[lbo-talk] Re: An Appeal to Ignorance

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Thu Jun 16 13:59:25 PDT 2005


On 6/16/05, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> >
> > apologies: this is entirely too long. i recommend skimming. or deleting. :)
>
> I read it straight through (and agree with much of it) but my responses
> are going to be a bit here, a bit there. (I was tempted to change the
> subject line to "An Appeal to Ignorance: Nibbles"). Disagreement with
> any particular point implies nothing about response to other (not
> quoted) parts of the post.
>
>
> > my point about scientists rejecting religion, which
> > was not that it's all western religion, but that to reject ""religion"
> > is utterly non-sensical, especially when no one on this list has --
> > unless i missed it, which i admit is possible -- satisfactorily
> > defined religion. and i'll bet those scientists can't, either.
>
> Agreed, one cannot define religions -- it is too miscellaneous a
> category. But I think one can give a fairly precise definition of one
> form -- the most important form -- of "rejecting religion." What most
> people mean when they say they have "rejected religion" is that they
> never had any "religion" to begin with.

i'm not sure about this part.


> And "rejecting religion" in this
> context means "not being interested in any form of thought they had
> encountered socially which called itself religion."

but i like this part. i think that interest can be lost. for me, i'm willing to admit there might be some god, but none i know of that matters to what i do on a day to day basis . . . besides think about it a lot.

i wonder what yoshie thinks of this provisional definition?

and here i think it lines up with the survey, maybe?, which i keep meaning to get back to.


> I'm describing
> myself, but I'm also describing many I have known who did at one time
> nominally ascribe to some religion (church). I'm remembering a
> conversation with a friend whose father had been a methodist missionary
> in India in the 1930s. I mentioned to him that he didn't have the
> hang-ups of someone who had "lost" his/her "faith," and I wondered how
> he had escaped that fate, since he took the same distant perspective on
> "religion" that I did. His answer was that it had never seemed to him
> that he had lost anything worth keeping. Edith Hamilton noted long ago
> that philosophical systems were never refuted, they were simply
> abandoned.

and isn't this really the way pragmatism (a la rorty) approaches such things, as well? and isn't it awfully close to the way kuhn talked about scientific revolutions? or am i misremembering?

there's a family resemblance if i ever saw one.


> And it is from this historical perspective (i.e., the
> perspective of the "humanities"?) that I would explain the intersection
> of science and religion (and of the tendency of so many scientists to
> "reject" religion). The early roads in the west away from Christianity
> were mortalism, deism, and politics! By the last I simply mean that
> political and economic activity began to push a focus on religion aside,
> so that more and more religion became merely a way of expressing one's
> political or economic position. Mortalism (the doctrine that the soul
> dies with the body and that both are resurrected together at the last
> judgment) was a capital crime in the 16th and 17th centuries, it being
> recognized even then that the belief in the temporary death of the soul
> could easily morph in to the belief in the death of the soul, period.

very interesting. i did not know that. i'm a medievalist, after all, so don't always get as far as the 17th century before i skip ahead. :)


>
> So science never _replaced_ religion;

this i'm not sure is entirely true. even if we look at the period you're talking mainly about above (the 16th-17th centuries, scientific revolution, etc. etc.), i think that's what was at stake -- people were really dealing with that conflict. and people like vico were doing the kind of analysis on historical religions that we see today (humanistic interps of ancient greek religion, naturalistic religion, etc.). but he was trying to push past the conflict. religion often did try to answer those questions science has begun to answer, and that's the growing pains we're looking at, and a lot of the conflict between science and religion is precisely over this. it's what i'm trying to push both away from.


> science was merely one of many
> currents which simply more and more nudged religion aside as not of that
> much importance.

there's probably truth in this as well. if you think back to ancient christianity, hellenistic religion, etc., it's pretty clear that the issue for religious people was *what worked*. christian converts would get their fields blessed by the priest AND a rabbi . . . you know, just to cover all the bases. as technology starts addressing some of those things in new ways, well . . .


> One early and minor but interesting symptom of that
> shoving aside may be seen in the contrast between Milton's superb "On
> the Morning of Christ's Nativity" and his wretched fragment, "The
> Passion." It's impossible not to be impressed by the power of Herbert's
> poetry, but I also find it a bit icky. Milton, as "The Passion" shows,
> had gotten beyond such ickyness, even when he tried to make himself
> produce it.

interesting.


>
> An additional point. Most of the "religious views" that surround
> scientists as social individuals _are_ the kind of views which purport
> to answer scientific questions.

again, agreed absolutely.


> Hawkins notes that one of the Pope's
> (the one who just died?) proclaimed that the Big Bang theory was
> acceptable because it presumed an absolute beginning.

yeah, that makes sense -- see my thing on thomas aquinas and the eternality of the world.


> In other words,
> though you are right that one cannot define "religion" very precisely,
> the social fact is that the religion most of us rub up against is some
> form of theism, and usually forms that imply some sort of interference
> with nature from "beyond nature." Science does not disprove "religion"
> for reasons you give. But on the whole the last few hundred years have
> provide more exciting things to think about than god or spirit.

maybe. an awfukl lot of people still think an awful lot about god and spirit (even some of us who think of ourselves as atheists). but it's certainly given us plenty ELSE to think about.

j

-- Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments.

- Alfred North Whitehead



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