I’ve been thinking a lot about religious knowledge this week, and I wanted to try to organize my thoughts here. The exercise was helpful, but boy did it take forever. Due to its length (and it could have been much longer), I’ve separated this into three parts to make it easier to digest. The thoughts herein are rather raw, so I would love to hear from anyone who reads this. Please, comment away, and let me know if my reasoning is sound.
Before we proceed, we have to first figure out what I’m talking about when I say ‘religious knowledge.’ What I don’t mean is knowledge about religion; facts like knowing the 10 commandments or which religions trace their lineage back to the biblical Abraham. These facts may or may not be important historically or socially, but they are clearly not required for participation in religion. What I mean by religious knowledge is the special knowledge professed by adherents of a particular religion. A Christian might claim to “know” that Christ is the Lord, or that the Bible is the literal word of God. A Buddhist may claim that the nature of life is suffering, but there is a way to salvation from it. All religions, in one form or another, claim to possess special knowledge, and in an effort towards building an understanding of these claims, as well as a means to analyze them, these claims need to be given a close look.
To critique religious knowledge is an unpopular pastime. If a physicist creates a new theory, dozens of other experts in that field attempt to reproduce the experiments that gave rise to the theory, and then follow the methodology and logic of the original physicist to see if the new theory holds water. Trying to do the same thing with religion is often frowned upon, or is considered impossible. People will inevitably say “people have the right to believe as they like,” or “how can you judge another culture’s ways?” By this logic, burning children as witches as is done even today in Africa, or throwing acid on the face of a woman refusing to wear a Burqa is perfectly fine and reasonable. After all, these are cultures other than ours and we would be cultural imperialists to foist our ways upon others. We need to be able to ask ourselves “what is the function of religion, and do x, y, and z practices serve this role or hinder it?” It is clear, at least to me, that for the betterment of humanity, we need to be free to call people out on their barbarism when religion serves to degrade us rather than upraise us. (For more on this, check out Sam Harris' excellent Ted Talk).
Some people say that critiquing religion is completely different than a hard science like physics, and we can never verify religious claims at all. Religious criticism, at best, becomes roughly as objective as a food critic. To this idea, I have to say “bullshit.” If religions claim knowledge, this knowledge had to come from somewhere, and in all cases, this knowledge came through the medium of human beings, just like us. I’ll get into this more in a bit. First, let’s look at what types of things religions claim. Let me know if I missed anything:
1) Religions make claims about reality. This is the area of the most overlap with science, as well as the most conflict. Religions usually have something to say about the world around us, perhaps its origin through a creation story, how it will end, even what it might be ‘made’ from (its substance). This is also where God (when he appears) usually comes into the mix, either as a creator, the metaphysical foundation of material existence, etc.
2) Religions make claims about morality. Usually based on their claims about reality, religions claim to tell us what is right and wrong behavior, how to live our lives, what a good life entails, and how to engage with our fellow beings and environment.
3) Religions make claims about our value and place in the world (Our “life myth”). This would tell us what our place in the world is, the relationship between humanity and the animal kingdom, as well as each other.
4) Religions make claims about the “problem” of life, as well as a means for overcoming it. Every religion identifies a problem that should be addressed: sin for Christianity, forgetfulness of God in Islam, desire and suffering in Buddhism, ignorance in Hinduism, and so on. Each touches upon a rather important and near-universal feeling that something isn’t right with the world, that the world is not as it “aught” to be, or at least that we are not as we aught to be. After all, if we were just hunky-dory from the start, why would religion be so prevalent and popular? I think this last, in combination with moral guidance, sense of place, and certainty of the nature of the world provides the major psychological force of religious ‘needs’.
5) Religion creates community and is a vehicle for non-religious information. This can be cultural (as in the connection of art to the Church), or practical (networking). But this is not really a form of religious knowledge, so we’ll ignore it for now.
Assuming that all religious knowledge falls into one of the above, we must ask for the source of this knowledge. Ask the Christians and they will point to the Bible, ask the Muslims and they’ll point to the Koran, ask the Hindus and they’ll point to the Vedas. Ask them where these various books came from and the answer is the same – God. But clearly none of them imagine God sitting down somewhere, pen in hand, to write these books, and then plopping them onto some prophet’s lap saying “here’s some eternal truth for you, go forth and make 4 billion photocopies.” No, tradition has Moses writing down the Pentateuch, the Evangalists writing down the Gospels, Mohammed writing down the Koran, and the Rishis (Seers or Sages) writing down the Vedas.
