Obsolete Philosophy: The Role of Revelation in Religious Epistemology

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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54 Responses

  1. Doctor Jay says:

    You know, the phrase, “evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person” kind of means something different to me than it once did, seeing as how I have seen people I thought to be reasonable ignore and override some big piles of evidence.Report

  2. Dark Matter says:

    If you really have “special knowledge” and “special influence” then it’s hard to see how you couldn’t monetize it. No one is monetizing it. Religions always need money, but can only get it by selling stuff to believers, asking for donations, and doing other non-magical things.

    Even aside from money, for all the claims of special ethics, these groups don’t showcase that. For all the claims of being able to turn off the laws of physics on demand, these groups don’t showcase that either. For all the claims of knowledge, inventions come from science which ignores all this.

    Other than cultural legacy, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe any of this is non-fictional.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

      No one is monetizing it.

      Would it matter if I found a number of people monetizing it? I imagine that a single example of someone monetizing it would be enough to move us from “No one” to “at least one”.

      Here’s a song from MC 900 Foot Jesus for no reason whatsoever.

      Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

        You are correct. If you can find even ONE PERSON who can get magic to work, then you get to rewrite the laws of Physics to include magic/gods/etc. This is deep into “Nobel Prize” territory and redefining reality as we know it.

        One person who can walk on water, raise the dead, or even predict what the stock market will do by cutting open the belly of a ram.

        That threshold of proof is very low. It has held firm in the context of Billions of people having access to media. All you need is one god, one person, or even one magic spell.

        That we can’t find something like that is strongly suggestive.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

          Oh, you’re using “monetize” exceptionally narrowly.

          Let’s tweak that. Given that the best things in life are free, this is a system that will help you appreciate the life you have been given, help you deepen your relationships with others, and enrich yourself through things that cannot be purchased.

          But, like, that’s not the *GOAL*. That’s a by-product.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

            you’re using “monetize” exceptionally narrowly.

            No, I’m really not.

            Most of the Gods offer super powers on tap. Healing. Knowledge. Predicting the Future. Immortality. A super-powered friend that steps in to help you on occasion, or even on demand.

            Money is something we can measure and evaluate for the amount of advantage. So if God [X] gives a bonus that does [X’s thing] then money is the way to measure the level of influence. Is my company better off going with Apollo’s ability to predict the future or Jesus’ healthcare and general “make my life better”? Does is matter which field we’re in, the needs of the Insurance industry are different than Hospitals.

            No Fortune 500 has a department devoted to super-natural aid. All of them expect zero super-natural influence, not only for themselves but for their competitors.

            Money is the way to compare just how effective the various Gods are, and the amount of money is zero, from everyone.

            If we move the goal posts to include things like sales of bibles, then we’re also including sales of Superman comics and Harry Potter books.Report

            • CJColucci in reply to Dark Matter says:

              “All those crutches, and not a single wooden leg.”Report

            • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

              Doesn’t the word “supernatural” imply “unmonetizable”?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

                It’s hard to picture a “real” supernatural effect that couldn’t be monetized.

                Lots of people are willing to pay for healing. Most countries and some groups are willing to pay for death.

                If “predicting the future” required a virgin 14 year old cutting open a ram, then every big player on Wall Street would have “employees” who did that. If it was possible to curse someone via cutting someone else’s heart out, we’d do that less often but we’d do it. We have cold cases that could be resolved by speaking to dead people.

                The effect needs to be fictional in order for it to not be exploitable.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                You’re talking about what I’d call magic rather than the supernatural. Magic is mysterious chemistry. The supernatural is an intervention from outside the natural. It’s something beyond systemization. The Catholic Church may teach a formula for getting to heaven, but not a formula for getting a cure. Cures can happen but they come from outside the realm of nature.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

                The Catholic Church may teach a formula for getting to heaven, but not a formula for getting a cure.

                They teach a formula, it just doesn’t work. Bible says all Prayers are granted. The problem with the one-off supernatural is it doesn’t seem to exist after we subtract human self delusion and/or fraud.

                If you could predict the future 1% of the time that would be an license to print money on Wall Street. Similarly if you could cure incurable diseases 1% of the time, or regrow limbs 0.1% of the time, or even ONCE, you’d be a god of medicine.

