contact@onbelief.orgThe Miraculous, Re-interpretation and Escaping Literalism
The Miraculous
There are many who, despite the scientific basis of modern culture, believe in the existence of miraculous events. Indeed there would appear to be a very long pre-christian tradition of such beliefs. Christian churches, notably the Roman Catholic Church, have a continuing narrative of such events as a way of sustaining belief in the rewards of a the saintly life. Other churches in an equally bizarre fashion only stress miracles of the past. Clearly for the adherents, being part of an organizations in which miraculous physical events occur is obviously good for morale and for the promotion of solidarity amongst the community of believers. Believing in these events will in that sense provide benefits to the adherents. However is it not better to view the world from a non-miraculous perspective so that we can direct our energies to the most productive strategies for enhancement of our well being and happiness? Living in hope of personal miracles that cannot occur is neither a productive nor fulfilling way to live. What can truly be gained by believing that a statue weeps, for example?
It is hardly surprising that people develop such outlandish ideas when they have been indoctrinated as children into believing in the literal truth of ancient books from a pre-scientific era. If instead of being taught that such books are literally true the physical implausibility of the narratives were coherently presented, the emotional content of present religious thought might be very different. Would those who are presently educated to appreciate the narratives of miracles be less emotionally secure in their belief or less intellectually convinced without them? If the religious were in some way diminished by the lack of miracles one can only begin to question the strength and vitality of their world view.
Re-interpretation
Of course there are those who argue that literalism is not a prerequisite for appreciation of ancient religious literature. They therefore emphasize a modern non-literal interpretation of sacred texts including accounts of the miraculous. For the non-literalist this also has the value of maintaining the cultural, aesthetic and social aspects of the religious tradition. There are two obvious questions about such an approach. Firstly we may ask why bother at an intellectual level if there is something more fulfilling to be had from more modern thought. Science presents us with wonderful new powerful narratives of origin and at the same time can transform our physical existence. We then of course need some forms of ethical, moral, social, legal and aesthetic education to provide us with an understanding of that which does not emerge from within the domain of science. Our legal and political systems and non-religious social institutions must then be encouraged to flourish. The preoccupation with bizarre ancient laws, such as that found in Judaism, can be dropped if a commitment to a vibrant political culture can instead be developed.
The second and perhaps more substantial set of reasons for shunning non-literal interpretations is
1) the rejection of the possibility of error that reliance on re-interpretation implies.
2) the stifling effect it has on original and investigative thinking and
3) the lack of self-correction (or change if your prefer) that is a great strength of the sciences.
Why can those who crave the emotional comfort of re-interpretation simply not say 'enough is enough' let us move on to something fresh? In science ideas are of course tinkered with, adapted and refined to meet an ever growing body of observational data. However there is also the occasional paradigm shift in which completely new ways of thinking develop that lead to new and expansive bursts of creativity. Slogging over the same old text to find new interpretations would seem valueless to most scientific, engineering or medical researchers. They have a much richer view of the world and a more profound intellectual life which is founded on the premise that engagement with the world as it is to be found by observation should be pre-eminent. Scientists simply accept from the historians of science that Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (mathematical principles of natural philosophy) are a work of profound genius without ever reading a line. Indeed the the way Newton presented what we now see as his second law of motion ( f=ma) was not even expressed by him in that mathematical form (hear a BBC audio presentation). Researchers and developers only need to know precisely what their predecessors did in a practical sense, extract the useful principles and then move on. Then they might refine modify' refute and ultimately abandon those same ideas in favour of some novel belief that provides greater consistency, cohesiveness and comprehensiveness of explanation. Science and technology changes, or progresses if you prefer, by accumulation of new observations and explanatory beliefs. For those who are steeped in the tradition of reinterpretation achieving the paradigm shift will be much more difficult. To be fair, the religious or the theological are not unique in carrying out continuous re-interpretation on an industrial scale. Despite the social, political, moral and scientific engagement of analytical philosophers, philosophy still has its devotees and interpreters of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle for the present age, not to mention the re-interpreters of the interpreters of the minutiae of Kant and many other luminaries. This is not to make a virtue of our ignorance of the history of ideas (or more importantly history in general) merely to value novel observations and their inherent logical integrations or resultant paradigm shifts as ultimately of greater worth than the re-interpretation of redundant arguments.
Escaping Literalism
For those who adopt any form of empirical materialism, such as a scientific outlook, not only should we not need to re-interpret narratives of the miraculous but we should apply our present-day understanding of the way the world functions to examine their content. (In so doing we should also accept the potentially transient nature of our technology, descriptive theories and cultural values in which our understanding of observations are embedded.) Using such an approach with the science of today we can be sure, with a very high degree of certainty, that there are fundamental descriptive errors in biblical narratives for example and all sorts of nonsense in many of the great word religions. By the power of thinking alone we will never change water into wine. The equations of chemistry do not permit it. There are no carbon atoms in the water molecule, end of story. There is no need to re-interpret such a claim in a non-literal or metaphorical sense so that we can derive some social or moral value from it. The claim should be treated as a complete irrelevance either in a literal or metaphorical sense.
By contrast we know instead that chemistry has tremendous predicative power and allows the generation of alcohols by other means. The curious might like to compare an account of ethanol synthesis, a chemical conjuring trick, and the biblical story of changing water into wine then ask themselves what provides a better understanding of the world. The chemist can predict the synthesis of ethanol by novel methods using chemical theory. Indeed the chemist might go on to synthesize another 10 million organic compounds or any one of the thousands of new molecules produced each year. By contrast the believer cannot predict the existence of more miraculously transforming pots of water. (It is notable that in the particular miracle being referred to did not apply to mand made fluorocarbons for example, although in future similar ignorance could generate beliefs of a quasi-religious nature related to those compounds.) In fact the semi-rational believer has to stipulate is that such events could not happen again, except by supernatural processes. In more general terms there can be no intrinsic value in construing that there does not occur within the universe as a series of events that cannot happen using our most tested concepts of what is possible. Clearly discrimination is then needed to understand the limitations of present descriptive ideas. However it is unlikely that such insight is to found in ancient texts which claim that bizarre ideas are literally true or which modern interpreters claim have metaphorical value ( such as the "talking snake in the garden" and "rib woman"). It is certainly more valid to claim that the better appoach to understanding our present limiations is to make new observation and develop novel theories.
Similarly we can see the lack of an observational basis and mechanistic explanation in the idea of reincarnation, a very important narrative component of many religions. "The most obvious objection to reincarnation is that there is no evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body (taken from previous link)". To claim that a phenomenon is recurrent with no observational evidence or mechanistic explanation is not acceptable. Microbiology, zoology, botany and biochemistry on the other hand helps us explain how the biosphere is a continuum and how one day part of us might become part of a worm.
If we confine ourselves to present day science we dismiss ideas of physical immortality and continued existence after death. If anything, other than our ideas and our genetic information, is to persist within others after death, then it is up to the believer to provide us with testable predictions and so advance our understanding. What testable proposition does belief in reincarnation lead to for example ? It is not the role for science to negate every untestable idea.
Of course we should not confine ourselves to considering errors of religious belief. Any belief that we can formulate is subject to error if we hold them to be true or at least have a utilitarian value in a literal sense. This condition applies also to science and politics.
On the Nature of Belief
www.onbelief.org
Scotland, 12th October 2007 and thereafter
Copyright 2007 onwards
