on a recent visit to the natural history museum, i was struck by the number of hijabs, kippot and crucifixes on display. unfazed by fossils, geological displays of the age of the earth, australopithecine skulls and the marble statue of darwin that gazes enigmatically over the entrance hall, they gamely queued for the dinosaur exhibit, children in tow, back and forth beneath the massive skeleton of diplodocus, eager to expand their knowledge of the universe. it was an inspiring sight and one that i found immensely encouraging given the current level and tone of debate between religion and science. nobody appeared to be there to tell their children “and these are the fake animals G!D Placed in the earth to Test our faith”. everywhere were children asking clear, in some cases unsettling questions about how things came to be.
outside the serene environment of the museum, however, the dispute between the self-appointed guardians of faith and reason continues to rage. professor richard dawkins, the napoleon of socio-biology, recently devoted an entire episode of his hagiographic (but mostly excellent) series on darwinism, “the genius of charles darwin”, to rubbishing religion, as usual choosing its most rabid, swivel-eyed partisans, leavened with a selection of double-tongued “intelligent design”-peddling weasels to make his point about the idiocy and irrationality of belief. the sole exception to this parade of lunacy appeared to be the archbishop of canterbury, whose lyrical, articulate moderation was immediately dismissed by dawkins as yet another creationist strategy, this time the stealth doctrine of “absorption”. to this way of thinking, even the honour accorded to darwin by burying him in westminster abbey was suspect.
it is notable that those who find evolution unpalatable are similarly splenetic, even if they fail to match dawkins’ magisterial contempt in either grammar or coherence. but however less militant in tone than his ferocious assault on religion, the god delusion, “the genius of charles darwin” still left the indelible impression of an agenda that believes there can be no genuine meeting ground between empirical, peer-reviewed truth and obscurantist, infantile fantasy. religion, in dawkins’ view, quite simply cannot be taken seriously as a choice for anyone who considers themselves intellectually sound or critically robust. it is a vestigial remnant, a reminder of the dark era before scientific knowledge was available, a sentimental, regressive attachment – and it must be discredited, debunked and unmasked for the toxic, anti-reason fallacy that it is.
this is, of course, not the first time that religion has been attacked in these terms. the european “enlightenment” was founded upon a profound hostility to religion as an obstacle to progress, judaism in particular. much of enlightenment criticism of judaism could also be characterised as a new version of christian supercessionism, this time using reason and science to prove that christianity was more “modern” and “progressive” than its “backwards”, “primitive”, “uncivilised” predecessor. naturally, some thinkers went far further than this, rejecting any and all religion in favour of a new faith in reason, science, progress, class, nation or race. for judaism, however, the hostility remained constant; whether the aim was to convert or debunk. and, ultimately, even for those who abandoned traditional belief or any kind of belief, a new form of hostility, based on a vicious distortion of science itself, was able to make even having jewish ancestors a crime punishable by extermination.
pseudo-scientific racism offered judaism no opportunity to defend itself but, fortunately, science and reason seem unlikely to lead to a new holocaust. but existential issues notwithstanding, the militancy of science-inspired hostility to religion seems to have adopted a recognisable posture and set of tactics. they appear to be strikingly similar to those of the famous mediaeval spanish “disputations”, in which judaism, represented by such luminaries as nachmanides, found itself called to account before the kangaroo courts of the catholic church and the inquisition.