                What we’ve got is one off events that can’t be investigated and aren’t taken seriously by serious people. This is VERY different than the “super-powers on tap” which supposedly existed and which we’re told we’ll get.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                That’s one interpretation, but it doesn’t much fit with James 4, which talks about why our prayers aren’t answered. Or more basically, with the Our Father, where Jesus’s own recommendation for our prayer is “Thy will be done”.Report

  3. Pinky says:

    I’ve never found arguments against a First Cause to be persuasive. In fact, Russell’s response to it convinced me that there was no good response to it. The infinite regress reminds me of those Escher drawings of a hand drawing another hand, which is drawing the first hand. You can call it possible, and I can’t say that it’s impossible, but there’s nothing in reason to suggest that it is actually possible. And Escher (an entity outside the two-hand system) created them. Likewise, there’s the old philosophical exercise of trying to prove that the universe wasn’t created 5 minutes ago. It could be true, or 10 minutes, or 15 minutes ago, but there’s no reason to think that any of them are.

    The relationship of epistemology to metaphysics is like the relationship of a foundation to a structure. The structure with a foundation will be sounder than without it, and it’ll be even sounder than that with a deeper foundation, and people can go mad digging a foundation and never build a structure. I’d love a be able to prove God’s existence to the standard of “indisputable”, but it is literally reasonable to consider it proven to the standard of “no reasonable position against it”.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

      The First Cause argument is God of Gaps. We don’t understand something, ergo God.

      First Cause likely stems from Physics and ergo is not sentient, benevolent, nor interested in me any more than the other laws of Physics.Report

      • Marchmaine in reply to Dark Matter says:

        “First Cause likely stems from Physics and ergo is not sentient, benevolent, nor interested in me any more than the other laws of Physics.”

        This itself is an unscientific statement.

        In the event that this is, in fact, a simulation, then Physics itself is derived from sentience; whether it is also benevolent or interested in you beyond a statistical interest is speculation.

        Now, whence the simulators and why the simulators, we have no idea; but worse, how are we to assume the the physics we apprehend apply to them? Or put another way, what if our physics is the tiniest derivative that they could think to program as a representative of their horribly incomplete understanding of PHYSICS?

        Part of which is to say, you are epistemologically wrong in that we can even apprehend how much we *can’t* understand about PHYSICS with our derivative Physics. The tools to go beyond Physics to PHYSICS aren’t even in the program/simulation.

        This isn’t “God of the Gaps” this is Philosophy of Science. Or, your notion of Physics is filling in Gaps you can’t measure, nor ever will. Which in the end is a sort of infinite regression argument for Physics that the simulation will be updated by the simulators who have their simulation updated by the ultimate knowers of PHYSICS.

        And, if the simulation theory is simply silly; then we really have no idea what we’re even on about.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

          This was the example that the prof used to explain “The Horns of a Dilemma”.

          He broke down the Greek for us (“double” “proposition”) and gave us the Horns (ROCK AND ROLL).

          Either there was a first thing
          Or things go back forever and ever without any first thing

          And both of those propositions are unsatisfying.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Marchmaine says:

          Simulation “theory” is non-falsifiable. Here it pushes “First Cause” back into the unknowable weeds.

          “Unknowable” doesn’t result in “ergo it’s reasonable for my God to have done it” any more than it means “it’s reasonable that Odin did it”.

          It results in “we can’t disprove Harry Potter or Superman but have no reason to think they’re not fictional”.

          If you need to lower the evidence bar to the point where fictional entities can pass, then that says a lot.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

        I’ve never heard anyone claim that the First Cause argument implies a personal, loving God, so that seems like a strawman.

        As for a God of the Gaps, well, define what you mean by “gap”. If it’s that we don’t understand how the eye responds to light, so there’s got to be a God, then yes, that’s a fillable gap. If it’s that we don’t understand that which created all time / space / matter / energy / reason, I’m not expecting that gap to get filled any time soon.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

          I’ve never heard anyone claim that the First Cause argument implies a personal, loving God, so that seems like a strawman.

          If First Cause gives no support for a personal loving God then there’s no point in raising it if that’s where you want to end up. However it does get raised by people who want to end up there. Thus the Kalam cosmological argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument

          we don’t understand that which created all time / space / matter / energy / reason, I’m not expecting that gap to get filled any time soon.

          Gaps in understanding exist and have always existed. They’re getting smaller. We used to think Lightning was caused by Thor, and various other gaps were filled with various other gods.

