It’s time to unpack the back half of the previous post. Let’s talk about approaches.
When we say that something is true, what do we mean? Honestly, I usually hate this question because I associate it with impending dissembly.
True means… true. So, that’s not very useful (some truth, after all, is not very useful).
True means… an accurate description of reality? Yeah, I think so.
Why is something an accurate description of reality? How does it qualify?
I guess something is an accurate description of reality when it is PREDICTABLE. Not sometimes predictable. UTTERLY predictable.
Let’s take an example. Is math true? Yes, I think so. 2+2=4. This is really an abstract principle, right? It’s not describing anything in particular. It describes a lot of things in general. But it describes them always, and accurately.
Now, some smartass will want to go all quantum and talk about Heizenberg. That’s fine. Heizenberg’s uncertainty principle is… certain. At the right moment it is ALWAYS there. Heizenberg’s uncertainty principle is PERFECTLY CERTAIN.
Science describes the evidence in PREDICTABLE ways. So, the same smartass may point out that physicists don’t believe Newton the way they used to, that truth is somehow changing. And I will punch that smartass in the face to demonstrate Newtonian principles. Newtonian physics are predictable. There are contexts where they are no longer predictable. That doesn’t make them false. It makes them inapplicable for the context.
Humans have incredibly complex brains, but our conscious capacity is not incredibly complex. You can effectively prove the fallibility of free will by simply asking someone to memorize a 7 digit number and then offer them a snack. In the previous post I glossed over the fact that when it comes to complex decisions, we have a huge subconscious process that provides us answers in the form of… feelings.
I think there are a few things that are worth pointing out here.
One. The programming for that subconscious process is NOT a product of modern technology. Our programming harks back to the early days of man, i.e. yesterday in an evolutionary time scale. Back to the time when societies didn’t exist, when food was what you found and killed, when religion was what you thought about the sound of thunder and the stillness that crept into your friends when they wouldn’t wake up again (where the hell did they go?). This is fine except that it means that our programming is susceptible to all kinds of shenanigans by those who would manipulate it. Those systems are easily fooled by modern sophisticates. We have names for all these ways of fooling each other, but that doesn’t make it any less effective. I can explain confirmation bias and Stockholm Syndrome to you and you will still exhibit them.
Two. Humans are the most successful species on the planet because we are the most social. The most effective forms of torture are isolation techniques. We are absolutely wired to CARE ENORMOUSLY about our social ties. When people do not exhibit normal sympathetic responses to the pain of others, we label them sociopaths. They are socially broken. There is no form of human breakage that we regard as more hopelessly broken than social breakage.
Three. That subconscious mechanism is not all that concerned with figuring out philosophical truth, per se. It is concerned with figuring out how to make decisions. Our big brains want to figure out the way to predict the effects of our actions. We’re not going for INTERMITTENT predictability. We want CONSISTENT predictability. Which brings us back to truth. When I can consistently predict outcomes, my modern brain takes a number of abstract principles and tells me that I have found TRUTH.
Four. Evolution has wired us to fool ourselves with regard to our ability to predict. One easy root to look at is the problem of type one and type two errors. Type one errors are false positives. Type two errors are false negatives. Type one errors are evolutionarily harmless. If I hear the rustle in the grass and believe it to be a snake, when the snake isn’t there, I am still alive. Type two errors will win you a Darwin award. When I hear the snake in the grass and think it is just the wind rustling, I die. Evolution favors type one error makers. Hence, evolution favors credulity. Evolution favors faith.
Let’s talk about Church, shall we?
Assuming that you, like I, were brought up in the faith it looked something like this:
I was taught from the beginning that the Church is TRUE.
The vast majority of my social group (family and friends) reinforced this to me.
I believed it.
I liked it.
I found “evidence” (in the emotional epistemology presented to me) to help confirm the belief structure that strengthened my primitive primate relationships.
Sound familiar?
So what happened?
We can approach this from MANY directions. I would say that we could approach this from ANY direction and the result would still be the same.
The Church makes a number of TRUTH claims. I am positing here that TRUTH ultimately boils down to PREDICTABILITY.
So, when the Church makes a truth claim, it is hard for me to not compare that with a scientific claim.
What about faith, you say?
Let’s take a look.
