You can always tell when Andrew Sullivan is going to talk about religion, because he sticks a nice picture of clouds, or water, or rainbows, or some photogenic bit of nature at the top. I’m guessing that he was exposed to “All Things Bright And Beautiful” one too many times as a child.
Anyway, today’s piece was pretty much par for the course. A nice picture of rippling water, and then a correspondent talking about an autistic child:
The example of Jessica shows us how our own view of the world might be equally skewed. There may be many essential features of the world to which we are blind, just as she is blind to other people’s thoughts and feelings. So our theology also reflects our possibly skewed view of the world.
And Sully plunges in:
It has to, of course, because we have no other way of knowing God. But that is surely the point: anyway to understand God that is not God will misprise the divine in some way. Which is why the Incarnation remains our best hope; and why he spoke in parables. The most we can understand is stories and analogies. The rest is more distant from us than an autistic mind is from a normal one.
WTF? What the hell does that bold text actually mean? First there’s the obscure “misprise”, which even Google can’t define. (It means “mistake”, of course.) But even then… Is “anyway” meant to be “any way”? No, it still doesn’t mean anything. Won’t parse. The last time I saw that kind of woo was when I mistakenly read some Deepak Chopra over at HuffPo.
Coincidentally, the Barefoot Bum1 just posted my favourite quotation from Frederick Crews’ book Follies of the Wise. It’s a wonderfully refreshing antidote to woo of all kinds:
“The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is simply empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith or privileged ‘clinical insight’ or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which all other contenders are subjected.”
And if Andrew feels that this doesn’t apply to theology, then he’s really saying that his theology doesn’t involve the real world. It’s unreal. In which case it’s time for Dawkins’ suggestion.
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I mostly just wanted to capture the quotation in my archives. In any event, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
The only reason Andrew Sullivan has any reputation at all is because he calls himself a “conservative”. In that context, he gets to compare himself to Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin et al. Not exactly the highest bar.
He’s actually fairly liberal. It’s just that it generally takes him several years (cough Dubya) to figure out what ordinary liberals manage in just a few minutes. As a “conservative”, coming out against torture and for gay marriage looks gutsy; were he to compare himself against self-described liberals, he would be third- or fourth-rate and always late to the game.
In Sullivan’s fantasy world, shallowness looks like decisiveness, and a mass of neurotic contradictions looks like agonized, thoughtful deliberation.
how is empiricism “validated”? What about situations where absolutely no agreement on evidence is possible, does that render propositions absolutely invalid until the evidential question is deemed solved?
Hear, hear! An excellent post all the way around, Mr. Arnold. If the words are still gibberish the second or third time around, then so is the thought behind them.
Thanks!
Chris: I think “validated” because it works. Because, over time, the conclusions arrived at through empirical methods prove more consistent, repeatable, practically useful, and metaphysically parsimonious than any others. Should we make sacrifices to the rain gods, or consult a meteorologist? Exorcise a lunatic’s demons, or give her anti-psychotic medication?
You ask about the hypothetical situations “where absolutely no agreement on evidence is possible”. You’ll have to provide some examples, because such situations seem so far from our normal, everyday world in which the cat sits on the mat and cause precedes effect.
Are we talking about arguments from personal incredulity, when someone is unable to imagine how a particular phenomenon could be the result of natural processes, and insists on reaching for a further, supernatural explanation? Are we talking about cases in which a personal observation is stipulated to be veridical, so that one party seeks to explain that which was claimed while the other insists on questioning the basis for the claim?
It means “mistake,” true, but doesn’t it carry connotations from “misprision,” namely, a mistake also involving “contempt against the government, monarch, or courts, as sedition, lese majesty, or a contempt of court”? So that would include a “mistake” against god, I guess. Hence “misprise.”
I’m no fan of A. Sullivan’s, but just happened by and saw the blog. I hope all’s well. It is with me, other than that I’m in a state of pretty much constant and extremely depressing certainty that we’ll soon bomb Iran and the world will creep closer to most grisly cataclysms and writhings.
Eric