Nothing You Can Say
A family member not typically one to lob bombs let fly a doozy over the fence when he made a comment about religion directed at his siblings on Facebook. The ensuing conversation could have quickly turned ugly, but it remained a civil and cordial expression of differing opinions. One comment in particular caught my eye: one of said family member’s brothers asserted in a matter-of-fact tone that their differences could never be resolved because he had made an “educated, carefully considered, researched, thoughtful and heartfelt decision” regarding religion and nothing anyone could say would lead him (or his brother) to change his mind or convince him that his viewpoint was wrong.
As a matter of what one could reasonably expect from the interlocutors in their discussion, he was almost assuredly correct. No participant or silent reader would be making a decision for or against religion because of remarks made on a Facebook thread. However, as an intellectual disposition, the closing of oneself off to the possibility that one is in error, that one has not heard or understood all that could possibly be said, troubles me more than anyone’s decision to embrace or forsake religious belief.
Perhaps my passionate, messy and sometimes sordid love affair with uncertainty has clouded my mind and rendered me incapable of lasting conviction, but, be that as it may, to my way of thinking, making a decision against ever changing one’s mind isn’t conviction; it’s fundamentalism. It’s not the attainment and surety of truth, but the abandonment of its pursuit. If you can say nothing to me that could make me rethink my positions or beliefs, then I’ve ceased to have any openness to or even interest in the truth. Fundamentalism is just another form of relativism, really.
Comments are closed.
I recall an amusing essay by Erasmus, in which he describes a dialogue that begins in a way that would warm the hearts of liberal Catholics both today and in Erasmus’ time. Two ordinary gentlemen — one a butcher and the other a fishmonger — start a friendly, charitable and learned exchange, each interested in the other’s thoughts and inner convictions they have on the issues of the Reformation. Eventually, the conversation turn to the particular issue of the authority of the Church and each becomes more strident in their position. In the end the conversation devolves into a nasty fight as its narrows to the issue of the right of the Church to make it a sin to eat meat on Fridays, with the fishmonger fervently defending the Catholic faith and the butcher vociferously supporting the Reformation.
That’s funny.
Consider, however, whether you are open to the possibility that rape might occasionally be good or at least deserved, or racial segregation perhaps a wholesome way to order society. Consider whether the commitment to human equality might perhaps be exaggerated and misguided. Is there not anything I might say that would change your opinion about these matters?
If you were open to any of the above, I would be worried about you. Such an “openness” would be the sign of a failure of reason, and not its use. Like Eve in Genesis 3, there is a kind of seeming openness that is actually a refusal to pursue the truth. There are times and matters about which we need precisely not to continue to engage when (1) we have come upon the truth but (2) we know that either our hold on that truth is weak or perhaps other personal weaknesses of our own might incline us to abandon a truth otherwise important to us. Said differently, it seems as that bad as the decision not to be open to correction might be, there are things about which raising the possibility of being convinced otherwise could itself be perverse. As a rule, such moments are not common, of course, and I appreciate your overall concern. Even so, I wonder whether you might want to reimagine your notion of fundamentalism just a tad.
Or, perhaps you can show me how I am wrong? (Irony intended!)
Dominic Holtz, O.P.:
First, I don’t the Kyle claimed he was open to the possibility that any and everything he had been taught, believed, and knew might be wrong. I doubt that he would be open to an argument that jumping off the top of the Empire State Building would not result in injury or that beheading people does not kill them. He was talking about religious faith. If some Jews in the first century had not believed Jesus when the majority did not, there would be no Christianity. If non-Christians throughout the ages had not been open to the possibility that they did not have the final truth, there would be no Church today.
There were people who were absolutely convinced that racial segregation was not only right, but was ordained by God. It seems to me that your argument is that right people should have any truck with uncertainty, but it is okay for wrong people to doubt that they are right. Unfortunately for human beings, being convince we are right when we are wrong feels exactly like being convinced that we are right when we actually are right.
Rape is wrong pretty much by definition. Murder is definitely wrong by definition. I will never be convinced that murder is right, because it is wrong by definition. Racial segregation might be the way to order a society if there existed two races who, for good reasons, wished to cooperate in a segregated society.
When it comes to religion, it seems to me that the major religions are not compatible, and out of a billion Catholics and a billion Muslims, a billion people must be wrong. (Of course, it could be two billion.) Would you urge everyone to remain closed to the possibility that they could be wrong?
