[MD] Dog Dishes and Direct Experience

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mark,

Matt said:
I'm not a huge fan of gerrymandering all moments predicated on 
assumption, projection, not-currently-questioning, and/or 
not-directly-experiencing (and many other statuses that fall under 
what we might just as well call "knowing") together into a 
homogenous pile called "Faith." ...  I think it might be important to 
see the analogies between the epistemological status of something 
called "faith" and other statuses (like the unquestioned assumptions 
involved in predictive knowing), but it doesn't tell you much about 
what is special about "faith" as a status.  And you need to do that in 
order to say anything interesting about the cultural and political 
controversies that have always surrounded religious experience.

Mark said:
Where does Faith end?  I am fine with categorizing it, but we do seem 
to draw a distinct line between a religious faith and a scientific belief.  
I do not find such a line easy to draw.

Matt:
We do draw the line, and I don't want to say that the line is easy.  I 
find it harder than a lot of my fellow non-theists.  I've been too 
impressed by James' "The Will to Believe" to think that while the 
political scorecard is easy to keep, the conceptual one is harder.  (By 
that I mean that the Enlightenment was right, religion has got to go 
from the political scene, and that this just becomes more and more 
obvious as the years wile by.  However, religion leaving the broader 
cultural scene is a different question and requires a closer look at the 
conceptual apparatus in question.)

I wasn't placating when I said "it might be important": it might be 
quite important to begin the investigation into what faith is by seeing 
the analogies between faith and assumption.  And we should know by 
now that assumptions are necessary to thinking.  But saying faith is 
necessary to thinking seems weird to me, and the weirdness stems 
from the fact that I think it causes us to lose our grip on the distinction 
between religion and science.  To lose that grip is important for some, 
those "some" including most importantly my political enemies, if you 
will, who want to stuff religion back into the public forum of political 
deliberation.  (Philip E. Johnson calls this the "wedge strategy" in his 
polemic against Darwin, or I should say, "biology.")  So I take 
"assumption" to be the genus and "faith" a species.  And I also put at 
a much lower priority the problems of those who are concerned 
about science-fanatics (of which, I take it, you've been articulating a 
concern for, lately in your polemic against psychology).  I consider 
religious fanatics much, much more dangerous to civilization than 
any "cult of science" or " of experts" or whatever label people who, 
like Pirsig and Heidegger, want to question the cultural pedestal 
European culture has seemed to put the natural sciences.  I'd rather 
accidentally aid and abet the science fanatics than the religious, 
though I'd rather do neither.

I think an investigation of this kind is terribly important for Pirsigians 
in getting a handle on Pirsig's relationship to religion.  Some of the 
discursus on Pirsig's beliefs in this area borders on a virulent 
anti-theism, what Dewey called "militant atheism," that blurs the 
distinction between the political and cultural question.  But I think 
keeping those questions bright and clear might be the only way to 
properly appreciate Pirsig's relationship to mysticism.

Matt