The Varieties of Religious Claims

[alixtii]

It seems to me that most if not all religious claims can fall into one of five groups:

1. Practices prescribed for the faithful. Go to church on Sunday; don't eat meat on Fridays; don't mix meat and dairy.

It's hard to get worked up over these, I think; they might be silly, but most organizations have mandated behavior for their members, so why should religion be any different?

2. Ethical precepts. Do not commit murder; love thy neighbor as thyself; clothe the naked.

For most religions, the vast majority of claims of this sort overlap with the similar claims one gets through the application of secular reason. When this doesn't happen (homosexuality is an abomination; women should be subservient to their husbands; suicide bombing is a moral obligation) we begin to have problems, especially since these are considered to be universally normative.

3. Claims about transcendence. God is three persons in one being. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Pretty much any sentence of the form "God is ____." plus a bunch of other metaphysical claims, like about transubstatiation. Claims about the afterlife fall here too, I think. (Afterlife claims are weird because we tend to frame them in quasi-empirical terms.)

Myself, being of a mystical Wittgensteinian bent, I don't think these statements are, strictly speaking, truly propositions as such, but rather gesture towards ineffable truths.

Atheists seem to tend to find religionists believing these things to be silly and wrong, but I don't think that much vitriol can be really served up by a metaphysical disagreement alone. I don't think either side is on particularly firm ground here; the religionist's beliefs are silly and weird, but often the atheistic objection is overly broad and leads to a self-refuting positivism as its endpoint.

Extreme skeptical responses, like "Last Thursdayism," would also move a claim into this category. The problem comes when religionists don't want to admit the move, and treat the statement as if were still saying something about empirical reality, e.g. wanting to get creationism taught in science classrooms. It's a sort of category error.

4. Claims that, while technically about the empirical world, are in practice unfalsifiable. Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.

Based on how much people fight over what "really" happened based on the available evidence, one can question whether this category truly exists at all. What else goes here? Is the claim that the moon landings were faked falsifiable in practice?

But while recognizing that it's not a hard-and-fast distinction, I think this is a useful category for instances where non-radical forms of skepticism might be called for.

The religionist has to remember, however, that to people who lack her faith commitments, "is not practically falsifiable" is a reason not to believe something, not a reason to believe, especially if it concerns something which as a general rule doesn't happen, like dead people getting up and walking. These, like category 3 claims, are things the religionist believes despite (or, in many ways, because) they are weird and silly.

5. Claims about the emprical world which are in practice falsifiable. Dianetics. Creationist claims which don't resort to Last Thursdayism. Bleeding statues.

Liberal theologies tend to eschew these types of claims altogether; conservative theologies (including but not limited to scriptural literalism) tend to multiply them incessantly. Of course, as long as the falsifiable claims are true then there's not really a problem. Both the biblical literalist Christian and the atheist might agree that Pontius Pilate was prefect of the Judaea province from 26 to 36 C.E. But even here, there's a difference, because the secularist's belief is tentative, subject to revision given new evidence, while the literalist's belief is held as firm knowledge based on faith.

I'm going to take a stand here and say if a religionist believes a falsifiable claim which has been falsified without resorting to a radical skeptical response--which is to say, if she claims to be working within the generally accepted epistemologies of history or science--then the religionist is just plain wrong.

ETA: Fixed the double-posting.

Crossposted from this LibraryThing thread.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Unless you are making an important point by repetition, I think you must have hit 'paste' twice when copying out this post :)

Do not commit murder; love thy neighbor as thyself; clothe the naked.

For most religions, the vast majority of claims of this sort overlap with the similar claims one gets through the application of secular reason.

While not actively disagreeing, I think it is worth pointing out that almost every atheist is still an atheist from a particular religion. Even if like me you are of the fourth generation in the family we are still surrounded by Christian values and I am under no illusions that the God I don't believe in is a Christian God. As such there is a huge cross fertilization of ethical beliefs, in both directions, so it's not surprising there are similarities. If I was ever taking a secular ethical stance and opposing it to a religion other than Christianity I would expect to find far more disagreement.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yes--I was deliberately vague as to how secular reason yields ethical conclusions. Now, I don't assume that secular ethics are quite as theological as you do, in that I take you as believing that ethics as whole are more or less just a useful civil mythology, which I don't accept; but I take your point that a culture's mores are going to be informed by its religious roots.

[deborah]

as an atheist, I don't believe that religionists making claims about transcendence are silly and wrong. I believe that religionists making claims that the precepts of their faith should be patently obvious to any non-believers who use common sense and read their (obvious proof) holy book are silly and wrong. And I believe that religionists making claims about atheist inability to be moral are silly and wrong. But I don't think there's anything about being an atheist that makes me necessarily think that believing in transcendence makes you silly, anymore than back when I was a religionist I believed that people who have different beliefs from mine were silly.

