Why?
There is a story of a philosophy examination. One of the questions was simply, “Why?” The student who got the highest mark for their answer simply asked in response, “Why not?” It is the only answer that can be given in many cases, even though we should like to have a more definitive reply that made sense of our world, and spelled out reasons why things should have turned out as they have. Of course, science can give us some of the answers that we seek, but none of them will answer the very human question that we often seem compelled to ask, when we are seeking a reply that in some sense accords a meaning or purpose to what has taken place. The question is often qualified. Why has this happened to me? What did I do to deserve this? What purpose does my suffering serve? Is there nothing more than this that I can hope for?
Literary critics, studying tragedy, note that the suffering endured by the protagonist almost always is the result of some fatal flaw in the protagonist’s character. To oversimplify, Hamlet’s indecision, Macbeth’s lust for power, Othello’s jealousy and mistrust, Lear’s gullibility: these lead in each case to downfall and destruction. And so, of course, we can look at our own misfortunes, and sometimes we can see clear reasons why some particular misfortunes have befallen us, since we are none of us so perfect as to be free from faults that can harm us. Yet some things we do not in any sense “deserve,” as though there were some reason deep in the nature of things why a loved one should be suddenly stricken by cancer or other disease, why flood, storm, hail, tornado, earthquake or other disaster should have, quite by chance, destroyed the lives of loved ones, opportunities, wholeness or contentment. Shit happens! People fall sick and die. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, accidents, even stray bullets on an otherwise peaceful street can slice through the heart of a prosperous happy life and tear it to shreds from which we may never recover.
It is arguable, I think, that this leads us into a region of discourse where science is unable to help us with the most important questions, and yet where we need to be able to speak in ways that accord truth value to the things that we say. We may not want to call it knowledge, as such, if knowledge is restricted to factual statements about physical existence, and the laws of nature, but there is here a dimension of human understanding which not only demands attention, but has an equal claim with science to be addressed with care and method and a commitment to what is true. Call it the humanities, if you like, but it includes a richly diverse field of study and interest, including art and music, literature, philosophy (which includes a number of “meta” studies, like philosophy of science, art, logic, mathematics, etc.), and, in many of their incarnations, the social sciences, psychology and anthropology, and even things like textual studies, hermeneutics and, of course, religion too, as a demonstrably dysfunctional extension of humane studies. Historically, as departments of philosophy became mathematically or empirically rigorous, they hived off from philosophy and became specialties in their own right, but their competence is limited to that particular area. Scientists themselves should not pretend to omni-competence, because their meta-disciplines, as, for example, the philosophy of biology, are conceptual-logical disciplines in which active scientists do not have special competence, though clearly close familiarity with the specific sciences and their methods is essential to anyone who ventures to speak in a meaningful philosophical way about the science itself. Clearly, practitioners of a science have special access to materials crucial to the philosophical study of that science, even though they may lack the aptitude.
I venture this far because it seems to me important to accept as bearers of truth-claims many statements besides the true statements of the sciences, but also because it is important to make a distinction between the humanities (or humane studies), and religion, which is often a bastardised form of both science and humane studies, and by playing in this very contentious arena, religious “experts” very often fly under the radar. This is one reason why I think it is vital that scientists not muddy the waters by claiming that knowledge is exhaustively accounted for by the methods and propositions of science. In the first place, the claim itself is not a scientific, claiming as true at least one proposition which is not a scientific proposition, nor established by means of scientific methodology. But, in the second place, it leaves room, by default, for the religious to dismiss as scientific hubris the self-defeating claim that science is the sole repository of truth. It can then go on to stake a claim to be a different “way” of knowing than that offered by the sciences, when the truth is that the expression ‘way of knowing’ is itself undefined and liable to many forms of misuse.
Let me return, then, to the question, “Why?” Consider the question in relation to the massacre of children and their teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Why? Why did it happen? What reasons can we give for the senseless murder of children and those who cared for them? There are no doubt many reasons, and many have been suggested. Some fundamentalist preachers and politicians have suggested that the children and their teachers died because of God’s judgement upon America. This is the silliest answer so far given, but it received a great deal of attention. That in itself prompts a why question. Another reason suggested relates to the gun culture in the United States, and the easy availability of weapons. The rate of gun related death in the United States is the highest in high-income OECD countries. As an answer to the question “Why?” the accessibility of guns in the US has much to commend it, as at least a partial answer to why such massacres happen. Other answers can be given. Lack of attention to mental health in relation to accessibility of firearms could also be a contributing factor. It was, for instance, well-known in Newtown that Adam Lanza was a strange kid, a loner, and that his mother was a firearms enthusiast. That should have set someone’s alarm bells ringing, but apparently did not. Then, of course, there are psychological answers that might reasonably be thought relevant to the occurrence of the tragedy, though they are now inaccessible, unless autopsy of Lanza’s body showed some brain or nervous system pathology. There might be sociological answers as well, possibly related to Adam Lanza’s socialisation or failure of socialisation. Here, of course, I can only make guesses or suggestions. Lanza, it seems, was acknowledged to be a strange kid. He used a briefcase at high school. This in itself shows that he did not relate well to his age-mates. Were there endogenous reasons for his failure to relate well with others? Did someone in authority notice and fail to act? Or did they act, but were unable to meliorate Lanza’s alienation? Or were there other social factors, related to his home life, the divorce of his parents, his relationship with his mother (in particular), or lack of relationship with his father, that further isolated him from others?
