Religious Knowledge: Part III (The Revenge)

Continued from Part II...

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali lists three acceptable forms of knowledge: direct experience, logical inference (based on the experience), or testimony from a trusted source.  To me, this is a sound epistemology.  The order in which the three sources of knowledge are listed goes from the most reliable to the least.  We trust our own experiences first, then what we can deduce or induce from them, and lastly, the accounts of others.  In the last is traditionally included scriptural sources.  In most religions, this important order is turned on its head:  the most important knowledge is that which exists in the scriptures, then what is inferred from them, then individual experience.  Absurd!  But the Sutras are essentially a mystic text, full of methods to bring about religious experiences for one’s self.  Therefore experience is considered primary. 

            The above thoughts are leading me to conclude that we must take the heights of religious speculation, presented as infallible dogma which we call scripture, with a sizable chunk of salt.  I believe that scripture still has value,  but most of its value is in its description of religious or mystic experience itself.  The interpretations of these experiences must be carefully weighed, preferably in light of our own experience.  Nothing should be taken as canon, as absolute, or infallible.  We may also find value in scripture when it contains actual mystic techniques used to obtain religious experience.  Here tradition is useful, as it is more likely that a method be tried and true than the metaphysic based on it. Based on these ideas, we may refine our list of religion’s claims of knowledge to a much shorter list, and each item should be kept distinct:

1)      Descriptions of the experiences of the founder.

2)      His interpretations of his experience (which includes the cultural information which informs it).  This may include the actions of the founder, for instance, giving to the poor, as these are the result of conclusions reached by his own primary experience.  Ie. if one experiences God as love, and one then reasons that one should therefore love one’s neighbor, charity should be considered an interpretation, rather than a religious experience in its own right.

3)      Others’ interpretations of his experience. 

4)      Recorded methods of attaining direct experience.

If scripture or tradition does not contain the above, we must either discard it or generously consider it to be either a purely cultural artifact (like literature) or a philosophy as open to criticism as Descartes or Plato. 

            Perhaps someone out there is asking themselves “but what about faith?”  It would be a bit much to tackle this exhaustively here, but I think its important to address in connection to the above.  St. Paul famously defined faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb 11:1).   But this clearly won’t satisfy any but the most credulous mind.  I may hope for Santa Claus, but that hope cannot in any way be characterized by evidence of his existence.  Similarly, the faith of billions is not evidence.  The experience of billions would be, however, if it could be reliably replicated by others.  But we can also say we have faith in something known and real – we might have faith in ourselves.  This is confidence in the face of the unknown.  Walking into an unknown situation, faith in one’s self is helpful, especially when based on evidence.  Faith in this sense means “believing something likely, though it is presently unknown or uncertain, based on our prior experience.”  We might immediately notice the similarity of this idea of faith to our idea of an “educated guess”, or inductive reasoning, and ultimately we can’t do without it.  Faith in our methods is certainly crucial in investigating anything (faith in the scientific method is necessary to really pursue science), but I must reiterate that faith is not evidence.  Faith is a temporary measure that bridges the gap between the known and unknown, at least until the unknown becomes the known.  This only happens through experience, and therefore I must conclude that religious faith can never be a source of knowledge, and that religious experience is the only real form of religious knowledge.

            The next step, and I think it is an important one, is to separate the actual content of experience from the theologies that spring from them.  For instance, we can separate the idea of God from the experience of God.  Perhaps I have an experience of something which appears to me to be eternal, or to be full of being, knowledge and bliss.  When I come down from my altered state of consciousness, I then ask myself “what the hell was that?”  I might well suppose it to be God, especially if I’ve heard about the supposed characteristics of God from others.  If we belong to a particular religious tradition, it’s likely I would then relate my experience to scripture and tradition.  Such adherence to a tradition may well even color the experience itself, so that this experience (which we might tentatively call God) takes on certain characteristics during or after the fact, becoming Shiva, or Jesus, or God the Father.  The fact that few believers have experiences that contradict their own scriptures, but may contradict those of other faiths makes me suppose that the conclusions reached by others (inherited metaphysics) may limit, or even shape the experiences of those who hold their beliefs as dogma.  In order to get at the actual, objective thing that is experienced as ‘God’ or whatever you choose to call it, we have to first separate the experience itself from whatever is layered upon it, especially a restrictive pie-in-the-sky metaphysic.  In order to do this, we must cultivate a new methodology to generate religious experience that is not dependant on metaphysics. Such a methodology would have some rather serious implications.  For one, morality that is based upon scripture and induction, for instance the Christian notion that morality is based on divine commandment and law, would be rejected insomuch as it claims to be absolute.  This would not necessarily lessen the beneficial implications of such ideas as “thou shalt not kill”, but such ideas cannot necessarily rest on the idea of divinity.  Any such behavioral prescriptions would be suspect so far as they claim to be based on the idea of “what God wants.”  Unless, of course, you heard God command such yourself. 

