Religious Beliefs in Science and Politics

Have you ever been engaged in a debate with somebody online, probably concerning evolution, and you come to realize that something fishy is going on? You present evolution as fact, and an IDer shows up with some criticisms. You response to all of the criticisms and yet the IDer stands firm in their conviction that evolution must be wrong for some undetermined reason. While I understand that not all IDers are like this, the picture which I have painted probably isn’t all that unfamiliar.

The problem I see is that our hypothetical IDer is arguing from what he takes to be an infallible position, a position which is true regardless of what reasoning and evidence may or may not be mounted against it. This person isn’t really arguing about the validity of their position, it being evolution is our example, but is instead merely preaching that evolution is false. If there is any valid argumentation going on in this context, it is isolated to the validity of their rational justifications for their position, such justifications being entirely beside the point in their own mind. It will be the purpose of this post to elaborate on problematic nature of the religious appeal to infallible knowledge.

In the last post we say that in a democratic society what other people believe, especially by way of religious beliefs, greatly influence our lives and are therefore our business. I thus made a plea for a greater willingness to engage, defend and criticize religious values and beliefs in the public sphere. Nevertheless, religious beliefs, while being the proper target of our most intense scrutiny, are of a nature which is resistant to such public debate.

The first problem with engaging religious beliefs in public debate is that there tends to be a social taboo against criticizing religious beliefs in general, especially if these beliefs are Christian in the United States. The second problem, and in my opinion far more problematic, is that religious beliefs are seen to be God’s beliefs and therefore are necessarily true, despite whatever criticisms might be mounted against them. The third problem is that the evidence which actually justifies the belief in the believers mind tends to be entirely private and beyond corroboration or scrutiny. In this post I will focus exclusively on the latter two.

The problems of positions which are taken to be infallible should be largely obvious. We would typically call any person who takes their position to be infallible to be insufferably arrogant, but religious infallibility is taken in such a way as to almost reverse the situation. The infallibility lies not in our religious neighbor, but in the God which is supposed to be omniscient, thus allowing the religionist to not feel at all arrogant in their claims. Furthermore, any person which disagrees with the position of an all-knowing God is thus by very definition wrong, and inasmuch as they cling to their views THEY are the ones who are seen as arrogant.

Of course to claim to know anything with absolutely infallible knowledge is arrogant, however. Even if God does accept something with infallible certainty, the idea that the religionist knows God’s mind does seem to be less than humble to put it mildly. More than a few atrocities have been justified over the course of history by claiming to know God’s will on a matter.

While God’s absolute knowledge is usually assumed to require no justification, the claim of the religionist to be privy to such knowledge does require such. How do they know that God believes X to be true? At this point there are three paths to justification which are usually taken:

1. logical arguments: all of which are, in the end, unconvincing
2. circular logic: “the Bible says that God believes X, and the Bible is God’s word and we know this because the Bible says so…”
3. personal experience: I had a dream, I feel it in my heart, etc.

I will assume that all but the last option are transparently useless. But the problem with the third option is that it does not seem to be of much use in public debate either. While an entirely physical and outward vision of an angel might make the visionary himself confident that he knows God’s will, everybody else will not have the same assurances at all. Furthermore, such accounts are not at all a mere question of whether the visionary is telling the truth or flat out lying. The visionary could have misinterpreted both the content as well as the source of the information which he has received.

The problem, however, is actually much worse than this usually, for most religious experiences which are taken as evidence for being privy to God’s knowledge are entirely internal to the individual. The first problem with such experiences is that even the specialists have a shallow understanding of human psychology, let alone the religionist himself in most cases. How can they be at all sure about the source or content of such experiences? The second problem is that just as I have no idea what it is like to be a bat, I have no clue what it is really like to be any other person either. I can never be sure what those experiences are really like, let alone how suitable they are to establish God’s will on any matter.

Thus the IDer shifts the focus of the debate from the validity of evolution to the validity of their religious experiences, a place where they are greater protected from scrutiny both in principle due to empirical considerations as well in practice by the social taboo which is particularly strong at this point. Thus, the religionist doesn’t really have to argue for most of the position which he/she holds, but instead simply appeals to God’s absolute knowledge and his or her inscrutable access to such. Not only is this position very safe, but it is really easy as well. One doesn’t have to know that slightest thing about the political or scientific issue in question to weigh in with absolute confidence.

There are two countermeasures which a society can take to fix this problem. The first is promoting a sense of humility, usually by way of an exposure to other people or cultures which are just as confident that they have access to God’s will and yet have come to a different conclusion. The two, or more, parties cannot both be right and honestly speaking it is actually better than 50/50 chance that you are wrong, since there are three possibilities: you are wrong, they are wrong or both parties are wrong.

The second way to curb such dogmatism is to force a separation between church and state, a move which is closely related to the first. Policies must be justified by publicly available evidence and reasoning, not religious dogma. Such, however, is not merely the case for those is office, but for voters as well. It is for this reason that the liberal tradition suggests that we vote not necessarily for what we believe to encourage the best behavior, but rather for that which allows for the most amount of compatible freedom, because our view of what is right just might be wrong. It is important that religious people do not view this as legislating immorality, but rather see it as legislating humility.