i do not seek to defend all religion against assaults when it seems manifestly obvious that some are well-deserved and many criticisms can be shown to have excellent foundation; in particular, the accusation that religion has often shown itself as all too ready to excuse injustice, immorality, inhumanity and the abuse of power, whether as a social influence or a political force. the prophet jeremiah speaks of the dichotomy between a “heart of stone” and a “heart of flesh”. we must be unarguably able to lay claim to a voice of righteousness and truth, or we will be unable to respond, as we should in no uncertain terms:
our religion is not as you say it is. you are misrepresenting what we say, misrepresenting what we do and misrepresenting our mission in the world. you are either ignorant of what we actually believe, or you are guilty of the same lack of critical engagement that you believe religion exhibits where darwinism is concerned and violating your own principle of empirical investigation. we have no problem with science, especially darwinism; it undoubtedly has some important things to teach us about ourselves and the universe. but we are not interested in a war between religion and science. more to the point, we will take responsibility for our own benefit to society and will not have our terms of engagement dictated to us by you. they should be dictated by our respect for the sources within judaism that enable us to articulate that benefit:
“when i behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you established; what is man, that you are mindful of him and the son of man, that you think of him?” psalms 8:6-7
“if a man is worthy, they say to him: ‘you preceded the angels’; but if he is unworthy, they say to him: ‘a gnat preceded you, a snail preceded you’” genesis rabbah 8:1
“man has no pre-eminence over the animals, for all is breath” ecclesiastes 3:19
there are often surprising sources of religious authority for such interpretations. one such is the towering figure of “the rav”, rabbi j.b. soloveitchik, who asks in response:
“in truth, what is man when set against the vast universe and the heavenly realms? what is his worth in comparison to the cosmic process? what is he when set against the world and the fullness thereof? what is he in relation to worlds, visible and invisible?” ‘halakhic man’, p.169
soloveitchik understands us as being reconciled by understanding G!D’s Recognition of us as “worthy to stand before G!D”. i do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the purpose of religion is to make us worthy of that divine recognition – and where we are not, we cannot expect protestations of moral superiority to hold water.
63 Comments
What a fantastic post!
oh thanks, stuart, feel free to cross-post it if you like.
b’shalom
bananabrain
I’d love too.
Agreed, very excellent stuff.
I would suggest, however, that Kant was a rather interesting philosopher in this respect; who rather defied the bounds set on Enlightenment thinkers by this article.
Thought-provoking article, Mr Bananabrain.
Some poetic quotes at the end, too; the verse from Ecclesiastes (re: “breath”) is very “Hindu” in its message & style, and the two verses referring to “heavens and man” (psalms 8:6-7 and ‘halakhic man’, p.169) could be part of Sufi qawwalis or the Guru Granth Sahib.
All of which show yet again, of course, that different religions and their respective followers often have more in common than some people may think.
Following on from the main article, BB and others on the same wavelength would also find the following article to be interesting :
“Is this the meaning of life ?”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/mar/05/meaning-life-evolution-universe?showallcomments=true#comment-51
(The ongoing discussion afterwards is good too).
And no, despite the similar-sounding name, the author isn’t the host of The Daily Show…..
Did you put the wrong title on this post? I saw no argument to support that militant atheism is a “toxic, anti-reason fallacy”.
All I got was:
- Atheists don’t like creationsts.
- Neither do I.
- I’m not a creationist.
Then some stuff about feeling insignificant in a big universe, striving to be recognised by something called G!D, and a seeming non sequitur about moral superiority (where did that come from?).
DavidMWW, as much as I respect you, it is as if this post has simply gone over your head….
Stuart, then could you please point out which part(s) of the main post support the proposition made in the title?
Sorry David, I should have been more specific. I have made a mental note not to be so quick to post my thoughts at 7am whilst suffering from a rotten hangover.
My comment to you was born out of a surprise that you got so little out of the post, rather than a comment in response to the title issue.
I read this post and found it to be full of salient points and profound thoughts skillfully articulated and you saw very little.
It’s all a matter of perspective I suppose.
bananahead boy you made some school boy errors on your grammer on this post. And yet you feel the need to criticise my gramme?
Wiki
I take it you do not have a clue of what bananabrain is writing.
As Wittgenstein said: of what we do not understand, it is best to remain silent.
Pitiful.
err, you really are a bananabrain abu faris… i.e. if you are gonna be writing a blog post, then atleast start the sentence with a capital letter. if you can’t see that, then don’t describe other peoples’ deliberate errors as ‘pitiful’ u pompous self righteous pig.
especially, when you quote someone without quotation marks. pitiful hypocrisy…
i on the other hand, (unlike you slaves to the british) couldn’t care if there were errors in the spelling or grammar, as that is only a cheap shot for you when you really don’t have nothing to add to the argument but try to disparage the character of a commentator by looking for spelling mistakes.
your own writing is heavily flawed, abu fart this.
“err, you really are a bananabrain abu faris… i.e. if you are gonna be writing a blog post, then atleast start the sentence with a capital letter. if you can’t see that, then don’t describe other peoples’ deliberate errors as ‘pitiful’ u pompous self righteous pig.”
Abu Faris didn’t write this article, another individual called bananabrain did. bananabrain chooses not to write his articles in sentence case. That’s his prerogative.
Why come on here to pick fault with this style when you have done the same yourself? Hilarious.