            But that just raises more questions.  Even direct religious experience is full of traps and pitfalls.  The modern neo-pagans are a great example of people working in the mystic tradition to achieve knowledge of deity.  But they too quickly can make themselves silly, as when High Priest #1 has a vision of Apollo that tells him to build a replica of the oracle of Delphi in his basement and that he shall be placed in charge of the millions who are about to return to the ancient religion of Greece.  It gets worse when High Priest #2 has his own vision of Apollo that tells him that High Priest #1 is a fraud and that he should build his own oracle in the shed behind his mom’s house.  Assuming that both individuals are truthful in their claims, the content of their religious knowledge differs.  What is a High Priest to do? 

            Reconstructist Pagans (probably the more intellectual of the bunch), who are trying to literally reconstruct the extinct religion of their choice or ancestry, have come up with an interesting solution to this problem.  They regard “the lore” as paramount, including primary sources from the period in question (for instance, Hesiod, Homer, Plutarch, etc, among the Greek reconstructionists), and treat matters of personal revelation as ‘Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis,’ usually shortened to ‘UPG.’  This is treated as suspect, until it is ‘verified’ by others, or it becomes too emotionally convincing to stay objective about.   Of course, this treatment creates the same problems as religious metaphysics of the mainstream religions – personal experience is subordinated to some kind of scriptural canon.  This problem is often exacerbated in reconstructionism in that the religion in question went extinct at some point, and often much of the textural context has been lost to history.  In a group like the Norse Reconstructionists, there is a terrible lack of primary sources, and what remains to work with often enough comes down through descriptions of the pagans by Christian monks, who were clearly not impartial.  The tradition, wary of ‘UPG’, and having little to base their reconstruction on, may well feel rather incomplete (as is anything in the process of being reconstructed.)  This is not to say the endeavor is not worthwhile, but its difficulties must be addressed honestly.

            The real question, and one I don’t have anything resembling an adequate answer to, is how can we judge primary religious knowledge ('UPG')?  By what standards can we critique such experiences?  My intuition tells me that Carl Jung may have been one of the few who tackled this area, but that’s a whole different can of worms. 

            Clearly this is a bigger job than any one blogger can take on.  If you’ve actually read this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts! 

Religious Knowledge: Part II

Continued from Part I...

In classical philosophy the discipline of metaphysics was a very popular way to try to understand the universe and our place in it.  Literally meaning “after physics,” the word comes from the untitled section of Aristotle’s work that follows the section entitled “physics,” hence ‘metaphysics’.  Metaphysics, as the word is used in philosophy, refers to an attempt to formulate a comprehensive, all-inclusive theory of reality, defining and describing its nature.  Prior to the development of the scientific method, this included “natural philosophy” (the old name for science) as a sub-section.  The primary method for creating a ‘metaphysic’ is inductive reasoning – drawing general conclusions about the world from a finite amount of experiences.  Wikipedia gives us a great example of an inductive reasoning:  Every life form we know of depends on water to live (an observation.)  Therefore, every life form depends on water to live (an inductive conclusion).  Clearly the second is not necessarily true based on the observation, although based on what we know, we might assume that this will hold true, even on other planets.  But that’s an assumption, not a fact.  We can call induction, and thereby metaphysics itself, nothing more than an ‘educated guess’. 

            The problem with induction, and metaphysics as a whole, is that it relies on pure reason to take a stab in the dark about unobserved phenomena.  If we accept a particular metaphysic and its inductive reasoning, we tend to limit our thinking.  For instance, if we reason that, based on observed life (life on earth) needing water to live, all life, including that on other planets, needs water to live, then we think of potential life in a limited (although reasonable) way.  When looking for life on other planets, we look for water first.  That may or may not work out for us, but if life forms exist somewhere out there that do not require water, we are less likely to find them. 

            We use induction constantly.  We assume that because gravity has held true for all of known history, it will continue tomorrow, although there’s actually no certainty of that (no empirical observation).  We assume that, based on the fact that we are alive today, we will be alive tomorrow, although there’s clearly no guarantee.  Metaphysicians of the past have used induction to ‘prove’ the existence of God (Spinoza), a Platonic world of ideas, and the division of nature into mind and matter (Descartes), but thanks to the advent of empiricism and the scientific method, modern philosophy regards their conclusions as suspect.

