Knowing Things Are True: A Community Sport

Lots of my online interactions are with people of faith who have commitments to a belief in a god of some sort but who are uncomfortable with the the way religious culture articulates such a belief.  In a great number of cases, those articulations are steeped in metaphysics or assumptions that are seriously flawed.

And it’s easy to get held up (if not mugged) by empirical realism on the one hand or religious fundamentalism on the other, the one insisting nothing is “real” that is not extended in time and space and on the other that nothing that can be perceived with the senses is reliable unless it falls in with God’s infallible Word, the Bible.

What’s a person of faith supposed to do when smashed between that rock and hard place?

Some thoughts in response to the question, “What do we mean by the word ‘truth’?”

“Facts” are a special kind of truth: truths that are readily available to the senses of all “normal” or “reasonable” people. “Rational truth” (of the kind we find in mathematics, and both inductive and deductive reasoning) is also definable in terms of its availability to all “rational” people, though it’s arguable that what “reason” consists in in a given culture may differ from ours in some ways.

“Fact” and “reason” in this sense have always been with us in some form: you observe, you note a thing, and file it away as “true.” The scientific method sort of codifies this into a formal body of knowledge that is “true.”

So much for the easy stuff: sense and causality are pretty indisputable things, and we have the advantage if we can appeal to them: if everyone can check your facts and your math and your reasoning, then only insane or delirious people will disagree with them. Or Answers in Genesis.

But the mind is a complicated thing.  We have many evolutionary plug-ins that we use to perceive the nature of things that don’t exactly fall under the rubrics of the five senses, and a number of ways of approaching reality that do not directly refer to them.

Memory, for instance, and its close twin imagination, and of course their close cousin, faith.

Let’s start off with faith.  I really mean biblical, Christian or even religious faith here, and I want to say carefully what I mean.  I think it’s dangerous equivocation for a Christian or other theist to say that “science is religious” as though that short circuits a rationalist’s objections to bogus truth claims about God. It’s not so: science, for its many admitted flaws, has the strength that its judgments are open to the examination of any observer.  Religious faith does not extend the same courtesy, but makes claims that are neither self-evident nor open to falsification.

But I do wish very much to look at what such faith can and might mean.

Religious faith (certainly “faith” as the New Testament uses the word) has a sort of spectrum of meanings between what we would call “belief” and something like “faithfulness, dependability.” I only mean that our intuition of what is true is something that I’m comfortable calling “faith in” or “unsubstantiated belief in” or “intuition about” something that is just “true.”

Falling in love is this kind of faith, usually disappointed but still insanely powerful at shedding a light on the nature of things in the universe. Every kind of religious experience is of this sort. Engaging in a new way of thinking often is. Mystical insight, or simply “trusting one’s instincts” and finding them accurate.

Is it as accurate as scientific knowledge? Yes and no. It is NOT in the sense that you wouldn’t want the engineer building your bridge, the pilot flying your plane, or the surgeon changing your valves to be an especially intuitive person. We’re all about reason and observable procedures and results there.  (“Faith’s a fine invention for gentlemen who see,” Emily Dickinson rightly said, “but microscopes are prudent in an emergency.”) 

So no, this is a different kind of insight into truth.

But it must be said that science’s self-declared goal is constant self-correction and constant self-revision, and it’s proved faithful to that for generations. Einstein’s science is not Newton’s, and the current science is not just something Shroedinger’s cat dragged in. 

And so if it is true that science emends itself constantly in the pursuit of truth, it is worth saying that the insights and intuitions of those who are gifted at imaginative faith are in constant self-revision (and they manifestly are), it is no great shame. If they don’t build bridges, that may be because they deal with realities that are not directly open to the senses and do not trade in the laws of the universe as the five senses report them to us.

I don’t personally believe that they are perceiving something beyond the five senses.  But they may be taking huge leaps ahead when it comes to what we can know through direct observation.

Emotions are the raw nerves that carry the messages of our intuitions. With practice, maybe we feel a little more clearly what is a “passing whim” or even pure fantasy, and what is a “reliable intuition.”  I’m not necessarily claiming some sort of infallibility for belief or intuition.  Unless we’re painfully solipsistic, we still line up what we perceive that way against observation, experience, the thoughts of others.

