“Truth is never heresy . . .”

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8 responses to ““Truth is never heresy . . .””

1. 

   2005-08-17

   trevize

   “Truth is never heresy, except for those who make their religion vulnerable to truth.”
   This line seems to suggest that religions should be invulnerable to “truth”. I’m not sure what this means. To take an extreme example, if it could be argued that Jesus of Nazareth never in fact existed (as some do try to argue!), does this mean that Christianity IS vulnerable to truth?
   What kind of “religion” would not be vulnerable in this way? The three major monotheistic faiths seem ruled out, as do any claims for the original Buddha who found enlightenment. Even Confucious’ pithy sayings rely on analogies to real events which are possibly falsifiable in a scientific sense.
   It seems any religion which posits any kind of interaction with, or effect on, the real world, and not wholly contained within some imaginary fantasy world, is vulnerable to truth. I wouldn’t expect otherwise!
   On the topic itself, I also don’t believe Intelligent Design theory currently belongs in a junior science curriculum, though the problems it poses are useful for the critique of particular aspects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

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2. 

   2005-08-17

   D. C.

   Trevize, my “take” on the quotation is that our primary religious allegiance is to God as he exists, not to our fallible conceptions of God or of his will.
   That kind of allegiance entails always facing the facts. (See the subheading of this entire blog, just beneath the main title.) To do otherwise is, in the words of David Pailin, to worship human wishes instead of Ultimate Reality.
   Scientists usually take the position that all knowledge is provisional, subject to possible revision as new evidence and new insights are revealed to us. (We don’t know exactly how things are revealed to us. We do know empirically that what we think might be new evidence or new insights must be tested to make sure they are what they seem.)
   A corollary, I submit, is that all religious belief should be likewise provisional, apart perhaps from the Shema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one”). And even the “one” part of the Shema should be provisional, I would think. Does that make me a Jew? In a way, yes it does; after all, being a Jew was good enough for Jesus and his followers ….
   On a different note, I’m grateful for your recent participation; I enjoy reading your comments.

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3. 

   2005-08-17

   Wayne

   DC,
   Thanks for the link. It is a very interesting article.
   About the “truth is never heresy…” quote. I think another (longer) way to to say it is: “truth is never heresy except to religions that make themselves open to being falsifiable by subsequent discovery”.
   For instance, if a religion has as its foundation the prediction that Jesus will return at midnight on January 1, 2006, we’d all know pretty soon whether that religion was false or not.
   In my view, Christianity is not falsifiable even if someone were to demonstrate convincingly that Jesus of Nazareth was not a historical figure. Now, to the literal-minded, I know this will sound scandalous, but the truth of Christianity is not in the historical facts surrounding its origin. In the story of the Prodigal Son, does the fact that the father and the two sons were probably not historical figures detract from the truth of the story? In the same way, even if Jesus of Nazareth were not a historical figure, the truths espoused by the “character” Jesus in the Gospels are no less true for those of us whose historical existence is not in doubt.
   Marcus Borg has a favorite analogy about this. He talks about listening to Native American storytellers who preface the mythical stories from their tradition with the following: “Now I don’t know if it really happened this way, but I know this story is true…”

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4. 

   2005-08-17

   trevize

   “In the same way, even if Jesus of Nazareth were not a historical figure, the truths espoused by the “character” Jesus in the Gospels are no less true for those of us whose historical existence is not in doubt.”
   By this token, everything and nothing is true. The truths espoused by Mussolini, Gandalf, and Nike are equally as true as those of Christ.
   What makes you think your historical existence is not in doubt? If I say that you are not real, surely it must be true, if I use your American Indian preface.

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5. 

   2005-08-17

   trevize

   Additionally, I think this view is also pretty much unreconcilable with the current trend towards “incarnational” ministry, emphasing Christ’s actions as well as his teachings. If Christ was not incarnate (in the flesh) then it removes all significance from his (ie. God’s) actions of healing and loving, his ability to grieve for humanity, and a host of other deeds. God remains an intangible dream, forever locked within human minds who imagined Him in order to cope with harsh Ancient Near East living conditions.

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6. 

