Jesus groups saw Jesus as overturning The Law. As a result, non-Jews could worship a monotheistic God who gave a damn about the plight of the poor and oppressed. Rich and poor, foreigner and compatriate, pagan and Jew, could all dine together (a very big deal at the time, and a not nearly big enough deal today) and in fact developed something like communes (all of the various gospels, canonical or not, are texts for such groups) that tried to live according to Jesus' message: which (and this is according to Q, which is the oldest reconstructed gospel) took elements of the Greek cynicism that Jesus was exposed to as a youth (Galilee is not in Judea, and Jesus would have grown up within walking distance to over twenty Greek communities that hosted wandering cynic philosophers during that period in history) and made them into something that could sustain a society instead of just those who individually dropped out, and then combined that with the Jewish belief that the universe itself gave a damn about you. This caught on in the classical world in part because it was the Good News and in part because no extant religion was as consistent with the cosmopolitanism demanded by Roman expansion. Why it caught on in the East and survived there for almost a thousand  years until the Mongol degradations, and to what extent it was shaped by Buddhism, is another story (see the previous post).

But to paraphrase Iggy Pop explaining his drug problems- "it's terrible when people are always telling you to get with the program. I hated the program. The program was stupid and vile. But then after a few years you don't have any program at all. And that's just as bad." Many, if not most, of Saint Paul's efforts were an attempt to square Iggy Pop's circle, and as a result he says a lot of incoherent things about the Law.

And ever since, organized Christianity has been a battleground between those who read Jesus as a critic of the law (in favor of the law's spirit, which is fully present when one honors God and loves one's neighbors) and the new Pharisees, many of whom like Saint Paul are initially just trying to reign in the harm done to people when they get too far outside any program. In Paul's case was heroic, and yielded much beautiful writing, but it dragged the early Church away from the Jesus of Q. This was probalby inevitable, given our fallen nature.

Following Paul, in the West Roman Catholicism erected a huge new system of Law in its own right to accomplish this. John Calvin reacted accordingly, but then his followers at Princeton University in the 1700's again could not stand the freedom this gave people to work out for themselves their relationship with God. So they invented the doctrine of biblical innerancy. There is no faith in God himself, so people need an idol, only these idols are books and priests and politicians (many more dearly bought than gold).

The continuous re-institution of the Law is the cardinal sin of the Christian Church; it is a fundamental act of faithlessness, albeit a sin politically empowered groups of Christians will continue to commit throughout history. And it is no accident that those who do so end up doing egregiously more evil (e.g. inquisition, colonialism, holocaust, contemporary anti-gay hysteria, etc.) than the gnostics they recoil from. For example, today we see how Nixon's "silent majority" really was created simply by recoiling from the scary excesses of the hippies. This led to Reagen's "trickle down" economics, the religious right, Bush's torture program- and so much else destructive to the faith and morals of a supposedly Christian civilization. The gnostics are of necessity disorganized and pathetic, but politically empowered religions are anything but.

If you really had faith in Jesus, you would not need a priest or bible or slick politician or history of Catholic philosophical thought to tell you what to parrot. We do not live in a totalitarian universe that rewards those who parrot the correct line. This was so much a part of Jesus' point, that it's a travesty that so much of mainstream Protestant and Catholic Christianity is at variance with it.

In contrast to this, the truly faithful is the person who doesn't pretend to lack doubts, and who refuses to put their reason on hold, but still remains devoted to God and who is able to be more loving (to people, truth, beauty, the universe itself) as a consequence of this devotion. And the person who loves their neighbor and honors God by doing things like lessening pain and increasing beauty is much more a devotee than someone who parrots the line, even if our Pharisaical culture stupidly calls the the parrots "Christian."

Now obviously (to me at least) the rituals of church answer deep spiritual needs and help many people with their devotion. I'm not putting that down. But to confuse this role with getting people to pretend to believe dogma that they don't even understand, much of which is absurd, and some of which is evil and antithetical to the very concept of a loving deity. . . well that's just sad.

On a happier note, here's a lovely part of Mica (6:6-8)

With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

some thoughts for the coming festival of Saturnalia

Fascinating article in the Boston Globe today. Even if you bristle at the hyper-ecumenicalism of the author (and I know two opinionated readers of this blog will, one from the religious right and the other from the humanist left), the history presented about half-way through the article is really interesting.

In some of my (too slight) studies of the history of Indian philosophy, I've come to the working thesis that early Christian monastic communities (whose ascendancy Edward Gibbon in part blames for the ultimate fall of Rome) are imports from Buddhism: (1) the similarities between Buddhist and Christian monastic communities is so great that it strains credulity to think they arose independently, (2) the Buddhists are the first to have established such communities (predating Christianity by hundreds of years), and (3) the Buddhists and early Christians almost certainly interacted at length in northern India and Persia.

Jenkins' information about the history that led up to the Nestorian church I think maybe provides more support to this. At some point I want to graph out some time-lines of the relevant events.

In a broader sense this is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. It is clear that the doctrinal aspects of Christianity were strongly influenced by: (1) Judaism (well, duh), (2) Greco-Roman mythology (virgin birth, resurrection, early signs or greatness, disappearing in childhood, etc.), (3) popular Platonism (and this goes back to the neo-cynic (in the classical sense) historical (at least the closest we can get) Jesus of the book of Q; it is not just a later, Roman neo-Platonist addition), and (4) Egyptian mythology (Egypt was Christian for four hundred years, and a good argument can be made that the doctrine of the trinity bears the same relation to previous Egyptian beliefs as do the Catholic holidays (saints) to previous pagan festivals (divinities)). And I think the monastic aspect probably comes from Buddhism. So now the question is to what extent doctrine is influenced by Buddhism as well. Clearly there are overwhelming similarities, but to what extent did Christianity reinvent these, and to what extent were they imported from India?

For the record, none of the above is inconsistent with liberal Presbyterianism.