It's time to talk about religion again! And as usual I wanna say up front that I'm not making this
video to bait either Christian YouTube or Atheist YouTube;
I'm making it because this is on the British A-Level Philosophy syllabus.
So here we go.
PART 1 - Truth or Hare
There's a popular idea that religion is
about believing certain things to be true.
If you read a lot of atheist writers or watch a lot of atheist YouTubers actually,
they'll often talk about whether the central claims of religion are true and make sense, and apologists
will argue back that do. And
that is absolutely valid and valuable discussion: believing
that things are true is a central part of a lot of what religion is about. People kill and die for dogma and throughout
history there have been long and bloody disputes
about the supposed truth of very specific
details. But what I'm gonna be inviting you
today is the idea that religion
is often about more than just supposedly true claims.
One of the most famous analyses of religious
statements came from Anthony Flew, with his
parable of the gardener. Flew imagines two
explorers who come to a garden in a jungle
clearing. One says that there must be a gardener
who maintains it; the other is sceptical.
So they set a watch, and they don't see
a gardener. And the believer says, "Ahah,
the gardener must be invisible." So they
use bloodhounds, thermal cameras, tripwires,
all kinds of methods of detection, and they
never find a gardener. And every time the
believer says, "Ah, the gardener can't
be smelled, or seen on thermal cameras, but he is there."
And eventually the sceptic says, "Look,
if there's a gardener
but they're invisible and they be smelled
and they can't be detected in any way,
then how is that really different from what I'm saying, which is that there
is no gardener? How is the world you're
picturing really different from the one I'm picturing?"
And Flew's point is that religious claims
can sometimes similarly be unfalsifiable.
If no evidence can count against them, if they cannot be falsified, then surely, he said, they're just redescribing the same world that the atheist sees?
Take the statement "God loves us." We can come up with a rough idea of what it would mean for a human being to love us
and if somebody said, "I love you," we cna think of evidence that would count for and against that idea.
But God doesn't really prevent people from dying, doesn't really prevent suffering, and doesn't really prevent evil either.
And yet believers will still say, "God loves us." But if no evidence can count against this idea then how is, "God loves us," really putting forward a
vision of a different world from, "God doesn't love us." What is actually being said here? Now this
is just an example - don't get too bogged down in it - but as you can see, Flew is looking at religious claims
as if they are supposed to be true statements about the world.
But the philosopher R.M. Hare has an interesting
reply. He tells a story about a lunatic who
is absolutely convinced that all university dons want to murder him. His friends try to introduce
him to nice dons, and he says, "No, they're just lying to lull me into a false
sense of security!" There's absolutely no evidence that can convince this guy, his belief
is completely unfalsifiable, and so according
to Flew he's not really saying anything
about dons at all because no matter what we tell him about them his beliefs doesn't change. So what is he really saying?
Hare says that what he's expressing is a "blik," which is a word Hare made up. Bliks are not
so much beliefs as they are ways of looking at the world. There's
no evidence that can convince this guy, so his blik is more about assessing what does
and doesn't count as evidence, and what is worth paying attention to.
As another example, take the idea, "Everything that happens, happens for a reason, even if we don't know it."
This is completely unfalsifiable: you couldn't begin to find evidence against this idea, or even, I think, for it actually,
because it's completely consistent with anything happening or not happening.
And yet, someone who says this is looking at the world differently from someone who
doesn't say it. And that difference is what the idea of bliks tries to capture.
PART 2 - Life, uh, uh Finds A Way
Now you don't have to buy into the existence of bliks wholesale, but I think the general point Hare
is trying to make here is one that a lot of people have made, namely that there's more to
religion than just believing things to be true. As an example, let's imagine that you are
a member of the Russian Orthodox Church in
the final years of the Russian Empire.
When you go to Church there's the sound of bells and chanting, there's the smells of the incense, the candlelight flickering over the icons and the gold;
the inside of Russian Orthodox churches are beautiful!
You probably go with your whole family, and when you go you pray for the souls
of your ancestors who went to the orthodox church before you, so there's a real connection
to family and tradition there. Maybe you're aware that the Bolshevik revolutionaries
are very anti-religion, so when you go to church there might be some political sentiments in there as well. The
prayers that you're saying are circular, chanted, almost meditative... There is so much more
going on there than just turning up
and saying, "I believe that X, Y, and Z
are true." The day-to-day experience of having faith is more than that; so much so that even bliks is kindof a dry way of looking at it.
I've mentioned the theologian Mario Aguilar
on the show before, he was one of my theology
lecturers; and he advocates an approach to religion that he calls "Living Theology." The idea is
that yeah we can sit around and we can talk about the arguments and the logical nitty-gritty,
but meanwhile the Church is an organisation with a lot of money and influence, and there are people who could use that Church's help. So for people
like him the duty to help others is more pressing, and in particular the duty to politically help others. His approach comes
from his experience fighting against  the Pinochet regime in Chile, which is something that his own faith and the Catholic Church in general
played a not insignificant role in. His approach is that religion is something to be lived, not
just thought about, and the political actions that religion can lead him and others like him to are still possible whilst the more theoretical questions are left unanswered.
It's quite like an idea by the poet Rilke,
who I've referenced on the show before as well,
who advised young artists to "Live the Questions." To be open to experiential ways of trying to figure something out
rather than just theoretical ones. Now you
may not like that approach at all, and you
might, even if you do like it, say that it's not really appropriate in this case, which is totally fair enough, but we are now aware of that point of view and
have a greater understanding of the people
who do think it's a good idea.
PART 3 - Madness!
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard tells
a story about a madman who escapes from an
asylum, and he realises that if he just says
mad stuff people will quickly figure out he's
an escaped lunatic and they'll send him
back. So he decides he's only going to say
true, uncontroversial things. And when he
goes into town, to everyone he meets he says,
"The world is round." That's all he
says to anybody. And it's true. The world
is round. But they quickly realise he's
mad and lock him up. And what Kierkegaard
was saying is that you can have all the facts
and all the truths and still be wrong, because
you haven't appreciated the context in which
those facts matter.
And the writer Sam Kriss has said that
sometimes certain popular atheist figures can be a
little bit like Kierkegaard's madman - insisting only on what is true and missing the more
contextual stuff. The philosopher Terry Eagleton said similar things: he said that when it comes to religion if
we're only assessing the truth claims and insisting on the debates and
the rationality and the proofs then we might not get very far. We know not just from psychology
and also, hey, from politics that we can give people facts but that might not always change their
position, because people's positions are often more to do with how they interpret facts and what
facts they care about. There is nobody for whom all facts are equally important: there is nobody for whom all
information is equally valuable and action-guiding. And to pretend that anybody is like that is to run the risk
of being a little bit like Kierkegaard's madman.
All of this is not to dismiss science or truth or popular atheist talking points. I just wanted to
teach this material with a bit of a different spin that I hadn't seen on YouTube before.
I'm not throwing truth out or disparaging the truth or being a Marxist Illuminati SJW Cultural Relativist, okay?
I don't believe in the truth of any religion's central claims, and so I don't personally see the point,
for me, of living those questions but it's still cool to appreciate other people's viewpoints.
And all I'm doing is inviting you to the idea that for people who have faith there's more going on there.
There, I'm sure YouTube will appreciate and understand the nuance of that position.
I'll be interested to hear from people of
all faiths and none in the comments.
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