I think we are being given an object lesson on why not to educate your children at inner city madrassahs.
Some of my best friends went to madrassa. But now they all eschew religious dogmatism and champion secularism and individualism.
nah, effendi, they don’t buddy. they all jamaati islamist u simpleton. ur madrasa pals, yep, they all qutubis. hey! banabrain! abu fart this! ibrahim! where are you guys!? effendi’s best friends are alqaeda, so by association, he EFFENDI, is also alqaeda. Ban him and report him to gilligan, your british master.
hah! there, i picked up your ways quickly on this blog.
careful effendi, don’t give too much of yourself away here mate. it depends really… your only safe if you’ve kissed their butts frequently enough here. yeh, the stinkin butts of atheists, christians, gays and jews, not forgetting to mention hindus and whatever else.
Are you on paan and cigarettes again?
yeah, effendi definately is. care to splash some wine with that too dawood? or u only drink to appease your british masters?
Make mine a large bourbon with ice, cheers.
It’s the same idiot who posted earlier as T2. Ignore.
ignore? oh why now gentleman… we just gettin warmed up. yeh, madrasah nuts can play this game with sell outs better than ever imagined. sissies…
spit, spit! spittoon got tashaya’d.
ive just laid a bangladeshi flag on my toilet seat and have custom printed toilet tissues with shake mujib’s face on it. you will excuse me, all this whisky and paan is forcing me to take a dump. so i’ll be off now, i have a delivery to send via the drainage tunnels of my toilet that lead all the way back to bangladesh! bon voyage!
gulam okhol…
I’m thinking, what, 12, 13 years old? Or mental age thereabouts.
LOL you make me laugh dave! Its not a bad idea maybe you should ass her lesbian daughter hasina on your toilet too.
Time for the mods to intervene, I think…
No comment necessary.
time for the mods to intervene? why? tellin people to f off doesn’t warrant deletion, yet a joke warrants censorship.
tell a faris and bigland boy to stop tellin people to f off and be demeaning to peoples’ mothers.
anyway, i thought heresy is freedom of thought. 2 can play that game.
Hello, it’s the same troll again.
Do fuck off.
Time for the mods to intervene, I think…
oh by the way my frutie, do shut up…
Not the same termite, of course. It’s our Jamaati troll playing games. The real Termite can spell and punctuate.
No problem, Stuart. It’s just that when I saw an article titled “THE KANGAROO COURT OF MILITANT ATHEISM IS A TOXIC, ANTI-REASON FALLACY” I read it in the hope of finding out why the kangaroo court of militant atheism is a toxic, anti-reason fallacy. I was disappointed to find nothing of the sort. Turns out the title was just a little cry of rage, with no relation to the rest of the text.
Fuck off, you pig-ignorant scum sucker.
You know what is remarkable? How many decent blog posts get hijacked into bolox by commentators.
@abu faris:
the article is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of the philosophy of the enlightenment, of course, obviously there are a number of philosophers whose attitude is far more nuanced; i think i would be correct in mentioning locke in this respect. i only mean to say that the attitude that seems to have taken hold amongst the militant atheists could be more or less summarised as being that of voltaire’s “écrasez l’infame” with an added dash of love-vs-law false-dichotomy.
@jai:
you will find that the attitude displayed by most of the more forward-thinking amongst the mystically-inclined does tend to mirror the sort of attitude one gets from sufis, albeit the problem i have with mysticism is when it loses all external focus and turns wholly inward, losing contact with the real world. that is where you get antinomian approaches and, in my view, this is the road that leads to messianic approaches like that of shabbetai tzvi.
@davidmww:
it is possible that i was not as clear as i could have been – what i mean to say is that atheists of the dawkins stamp do not understand what it is that they are condemning – they take the lunatic fringe to be the mainstream and the most bigoted, small-minded, anti-intellectual to be the most representative, whilst minimising the importance of inclusive, tolerant, partial/separated-magisteria points of view like, for example, the archbishop of canterbury’s, presuming him to be at very least, a weasel and fundamentally dishonest. that, to me, is unscientific in its approach as it fails to observe its own rules about sampling, let alone support its contentions with well-argued scientific data. i may not agree entirely, for example, with dan dennett, but at least he fails to do this sort of thing in the way that dawkins does. i believe the approach i condemn is tendentious, sectarian and hypocritical, toxifies debate and is based on fallacious understandings of religion – my own being a case in point. i think it is unworthy of people calling themselves scientists.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Thanks, bananabrain. That reminds me of a Jesus & Mo cartoon.
yes, i can see that – perhaps i’m missing the point of the cartoon, though? i hope the point stands, though. to address your other points:
my point is, in fact:
- atheists don’t like creationists
- i don’t like the sort of creationists atheists dislike for some of the same reasons, but for different reasons as well.
