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> On Sep 19, 2009, at 10:15 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
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> Jesus rose from the grave -- you can't really prove that statement false
>> unless you have a time machine
>>
>
> In that case, the burden of proof isn't on the skeptic.
>
>
It's not clear to me that the burden of proof is on anyone. It's not even
clear to me that the concept "burden of proof" is relevant, except insofar
as we're talking about changing people's minds, which isn't necessarily the
most important thing (and even then, it's not clear that the abstract
rationality of a particular belief is most of the time what's at stake, or
that it *should* be what's at stake).
If you ask me there are strong intellectual traditions in Catholicism and Protestantism generally that are miles and miles ahead of the Mormon tradition, for example, regardless of a premise that includes the resurrection of an obscure Jewish preacher. And this is true even in the twentieth century. We don't have to go back to Thomas or Eckhart or whatever - we can talk about Balthasar and Barth and Rahner and Niebuhr. Mormons haven't been around that long, really, and it's still possible that there will develop a Mormon intellectual tradition that will have something interesting to say even to non-Mormons.
But I want to talk about this in the context both of aesthetics and of the "radical kernel." William James's argument in *Varieties* is that theology itself is a function of aesthetics. James is instructive here in part because of his Scottish Presbyterian roots, which I think also have a lot to do with American Protestant aesthetics generally, including a preference for plainness or simplicity both in "art" (church decor, music, poetry, etc.) and in thought. This is not to call American Protestant thought simplistic, of course, although certainly it often is -- but this a class and culture issue, and not primarily a religious issue, imo. Religion is part of the anti-intellectual culture, but to reduce anti-intellectualism to religious beliefs is pretty naive, and in any case not very rational or scientific. There are too many other factors at stake. James himself is the sort who prefers the plain aesthetic. And yet there is all this fantastic philosophy and psychology. His main point, probably, in *Varieties* is that different aesthetics appeal to different people. This is a very simple point, even banal, except that he applies it to religion in ways that many religions and religious people will reject -- the idea that the real differences between religions are primarily (even entirely) aesthetic is anathema to most religious people, certainly in America, if not necessarily elsewhere, even though it appeals to a certain New Age crowd.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a plain aesthetic. We just don't want it to be imposed on us, just like at least some of us wouldn't want rococo jammed down our throats as the only "meaningful" or even "enjoyable" aesthetic. James says, don't mistake your aesthetic for truth. I'm not in James's camp on "the science of religions" (Huston Smith is the modern heir to this approach, but he is to James what Joseph Campbell is to Mircea Eliade), but his diagnosis of the situation now would probably be the same as it was a little over 100 years ago when he delivered those Gifford Lectures: the biggest problem in religion is when people mistake their aesthetic sensibilities for eternal or universal truth(s). The truth for James is not in the aesthetic, not in the ritual itself or the building itself, but in whatever is communicated in the ritual or the aesthetic, and when those truths are truly true, you find them elsewhere also. Because, you know, truth is universal.
In other words, as Patton Oswalt puts it, "did you hear the good news about the sky baklava?" "It's cake, mother fucker! You're dead!"
So, where does proof come into any of this, never mind burden of proof? Indeed, it's not just a question of "burden" of proof, but of the nature of "proof" in the first place, and the contexts within which proof operates, which is why I don't think Chris's question is the right question -- its problem, at least in part, is that it entails Doug's. We have beliefs that suit our sensibilities (James expounds on this, as well). Our sensibilities change, and our beliefs change, not always in sync with each other (although certainly more or less in response to each other -- here Geertz, again, is useful, if you ask me). Rationality is mainly a question of the relationship between those sensibilities and those beliefs (and then to action, I suppose, but I'm not trying to be systematic here, although, again, this would pull in Geertz). It is irrational to believe something that doesn't fit with the view you have of the world.
Views change of course, as we encounter new things and reflect on old things. James says we make "spiritual [or value] judgments" according to three criteria or modes: immediate luminousness (what i like to call "the smell test"), philosophical reasonableness (how does it fit with what we already know/believe to be the case), and moral helpfulness (he means, how does it make us better and also happier people, but i think as a pragmatist he would not shake his head too much if i said it really means, "how useful is it?").
This is of course tricky in a variety of ways, not least in thinking about the nature of the balance when you get different "results" from application of the different criteria, but this post is already too long, too rambly, and too tangential to any main thread there once was to this, er, thread, so i'll just leave it at this for now: from what I can tell, religious people and atheists both make decisions about religious beliefs (and other beliefs, too) more or less according to these criteria. In that sense, the "burden of proof" is always on the person who wants to change the other person's mind. And why should we expect it to be any different from that?
If you've actually read this far, sorry to leave you hanging, and thanks for hanging in. I took forever writing this, because I was thinking through a lot in the process of putting it together. But now, I have actual paying work to get done. :-)
j -- http://brainmortgage.blogspot.com/