Age of Reason
I find Biblical literalism confusing.
We live in a scientific age. Our modes of thinking about the world were born of the Enlightenment and the philophical ideas that sprung from this era. We value reason, evidence based on empirical observation, and truth based on this evidence. I'm not a scientist, and I don't fully understand how to properly go about applying the scientific method, but I can bandy the term falsifiable around like I know what I'm talking about.
This is a marvelous age we live in. It's easy for us to forget that the world wasn't always like this. Before a few hundred years ago, we didn't value evidence and testibility of claims. Truth was something more elusive and difficult to pinpoint.
As this means of viewing the world became more commonplace, I would have expected religions, in particular Christianity, to distance itself from this paradigm. Any and all religions have no evidence to back up the claims that they make; these things are simply matters of faith. An age in which everyone bases their beliefs on evidence immediately puts religion in jeopardy.
There are two odds things that have happened. First, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians embrace this paradigm. Yes, they insist, you can use evidence to learn about the world, they claim. This has put them into the rather precarious position of having to both fabricate evidence to back up the stories in their scripture, and to deny any evidence that presents an account of the world that contradicts their evidence.
Are they trying to fight fire with fire?
Second, while you'd think that Christianity embracing the evidence-based paradigm would be akin to it letting in a Trojan horse, soon to destroy it from the inside out, this hasn't really happened. People seem happy to accept the "evidence" that is offered in order to prove that the events of the Bible really happened. This is perhaps less surprising than the first point; humans have always been prone to superstition.
Isn't this to miss the point? Christianity sprung up in an age in history when people weren't reading the gospels with the understanding that they must be true, in the literal sense, absolutely and 100%. Sure, people believed in Jesus, but they didn't sweat every last detail of the books. People valued them because they contained truth, the kind that any narrative-based work of art is supposed to reveal about ourselves and about the world.
I find it embarassing when people try so hard to convince others that there is "evidence" in the world to back up their religious beliefs. Whether they know it or not, they're negotiating against themselves.
In an effort to better understand myself, I did a thought experiment about the end of the world. If the human population were largely decimated, and I was among the small band of survivors that had to re-build the world for future generations of humans, I carefully considered what I would make an effort to preserve.
In the past, when faced with this exercise, I've actually considered Christianity. It's a mythology, to be sure, but it's one that I grew up with, and on the surface, it appears to have done good things for humanity. Why not preserve the Beatitudes? In terms of moral codes, you could do worse; I wouldn't want to live under the ancient Code of Hammurabi, for example.
The deeper I dug into the religion itself, the less I could actually see myself advocating for its preservation for future cultures. I think it's debateable just how much of human ethics in modern civilization is actually derived from religion, and, given that it has contributed at all, just how much of a difference it has made in the quality of human life. The ideals of any religion tend to be very far removed from how the religion itself is carried out in practice. As Ghandi said, "I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians."
Here is what I would preserve, in the post-apocalyptic doomsday scenario in which I have some say about which ideas get propagated to future generations: the scientific method. This goes back to works of Aristotle, which emphasized observation of the natural world and basing conclusions on this, which is far cry from Plato's Cave, which seems to suggest that reality has a hidden metaphysical layer that we should read into. Science has given the world some awful things; people cite the atomic bomb and eugenics. But we should not conclude from this that science must be scrapped. It would be too simplistic.
Science has given us a tremendous understanding of the natural world around us, and this has led to an incredible quality of life for those of us who are fortunate enough to live in a time and place where we've been able to develop technologies to leverage this understanding. This is absolutely something worth preserving in our culture, to encourage in nascent and flourishing cultures, and to pass down for the future.
We live in a scientific age. Our modes of thinking about the world were born of the Enlightenment and the philophical ideas that sprung from this era. We value reason, evidence based on empirical observation, and truth based on this evidence. I'm not a scientist, and I don't fully understand how to properly go about applying the scientific method, but I can bandy the term falsifiable around like I know what I'm talking about.
This is a marvelous age we live in. It's easy for us to forget that the world wasn't always like this. Before a few hundred years ago, we didn't value evidence and testibility of claims. Truth was something more elusive and difficult to pinpoint.
As this means of viewing the world became more commonplace, I would have expected religions, in particular Christianity, to distance itself from this paradigm. Any and all religions have no evidence to back up the claims that they make; these things are simply matters of faith. An age in which everyone bases their beliefs on evidence immediately puts religion in jeopardy.
There are two odds things that have happened. First, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians embrace this paradigm. Yes, they insist, you can use evidence to learn about the world, they claim. This has put them into the rather precarious position of having to both fabricate evidence to back up the stories in their scripture, and to deny any evidence that presents an account of the world that contradicts their evidence.
Are they trying to fight fire with fire?
Second, while you'd think that Christianity embracing the evidence-based paradigm would be akin to it letting in a Trojan horse, soon to destroy it from the inside out, this hasn't really happened. People seem happy to accept the "evidence" that is offered in order to prove that the events of the Bible really happened. This is perhaps less surprising than the first point; humans have always been prone to superstition.
Isn't this to miss the point? Christianity sprung up in an age in history when people weren't reading the gospels with the understanding that they must be true, in the literal sense, absolutely and 100%. Sure, people believed in Jesus, but they didn't sweat every last detail of the books. People valued them because they contained truth, the kind that any narrative-based work of art is supposed to reveal about ourselves and about the world.
I find it embarassing when people try so hard to convince others that there is "evidence" in the world to back up their religious beliefs. Whether they know it or not, they're negotiating against themselves.
In an effort to better understand myself, I did a thought experiment about the end of the world. If the human population were largely decimated, and I was among the small band of survivors that had to re-build the world for future generations of humans, I carefully considered what I would make an effort to preserve.
In the past, when faced with this exercise, I've actually considered Christianity. It's a mythology, to be sure, but it's one that I grew up with, and on the surface, it appears to have done good things for humanity. Why not preserve the Beatitudes? In terms of moral codes, you could do worse; I wouldn't want to live under the ancient Code of Hammurabi, for example.
The deeper I dug into the religion itself, the less I could actually see myself advocating for its preservation for future cultures. I think it's debateable just how much of human ethics in modern civilization is actually derived from religion, and, given that it has contributed at all, just how much of a difference it has made in the quality of human life. The ideals of any religion tend to be very far removed from how the religion itself is carried out in practice. As Ghandi said, "I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians."
Here is what I would preserve, in the post-apocalyptic doomsday scenario in which I have some say about which ideas get propagated to future generations: the scientific method. This goes back to works of Aristotle, which emphasized observation of the natural world and basing conclusions on this, which is far cry from Plato's Cave, which seems to suggest that reality has a hidden metaphysical layer that we should read into. Science has given the world some awful things; people cite the atomic bomb and eugenics. But we should not conclude from this that science must be scrapped. It would be too simplistic.
Science has given us a tremendous understanding of the natural world around us, and this has led to an incredible quality of life for those of us who are fortunate enough to live in a time and place where we've been able to develop technologies to leverage this understanding. This is absolutely something worth preserving in our culture, to encourage in nascent and flourishing cultures, and to pass down for the future.