- i *am* a creationist, but don’t see what the problem with science is and don’t need something like so-called intelligent design to help me out of a corner i’ve been painted into by my own deficient literalism.
- in short, creationism doesn’t necessarily mean what [some] atheists assume it means, but until they actually understand what the more sophisticated amongst us *do* mean they are basically strawmanning. more to the point, if they don’t bother to investigate their hypotheses properly they are compromising their own intellectual standards.
it’s not that hard – these hardline atheists consider religion to be basically stupid, bigoted and immoral, if religious people are supposed to be interested in morality and talking about how our beliefs and texts inspire us to that morality, we can’t be doing it from a stupid, bigoted or morally compromised position, otherwise we don’t have a leg to stand on.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Mention of Locke reminds me of his teacher, Thomas, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. . A good introduction to this too neglected thinker is here:
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=653&Itemid=286
For a Continental (for a slightly earlier period), a good antidote to Descartes is to be found in the sardonic, brilliantly cynical yet enormously morally impelled maximes of la Rochefoucauld.
Yet, when all is said and done, give me the good sense and humour of Davey Hume.
I think the point of the cartoon is to illustrate the no-win situation atheists are sometimes put in. People complain about atheists attacking swivel-eyed fundamentalists (see para 2 of the OP) as if they are tarring all religious people with the same brush, and yet when they do turn their sights on the more religiously sophisticated they get “don’t be so toxic, we’re not swivel-eyed fundamentalists!”
Your accusation that atheists do not understand what the more sophisticated religionists believe can, I am sure, be backed up with a few examples. But it is not a general truth. In fact, ironically enough, it is a straw man.
This is a polemical, informed and thought-provoking review of Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” by Terry Eagleton. In my opinion it is correct:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
oh, i think that’s what i don’t quite get, why they should feel the need to turn their sights on the more religiously sophisticated – i mean, the more religiously sophisticated have enough to do attacking the swivel-eyed tendency on *behalf* of things like science without having to spend our time justifying why we are ourselves not swivel-eyed. i mean, i’m not saying that we should be exempt from attack or anything, i just think it begs the question “well, why don’t you attack the s-e-fs while at the same time making sure not to tar all religious people with the same brush?” after all, we take our trouble to attack fundamentalist muslims and jews whilst at the same time trying to make it abundantly clear that we’ve got no problem with muslims qua muslims or jews qua jews. it isn’t beyond the wit of man, atheist or no – and, also, is tactically unwise, because it increases the likely success of “aha, the atheists are out to get you anyway, you should have solidarity with your own kind” argument which we oppose in the first place.
it’s only a straw man if you can find an informed atheist who understands in some detail what sophisticated religionists believes and can still construct an overwhelming argument to say that this type of religion is a bad thing. those sort of people are, in my view, excellent people to engage in dialogue.
i am also bound to wonder whether a crusade to rid society of religion is not more likely to produce its opposite – the history of anti-semitism ought to be a case in point. i would prefer to say: fine – what is the purpose of this? to create a better society? fine, we want to do that as well. now let’s talk about what we mean by “better”.
@abu faris:
it is an enjoyable review, but i also enjoyed a.c. grayling’s objection to it – i do see his point that if you reject the premise, there’s no point examining what flows from the premise, but my own objection is that dawkins hasn’t identified the premises, only the effects. this is one of the reasons that i identify maimonides’ “13 principles of faith” as the axiomatic basis on which the jewish system is constructed. i would have had a lot more time for dawkins if he had attacked these premises as unsustainable. of course, in doing so, he would have been in excellent company with the other religious authorities who disagreed with maimonides, both in terms of number, subject and significance, for about the next hundred years. even now i don’t think people are ever very clear about what these premises are. i might also feel moved to mention r. jonathan sacks’ comment on this debate, something along the lines of ‘science explains how things came to be the way they are, whereas Torah, by contrast, explores the question “and so, how shall we live?”‘
b’shalom
bananabrain
That is typical Grayling, if you do not mind me saying.
