[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[markhsmit]

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the pragmatic description, you state, what I only attempt in
sound-bites, much more effectively.  Perhaps I should read Rorty.

I have several comments.  The need to impose one's belief, or to deny
another's is indeed where conflict arrises.  It seems that justification
is needed for one's beliefs through the acquisition of like-minded
individuals.  There is a need to feel that one's perception is right, 
through consensus, to remove doubt and uneasiness.  However as
you state, to put manners of thinking into perspective (thus creating
another belief) has positive effects in terms of diminishing
conflict and righteousness.  

There are many forms of justification for beliefs.  Some prefer to have
self-referencing logic.  Others prefer to equate cause and effect.
Others prefer to envelop the universe into a giant creative being,
themselves included.  Each has its own dogma and rules.  Applying the
rules of one to another, never works.  One finds he is only fighting
his own understanding of the other.  Like I have said previously,
it is doing battle with windmills.  The enemy does not exist.
What exists is ones feelings about things.

The way I see it, human thinking is akin to a candle shining light.
A candle illuminates, and humans radiate thinking.  That is what
we do.  Like a candle, this thinking creates shadows in the form
of words.  The more candles that are lit, the brighter the light, but
the bigger and darker the shadows.  The candle goes out, and the 
shadows disappear.  Nothing more.

Sometimes my posts go overboard into existential absurdity.  However,
I "feel" that there are answers to be found there.

Mark


Hi All,

I recently posted a question about rationality and theists, and I have some
thoughts to share regarding the issue.

Pragmatists recommend that religious belief, like any other belief, is best
thought of as a habit of action. If we MOQers think of belief in this way,
then we may more easily drop the SOM notion that beliefs exist within an "in
here" realm of ideas that needs to correctly correspond with an "out there"
realm of phenomena.

Habits of action are always already part of reality rather than a mirror of
reality or a representation of reality. Then we never even think to ask
about beliefs such questions as, is this habit of action in the correct
relationship to The-Way-Things-Really-Are. Instead, the question that we ask
about a belief is, does this belief lead to more or less successful
action--to gratification of our desires--with the understanding that our
desires are many and varied and that different beliefs serve different
purposes. So the atheist subscribing to pragmatism (and I should think, the
MOQ as well) doesn't want to argue that the problem with theists is that
their beliefs don't correctly map to reality, since she has already dropped
the notion of "proper mapping to reality" as a useful test for truth or as
the goal for holding beliefs. From an evolutionary perspective, the point of
holding beliefs is instead to gratify particular desires. Beliefs are
thought of as tools for helping us get what we want. Since truths are
pursued in support of particular human projects, before we can even talk
about the truth of a belief, we need to sort out what sort of desire we hope
this or that belief will satisfy.

So if pragmatists and MOQers don't hold "getting things right" as their
ultimate concern, what sorts of criticism of religious belief, if any, can a
nonbelieving pragmatist or MOQer level against theists?

The pragmatist atheist's only concern for religion is, as Richard Rorty put
it, the "extent to which the actions of religious believers frustrate the
needs of other human beings..." While some atheists (often such SOMers as
those who refer to themselves as Rationalists) see the appeals to faith
rather than to evidence in relation to religious beliefs as the shirking of
the believer's responsibility to have true beliefs or at least to base their
beliefs on evidence, pragmatists don't think that we have a duty to Truth
anymore than atheists think that we have a duty to God. Pragmatists who are
also atheists don't think we have a duty to any such nonhuman powers as God,
Truth, Reason, or Divine Will, Reality, or The Moral Law.

Instead of conceiving of evidence as something which "floats free of human
projects" and demands our respect, Rorty says that the demand for evidence
is "simply a demand from other human beings for cooperation on such [human]
projects." Our duty is not to "evidence" but only to ourselves and to our
fellow human beings. We want our beliefs to cohere with our other beliefs,
and to the extent that we want to participate in common projects with other
people, we need to try to get our beliefs to cohere with their beliefs, but
only to that extent. So the demand for evidence to justify our beliefs only
needs to come up when we are engaged in a common project.

Consider the parallel to this way of thinking in Classical Liberalism. The
project of having good beliefs is part of the wider endeavor of our pursuit
of happiness where there is a defined right to privacy. People are said to
have the right to pursue their own conception of the good so long as that
pursuit doesn't get in the way of other people's right to pursue their own
conception of the good. A bald belief in God (just like a simple lack of
belief in God) does not necessarily cash out as a pattern of action that
frustrates anyone else's pursuit of happiness, so we don't have the right to
demand that theists supply evidence in support of their beliefs until such
beliefs are made public as specific actions or the intention to act in such
a way as to interfere with other people's desires.

