I continue to post my grad school papers on this blog. I am currently pursuing a Master’s in Public and Pastoral Leadership at the Vancouver School of Theology. The school is an affiliate of the University of British Columbia.
This paper was given as an oral presentation, so footnotes are not included.
Religious Solipsism and Uncertainty as Safe Space for Interfaith Dialogue
In a pluralistic world often fragmented and conflicted along the lines of religious belief, as they relate to encountering and negotiating with the other, can something be gained from the lessons of the radical philosophical theories of solipsism? Which is the view that nothing in one’s life can be asserted with certainty, outside of one’s own personal thoughts and experiences. The brain in the jar hypothesis. The Matrix. The whole idea is a kind of joke in philosophical fields. But could solipsistic postures help temper the intolerance and dogmatism that so often fuel religious conflict and hampers interfaith dialogue in the pluralistic era? Can the persistence of the philosophical ” problem of solipsism” open a space for uncertainty and humility, through which interfaith dialogue and relationships could flow?
“During the last few decades, modern technology, with radio, television, air travel, and satellites have created a network of communications which puts each part of the world into almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, inspite of this worldwide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.” according to Bohm. [Bohm p 1]
This failure to communicate can be acutely felt in the interfaith context. Religious beliefs, especially monotheistic ones, are infamously intolerant. The authors of Religion Gone Astray, for example, set out to answer the question:
“How can we talk with those who think they have the only truth.” [RGA p92 Kindle] The authors go on to day, “When our tradition is grounded in the belief that ours is superior to others, we often have the basis for serious discord. If my faith is the only way to God and to Heaven, and the only way to avoid Hell, then I cannot help making negative judgments about those who do not accept my faith. Such feelings of exclusivity can even lead to violence in the name of our own understanding of faith and of God.” [RGA p 337].
However, I would assert, that it is not religious belief that is the cause of discord, but the certainty to which it is held, that breeds intolerance.
In IP15/710 it was asserts that Interfaith conversations and relations are a social good. That they ameliorate potential inter-religious conflict in communities. These conversations are generally governed by principals or guidelines, generally meant to allow believers to express their views without negating or threatening the view of others. A toolbox of techniques to be used in an interfaith dialogue: the arrangement of meeting space, making I statements, do not compare or criticize, active listening, seeking out commonality. But can this type of approach really reach the scalability needed to address religious conflict that arise when encountering the others in the pluralistic West.
Is there an epistemological posture that can do the work of these tools instead? Can a posture both affirm individual religious convictions, but temper the urge to extend or even force those convictions onto others?
“Epistemology, the branch of philosophy devoted to studying the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. [RvE page 1]
What follows is an oversimplification, but serves to locate us epistemologically between religious believers of differing faiths, and those of no faith. These polarities can generally be described as the warring way of knowing: rationalism and empiricism.
The impotence of Rationalism in an Emperical World
The dominant epistemological views in the pluralistic west is arguably empiricism. Empiricism would posit “We have no source of knowledge in X or for the concepts we use in X other than sense experience.” [p. 5. RvE]. There is broad consensus about what constitutes a real object or phenomenon are sensible material objects, that which can be weighed and measured, and those things that can be directly experienced. The empiricism put forward by the likes of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume is so engrained in the West it requires little discussion. In the era of scientific empiricism, religions cannot make their traditional claims on physics, such as the mountains hold up the sky, the dome of the sky holds back all the blue water up there, and lightning strikes when God is mad because you masturbated. If I claim there is a god, I cannot point to this God, weigh it, or measure it. If I claim my religion’s approach to God is the exclusively correct, I cannot offer proof from the sensible world such as “My God weighs 18 divinity units and yours only weighs 4, so I win.”
Conflict arise when communication turns to argument and arguments cannot be settled when no proof of a claim can be offered.
The only empirical claim that can be attached to religious belief, is that of individual spiritual experience. “I know there is a God because my prayers were once answered,” “I feel His presence,” “There are just so many coincidences.” Experiences, of course, is subjective and open to interpretation. Ironically, the West is so empirical, that even making claims of religious experience might discredit your argument. They’ll think your crazy. So, rarely do religious Westerners speak of religious experiences and the conversation during the encounter with the other usually consists of abstractions and sentiments: symbols (semiotics), stories, historic conjecture, and speculations.
“This story in the Bible proves the existence of God. This verse supports my claim that only Christianity is correct. Why would the Jews have returned to Israel after 2,000 years, if not to fulfill God’s promise? Etc.”
From this point of view, it seems fair to characterize religious believers taking the posture of rationalism. Fist laid out by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, a “rationalist with regard to our knowledge of the external world holds that some external world truths can and must be known a priori, that some of the ideas required for that knowledge must be innate, and that this knowledge is superior to any that experience could ever provide” [p 6 RvE].
Aside from this innate knowing, a priori knowing, there is often and intuitive knowing. “Some place ethical truths in this category. Some include metaphysical claims, such as that God exists, we have free will, and our mind and body are distinct substances. The more propositions rationalists include within the range of intuition and deduction, and the more controversial the truth of those propositions or the claims to know them, the more radical their rationalism.” [p.3 RvE].
One might see this in operation, in the arguments on “natural law” that CS Lewis lays out in Mere Christianity. By this he means that there is a law that is simply understood by everyone and does not need to be learned. He says the proof would be that ancient civilizations, while having some particular difference in moral codes, were more similar than different.
” If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.” [MC, p 5-6]. To this end, Lewis concluded “It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong.” [MC p.6] foot 9.
Lewis made this assertion in 1943during a series of orations on BBC radio. At that time, an empiricist might countered his assertions with skepticism. “I doubt it” or “I see no evidence for that.” Today, Lewis’s assertions might be dismissed outright in the face of claims made by biological anthropology and evolutionary psychology where morality might be seen as an evolved mechanism of group survival. These scientific empiricists might view morality as an emergent property of human group dynamics and not an innate idea, or innate to a human individual in any way.
With the battle for Christian physics having been lost to empiricists, religious rationalist’s arguments have largely centered on metaphysics.
Hume puts it adroitly,”The very concept of metaphysics ensures that the sources of metaphysics can’t be empirical. If something could be known through the senses, that would automatically show that it doesn’t belong to metaphysics; that’s an upshot of the meaning of the word ‘metaphysics.'” [p6 RvE]
While rationalism can be demonstrated in the realm of pure logic, such as mathematics, according to Hume this is not knowledge of the external world, it’s just the knowledge of the relations between things that we use to represent the external world. [p9 EvR]
Again, Hume. “If we take in our hand any volume–of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance–let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (Hume 1748, Section XII, Part 3, p. 173) [p. 10 RvE]
The God Lab 