[zepooka.livejournal.com]

I think you're shoehorning the metaphysics (is that the right term here?) of afterlife and divinity into group 3. While "transcendence" is a good catch-all term for, let's say, claims about the non-empirical world (which I guess would be, by default, non-falsifiable), the ideas of life after death and who's calling all the shots are further apart than, say, moral precepts and faith-based precepts, imho, and they have separate groups. Afterlife deals with the very personal nature of the soul, whereas divinity is more about an idea of the world at large and how it runs. I'd be tempted to make 3 solely about soul-based metaphysics (is there a soul, what happens to it after death, and are we in fact more connected with the world than just regular physics allows), and nudge divinity somewhere between 3 and 4 (since it's empirical and, without getting too squabbly about it, non-falsifiable).

Also: where would you stick eschatology? Group 4?

Also also: I like your system, but I feel like there are probably non-Western religions out there - or hell, even some Western ones - that probably break the mold. Good tests waiting to be discovered. :)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I agree that the metaphysics of afterlife don't fit quite comfortably, in large part because I haven't quite figured out exactly what questions about the afterlife are asking--they tend to pre-assume the discreteness of the ego in a way I just don't have a handle on. But any claims about the ego are going to be by nature metaphysical.

I don't really see what's problematic about the metaphysics of divinity, though. I think it depends on what one means "calling all the shots." The mere fact of God's Lordship is a transcendent claim; specific instances of shot-calling (e.g., the flood, the ascension of Elijah, the blinding of Paul, whatever) would fall into categories 4 or 5.

Eschatological claims like the Rapture existing as a historical even would indeed fall into category 4, I suppose.

Also also: I like your system, but I feel like there are probably non-Western religions out there - or hell, even some Western ones - that probably break the mold.

I really think there is a need for a feminist/postmodernist panreligious liberal metatheology, but I do think there are going to be very strong objections of cultural imperialism, that any metatheology (and really, the very idea of "theology" is pretty darn Christian) is going to be overly influenced by a particularly religious theology, is definitely going to have to be addressed.

I don't really think the claim'll be so much that certain religions don't fit the mold as that the mold distorts the reality of those religions. (Of course, to some degrees, calling some religions "religions" distorts the reality of those religions.) I really can't think of any Buddhist or Taoist claims that can't fit into one of these groups; of course, I'm not an expert on non-Christian religions (other than Discordianism, I guess).

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

Is posting everything twice a statement on dualism or the dialectic? :-)

1. Practices prescribed for the faithful.
It's hard to get worked up over these.

In the abstract, no, but some practices can be actively harmful from the perspective of people not of that religion. "Cut out the beating hearts of victims to feed the Sun God.", to take an obvious example. Or "Don't mingle with the lower castes, because they are unclean." Was Lord Napier right or wrong when he threatened to execute Hindus in British India who attempted to carry out the religious rite of sati? And then there's the whole question of circumcision/genital mutilation.

3. Claims about transcendence.
Atheists seem to tend to find religionists believing these things to be silly and wrong, but I don't think that much vitriol can be really served up by a metaphysical disagreement alone.

That's not my experience. :-) See how well things go when atheists use a reductio ad absurdam argument involving invisible pink unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and theists see this as mockery of their deeply-held beliefs...


I don't know if you'd include this in one of your other categories, but there's also "Claims about human nature." Original sin; are we naturally good, or naturally evil? Do we have eternal souls, or do we return to nothingness when we die, or do we merge with the greater universe? Is our individuality a good thing or a tragic flaw, on the cosmic scale?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

In the abstract, no, but some practices can be actively harmful from the perspective of people not of that religion.

This is a very important point, and you're right that I missed it completely in the analysis given above. I treated these practices as if they were always morally-neutral, when of course they aren't. Mea culpa.

I'd go a step farther, too, and argue there's even a problem when the morals of secular reason cast doubt on practices which don't affect people outside the faith, like not admitting women or gay men to the ordained priesthood.

See how well things go when atheists use a reductio ad absurdam argument involving invisible pink unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and theists see this as mockery of their deeply-held beliefs...

There's a part of me still thinks that the theists are still just committing a category error as to the nature of their (our?) beliefs, but you're right that in focusing on what was likely to raise the ire of atheists I lost track of what might inflame the passions of my fellow religionists.

Original sin; are we naturally good, or naturally evil?

I can parse this either as a metaphysical claim about our formal nature or essence (cf. the transubstantiated communion wafer) or as a psychological/anthropological empirical claim about h. sapiens sapiens.

Do we have eternal souls, or do we return to nothingness when we die, or do we merge with the greater universe?

First we have to figure out what we mean by "we"; since the transcendental ego isn't an empirical entity, this seems like it would have to be a metaphysical question. Cf. the question "where do we go when we sleep?"