And we can’t screen out emotion, emotion is the *carrier* of the insight, the “nervous system” of that way of “seeing”. We can only try to learn not to be mistaken, the same way we learn to deal with optical illusion such as depth.

To fault them for that is a little like faulting the French for not speaking English in Paris. These intuitions are at home when pursuing a kind of truth that is not evident to the senses.

What sorts of truth?

The most obvious example is the phenomenon we call “falling in love.” 

If I ask someone in love, “Are you in love?” he will fervently answer that he is. That he is in love is nothing more than a truth about the state of his emotions, and it shows no great insights into the world.

If I ask him, “Why? The woman you love isn’t especially worth it, you know,” he may try to find some “rational” grounds for discussing it… that is, he may find some discourse open to “all reasonable people.” He may point out her hair color, her eyes, all the rest of it. He may tell me about her charms, and the way she makes coffee, and the way her eyes sparkle in the autumn sunlight. All of which will leave me dreadfully unmoved. I look at the girl and see a plain, rather boring specimen of ordinary gifts.

What is it he sees?

The hardcore rationalist will tell you that what he experiences is actually a complex intersection of pheromones, scents, chemicals, hormones, and so on. The rationalist may drag in psychology to explain my friend’s rather bizarre tastes.

All of which is perfectly true and just as useless as my friend’s description of her gifts: to my friend, there is a truth that is opening up around this woman, a space that transcends (I would argue, having been in love) the particular discourses of science and reason. In other words, something changes in him at a level so deep that we might as well say this: if he is not encountering a truth about the woman, he is certainly changing the truth about himself. Which is why Dante and Plato agree (in different accents) that falling in love is the first rung on the ladder to God, but not the last: such experiences represent a totality of experience that isn’t quite the sum of its parts, but which attach a person to his or her own existence in ways that we are pleased to call “significant.”

It’s a truth that might be closed to science, which can only measure the effects on his psychology and chemistry, not the actual operations. Or if it can measure the operations, I would argue that it’s measuring the least interesting thing about what happens to this guy, who comes out of his experience utterly changed. 

No hardcore rationalist will of course admit that this is the case, but I think it is, and I think any hardcore rationalist who hasn’t been able to talk himself out of his broken heart will be dishonest if he disagrees. Not saying at all that we can’t pin down the pheromones and hormones and all the rest: we surely can. But it’s only the moral coward who flinches in the face of a really good heartbreak: every falling-in-love proves that our faith is in something that can’t be measured, something capricious and delicate (which is why falling in love feels so very much like fear).

So. “Truth” is the thing to which our statements about and perceptions of the world either do correspond or do not. They are rarely perfect, these statements of ours. But I would argue that what’s really interesting is what happens before we talk about truth when we are restlessly looking for the thing(s) in which we shall put our faith. If we are narrow (“senses, reason”), we will see only those things in the universe (and in ourselves) that are opaque to the senses and reason: if we are a little broader, we’ll be thinking about things like love,  and how what we really do know fits together and situates us in relation to other things.  No sense can teach you that.

If we open the field of our faith wider (“senses, reason, intuition, faith itself, love, kindness…”) we perceive things that are open to the sharper eyes of the spirit (that is, our capacity for self-conscious relationship).

But between the two, there can rarely be much dialogue until we agree, the first way of knowing anything is our faith in how we know.

Comments

[Natalie]

Very interesting post.

I have to disagree with you on one point, though. You are mistaken that no hardcore rationalist will agree with:

Or if it can measure the operations, I would argue that it's measuring the least interesting thing about what happens to this guy, who comes out of his experience utterly changed.

Of course the physical state changed the guy. If the Self is an emergent phenomena (and I believe it is), there are parallel things going on inside one's physiology--especially the brain--while falling in love. Billions of local events within the brain can look very different when combined and viewed at the macro level.

The person is change irrevocably regardless of how the relationship turns out. That other person's own emergent Self was brought into the lover's Self when private thoughts and intimacies were shared. It is a purely physical phenomenon that is completely personal-spiritual, although I would not use the words "supernatural" or "soul" (in the traditional sense) here.

What's to deny?

[Pamela]

Otter, why do you have the wrong day, date, time for this entry?