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

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.

Let’s say the proposition is “Text X is supernaturally authoritative”.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

– 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.

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

a) why is it implausible?
b) why are the reasons “epistemically questionable”?

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.

c) how do you know what these reasons are in the first place?

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.

d) why do you think the world would rub along better if these things were not believed?

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?

[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

as being, as he puts it, “empirically equivalent” to his own reformulation of the statement:

“Now they [genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence”.

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

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/b/bittern/index.aspx

Also known as the Butterbump locally, by the way.

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)

you guys got me scouring the dictionary now; a few days ago I’d have said that sounded fairly implausible !

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.

b’shalom

bananabrain

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” ).

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

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.

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).

that sounds about right to me, a sort of precursor of gould’s NOMA/POMA concept.

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?”

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

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.

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?”

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”?

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).

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

It does most certainly not follow that rejection of a premise should or must lead to the pointlessness of further examination of the same.

That should read

“the pointlessness of further examination of what follows from the same.”

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?”‘

I should say that this is exactly the distinction that was being upheld by Kant – and to which I was alluding earlier.