When I went to Church and heard nice, comforting stories about how much Jesus loved me, and how special and lucky I was to be born in a chosen generation, and how lovely it would be to be one of the few lucky ones to live with my mommy and daddy forever, I was told that the nice, comforting feeling I had was God’s spirit. As I got older (and the messages became less warm and fuzzy) I didn’t feel that comforting feeling so much. Life got complex, and frequently uncomfortable. The feeling became UNPREDICTABLE. The feeling wasn’t TRUE.
So I prayed and I studied the scriptures. The scriptures describe a process of communication with God that we call prayer. In the scriptures, prayer is answered unambiguously, and CONSISTENTLY. There is no second guessing the answer. There are no unanswered prayers in the scriptures.
The process of prayer in the scriptures is PREDICTABLE. The practice of prayer in modern life is NOT PREDICTABLE.
But we all know that life doesn’t work like it does in the scriptures….. Woah! Hold on a minute. Why doesn’t it?*
Spiritual phenomena in the scriptures are commonplace. Spiritual experiences in the 21st century are remarkable. In the scriptures they are PREDICTABLE. In modern life they are NOT PREDICTABLE.
But what about faith, you say?
Yeah, what about it?
Faith is action/obedience/loyalty/trust based on a conviction of… PREDICTABILITY. Faith is when I do something because I believe the result will be a certain way. The scriptural concept of faith (consistent with its other bronze age philosophies) presupposes the desired result.
But, you say, maybe God is testing you.
Maybe He should indicate somewhere that He is going to screw with me this way, then.
You just have to believe.
Well, maybe God is a liar.
No, you say, He says he isn’t a liar.
Every liar says he isn’t a liar.
No, you say, God says that if He lied, He would cease to be God.
I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. Better yet, I’ve got an MLM scheme I want you to join up with.
You say, God can’t be consistent in His responses or it would obviate the need for faith.
Well, a) you’ve forgotten that we already established the fallibility of that premise above, and it just brings us back around to the lying problem again.
But don’t you want to have faith? Don’t you want to believe?
No, why would I? Is it PREDICTABLE? No. Is it TRUE? No. So, is it useful in my life? No.
What, in all of this tortured theology IS PREDICTABLE?
Nothing. There is nothing for me to hang my faithful hat on.
BUT YOU COULD MAKE IT WORK ANYWAY!!!!! (The last ditch effort)
…… I’ve got to stop now for a second, because I’m about to burst into obscenities.
I’m sorry that it makes you feel so uncomfortable that I don’t believe the same way you do. I understand that it is built into your primate DNA; that your humanness is not built to appreciate plurality.
There are two main points left to make.
One. If it makes you feel good, live it. I understand that the human need to succumb to social pressure is MUCH MUCH greater than the need to conform to truth. We can’t get around it. I can’t get around it. We’re built that way. The need I have to conform to social pressure is MUCH greater than my need for truth.
If it makes you feel good, follow your feelings. If the GOOD it does for you, outweighs the BAD, please, feel free.
I wasn’t happy any longer inside. I did not feel good. It did not work for me. Please stop asking me to pretend it did. There should be absolutely no surprise that what I believed as a child, shifted as a man. That doesn’t mean I was an insincere child… it means I am a sincere man.
Two. If it works for you, it’s not because it works as advertised. We all acknowledge that it doesn’t work as advertised through all kinds of doctrinal subterfuge. “God is testing you.” “He was speaking as a man.” “The Church is true, but the members aren’t.” “It was the Lord’s will.” “Sometimes the blessing doesn’t come until the next life.” “You should pray more, then you will understand.”
It doesn’t work as advertised. None of it. It works (at best) INTERMITTENTLY. But TRUTH is PREDICTABLE. If it works for you; if it makes you feel good, it’s because you are reconstructing it to fit your circumstances. Take a good solid look at the way God interacts with people in the scriptures, and then take a good solid look at the way He interacts with you. Then mull over the uncomfortable fact that if you were to actually have the kind of spiritual life the scriptures describe, you would be locked up as a lunatic (see William James first essay in The Varieties of Religious Experience).
Gerald Lund’s recent book Divine Signatures is one long discussion about how IT DOESN’T WORK AS ADVERTISED.
I thought it was so thoroughly, refreshingly honest when Daniel Peterson said (on his Mormon Stories podcast), “If you want to believe, I can help you. If you don’t want to believe, I can’t help you.”
Exactly.
The reiteration of my simple, still a little sad, conclusion: I can’t find a single direction from which to approach it that will provide a toehold to begin. I can’t find a single satisfactory angle.