It does most certainly not follow that rejection of a premise should or must lead to the pointlessness of further examination of the same. Indeed, one might point out that my rejection of premise X might be confirmed by exactly the sort of investigation that Grayling seems to want to be ruled out as “pointless”. Alternatively, and a fortiori, my prejudicial rejection of that premise X may be overturned by such further investigations as may be made despite any a priori rejection of the premise.
It is puzzling that Grayling does not seem to see this issue in this manner; but perhaps unsurprising – given his own prejudices in these matters.
I should say that this is exactly the distinction that was being upheld by Kant – and to which I was alluding earlier.
That should read
“the pointlessness of further examination of what follows from the same.”
i think he’s addressing the “orbiting teapot” fallacy here and would probably appeal to some form of reasonableness test. after all, it is quite a large ask to believe that a) there is a G!D, that b) G!D Is Interested in humans and c) that G!D has actually Communicated with humans. i expect he would probably say “but at what point does this become reasonable enough for me to spend any time checking it”?
for me, the answer is to do with where you start. judaism does not flow from a systematic theology – indeed, we consider such matters to be an area where any reasonable opinion may be followed. the only thing we are sure about is a) what the Text states and b) what we know we’re supposed to do as a result – the discovery of a robust connection between b) and a) is the quest of all halakhic interpretation. all other things are somewhat more fluid.
b’shalom
bananabrain
This rather depends upon what language game we are playing with “reasonableness”.
What Kant suggested is that criteria for the assertion of the reasonableness of sentences in religion are distinct from those we would expect in science. We should not expect the same sorts of sense for these distinct forms of life (lebensform).
One reason is that even the religiously sophisticated believe implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons and, generally speaking, atheists think that the world would rub along a bit better if fewer people did so.
When I say “‘implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons” I mean things like: text X is a supernaturally authoritative and useful exploration of the question “how shall we live?”
that sounds about right to me, a sort of precursor of gould’s NOMA/POMA concept.
ok, i’m happy enough with that as a response, but i would have to ask in return:
a) why is it implausible?
b) why are the reasons “epistemically questionable”?
c) how do you know what these reasons are in the first place?
d) why do you think the world would rub along better if these things were not believed?
i will be happiest if you pick just one implausible thing so we can extract and examine the epistemically questionable reasoning thereof, so we’re talking about specifics rather than broad hypotheses.
b’shalom
bananabrain
*bump*
bananabrain
I’m not sure Gould’s evolutionary theories have direct relevance here. After all, the force of Kant’s argument is that science and religion have different assertability criteria. Thus it would be at least confusing to use a scientific theory in order to support this claim.
i don’t understand these as being evolutionary theories, strictly speaking. from what you say about kant, he sounds like he’s saying more or less the same thing as gould, that a “magisterium” (“a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution”) has its own “assertability criteria”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria
of course, i may be conflating different ideas, so please feel free to correct me. and, of course, i don’t hold with completely non-overlapping magisteria, but rather, a slightly more porous, partial overlap, although of course i would suggest that where both magisteria have something to say that they say it politely and without dismissing the wisdom, insight or evidence of the other.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Kant’s argument can be taken as marking the point where, in the course of human understanding of the world, various items began to be understood as becoming increasingly more or less differentiated in their appeals to one another for justification. Religion and science became increasingly autonomous (if not independent) of each other.
We can also detect a similar boundary point in the relationship between religion and politics. In Europe it happens around about the mid-17th Century (we might as well take the turning point as 1648, given its pivotal importance for European history). As the late Christopher Hill pointed out, Cromwell’s armies marched to war singing Psalms, William of Orange’s armies sang hits of the day (such as “Liberello” ).
ok, i think i must be having a mr thicky day what with my cold, but i’m not sure i understood what you just said!
b’shalom
bananabrain
I have a cold too!
I may not have expressed myself clearly enough:
Just as politics stopped being overwhelmingly articulated by means of religious justifications themes or allusions from about the mid 17th Century in Europe, so science began to express itself without recourse to religious justifications or themes by at least the middle part of the 18th Century.
A similar trajectory can be traced between philosophy and religion, David Hume felt it useful to include a section on pneumotology in his works – the study of the kinds of beings that have souls (a branch of ontology); but someone as manically religious as Kierkegaard (for example) did not feel so driven about a century later.
