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01 Jul 07

Mark Kleiman | A Sermon on Doubt

markarkleiman.blogspot.com/%20doubt%20November%202002.htm - Preview

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Doubt is the chastity of the mind.
Taking religious language as poetic rather than prosaic means that simple categories of truth and falsehood don’t directly apply. That’s what allows the mystics to claim that they all see the same transcendent reality, while each affirms as well his or her own adherence to a particular faith tradition. And once we understand traditional moral teachings as deserving of respect merely as the traditions of the group – more or less like Constitutional law – their authority is no longer entirely bound up with the passages in various sacred texts that seem to embody factual assertions about cosmology, biology, or history, or even to the obsolete moral content of those same texts.
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- Starting from a strong set of beliefs backed by divine sanction, it’s possible to reason oneself into a less dogmatic frame of mind, while maintaining the intensity that came from the original dogmatism. But can such a sophisticated belief set be passed down from generation to generation? Children are highly imaginative, but also strongly literal-minded. If you don’t teach a child that, say, Methodism, is true (in a sense that means that the alternatives are false) then how serious a Methodist is he likely to be? It has been asserted – I don’t know with how much accuracy – that third-generation Reform Jews are very rare.
- It’s just not clear that one can sustain a church over time without claiming more special access to truth than an appropriate epistemological and theological humility would allow. Consider how Buddhism and Taoism, each started in a purifying reaction (from Hinduism and Chinese ritual practice, respectively), have become encrusted with elaborate superstition.
- I too have a creed. (Can I get a grant?) As far as I know, it was first preached by Socrates, though I learned it from my parents and first read it in one of Bertrand Russell’s books. Here it is:
  
  Believing false things is wrong.
- Or to put the matter more bluntly, I think that false belief is sinful. Human nature makes that sin inevitable, but each instance of it is to be repented with a firm purpose of amendment, and the will should be trained to resist it insofar as possible. Error (material heresy) is venial; stubbornness in error (formal heresy) is mortal.
- My attitude toward truth might fairly be described as piety, but it’s a polytheistic sort of piety; justice, beauty, and eudaimonaia (human flourishing) also compete for my devotional attention. As Socrates pointed out to Euthyphro, any given action may be pleasing to some of the gods and hateful to others.