If it were TRUE, it could be approached from EVERY direction.
If it were TRUE, it would be PREDICTABLE. It would be CONSISTENT. It is not.
The TRUTH does circumscribe into one great whole, but THIS is not IT.
*Any conscious admission of this constant shifting space is simple proof that it’s all made up. The greatest proof of the untruth of the New Testament is the Old Testament. Even 5,000 years ago, an everlastingly loving God is not allowed to be an immoral reprobate.
Great, so this confirms the pragmatic theory of truth. If a principle works predictably to better character, life, etc. then it is true. :)
ReplyDeleteYeah... I'm probably warming up to that.
ReplyDeleteYou win. I concede. :)
No, I redact that.
ReplyDeleteIf a principle is PREDICTABLE it is true.
Moralizing of the principle be damned.
There are plenty of true things that are not bettering.
It seems that you want a simple, clear-cut criterion for truth, and especially that you want Science and Mathematics to be particularly True. I find that a bit simplistic, so I'm going to work for a paragraph or two at undermining your seemingly strident confidence in the sciences.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that Newtonian mechanics has been superseded by quantum and relativistic dynamics doesn't mean the truth has changed. It just means our understanding of the truth has been revised. Or, put in instrumentalist terms, we've had to build new prediction-making systems in order to fit data that contradicts the Newtonian system. These systems are still falsifiable, and in important ways they are known to be wrong. (Quantum mechanics is known to contradict relativity, and no suitable reconciliation yet exists.) That doesn't mean they aren't useful at making reliable predictions, but it DOES mean that we have to be careful talking about their being "true".
The problem is even more pronounced for mathematics. It's common to talk about mathematical truths as existing independent of the physical world, as though they are the Platonic ideal of Truth. On this I call shenanigans. 2+2=4 isn't an absolute truth derived from pure logic; arithmetic was *constructed* in order to correspond to our long-standing empirical experience. (Check out Peano arithmetic. It's worth a little despair to realize that it wasn't until the late 19th century that mathematicians felt the need to formalize the arithmetic intuition they had simply been taking for granted.) Proofmaking and (hopeful) internal consistency aside, mathematics is no more True than anything else derived from empirical observation.
All my pedantry aside, of course I agree that reliability correlates with any conceptualization of truth, and that the sciences are built in order to make reliable predictions. And certainly Mormonism fails to make reliable predictions.
Matt Matt Matt... [shaking head sympathetically],
ReplyDeleteI just did a bad job explaining myself, or you bit a little too early on where you thought I was going.
I think we are in agreement (and I have long thought it a safe bet for me to be in agreement with you, so I'm going to work to make sure it is the case).
As I was writing last night, in the brief sentences wrestling with "what is truth?" I started to understand the enormity of the problem more than I have previously. There is certainly a perception problem (we perceive and deduce "truth" from that). There is a problem (as you correctly point out) that our abstractions are representational, that they do not exist. We have an idea that truth exists, but I think I would argue that truth is conceptual. We have invented the concept of truth (which problematically defeats the meta-purpose of truth for many of us, right?).
That's why I was trying to go with the idea that truth is representative of conceptual attributes, and the most significant conceptual attribute I can come up with around it is that truth is consistent and predictable. As you correctly point out, Newtonian Physics has been determined to not be predictable in certain contexts. But those contexts are known. They, themselves, are predictable. Hence, Newton is still true in that we know precisely how to use his ideas predictably. Am I missing something there?
I like the idea that truth can be expressed in percentages of likelihood, because it begins to tame the unpredictability a bit as well.
Humans are (in the aggregate) very predictable. I feel safe proposing that we are the most social species and that our behavior will follow our sociality, because (in the aggregate) we will see that follow through, i.e. behavioral experiments (ultimatum, etc.) produce predictable results, even if it is impossible to predict one human's response.
What am I missing?
This is interesting because in a way, defining truth as consistent and predictable, I can hear someone say "I know the church is true" and be okay with that. From an empirical standpoint that person's experience with the church was completely predictable, comforting in its consistency - though for someone else that predictability of experience could be maddening. So I hear you, I agree with you. The truth people assign to the church is the truth of their social experience.
ReplyDeleteMere, right. I think that is very important.
ReplyDeleteI want to underline a thousand times, though, that as far as I can tell, there is NO ONE who is having the Mormon spiritual experience in the way it is presented in the doctrines.