Essentially, all religious knowledge originates with human beings who had certain experiences, told others, and perhaps wrote them down. Swami Vivekananda puts this perfectly in his book Raja Yoga:
“…if you go to the fountainhead of Christianity, you will find that it is based upon experience. Christ said he saw God; the disciples said they felt God; and so forth. Similarly, in Buddhism, it is Buddha’s experience. He experienced certain truths, saw them, came in contact with them, and preached them to the world. …Thus it is clear that all the religions of the world have been built upon that one universal and adamantine foundation of all our knowledge – direct experience.”
Of course, this is the same exact foundation as found in the empiricism of the physical sciences. Theories come from what is observed, or experienced. The difference is in the method, but also in the terms and the way the terms are understood. In empiricism, experience leads to theories, which are by nature tentative, and open to change; and in religion, experience leads to doctrine, dogma, and tradition, which is canonical, and not open to change.
Cont. in Part II.
Perhaps it's because I've spent too much time around anthropologists, but whenever anyone says, "all religions [blank]," I become exceedingly skeptical. Religions are at least as diverse as games, and if you try to say "all games [blank]" anyone will be able to give you an example of a game that doesn't and probably several things that are not games that do. (See Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations for more on language games.)
ReplyDeleteSpecifically, you say that all religions claim to possess special knowledge. That's certainly true of Christianity (the Gospels) and Buddhism (the 8 Fold Path). But what is the special knowledge of the Jews? The Torah? I'm not sure if that really counts as special knowledge. It's very important if you're Jewish, as it tells you (among other things) how to be a Jew, what being a Jew means, and the history of your people. But quite unlike the Gospels or the 8 Fold Path, the Torah is not seen as a source of salvation. The Torah is special, but in a way very different from the knowledge that Christ is salvation or the knowledge that the 8 Fold Path can relieve suffering.
And what about religions that don't have holy books? You cited the Torah, the Quran, and the Vedas, but Siddhartha never wrote anything down, and Shinto has no holy books that I'm know of, nor do most of the Native American religions of which I am aware. Muslims and Protestants are very emphatic about their holy books, but they seem more the exception than the rule in this case. Even the Vedas, so far as I understand it, do not play a major role in Hinduism anymore. Does anyone even still worship Indra?
I thought it was interesting you brought up the problems that each religion addresses. I saw that in God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero. It was compelling at first, but on reflection I found it simplistic. I think he's fundamentally right that religions are different (hence the last three paragraphs) but his depiction of each religion (at least on the front flap, I haven't actually read the book) touches on only the most basic aspect of each religion. Saying that Christianity is about sin and salvation is like saying Life is about survival and reproduction. From a certain angle it may be true, but from another, it misses the point completely. It is also worth pointing out that sin means many different things to many different Christians. What it means to Thomas Keating is very different from what it means to Pat Robertson.
ReplyDeleteSam Harris and the other new atheists talk a good game about bringing religious claims under scrutiny. They point to the examples you cited (burning children, etc.) as reasons why we should not tolerate religious beliefs. From a geopolitical angle, I must point out that the fact that those atrocities are associated with religion is entirely beside the point when it comes to international involvement. We tolerated Pol Pot and Stalin for the same reason. Basically, as Eddie Izzard said, they're killing they're own people, "and we're basically OK with that." Harris & al. claim that we let these atrocities go by because it would be politically incorrect to object. Not so! We let them go by because we have nothing to gain by objecting.
That isn't to say that fanatical devotion to unsubstantiated claims made by psychopaths should not go unchecked. But if your argument is that direct religious knowledge a la Vivekananda is the solution to this, then I think you may be mistaken. There's a reason that born again Christians are the most rabid fundamentalists: they've had religious experience! I'm sure any fundamentalist can tell you with great enthusiasm their conversion experience. One might even call that a perverted form of experimental validation!
Thank you so much for jumping in Alex! Your views and criticism are always welcome here. I do want to address a few points you raised, for various reasons.
ReplyDelete"all religions ___." Clearly, I agree with you here, but I was trying to be as general as I could. Also, I plan to check out Wittgenstein, but I'm trying to catch up with some of his predecessors first (currently looking into Hume and Kant). Just so I remember, Wittgenstein is that game where you run around shooting nazis, right?
Judaism - actually, I would say that Judaism claims special knowledge, however that knowledge is specific to a ethnic group. The doctrine of the covenant, of the very Law itself claims to be based on divine revelation and communion. This is what I called our "life myth", Judaism tells you what it is to be born Jewish, and to live a life based on that. Being a pre-Axial age religion, I think it does address different issues than Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. Further, once we bring up Kabbalah, and esoteric exegesis of the Torah, we get into very "special" information about the world - in a way this is Judaism updating itself by way of Neoplatonism. At least that's one way to say it.
As for the Buddha, he may not have written things down personally, but his followers did, and we now have the Pali Canon which is as sometimes interpreted as rigidly as any holy book. In traditional Tibetan debate, if you can bring any point back to the words of the Buddha, you more or less automatically win (as I understand it).