My uncertainty extends beyond the religious sphere into the philosophical, and, in a way, to the empirical, though I hasten to add that I’m not equally uncertain about all things.
Dominic Holtz, O.P. ,
While no one today is challenging my moral views about rape or racial segregation, society has not always been as certain about these actions as it is now. To come to where we are now required people to fundamentally change the way they understood human dignity. It’s that willingness to fundamentally change one’s mind for which I’m advocating.
I maintain an uncertainty about all things, but not the same level of uncertainty do I have about all matters. I certainly don’t go around thinking that maybe I’m wrong about rape and racial segregation. Not only am I much more certain about these actions than I am about economics or my pet aesthetic theories, were someone to assert that rape is morally acceptable, I’d consider him looney and perverse. I’m reasonably confident in my moral sense about rape and my ability to demonstrate its immorality. However, I’m not absolutely certain that my moral sense is truly sensible or that there couldn’t possible be reasonable challenges to my moral arguments. I’m willing to acknowledge that my moral sense could be disordered and that my moral thought could be in error.
I’m perfectly willing to judge rape and racial segregation as evil and to do so with full conviction, but then, I also admit that my very understanding of what it means to be evil could be partially or wholly false. I don’t think I’m in error, nor do I act as if I’m in error, but I don’t absolutely rule out the possibility that my moral thinking could be mistaken.
To put it metaphorically, when condemning actions like rape and racial segregation, I stand on the firmest ground imaginable, and yet even the firmest ground is destructible.
“I maintain an uncertainty about all things, but not the same level of uncertainty do I have about all matters. I certainly don’t go around thinking that maybe I’m wrong about rape and racial segregation. Not only am I much more certain about these actions than I am about economics or my pet aesthetic theories, were someone to assert that rape is morally acceptable, I’d consider him looney and perverse. I’m reasonably confident in my moral sense about rape and my ability to demonstrate its immorality.”
It seems at least possible that the paraphrased speaker was expressing a comparable degree of certainty, in more hyperbolic, less articulate terms. He may have considered his proofs sufficiently sound that any disproof was so unlikely as to be virtually impossible, even ludicrous.
“Murder is definitely wrong by definition. I will never be convinced that murder is right, because it is wrong by definition.”
Yet by any reasonable definition of “murder,” Osama bin Laden was just murdered with the full approval of what seems to be a rather large majority of Americans.
It does not seem to me that either the word “belief” or the word “faith” requires that the person using those words insist that he is “right” in the sense that he has empirical proof to support that which he believes and has faith in.
Yet by any reasonable definition of “murder,” Osama bin Laden was just murdered
Rodak,
I absolutely disagree. Murder is “wrongful killing.” In order to claim bin Laden was “murdered,” you have to make the case that the killing was unlawful (to legally qualify as murder) or immoral (to morally qualify as murder). It seems clear to me the killing was lawful. Under the rules of war and international law, the United States did nothing wrong. Whether or not it was moral is a matter that people have differing opinions on.
I think it is fair to say that bin Laden was assassinated, but to claim that assassination is always murder, you would have to claim that the plot to assassinate Hitler was an immoral murder plot. In every discussion I have seen on the assassination on bin Laden, it has been universally agreed that the plot to assassinate Hitler was justified.
People who believe in God insist that they are right and atheists are wrong. Period. Nobody says anything about empirical proof.
David–
So, your definition of murder, which is apparently based on secular law, and my definition of murder, which is based on what I would recognize as moral law, clearly differ. This would seem to support at least part of Kyle’s argument.
It would be my contention that “murder” is defined by the nature and circumstances of the act, not by the moral standing of the victim.
At the time of his killing, OBL was overwhelmed by numbers and unarmed. He could easily have been taken alive. Instead, he was gunned down in cold blood. I call that murder. “Assassination” is murder for political purposes–a nuanced kind of murder, perhaps, but–even as defined by my Webster’s dictionary–still “murder.”
By your definition, the Crucifixion was not a murder, since it was ordered by legal authority. I don’t buy that reasoning.
I would say the Crucifixion was not murder, nor is any legal execution murder. Presumably under Roman law, Jesus was guilty as charged. Why else would he have been crucivied?
Would you say those who tried to assassinate Hitler were wrong?
At the time of his killing, OBL was overwhelmed by numbers and unarmed. He could easily have been taken alive. Instead, he was gunned down in cold blood. I call that murder.