          Pointing to a gap of understanding doesn’t support the idea that magic/supernatural did it. Nor does it support god, much less [the god I was personally raised with and not the thousands of other gods].

          The point of calling it “god of gaps” is to point out that as the gaps have gotten smaller we’ve figured out god wasn’t hiding there and that should be expected in general.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to Dark Matter says:

            On a side note it looks like the core foundation of the cosmological argument is wrong. We have examples in nature of particles spontaneously appearing so it is possible for stuff to just appear without a “cause”.

            This is how Hawking got his Nobel and became famous, he predicted Hawking radiation.Report

          • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

            OK, it looks like Craig added three steps to the First Cause argument. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone do that. You name it, some philosopher has tried it, I guess. Looking over his book of that name, though, I notice three chapter titles which follow the standard argument, and none that refer to a personal God.

            People use the cosmological arguments because they think they’re right, not because they get you all the way to a personal God. Aquinas is notorious for taking an argument as far as logic allows, then stopping. If it doesn’t get him to his desired destination, he’ll acknowledge that, or he’ll write “theologica” across the title page because philosophy can’t complete the journey on its own.

            Going back to the gaps topic, the tools we use to fill in the gaps aren’t capable of filling in the biggest questions. We can learn more about the structure of the retina, and neurons, and grow closer to a full understanding of how we see light. But those tools lack the capacity to answer the questions I’m asking about. To put it in the old terminology, natural philosophy (that is, observation and reason) is a branch of philosophy.Report

            • Pinky in reply to Pinky says:

              Correction: I should have been more consistent between paragraphs and said that theology (the philosophy of revelation) is a part of philosophy too, but that philosophy without revelation can’t complete a proof of a personal God.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

              those tools lack the capacity to answer the questions I’m asking about.

              Which questions are those?Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                The questions we call philosophical or religious. The ones about “that which created all time / space / matter / energy / reason”. The ones that observation and reason alone can’t grapple with, because they’re unfalsifiable by observation. Also, the ones about “oughts”.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

                The ones about “that which created all time / space / matter / energy / reason”. The ones that observation and reason alone can’t grapple with, because they’re unfalsifiable by observation.

                “Reason” will probably be duplicated by us when we get seriously into AI or creating creatures. We used to think there was a massive difference between organic and inorganic material (and god created it was in the former); Then we found we could change one into the other. The distinction between reason and not-reason will be a thing until it’s not.

                One you didn’t mention was the creation of life from non-life, that will have to wait until we explore the galaxy and see what experiments mother nature has run on other planets.

                For the others, my expectation is when we add up all the forces in the universe we find they cancel out. The universe will be Hawking radiation on steroids. We already have particles coming from nothing without cause and Nature likes to repeat.

                More importantly, time / space / matter / energy / reason are real-world things and thus part of science. Pulling gods into a discussion on the origin of time seems an effort to justify faith and unlikely to add to science/knowledge.

                And I don’t know what the “oughts” are.Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to Pinky says:

      Counter-intuitively, perhaps, I’ve always felt the ontological arguments will always be recursive (maybe not the right mathematical description given their use of formal logic, but let’s say recursive in that ontology presupposes ontology); the existential contemplation of Nothingness common across several different Religious Philosophies is an interesting area of conflict and mystery.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Marchmaine says:

        My first thought is, anyone who writes the words “recursive in that ontology presupposes ontology” should be locked up. Beyond that, I don’t mind a little circularity. It’s dangerous, sure. If you say that A proves B, B proves C, and C proves A, then you’re not “proving” anything perfectly. But you’ve described a system where A, B, and C don’t contradict each other, and if A, B, and C can be observed in reality, then you’ve got a system that stands up to scrutiny. Like I said, you can always dig deeper to make a better foundation, until you end up on the side of the road weeping because no foundation is going to be perfectly secure.Report

        • Marchmaine in reply to Pinky says:

          I think a strong case could be made for locking those sorts of people up… I’m not saying (exactly) that the arguments are circular, but that some Axioms Are-that-they-Are. And when logicians/mathematicians go after them, they founder on this nexus. Such that Plantinga (with whom I overlapped at ND, and had the pleasure of knowing casually and understanding not at all) takes a somewhat nuanced position that the rationality of the logic is the proof itself… not the proof.

