Knowing Part I

Religions in America
Christian 78% (Protestant 52%, Roman Catholic 24%, Mormon 2%), other 10%, none 10%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 1% (2002)

How is religion viewed in America?
Is it useful? Is it for the weak? Jesse the Body Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota said that religion is a crutch for weak minded people. Is that the case? Freud believed God is simply a projection of our minds. Is that how it works?
How does religion help people? How does religion harm people? These are questions we must ask. But, there are bigger, more important questions.

Can it be proven? Can we say that one is right or wrong? How? What do you think?

The buzzword: Relativism
(can also be nuanced by calling it syncretism, pluralism (religious), or ecumenicalism)
What does it mean? Is it true?
Statements everyone has heard: We all worship the same God. Different religions are just different paths to the same God. What’s true for you is true, but is not necessarily true for me. We can’t know which God is true
What do you think about these things?

The heart of the Issue:
What does it mean for things to be either subjective or objective?
What are things you can know objectively?
What are things that you can know subjectively?
The idea behind describing things in this way is that things that are subjective are up to personal choice and cannot be proven because they are outside the realm of what is provable or objective. Things that are objective are provable by means that are absent of human influence and subjectivity.
Is this an accurate way of looking at things?

The objective/subjective lie:
The problem...
“is the divorce between the objective and the subjective poles in human knowledge and the consequent polarization between objectivity and subjectivity. This has led, in turn, to a popular image of science as a realm of objective facts which are quite sanitized of any elements of subjectivity, with the corollary that all other claims to knowledge – for instance, claims in the realms of art, literature, poetry, and religion – are merely subjective. The best scientists in all times, and recent scientific work in particular, have totally repudiated this image…”. Lesslie Newbigin
Our knowledge, scientific and religious alike, are equally subjective and objective. They are objective in that they are talking about a real world which can be understood and observed, but also subjective in that we bring our point of view, our historical influences, and our personal biases to the table. This does not make it less true.

Example:
I am currently sitting at my desk in my office. As I look at the window, I can see cars pass by on the road. If I look out and see a purple car pass by, I can make the statement "I saw a purple car pass by a moment ago" (let's leave aside foolish talk about 'what do I mean by purple' and 'moment ago'). Now, I am talking about a real car out there in reality that actually passed by. However, I am making a statement from my subjective point of view. The subjectiveness of my view could make my statement false, but doesn't have to. If could be false if my window were tinted purple. However, if it is not tinted purple and my subjective perspective is not skewed, then I am right to say I saw a purple car. Just because something is subjective does not make it false, no more than it makes it right. Let's move on.

Science:
“The scarcely concealed assumption is that the word “scientific” refers to a kind of study which has no prior commitments about the nature of truth but has a totally open mind, as thought he scientific mind were a sort of empty page on which nothing had already been written. The truth, of course, is that both approaches – the confessional (religious) and the scientific – presupposes (as all rationally inquiry must presuppose) a long tradition of thought and practice that determines which beliefs are plausible and which are not.” Newbigin

The problem is that science can only give us so much. It can only tell us what it perceives about the world. It cannot tell us why things are the way they are, nor can it tell us the purpose for which they exist. Yet, you will find scientists falling into this kind of language all of the time. All humans do. Evolutionary scientists inevitably use phrases like “Nature has made provisions for…” or “natural selection has seen to it that…”

Facts are not entities which are implanted in an open, vacant mind, but are only grasped by a mind trained in a particular culture to understand them.

The point is that all knowledge is both subjective and objective. I will build upon these ideas in the next post. Please feel free to leave comments.