            Turning back to religion, we find that their founders had certain religious experiences that we can equate with observation in science.  A certain uncommon thing (something different than average day-to-day experience) was experienced by a person, and this person tried to make sense of it.  In other words, the religious founder had an uncommon experience which impacted his current understanding of the world in one way or another, and in order to create a new worldview incorporating the new information, created a sort of metaphysical theory by inductive reasoning.  I know, I’m being extremely vague and general, but only because I want to include all major religions.  Each founder reacted differently, may have experienced differently, and certainly induced different conclusions.  Lets use the Rishis as an example:  Consciously searching after truth beyond the appearance of the world (based on what they heard from others), they used various methods (yoga, hallucinogens, etc) to bring about certain experiences.  They described these experiences as Indra, Brahman, Shiva, etc.  From this basis, they induced a metaphysical corpus which includes everything from moral law, social law, physical theories, even medical theories.  As each of these seers described things in different ways, their accounts were later organized by others into 4 Vedas, which were then connected to later commentaries and inductive speculation (the Upanishads), integrated with fictional epics (Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita), and refined by a commentarial tradition into Vedanta (meaning literally “The end, or conclusions, of the Vedas”).  Over thousands of years we come to a rich body of religious and cultural information we call Hinduism. 

            While we may look at this rich tradition and admire its complexity and beauty, we cannot ignore the problems.  The inductive reasoning that postulated that different types of people should follow laws appropriate to their role in society (dharma) became crystallized into the unfortunate caste system of the India.  Further, the deep cultural respect for tradition discouraged any attempt to look beyond what is in the scriptures (like only looking for life on water-rich planets), creating a setting in which thousands of years of guess-work based on limited spiritual experience defines one’s world view.  Intellectual life for a long time in India included logical debates which were less about reality or truth than about the clever ability to manipulate the massive scriptural corpus to prove one’s point.  My guess is based upon your guess, like a castle on a cloud. 

            The same certainly holds true for Christianity.  After the initial spate of religious experience among Christ and the Disciples, quite a few Gospels turned up around the ancient world.  Eventually the four we know became canon, around the time of St. Augustine (4^th century).  Many Gospels were rejected to make room for those four, most because they were either suspect in authenticity, or they conflicted with the metaphysics of those with the most influence.  The “Church Doctors” then put together their metaphysics based on the canon (and really, the New Testament doesn’t give us a lot of actual information about the world), and this became the Christian tradition.  The dogmas of a church are really just metaphysics, but regarded as infallible by tradition. Heresy is really just when one person’s inductive reasoning conflicts with the standard metaphysic.

            For this reason, empiricists tend to regard metaphysics and religion both as a waste of time, even calling religious or metaphysical statements “meaningless”.  David Hume wrote of classical metaphysics:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles [Hume’s empirical principals], what havoc must we make?  If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?  No.  Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?  No.  Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing by sophistry and illusion.” – Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 

When we also consider the difficulties of knowledge and perception, we become even more skeptical that such grandiose conclusions, such as offered by metaphysicians and theologians, can ever attain to real knowledge.  Consider further the fact that if the speculations of metaphysically inclined ‘natural philosophers’ could be so wrong in their conclusions about the physical world that everyone can touch and see without any special effort, then what is the likelihood of any metaphysic being accurate in describing the nature of what is not seen by all?  I’d say it’s not bloody likely. 

            While most empiricists call for rejecting religion as a whole on these grounds, this seems to me a bit hasty.  As top-heavy as religious doctrine becomes, it is still based on human experience.  People have spiritual experiences all the time, to varying degrees of intensity, and I myself have had quite a few.  As skeptical as I am about most theology, I cannot doubt what I have experienced, just as you don’t doubt that the earth exists under your feet.  We also cannot doubt that unlike a perception of political rights, the scientific method, or written language, religion is a truly universal cultural phenomena.  Religious experience, in its primary sense, is universal to humanity, in the same way as spoken language, an upright walk, and music exist wherever there is man.  For a modern atheist to proclaim that there is no God is bad inductive reasoning.  He makes a negative observation: “I have never experienced God” and by inductive reasoning concludes “there is no God.”  By that same logic we might go from “I have never seen Transformers 2” and therefore “Transformers 2 doesn’t exist.”  As much as I wish that were the case, just because I lack experience of it, does not make it not exist.  Mr. Atheist might then say “but Dave, you can read reviews of Transformers 2, hear about it from others, and even go rent it yourself and watch it.  You can verify its existence, but you can’t do that with God.”  To which I must respond that there are no shortage of churches out there who profess God’s existence, you can hear about him from people who’ll even come knock on your door to chat, and according to the mystics (like the yogis), you can even train yourself to eventually experience God.  While that might take years, it also takes quite a bit of training to personally verify most scientific claims.  Most atheists, secure in their own inductive reasoning, are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to even attempt having a religious experience.  We might liken this to the fact that, despite the efforts of those who might insist on its existence, I’m unwilling to sacrifice my time, intelligence or sanity to verify the existence of Transformers 2 by actually watching it.  

Cont. in Part III