If this fully describes murder, then the death penalty is murder. Those who are executed by the state are unarmed, overwhelmed by numbers, could be kept alive, and are killed in cold blood by people whose job it is to kill people.
I acknowledge there is a case to be made that bin Laden was murdered, but it is not merely a matter of pointing out that he was killed while unarmed. A good argument can be made that his killing was both legal and moral under the rules of warfare. And of course, the Navy Seals who shot him could not know he was unarmed. Even if he raised his hands to surrender, he could have been wired with explosives. Remember, he was the master terrorist of all terrorists. How much risk to their own lives should the Navy Seals have allowed to try to capture him alive?
I apologize for jumping in when I haven’t read the whole thread, but it seems pretty clear that what happened to Jesus was semi-legal at best. It was a bit more of a lynch mob co-opting an unprincipled executive than a proper trial. I would call a such a lynching murder, despite the trappings of legality, though I admit it is a little less straightforward than what we usually call murder.
Brett,
I certainly wouldn’t call the accounts of the trials of Jesus in the Gospels fair. But also, I don’t know that they are historically accurate. Without getting too deeply into the historicity question, what I would say is that Jesus appeared outrageous to the Jewish authorities, and he must certainly have appeared as a threat to the Romans, or they would not have crucified him. Pilate, known to be ruthless, is far too nice in the Gospels, going out of his way to try not to execute Jesus.
Of course, if the Jewish authorities had believed Jesus was the Messiah, then the actions against him reported in the Gospels would be monstrous indeed. But they didn’t believe, and someone claiming to speak with the kind of authority Jesus did was certainly an offensive troublemaker. If Pilate had any reason to believe that Jesus was, or would be widely accepted as, the Messiah, he had ample reason to have him executed. The expectation was that the Messiah was going to free the people of Israel. That is certainly not what the Romans wanted.
If Jesus had not been executed, what would he have done in his remaining years, and would it have been to the benefit of the Jewish authorities and the Roman occupiers?
One of my favorite quotes is from F. F. Bruce:
If Jesus is who Christians claim he was, then he was a major threat to the Jewish authorities (whom he was constantly denouncing) and a threat to Roman rule. I think one would have to say that to the extent they perceived him as Christians believed him to be, he was potentially a very dangerous person.
It is impossible to do this topic justice based on (a) my own limited knowledge, (b) the space here, and (c) the time any of us has to devote to it. So the above is very crude. But I think it is not correct to say Jesus was murdered. He was executed by the Romans, who had the authority to do so, and from their point of view, they had sufficient reason to do it. Jesus was not seeking followers among the Romans during his ministry, and the Romans could not possibly have seen him as important except insofar as his effect on their occupation.
At the time of his killing, OBL was overwhelmed by numbers and unarmed. He could easily have been taken alive. Instead, he was gunned down in cold blood.
The Navy SEALS had no idea how many people were in the compound and what traps awaited them. OBL, it seems, did not have a gun in his hand but had arms within reach. It was known he was willing to kill thousands, and therefore certainly would try to kill the SEALS. I think he had sacrificied any presumption that he would peacefully surrender.
In this particular case, I don’t think any other options were realistic to the Americans. But this is a particular case not a general principle. Had OBL’s problem been unpaid parking tickets, the raid would not be morally justified.
I disagree.
Just so we don’t spin out of control, I want to make it clear that I fully expected (and am delighted to have been correct!) that Kyle finds rape, racial segregation, etc. to be moral evils, finds his knowledge that they are unproblematic, and indeed would find someone who questioned them to be perverse. I also want to say that I agree with Kyle that human knowing is not certain in the way that angelic (or divine) knowing is certain, but that this weakness in our capacity to know does not require radical skepticism about basic intuitions, moral, philosophical, empirical or otherwise. It does require a kind of humility about what we take to be the basic grounds upon which we test things we might be otherwise inclined to reject. That is, since we know we can be radically deceived, we ought at least to give even offensive positions a good hearing, even if only to be certain that we were correct in taking offense!
What I wanted to raise was a kind of counterpoint to Kyle’s claims, without parsing out my more basic epistemological optimism over his skepticism (granting, too, our main agreements). The counterpoint was this: As much as we, who are already conditioned in a pluralist society to be suspicious to claims of certainty, do well to take a position of refusing to be moved by what another has to say, might there not also be a twin, shadow side of this, namely, the possible destructiveness of holding as potentially uncertain what we know to be true? After all, the hymn title is “I Know that My Redeemer Lives” not simply because “I Opine in a Largely Certain but not Intrinsically Irreformable Way that My Redeemer Lives” does not scan very well. The gift of faith, in other words, is not a matter of strongly-held opinion. It is a share in the divine light by which God knows himself. Mutatis mutandis for similar kinds of (especially supernaturally supported) insights.
