[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[markhsmit]

Hi dmb,

What you are describing are beliefs based on objective criteria, that
is what exists outside.  One can imagine an inner world that is
much larger and more encompassing that the outer one.  Indeed
it is that inner world that creates our perception of the outer.  In
this world it is possible that the rules are very different from the
objective world.  I believe that Pirsig, in ZAMM, is describing more
of the inner world.  With Lila he switches to the objective world.
Like another said, from the romantic to the classical.  Often,
sharing of the inner world cannot be done easily with language
and logic, the rules are different.

Mark

Steve:
This post is well written and thoughtful and yet it makes me cringe. What you're expressing here is Rorty's view of pragmatism, not THEE view of pragmatism. And there are more than a few pragmatists who think Rorty isn't a pragmatist at all. As James saw it in "The Will To Believe", for example, we have the right to assert our own desires and make a choice about what to believe ONLY when there is no available evidence to settle the matter. He had other conditions too, like it can't be a trivial belief. Pierce was fiercely scientific about what we can believe and assert. As he saw it, the only alternatives to beliefs based on evidence and inquiry were beliefs based on authority, tenacity and even less attractive options. Dewey thought inquiry was essential and basic to life on the planet and no less useful for philosophers. But of course it's Pirsig's pragmatism that concerns here the most. Like Dewey and James, he's a radical empiricist and that means that true beliefs don't correspond to an objective reality but they do agree with experience. That's practically what pragmatic truth means. I mean the rejection of objectivity, for Rorty, means that conversation is the only restraint on what we can assert. This is very different from the radical empiricist's claims. What was that quote from Pirsig? Something like...The scientific method is the way nature keeps us from thinking something is true when it isn't - or something like that. The idea is simply that experience is what constrains our truth claims. For the pragmatist, "truth" has no meaning except as an idea that works in experience. I'm not saying that consensus forming activities don't count as experience but rather that experience is much, much broader than that. 
For whatever its worth,
dmb


> Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:34:32 -0500
> From: peterson.steve at gmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: [MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists
> 
> 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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