   2005-08-17

   Wayne

   Trevize,
   Thanks for your comments. I can certainly respect anyone who makes the attempt to arrive at truth. There are a range of points that you’ve brought up, so I’ll try to take it step by step:
   The truths espoused by Mussolini…are equally as true as those of Christ
   I don’t think that they are, but I can’t prove that they aren’t in the same way that I can prove that my blood type is not AB Negative. I can assert that Christ’s teaching about loving my enemy is truer than Osama bin Laden’s exhortation to kill the infidels, but I cannot objectively prove that one view is truer than the other. I can only appeal to people’s intuition and experience on the subject. I know that’s not quite satisfying enough to those who will settle for nothing less than absolute certainty, but that’s all we have.
   To many people, Christ’s teachings ring true. But people’s acceptance or rejection of the teachings attributed to Christ is a separate issue from his historicity. If it turned out that Christ was not a historical figure, I’d still believe in the Golden Rule. Why? Because it rings true to me. As the apostle Paul noted, what God’s law requires is written in our hearts. And again, I don’t need to believe that the Prodigal Son really existed to see the truth of that story.
   I think the danger in the search for irrefutable truth is that we slip in to what I call the “argument from wishful thinking”. It goes something like this:
   1) If I don’t believe A then B follows.
   2) I don’t like B.
   Therefore:
   3) I’m going to believe A no matter what.
   The specific form of the argument that I’m hearing is this:
   1) If I don’t believe in the incarnation, then the notion of God becomes muddy and subjective.
   2) I don’t want the notion of God to be muddy and subjective.
   Therefore:
   3) I’m going to believe in the incarnation no matter what.
   I think the last part about God remaining an “intangible dream forever locked within human minds who imagined Him” suffers from an either/or fallacy. Something like: “Well if the version of God and Christ in the Bible is not 100% historically true then the whole thing is a bunch of imagined junk”. But one doesn’t follow from the other. Another interpretation is that the ancient Hebrews actually experienced God, but being human, they understood some things about his nature and misunderstood others. The same seems to be true in every age. Does this mean that the Old Testament account of God is useless? Far from it. Stories from the Old Testament continue to touch us and inform us to this very day.
   God’s peace be with you.

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7. 

   2005-08-18

   D. C.

   Wayne writes: I can assert that Christ’s teaching about loving my enemy is truer than Osama bin Laden’s exhortation to kill the infidels, but I cannot objectively prove that one view is truer than the other. I can only appeal to people’s intuition and experience on the subject.
   Wayne, I don’t know that we can “prove” the efficacy of love-your-enemy, but history does suggest quite strongly that collaboration, consistently applied, is a far more powerful life strategy than raw, win-lose competition. I imagine there are experimental studies that support this, but can’t think of them off-hand.
   A simple everyday illustration might be basketball: Other things being equal, a team whose members effectively collaborate with each other will usually trounce a team of ball-hogging individualists. Military history teaches the same lesson about disciplined, coordinated units versus undirected crowds of indiivdual fighters.
   (It just occurred to me that collaboration entails at least some commonality of (i) “worldview” and (ii) goals. I’m not sure what the implications of that are for religious analysis; I’ll have to give it some thought.)
   2. Wayne writes: I know that’s not quite satisfying enough to those who will settle for nothing less than absolute certainty, but that’s all we have.
   Unfortunately you’re right. Such people don’t seem to appreciate that people act on incomplete information all the time. We have to, otherwise we’d be in serious trouble. For example, every time we eat something, we’re making a bet that what we’re eating won’t harm us. Most of the time that’s a good bet.
   3. Wayne, your syllogism about people who are going to believe in the Incarnation no matter what is the classic fallacy of the false dichotomy / false dilemma. Unfortunately we see a lot of that among some traditionalist Christians, among others.
   Thanks for your comments; I enjoyed reading them.

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8. 

   2005-08-18

   Derek

   The problem as John has Pilate so ironically put it is…”What is truth?” There are categories of truth and categories of certainity proper to different categories of truth.
   Those things empirically verifiable are true and have a higher degree of certainty associated with them. I can weigh an object and know that it weighs 87 grams. I feel really certain about that given a few caveats–the scale is correct, I’ve taken my hand off the object, the object is in a state of rest, etc.
   When systems and interactions are introduced–even with those things which can be observed and measured, things get a lot more difficult. Planets move. Their motion can be analyzed, quantified, reduced to equations and effectively predicted. When the predictions come to pass, the equations are proven ture. But–I, like the medievals, could have empiracally true equations embedded within a problematic system. Their calculations were right and worked for them–but their model was all wrong. No, the sun doesn’t go around the earth, etc. Thus while the individual equations worked to a degree, the Ptolemaic system was not true or to be more precise was provisionally true, or was true in so far as it made sense of the data at hand.
   When we start talking about human experience and the big questions of life and meaning things are on a whole other order of complexity because so much of even our quotidian data is not quantifiable or is imperfectly so. What percentage of a system must be true for the system to be accepted as provisionally valid? How would we even know? At a point it does come down to faith whether it’s faith in God, faith in the randomness of the universe, or faith in the efficacy of a digital scale. I wouldn’t mind seeing more religious folk talk more openly about the provisional nature of their faith–that is, a willingness to make *some* changes to the system in light of new data and new insights on existing data. That’s part of the current Anglican struggle. One groups asserts a certainty that is, to my mind, not ultimately defensible because it is too rigid…

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