So, asked again, is there a parallel, about which we ought rightly to be worried, to fundamentalism? Is there, in other words, a culpable openness to questions akin to, and as dangerous as, the irredeemably closed mind? As hope, which is certain, nonetheless stands between the twin errors of presumption and despair, is there not a kind of certitude which, without worrying about its truth, sails safely between the Scylla of the closed mind and the Charybdis of the all-too-open one?
Is there, in other words, a culpable openness to questions akin to, and as dangerous as, the irredeemably closed mind?
There may very well be, but it’s not what Kyle is talking about (or at least not what I am talking about). There was an interesting discussion on First Things about miracles, and people were being critical of atheists who, they assumed, would not be open to admitting a miracle if it happened right under their noses because of a philosophical conviction that there was no supernatural. The author of the article, a Christian (but not a Catholic), then said if he saw a miracle worked in the name of someone other than Jesus, he would assume it was either not a miracle or was the work of the devil, or whatever. And he said if he saw the pope work a miracle, it would not convince him to convert to Catholicism. So exactly how does he have a right to criticize atheists for not accepting miracles when he would reject them himself when they don’t conform to his belief system?
I still contend that the definition of “murder” is not dependent on the moral standing of the person killed, but on the circumstances of the killing.
I don’t think it’s true that the Seals had “no idea” how many people were in the compound, and I think that this is irrelevant to how OBL was killed in any event. If they were worried about being overrun by hidden others, how did they have time to load the equivalent of “a small college library” in evidence into the chopper?
You want to justify murder. Fine. Justify it. But call it what it is.
Rodak,
Can you tell exactly what took place when bin Laden was killed? Suppose a policeman is holding a gun on one of the most dangerous criminals who ever lived and says, “Raise your hands or I’ll shoot!” The criminal starts to run away. Or he rushes toward the policeman. Or he very quickly thrusts his hand in his pocket. Is it murder if the policeman shoots? All you know is that bin Laden was unarmed. You don’t know if the Navy Seals knew he was unarmed at the time he was shot. And even if they did, the official story is that he “resisted.” How do you know he didn’t resist in one of the ways I described above?
I would have to say that there are stories of police killing people all the time under less threatening circumstances, and they are never convicted of any crimes.
If they were worried about being overrun by hidden others, how did they have time to load the equivalent of “a small college library” in evidence into the chopper?
Tremendous bravery even in the face of great danger.
So the bravery necessary to remove computers, etc. trumps the bravery necessary to capture an unarmed human being without taking his life? Okay. We’ve put our priorities in order, then.
I am absolutely certain that a thing can’t be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.
Can you explain what you mean by “same time”? Einstein had some interesting things to say about before, after, and simultaneously. They often depend on your frame of reference. Or, for that matter, can you explain what you mean by “time”? It is no longer even clear that time exists. You may be certain of the proposition you stated, but it may not really mean anything!
David,
It’s not just “same time”, it’s the “same time in the same respect.” This is the principle of non-contradiction.
“All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.” ~ T. Aquinas
That pretty much sums the situation up, does it not? Having received a direct, personal revelation, Aquinas realizes that he didn’t really ever know what he thought he had known; or, to the extent that he had known something, that something was fit only for kindling, or to stuff a mattress.
Those of us who have received no revelation, who have only books, or the words of other men who have only books themselves, can only grope toward the truth, testing ideas one at a time, using our limited intellect, while trying–when we can remember to do so–to stop and listen for that still small voice that may guide our efforts.
To say that our understanding of reality is beyond revision is to claim ownership of something that we do not possess.
Kyle, that’s an interesting post. I like your characterization of fundamentalism as another kind of relativism mostly because it would anger a lot of fundamentalists. I read about your sordid affair with uncertainty. Adjusting for life details that’s something I could have written; nevertheless, I found it a little annoying. I guess I wish other people would have more Faith for me. I think us skeptical types with a fondness for admitting uncertainty have a tendency to pat ourselves on the back for, well, being who we are. It really has little to do with our minds and less to do with our intelligence.