Some humanists (typically atheists and agnostics, sometimes self-proclaimed Christians) account for faith in merely neurological terms. They describe the neurological phenomena that correlate with religious and ecstatic experiences (the active areas of the brain, the chemicals released and their effects on perception and emotion, the psychological benefits of faith, etc.), and believe that they have proved that religious belief is merely a natural phenomenon. However, to demonstrate the natural causes of faith does not preclude the existence of supernatural causes. It’s logical nonsense. It’s like a crime scene investigator deciphering precisely which angle the bullet hit the victim, and how it caused death by hemorrhaging, and thereby concluding triumphantly that he had solved the murder. Humanists convince themselves that the neurological causes of religious experience entirely account for it because they hold the inherently non-scientific presupposition that no supernatural causes can exist. It is absurd to enter a dialog whose purpose is to investigate whether supernatural causes exist with the presupposition that all phenomena must be natural. When such presuppositions are suspended, we can finally examine the facts of the phenomenon of religion without bias. We will find a great number of human behaviors that don’t seem to be easily accounted for by explanations of natural human behavior–chief among which were a wise and gentle moral teacher who claimed to be the One True God in the flesh, and a group of men who, after his death, themselves went to execution because they swore that he was, and a sect that has survived for 2000 years teaching that God died, that three are one, that a woman gave birth to a child without a man being involved, and that the path to life is not the survival of the fittest, but of the least fit.
Tag: humanism
Redemption by literature
The following is excerpted from Tony Rawson’s summary of a talk by Richard Rorty, which can be read here. Rorty, although unnecessarily being wary of redemptive truth, accurately identifies its distinct import into culture, and traces the movement whereby Modernist redemptive truth is giving way to the Postmodern disintegration of metanarrative into mere narrative, indeed, as many narratives as their are people.
[Redemptive Truth] brings a feeling of self-fulfilment. This is the sort of truth that Rorty regards as suspect and potentially harmful. He expresses it in this way “I shall use the term redemptive truth for a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves. Redemptive truth would not consist of theories about how things interact causally, but instead would fulfil the need that religion and philosophy has attempted to satisfy. This is the need to fit everything – every thing, person, event, idea and poem – into a single context that will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined and unique”…..
Rorty’s version of the history of Western philosophy he says that intellectuals in the West have, since the Renaissance, passed through three stages. In addition, that these three stages have been moving us ever closer to self-reliance.
Stage one: Redemption by Religion. The hope for redemption through entering into a new relation to a supremely powerful non-human person. Belief – as in belief in the articles of a creed – may be only incidental to such a relationship.
Rorty sees the transition from a religious culture to a philosophical culture beginning with, “the revival of Platonism in the renaissance, the period in which humanists began asking the same questions about Christian monotheism that Socrates had asked about Hesiod’s pantheon”. In other words, one should ask not whether one’s actions were pleasing to the Gods, but rather which gods held the correct views about what ought to be done.
Stage two: Redemption by Philosophy. This being through the acquisition of a set of beliefs that represent things as they really are. To agree with Socrates that there is a set of beliefs which is both susceptible of rational justification and such as to take rightful precedence over every other consideration in determining what to do with ones life.
Rorty would also claim that it is a mistake to look to science for redemption. That science has a function in improving our lives by providing us with better technology and that other than this, science books should be read as narrative along with all other works.
Stage three: Redemption by Literature. For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. The literary culture is always in search of novelty rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal.
In Rorty’s words, “the sort of person that I am calling a literary intellectual thinks that a life that is not lived close to the present limits of the human imagination is not worth living. For the Socratic idea of self-examination and self-knowledge, the literary intellectual substitutes the idea of enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human.
For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up with a supremely powerful or supremely loveable non-human person, the literary intellectual substitutes the Bloomian thought that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become – the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save one another”.
What Redemption by Literature has right: It’s an epic story, not a scientific or philosophical “figuring out” of the world, that redeems us.
What Redemption by Literature needs: The right story.
Ben Taylor 