He explores the issues of science, faith and proof, and then turns to the accusation that the religious believer is all about simplistic, happy solutions, free of tension:According to recent surveys, somewhere between 79 and 92 percent of Americans believe in God. But if the responses to my column on Terry Eagleton's "Faith, Reason and Revolution" constitute a representative sample, 95 percent of Times readers don't. What they do believe, apparently, is that religion is a fairy tale, hogwash, balderdash, nonsense and a device for rationalizing horrible deeds.
Some readers find a point of vulnerability in what they take to be religion's flaccid, Polyanna-like, happy-days optimism. Religious people, says Delphinias, live their lives "in a state of blissfully blind oblivion." They rely on holy texts that they are "to believe in without question." (C.C.) "No evidence, no problem -- just take it on faith." (Michael) They don't allow themselves to be bothered by anything. Religion, says Charles, "cannot deal with doubt and dissent," and he adds this challenge: "What say you about that, Professor?"
What I say, and I say it to all those quoted in the previous paragraph, is what religion are you talking about? The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent, and the struggles of faith, the dark night of the soul, feelings of unworthiness, serial backsliding, the abyss of despair. Whether it is the book of Job, the Confessions of St. Augustine, Calvin's Institutes, Bunyan's "Grace Abounding to The Chief of Sinners," Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling" and a thousand other texts, the religious life is depicted as one of aspiration within the conviction of frailty. The heart of that life, as Eagleton reminds us, is not a set of propositions about the world (although there is some of that), but an orientation toward perfection by a being that is radically imperfect.
The key event in that life is not the fashioning of some proof of God's existence but a conversion, like St. Paul's on the road to Damascus, in which the scales fall from one's eyes, everything visible becomes a sign of God's love, and a new man (or woman), eager to tell and live out the good news, is born. "To experience personal transformation that in turn can truly move and shake this world, we must believe in something outside of ourselves" (Judith Quinton)."The kind of religion that moves me," says Shannon . . . is the story of hope and love . . . not the idea that any particular story describes concrete historical 'truth.'" "It isn't about moral superiority," says Richard. "It's about humbly living an examined life held up to the mirror of a higher truth. It certainly does not seem to be about comfort."
So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion -- it is an inferior way of knowing -- is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism. And the critique of religion's content -- it's cotton-candy fluff -- is the product of incredible ignorance.
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Stanley Fish is defenseive, as you put it, because he is an academic. He is immersed in a culture (I've been there) of deep skepticism and atheism; a culture in which religion is seen as an unfortunate bump on the road which we have more or less gotten over. For a religious person, or even a not-very-religious person (see Terry Eagleton's book, which Fish trumpets in an earlier blog), the slavering devotion to "Ditckins" is incredibly irritating, and often offensive.
Furthermore, Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton and a slew of other academics make their living, and have devoted their lives to this sort of debate. I suggest you read both his blog post and the lead-in blog post (and then read some of the comments).
Ultimatly, he's just responding to the comments and what they represent - not our friendly atheist neighbor, but the atheist who thinks our religions is dangerous nonsense. There is very much a good reason to defend religion against that sort of thing.
Sandy -- read Acts chapter 17, the story of Paul in Athens.
It's one of the most powerful and personally meaningful narratives in scripture to me. Paul is given an opportunity to lecture a gathering of Greek intellectuals. Like you, Paul didn't want to tell them what they believe is wrong, he wanted to convince them the intellectual striving they experience is incomplete. His approach was to say: "I see that you are searching, that you are thoughtful people; so let me tell you, the god whom you are searching for is the God I present to you."
I believe John Paul II emphasized this point in his great encyclical Fides et Ratio, specifically referencing Acts 17.
There is a meeting ground between Faith and Reason, and we shouldn't be afraid to have conversations there out of fear of telling someone else they're wrong.
Fish insists on dancing around the point like a legion of angels on the head of a pin.
First he claims that his religion is somehow different from the literal, biblical, dogma that atheists attack, then he says we need to let the "scales fall away" and naively accept everything on faith. He even assumes that using the word epistemological makes his argument more convincing.
But here's the thing: It all comes down to "Is what he believes true", and the answer is...get serious. Sky fairies, angels, talking snakes and donkeys, bats as birds and men surviving three days in a whale, all are part of the big picture. Without them, one may be creating a spiritual refuge for oneself, but one is not practicing the Christian religion.
This is one of those harvests where the wheat is inseparable from the chaff, or, as poker players might say say, "You're either all in or your not".
John,
Fish's point about epistemology is not even remotely capable of being discounted, certainly not by someone who has apparenty never even studied epistemology. His use of the word "epistemology" is not jargon. The fact of the matter is that Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, the post-Heideggerians -- the whole of continental philosophy in the twentieth century -- all recognized that if reductionist materialism is true, then there can be no way whatsoever to validate the accomplishments of human reason. If philosophical materialism is true, then all human discourse is an exercise in irrationality. Science itself is impossible if philosophical materialism is true.
Of course, Kant recognized this much long ago, following Hume. Philosophical materialism, they both recognized, is necessarily tied to "sensationism." This is to say that human perception can be nothing more than the non-necessary association of successive sense data to our brain, somehow turned into the perceptual data of consciousness, if nothing else is present in the world but interacting material processes. Our perceptual experiences, then, such as color, sound, taste, beauty, love, etc., are delusory. Even moreso must be the presumably "reasonable" inductions that we derive from our senses. Hume himself went so far as to deny any objectivity to our experience of causality. Kant could only "save appearances" by postulating inner, psychological processes that turn material noumena into perceptual phenomena. But there is no real corresponce, for Kant, between our experiential phenomena and the world in itself. Kant "rescued" the universality of science by postulating the universality of human psychology. What is true in science, he argued, is simply a matter of psychology, which all humans share, not any correspondence between the mind and the world. Postmodern philosophers go even farther by denying the universality of human psychology. We are all, they tell us, products of our social conditioning. Science itself, except in its barest, technological application, loses its universal character in this postmodern position.
All of the great philosophers, the only ones worth reading, recognize this dilemma of philosophical materialism that I have just noted. Scientists themselves, unless they are also trained in philosophy, have little to contribute to the discussion. Stanley Fish assumes the truth of concluding to irrationalism from materialism, as rightly he should. The now-standard acceptance of the essentially irrational character of human discourse is why postmodern philosophers characterize the present age as a turn back to myth. Even scientific cosmology is mythical in character, according to this view. It can't possibly be "true," because human experience -- if matter is all there is -- cannot possibly correspond to objective reality. Thus, one famous postmodern philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, has characterized the intellectual character of our age as the "demythologization of demythologization."
It should be noted that theistic philosophers are able, contrary to the postmoderns, to take a more critically realistic view of epistemology, because they acknowledge the reality of spirit. Not everything is matter, they realize. There is one type of being that is capable of taking in (that is, grasping) the forms of the world: spiritual being. In fact, it was this theistic type of epistemological realism that inspired the advent of science in the first place, as Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki have so indubitably shown.
As for myth, many of the stories of the Old Testament are cast in the character of edifying myth, happenings that take place in illo tempore, and these stories have always been recognized as such. There never was such a thing as a "biblical fundamentalist" in the modern sense until the advent of modernity.
John - I think you find Fish irritating because he isn't writing apologetics. He is not concerned with how "in" a religion a person must be, necessarily. What he is concerned with, is pointing out that the critics of religion often are guilty of the very things that they lay at the feet of the religious person. To paraphrase a speech by Judith Butler on Foucault: Fish has the luxury of writing criticism, in which he has to make no truth claim, but only has to point out how everyone else's truth claims are off.