Usually the gap seems to be explained by people assuming that they are "broken/unworthy" in some way.
I would love for someone to be willing to cast their pearls before this here swine so that we could discuss whether it fits the prototype of Godly participation outlined.
Maybe a good follow up post would be, "what does the prototype Mormon experience look like?"
G:
ReplyDeleteI see two questions: (a) Is Newtonian mechanics "true" in its proper context, and (b) is that context itself predictable.
The answer to (a) depends on your philosophical alignment. If you're an instrumentalist -- which I suspect that you are -- I'd say "yes". Newtonian mechanics makes good predictions, and so it's as true as any scientific theory has business being. A realist -- for whom scientific theories should correspond to an underlying reality rather than just make predictions -- might argue "no". He could argue that since Newtonian mechanics has been supplanted by 20th-century systems, it isn't really getting at the a description of reality even when it makes good predictions. In any case, there is a good case for the Newtonian system to be "true", so I agree that we're on the same page here.
I think we disagree on (b). By now scientists have a pretty good handle on the context in which Newtonian mechanics makes good predictions, and I doubt that the future will force us to revise that context much. However, the fact that Newtonian mechanics had to be limited at all came as a big shock to the scientific world. Newton was so successful that it WAS common to assume that he'd discovered unchanging laws of the universe. It wasn't until the 19th century that advances in electromagnetics started to clash with the Newtonian system, which ultimately led to the early 20th century revolutions by Einstein and others.
The larger point is that while the context may be clear NOW, it's difficult to predict when limitations of context may become necessary. We may be done limiting the context of the Newtonian system, but almost certainly we aren't done placing new limitations on our current physical models. (Just today CERN reported new findings on the Higgs boson, the results of which may force us to reconsider our current subatomic models.) Because those limitations are unpredictable, I get nervous when I hear people talk about how precise and clear-cut scientific knowledge is.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteWell, I can't argue with your point b. It makes sense and I think you are right that I wasn't really considering the shock that it must have been to find Newtonian principles breaking down. (There is a little voice in me whispering that the shock was analogous to losing faith.)
So, did the shock of seeing classical physics break down cause a cultural change in the sciences? When current theories reach their useful limits, will scientists be just as surprised or did the culture shift in that sense because of this very thing?
It is easy for me to imagine that scientists before the modern age considered their facts in much the same way religion considered its tenets: unassailable. But in the post-modern age, aren't we beginning to view everything as contextual? Are there any more unassailable facts?
It seems that the only consistency and predictability that exists in belief is that which we create. Habits, some may say. Liturgy, reinforcement, psalmist prayers, repetition, davening. The beating of the drum in monotonous rhythm "I KNOW it's true, I KNOW it's true, I KNOW it's true." Whoever authored 1st Corinthians noted aptly "Charity never faileth, but where there be prophecies, they shall fail."
ReplyDeleteG:
ReplyDeleteOh, have I got a book for your Christmas wishlist. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Kuhn. Do you own it?
His argument is that science progresses as a stage of paradigms. A scientific paradigm becomes accepted, and scientists go about solving problems within that paradigm. Eventually enough anomalies are detected that the foundations of the paradigm are called into question, a revolution occurs, and a new paradigm is established. Just like you say, it's a post-modern take on science: we can't decouple scientific ideas from the context in which they were developed.
(Incidentally, the major paradigm shifts within LDS theology could be thought of as Kuhnian: small problems are ignored or shoddily worked into the prevailing orthodoxy, those problems eventually cause a crisis which is resolved through theological revolution. The difference is that scientists tend to recognize that the shift has occured, whereas Mormons pretend they were in the new paradigm all along!)
I *do* think that the breakdown of classical physics caused a cultural shift. My sense is that modern-era scientists though of their models as physical laws, and like you suggest they tended to see them as unassailable as the devout see their articles of faith. The 20th century revolutions forced scientists to see scientific models as perennially provisional, and I'd argue that most scientists cheerfully accept this limitation. (Watching the response to the possibility of faster-than-light-neutrinos, for example, gives me the sense that many are itching for another revolution.) They may be surprised at where the revolutions take them, but they won't be surprised that there ARE revolutions.
I like to think of modern science as chasing a modern goal informed by post-modern lessons. We're looking for objective, reliable facts, but we acknowledge that our answers are inextricable from cultural context.
amen
ReplyDelete