‘Bump, v.i. to make a heavy or loud noise. – v.t. to strike with a dull sound: to strike against. – n. a dull heavy blow: a thump: a lump caused by a blow; the noise of the the bittern.’
you guys got me scouring the dictionary now; a few days ago I’d have said that sounded fairly implausible !
I though bitterns boomed not “bumped”!
If ever you get the chance (and that is rarely in UK, sadly) try to listen out for the mournful bitterns booming out on the Norfolk Fens (or one of their other rare sanctuaries) – a very odd experience.
One of my favourite birds, actually (I am also rather partial to the Corn Crake)…
(Notes of a frustrated twitcher)
A good site for the Bittern (properly the Eurasian Bittern) is here, complete with soundfile of the male’s breeding call!
http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/b/bittern/index.aspx
Also known as the Butterbump locally, by the way.
oh, i see what you mean now – well, perhaps this is a sort of kantian approach, if you understand tools as being similar to terms, linguistically speaking. so, as philosophy and science develop, religious people begin to see that “proof”-based arguments won’t cut it, nor will appeals to what is “natural”, because it becomes increasingly obvious that we understand the natural world much less than we think and the best toolset for addressing such things is a scientific one. by the same token, i would probably argue that the rationalist toolsets for understanding religious systems begin to show their limits at about the same point. the border is probably determined by the empirical limits of each toolset – in other words, a religious text is not the best basis to understand how the eye evolved, but it might well be the best basis to use if it is a case of understanding the moral issues raised by eyesight and visual stimulation. where i get steamed is where everything is reduced simply to a darwinian mechanism and moral agency is superseded by the interacting drives of memes and genes. the best example i can think of is the systems biologist denis noble’s critique of the statement dawkins makes in “the selfish gene”:
as being, as he puts it, “empirically equivalent” to his own reformulation of the statement:
noble suggests that the difference is in the “sociological or polemical viewpoint” that underpins the interpretation of the same set of data, which is where i think the magisteria overlap partially.
j – *bump* in this context means to make a content-free comment to move the thread up the “recent posts” area on the site, in order to stimulate further discussion, which seems to have worked!
b’shalom
bananabrain
maybe sometimes more like a dull clunk !
gotta go shopping now, back later though; if poss.
Hi again, bananabrain. Sorry for the delay. I will try to answer your questions.
These two questions are related, because a large part of the proposition’s implausibility is down to its epistemic questionability. Let’s say the proposition is “Text X is supernaturally authoritative”. This is problematic for a number of reasons:
1) it presumes the existence of the supernatural, an ontological proposition for which there is inadequate supporting evidence
2) given that the vast majority of texts in the world are inarguably of exclusively human origin, it is reasonable, upon coming across any particular text, to assume that it too is of exclusively human origin – unless there is strong evidence to suggest otherwise
3) even assuming the existence of a supernatural force which believes writing/inspiring books is an effective means of communication with humans, what evidence is there that it had a hand in Text X? You wisely ask for specifics, so let’s take the Torah. What evidence is there (apart from the claims it makes for itself) that a supernatural force was at work on it? I confess to being quite ignorant of the Torah in respect of how it differs from the Pentateuch – but if the Pentateuch is anything to go by, it looks very much like it is of exclusively human origin. It contains no surprises; nothing that a human of the time would not know, plus a few misconceptions which a human of the time would share.
4) when assessing any extraordinary claim, it is useful to consider whether similar such claims are commonly made, and whether or not those claims have stood up well to scrutiny. As it turns out, “Text X is supernaturally authoritative” is an very common claim which has been made of many different texts from different times in various languages. The Book of Mormon is possibly the most recent one, which doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny, despite the vehement protestations of its adherents. Indeed, vehement protestation is a common characteristic of “Text X is supernaturally authoritative” claimants, as is exclusivity (ie “ONLY Text X is supernaturally authoritative”). It is a common phenomenon, and as such I am inclined to take the phenomenon more seriously than the actual claims.
Reading, talking, asking questions. The reasons vary from religion to religion and person to person, but not that much. And the cause is always different from the reasons. The cause for believing “Text X is supernaturally authoritative” is nearly always (I mean probably 95% of the time) that the parents also believed Text X was supernaturally authoritative. This obviously isn’t a great reason, epistemically speaking, but then neither are the reasons usually given. The main one usually boils down to personal conviction. I think most people understand – at least at some level – that personal conviction is an extremely unreliable epistemic tool.