          And I’m sure I’m butchering that for professionals, but good enough for a combox.Report

      • Chris in reply to Marchmaine says:

        I’m interested in how it is recursive (or something like recursive). What do you mean by ontology presupposes ontology? That existence (e.g., of God) presupposes existence of the mind that conceives of God? Which presupposes an origin of mind? Or something to that effect?Report

        • Brandon in reply to Chris says:

          The existence of Quantum Mechanics and the Waveparticle duality of Light strongly inclines this universe to be part of a simulation (the explanation of which delves into data theory and the principle of parsimony). And it’s unlikely to be the first simulation, either — it’s too well-done for that (it stores data too neatly).

          Honestly, we shouldn’t be surprised that G-d is a physicist and computer programmer.Report

        • Marchmaine in reply to Chris says:

          I think I touch on it above… It’s well before we get to God and Other Minds (so to speak).Report

          • Chris in reply to Marchmaine says:

            Ah, i see, the obverse of infinite regression, meeting in the middle at nothingness?

            I think the 20th century versions of the argument get around this somewhat, in that they’re less dependent on the idea of a greatest being, and center on necessity, contingency, and impossibility, but I could be missing part of what you’re arguing.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to Chris says:

              Yes, it was interesting to me to see that there are ongoing debates and books from the aughts and even the teens hammering out the formal logic. But for me, formal logic is the area of the map specifying there be dragons.Report

  4. J_A says:

    I think one of the essay’s several first mistakes is that no one defines what is a mystical experience or communing with the divine.

    There’s a difference between perceiving the image of a burning bush, let’s say, and looking onto the Grand Canyon and feeling ecstatic (see: for instance, the Stendhal syndrome). A lot of people that say they felt God in X or Y occasions describe things awfully similar to what new fathers describe when they see their child being born. But the birth of a child is not a mystical experience for purposes of the essay. Is it? In practice, the person having the mystical experience is the one making the call *IF* what he went through was a glimpse of the divine, or a great esthetic or emotional experience, or a deep moment of relaxation, or something else.

    We interpret the world around us based on the patters in our minds. Certain people, whose mental map has a God(s) pattern embedded, will interpret what happened to her as an encounter with or an inspiration directly from Allah, or Athena, or the Great Buffalo. Others would interpret it as something else, without any reference to the metaphysical.

    We all create the Gods in our image.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to J_A says:

      I kinda touch on it in the “We must first turn to experience” paragraph.

      If I had to define it, I’d say “it’s if the person describing it says it was”. Like in the example from William James:

      There are well over fifty examples in his book, and mentions several times that he has more, but for the sake of brevity he will give only a few. How, epistemically, are we to deal with an example such as: “I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine.”

      Did that person commune with the divine? I dunno.

      Did that person have a mystical experience? I dunno.

      But to say “no” seems improper.

      For what it’s worth, *I* had one, once. But it was an atheistic one.

      Now, do you know whether I had one?

      Nope. But here we are.Report

      • J_A in reply to Jaybird says:

        Perhaps what I am missing is the fifty examples, to parse what sounds like an emotional experience from what sounds like a supernatural one, to what sounds like a psychotic one.

        Me, I sometimes suffer mild episodes of bipolar disorder (it’s a family disease). I’m also a lucid dreamer. In the middle of suicidal thoughts or a manic episode, a voice behind my ears says: “pay no attention. It’s only a temporary lithium deficiency”. The same voice says: “I’m no longer enjoying this dream” in the middle of a nightmare, and monsters suddenly turn into puppies. I’m afraid if the Archangel Gabriel themselves would appear in front of me, my inner voice would say something about not eating those old leftovers from the fridge again in the future , since they obviously are growing [psychotropic] moldReport

        • Jaybird in reply to J_A says:

          Varieties of Religious Experience was one of the books assigned for the class and I read it.

          I don’t have my copy handy… do I? Lemme check my shelves… Nope. But wait! It’s in the public domain! Yay 1917!

          Here’s a PDF copy (warning: PDF).

          Jump down to page 58. He talks about some of the answers given in interviews with people who have claimed to have religious experiences.

          I suppose we could wave all of these away by saying “oh, it’s just the brain acting up.” An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.

          But that seems to come from a place that says “these experiences are not possible and, therefore, we need to come up with a plausible explanation otherwise”.