As for those few religions without holy books, they are usually rather antique, and are not much different than Shamanism (Shinto, Native American Religions). Although these religions clearly claim information about the world (existence of spirits, etc), I didn't bring them up mostly due to my lack of experience with them, but also lack of unifying texts makes the religions themselves harder to pin down in the way I want to with the more major ones.
In terms of Hinduism, the Vedas, while not studied on their own too often, are considered extremely important, to the point in which everything that comes after them is traditionally considered to be nothing more than an elaboration of them. This is the orthodox, 'scholastic' view, not the understanding of the average Hindu. But then again, the religion I'm interested in is not the religion of the average Joe. Cont...
Damned character limits... on to your second comment:
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying that Christianity is 'about' sin, just that sin is considered to be the root of the evils in one's life, and in the world. It is a problem to be addressed. I'm certainly not flattening religions here (or at least, I don't intend to) - but despite the varying interpretations of sin, it is an important consideration in Christianity, and is similar to other ideas in other religions. Its my suspicion that they're all roughly talking about the same idea, but in different ways.
re: Sam Harris. I enjoyed his Ted talk, in that he wasn't afraid to call barbaric practices what they are, but I do have some problems with what he and his buddies say. More than even the way he blames our lack of moral intervention on political correctness, his insistence that science can somehow reveal a moral absolute (his words) seems implausible. Speaking of the New Atheists, I'm planning to write a review of 'God is Not Great' by Hitchens soon.
Your last point I think hits on something extremely important, and something I'm thinking a lot about, but have yet to come up with anything resembling a solution to. The problem is that religious experience is so powerful, and that it tends to manifest itself through our own religious preconceptions, and therefore tends to validate what we already believed. Even if it gives us new information to interpret, we do so through our own prejudices (and uneducated people are usually unable to conceive of their own prejudices). My current thought is that a way out of this problem may be to try and separate (not for the average church-goer, btw) the experience from the specific circumstances. The conversion experience, separated from the specific religion, for instance. Not easy, and certainly not a mainstream approach. A good example for me would be the idea of a vision. Lets say I have a vision of a great temple of Horus that is intensely numinous and 'real' to me. I 'see' four walls, space, ground beneath. But is that what is 'there'? Is that the content of the experience, or the interpretation. The mind is built to deal with things at the level of the animal kingdom - built for survival on earth, in 3D, etc - not necessarily for any other realm. In physical sciences we use tools to overcome this, to 'perceive' beyond the limits of the brain. In mysticism, we clearly lack these tools. My experience of the 'temple' then, if it is me seeing 'something out there' rather than just imagination (a valid possibility), is an assemblage of object of experience plus mind. there's no reason to suppose that whatever I'm seeing is actually in 3D like the 'vision'.
Reading back, I think I'm just creating more questions in you mind (and mine). It would clearly take a book (or a few) to actually work all this out, but I hope you see where I'm trying to go with all this. I guess I'm really just looking for a consistent methodology to use in my further investigation of religious issues. The interpretations of the religions themselves are unacceptable for the reasons outlined in the post, but clearly I cannot reject their claims outright. My experience has led me to believe that they're getting at 'something' or a few 'something' beyond average experience. So how can we approach this without making ourselves ridiculous? This whole post was a thought experiment trying to figure that out.
Thanks for being involved!
You suggest "The conversion experience, separated from the specific religion" is possible, that one could "separate . . . the experience from the specific circumstance." But how? Are you suggesting that there is something objective about religious experience? And if so, how would you prove that?
ReplyDeleteDamn, I wrote a nice reply to this, and for some reason it didn't post. To sum it up in a simplistic example: to study sports fandom, it is necessary to separate individual cultures surrounding specific teams from fandom as experienced by fans of all teams. If we had to treat Giants fans separately from Jets fans, it would get ridiculous quick.
ReplyDeleteWe can separate the feelings and general social engagement profitably from the specific beliefs of each denomination.
As for something objective, other than mankind I'm assuming, I believe that certain (but by no means all) types of religious experience are based on contact with an objective reality, but clearly this isn't provable with our current methodology. Hence my motivation (explained better in part III).
If you're curious, I differentiate conversion experiences from the above, in particular those of charismatic churches produce, as I regard those mostly as emotional and social, rather than necessarily (imagine that that word is in italics) due to contact with the divine. And experience of that latter sort tends to not be fleeting (charismatic churches have huge turnover rates), and often are a touchstone for the rest of life (as they have been for me). Clearly interpretations may change, but the experience tends to inspire more lasting personal change. Perhaps this is biased, but its what I got for the moment.