BB, this is a huge question which would merit several hundred more words which I don’t really have time for at the moment. Could we skip it for now?
i’m not sure that’s a proposition that would be necessary in our case, because only a minority of commandments actually require supernatural authority – most have some sort of logical or moral basis and very few actually rely on the because-I-Said-so appeal to authority. additionally, you would have to concede that we only expect our text to be authoritative for us, not anyone else.
but there isn’t a standard of evidence that is adequate for the existence of the supernatural in any case – surely, if something can be “evidenced”, it is therefore by definition “natural”, as it has manifested in the natural world, right? i am also bound to ask what standard of adequacy you impose and by what right you impose it upon an area where i believe your tools are inadequate. the assumption that the Divine Exists is axiomatic for us.
now, for me, my inner experience of the workings of the Torah would suggest that no natural explanation is adequate to explain them as a product of human ingenuity, but this isn’t conveyable because of the privacy of experience. in other words, there is perfectly adequate supporting evidence as far as i’m concerned and, indeed, as far as millions of other believers are concerned, but the snag is that this evidence is not transferable. i might suggest, were i being playful, that we might be looking at a strange form of the uncertainty principle – you can know that the Divine Exists as long as you don’t try and communicate this directly – you might do it by indirect, mutually experiential means such as music or poetry, but in the same way i can’t hear music using your organs of perception, you can’t “hear” Torah the way it speaks to me. for me, it seems supernatural how judaism has survived, how we have influenced human society, how we managed to return to our land after 2000 years of exile – these things would certainly seem pretty implausible – just as the claims of the prophets look pretty implausible were it not for the fact that many of them appear to have been fulfilled. you may have gathered that this constitutes pretty good evidence to me, but i wouldn’t claim for a minute that therefore it would meet your requirements.
well, “pentateuch” is the greek name for the five books of moses, the hamesh humshei Torah. but when you’re talking about it, you’re probably talking about the text itself, whereas i’m talking about not just the text, but the interpretation around the text that makes up what we call the Oral Torah, the “Torah shebe’al peh” as opposed to the Written Torah, the “Torah shebikhtav”. without understanding this almost as a living organism, you are simply reading dead words on a page.
well, as for the misconceptions, you’ll have to be specific, because i’m not seeing what you mean by that. as for “things that a human of the time would not know”, i don’t really understand the argument. say the Torah had revealed a design for a combustion engine, you’d then immediately say that this changed the date of the Torah – and if we found a 3000 year-old combustion engine, you’d then say that that was simply evidence that humans were more advanced back then, not evidence that they were spoken to by G!D, so i don’t think that this test of knowledge is valid. i would say that the surprises in it are more along the lines of providing a blueprint for a society and civilisation that there was no evidence would be successful, yet managed to become so despite the competing models. take the egyptians, babylonians, assyrians and persian empires, where are they now? that model was arguably the most dominant, why shouldn’t it have endured? what possible reason would we have to believe that *not* coveting what wasn’t yours, or stealing, or murdering, or prevailing by fire and the sword, but rather protecting widows and orphans, feeding the poor and “loving the stranger, for you were strangers in egypt” would be a surprising winner? it is the *moral* models there that humans at the time were unfamiliar with – patriarchs and prophets that were human, not demigods, a Divine that wasn’t a beardy shag monster who cheated on his wife disguised as a bull or a golden shower. it was a model of a new way to be. (you will note, of course, that this is the source of my objection to your contention that the world would rub along better if these things were not believed) of course, you could say that you don’t need G!D to come up with this as a new idea, but nobody maintains this is demonstrable in any kind of non-private way, or, if you prefer, that it’s not a “reliable epistemic tool” – except for millions of our co-religionists. this is also one of the reasons we also don’t say much about the exclusivity angle – as you probably know, we aren’t a recruiting religion, because as far as we’re concerned everyone else has a far simpler route to goodness and accepting the “yoke of Torah” comes with a pretty major set of downsides.
i’m a bit zukrochen (as the ashkenazim say) today, so you’ll excuse me if my argument is less coherent htan usual.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Abu Faris,
It underwent a major revival in Britain from the end of the 18th century and lasted throughout the 19th century, both in relation to the influence of Christian Evangelism in Britain itself and (particularly) its impact on colonial activities & policies in India.