          If there *IS* the possibility of Religious Experience, what would it be like for a human to have it? Well, I can’t help but imagine that it would be something recognizably describable as a Religious Experience. And, if so, we’re stuck with people saying “I had something happen” and comparing stories between the groups of people.

          Is there a lot of dross in there? Hells yes, there is!

          Is there any gold? I dunno.Report

          • Brandon in reply to Jaybird says:

            Has the internet taught you nothing? If you don’t know something, look it up.
            pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26631541/Report

          • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

            Since you bring up James (man, those Gifford Lectures have really turned-out interesting works) … his section on Mysticism (p.369++) is worth reading… it covers Christian and non-Christian mysticism and it’s initial tone is somewhat different than the first 400 pages of what we might call ‘supernatural’ experiences… things that happen TO people vs. things that are DONE by people and are repeatable. Not easy and not by many, but not unstudied.

            In fact, even popularizer Michael Pollan is jumping in the game with his psychedellics and pondering the connection between altered conscious states and mysticism – which is not to say that I think Mystics are using psychedellics, but that they are able to alter conscious consciously.

            Now… in all Religious settings I’m passing familiar with, Mysticism and its practices are recognized as potentially dangerous and ‘regulated’ with important guidance and instruction. I believe this is wisdom that is real and learned through very hard experience. It’s not woo woo to be undertaken lightly.

            That said, I anticipate further ‘Scientific study of Mysticism’ if that makes sense, and while I don’t expect it to prove anything, I expect it to sort of, well, mystify.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

              The number of philosophers that were friggin’ everywhere in the 90’s that you never hear about anymore makes me wonder if I was in a bubble back then.

              I mean, even more of a bubble.

              James was the quintessential “American Philosopher”. Whenever we talked about Philosophy, we made distinctions between “Philosophy” and “American Philosophy”.

              Real Philosophy happened on the Continent, I guess.

              We touched on Pollan, if I recall correctly. The professor walked on eggshells to avoid telling us how many drugs he did at our age but merely explained that mysticism and psychedelics were both wandering away from Normal. It’s not that they were comparable!, he urged us to understand. They’re not! It’s just that they’re both “away”.

              He grudgingly conceded that there might be people who would benefit from mysticism but don’t know how to leave who would benefit from psychedelics first. BUT IT’S NOT A REGULAR THING!

              Start them out on salvia divinorum and tell them it’s all like that, that’s what I say.Report

  5. Murali says:

    There’s also the internalism/externalism issue. Suppose you are an externalist (lots of people are nowadays), then you think that the things which make your belief justified need not be accessible to you (internalists think they must always be accessible at least in principle). So, externalists may distinguish between experiences of the divine (i.e. religious experiences that are genuinely caused by God or any similar being) and pseudo-experiences. Of course, while the pseudo-experience and the genuine article are indistinguishable from each other (from within), only the genuine article confers justification.

    Similarly, an externalist account of testimony says that only testimony from people who are reliable about the subject-matter confers justification. The thought here is that testimony merely transmits whatever justification the testifier possesses. In that case, the testimony that originates ultimately from the guy who had the genuine religious experience confers justification on the resultant belief while testimony from those who had a pseudo-experience does not.

    This makes the issue of multiple incompatible religious experiences moot. At most one of them is the genuine article. The fact that we cannot tell between them is irrelevant. That only means that we don’t have a decision procedure about how to form beliefs about God. If some religious belief has the right pedigree, then it is justified.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Murali says:

      One of my professors introduced the term “skyhook” to us. It’s a tool used in climbing and he drew one on the board for us. The tool is used to have someone from below hook onto something that he cannot see and can then pull himself up.

      (Here’s some pictures that are close to what he drew for us.)

      “We have no skyhook”, he concluded.Report

  6. Chris says:

    I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, to find Kaufmann in there ;). Cool to see James get some play, though.

    Coincidentally, I read a paper a few weeks ago about skeptical arguments — similar in different ways to the Pyrrhonians in some senses, and to later Enlightenment skeptics in others — in early Christianity and middle/late Byzantium, all aimed at fortifying the role of revelation over and against human reason (and philosophy in particular) in the seeking of Truth. It was interesting, to me at least, to think of early and medieval Christian writers advancing philosophical skepticism in the service of revelation, when today (and for a couple hundred years, really), it is so often employed against religion.Report