When does the intellectual responsibility of having evidence to support our
beliefs arise? And what do we mean by evidence, anyway? Having dropped the
notion of objectivity as being in accordence with reality and having
replaced it with objectivity as the ability to get consensus among informed
inquirers, evidence is then whatever may help us get consensus about a
belief. Evidence is only of issue when there is some need to get consensus.
The demand for evidence and the duty to supply it should only come up
surrounding some common project in which two parties with differring beliefs
have agreed to participate, and there is no outside authority to which we
can appeal about what ought to be counted as evidence beyond what authority
has been agreed upon between the parties that seek to have one another's
backing for their public projects.

When theists not only hold a belief in God but also believe that they know
what God wills for others, theist should be made to feel the pressure of the
demand for evidence, and if that believer seeks to have her knowledge of
God's Will enforced--to gain cooperation in such a public project--she is
obliged to provide evidence that what she says about God's Will is true. For
example, If someone not only makes the personal choice not to engage in
homosexual activity but also insists that others may not do so either by
seeking to prevent gay marriage, that believer is obliged to provide
evidence on demand that homosexuality is indeed immoral.

In addition to her moral projects to get people to adhere to her ethics,
another area where a believer may face a justified demand for evidence is if
she makes any scientific or historical claims. Rorty wrote that "On a
pragmatist account, scientific inquiry is best viewed as the attempt to find
a single, unified, coherent description of the world--the description that
makes it easiest to predict the consequences of events and actions..." This
attempt is the attempt to gratify particular desires--the desire to predict
and control. If a belief is not held with the desire to predict and control
then we need not worry about whether it agrees with science, but if a
believer asserts that, say, prayer is efficacious in curing diseases, then
she is partcipating in the public project called science and will face the
demand for evidence inherent in such an enterprise concerned with getting
consensus on a description of reality.

Likewise, claims about virgin birth, raising the dead, the Biblical account
of the origin of the universe, and the effectiveness of various sacraments
are the sorts of assertions that, if taken to be historically and
scientifically true, need to face up to the demands for evidence and the
standards for what counts as evidence that apply to the public projects of
doing history and doing science.

It is possible to imagine a theist whose beliefs about God are "sufficiently
privatized" such that they do not serve the scientific purposes of
predicting and controlling the world or influencing the moral choices of
others. Such beliefs would not conflict with science and would not need to
face any demands for evidence. Richard Rorty has recommended such "public
versus private" considerations to help us untangle beliefs as part of his
version of pragmatism. Someone who holds to a privatized version of religion
may view "the supposed tension between science and religion as the illusion
of opposition between copperative endeavors and private projects."

A high-profile battleground in the conflict between science and belief in
God about which we may gain some clarity in applying Rorty's public-private
split is the debate surrounding Creation Science. When pragmatists say that
Intelligent Design or Creation Science is "bad science" we mean that it
places the desire for God's agency to be at the center of science's
description of the world above the desire for this description to be the one
that is most useful for predicting and controlling the environment. A
desciption of the world that center's on God's agency renders any attempt to
predict and control the world futile. Since any possible experiences that we
might have or can imagine having would be consistent with the assertion that
God created the world to be exactly that way, Creation Science doesn't tell
us anything about what sort of experiences we should expect to have. Such a
"science" would then be useless for doing the sort of predicting and
controlling that scientific inquiry is pursued to help us achieve.

On the other hand, if these claims are intended as some other sorts of
assertions--if they are asserted as true in some other way than as
participation in the public project of finding a unified coherent
description of the world that best enables us to predict and control--then
these assertions need not face such demands for evidence on
historical-scientific terms. If people making such assertions do indeed
intend something clearly different in purpose from historical and scientific
inquiry and can articulate in what other ways, if not scientifically and
historically, these claims may be regarded as true, then perhaps it can
indeed be made coherent to say as is so often claimed by theists that there
is indeed no conflict between science and religion. Such does not seem
possible for theists of the Fundamentalist or Orthodox Catholic variety, but
perhaps it is possible for more liberal theists.

What might such an account of belief in God that does not run into public
demands for justification be like? In what sense could a religious belief be
said to be true if not in the usual historical-scientific way? Perhaps the
original question of whether theists are necessarily irrational doesn't need
to come up.

Best,
Steve
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