I do not pretend to be able to answer these questions, but they are all questions that could be asked, and perhaps, in some cases, answered. Some of them clearly invite scientific investigation. And each question addresses the question “Why?” But then there are “deeper” questions that are no doubt being asked by many, but especially by those who lost loved ones in the shooting. Those who buried their children will be the most uncomprehending. Indeed, those who lose children often have grief that is irresolvable. One study showed that the death of a child contributed to “sub-clinical” states of depression which time did not heal, and which had a serious impact on health and well-being, stability of marriage, and enjoyment and sense of purpose in life:
The effect sizes for the contrasts of the bereaved and nonbereaved parents were generally small, which indicates that most bereaved parents were not experiencing clinical levels of symptoms or substantial disruption in midlife. Instead, the elevated depressive symptoms paired with somewhat poorer well-being and lower sense of life purpose suggested sub-clinical levels of distress. Furthermore, the fact that better functioning was not more likely with greater time since the death indicated that bereavement for a deceased child might contribute to persistent problems lasting over several decades for many parents.
This makes sense to me, especially, since losing my wife Elizabeth was also very much like losing a child, she having been so much younger than I. I have a continuing level of distress and the pain of loss that simply does not go away. It is always there in everything that I do, and small things can call it quickly to mind. My sense of purpose and enjoyment of life are very tenuous. The question “Why?” is often much more insistent, though I also know that there is no answer to it.
Not even a religious answer will do, and I suspect that is the case with most people who lose children, or loved ones much younger than they. It seems inconsistent with the order of things. As Elizabeth’s mother said, “Children are not supposed to die before their parents.” (When Elizabeth and I applied to be married in the church (a requirement at that time for a second marriage) great concern was expressed over the fact that it would be likely that Elizabeth would be a young widow, a concern which I saw in a very different light when it became obvious that Elizabeth would die before me. The cruel irony was hard to miss.) And whatever reasons you can give for their death is bound to be unsatisfactory. Saying that they have “gone home” or are “in a better place” are obviously trivialising. In my own experience, people who have lost children seek comfort in religion but seldom find it. That may make them seek comfort in religion that much more diligently, but their dissatisfaction remains. The answer for this is, I think, fairly simple. We do want our lives to make sense, to have had some overarching purpose or direction. Dennett’s idea that the self is the centre of narrative gravity implies a narrative shape. We do story our lives, and expect them not to be simply one damn thing after another (ODTAA, a novel by John Masefield). It is just a bit too easy to say that we can give our lives shape and purpose, for when bad things happen, and shadows fall, time is not always a healer, and our losses cannot always be resolved or shape and purpose revived. In such situations the search for answers, and desperate commitment to a religious answer, even if never quite satisfactory, makes perfect sense to some people. Indeed, the study just quoted remarks that bereaved parents tend to be more involved in religion than those who are not bereaved.
My own experience was different, because I had some time in which to explore the question of where I could find God in the sufferings that I was experiencing, and more especially in the suffering and pain that was in the process of taking over Elizabeth’s life. Soon after her diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis I began studying the Holocaust, because, I thought, if I can find God in the midst of all that desperate suffering, I should be able to find God in the midst of my own life. Elizabeth in her journal wrote that she did not think, in the end, that I would be able to find God in the Holocaust, and so not in our own lives either. She was right, as she usually was. The problem of pain was simply too great to be comprehended by religious meaning, and despite the assurances of theologians, I remain of that opinion. Yet I still held onto shreds of religious meaning, by accepting religion as a cultural narrative in terms of which one could live one’s life, although the narrative itself was understood as mythical. This is generally the way religion is understood now in religious studies departments. However, this answer simply came unstuck during Elizabeth’s last year of life, when it was clear that the church could not employ the narrative in an entirely mythical way, because moral judgements were still based on the narrative itself as in some sense authoritative. In this sense, however, the authority of the narrative had to be more than cultural, and it was this fact, illustrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech to the House of Lords on the issue of assisted dying, that made it impossible for me to continue using religious myth as a vehicle for finding meaning and purpose in life. It also led me to the conclusion that the idea of religion as culturally expressed in a mythical narrative is all very well for the study of religion, but is not adequate to the internal significance of religion for the believer, since, as a believer, the myth must, at some points at least, be thought of in a realistic rather than a mythical way.
This was something that Elizabeth had realised long before me, in a journal that I did not read until after she had died. She said that she sometimes wished that there was an afterlife, so that she and I could be together again, since we would lose out on so much because of her early death (which by then she saw approaching very quickly). However, she said, she only had to think the thought in order to dismiss it as a reasonable or acceptable way of viewing things, because she would then, she said, have to think of her present suffering (which was very great) as having been visited upon her for a purpose, and that, in a longer view, her suffering, as well as suffering in general, could be seen as being a good. And that she was unwilling to acknowledge. In other words, the myth was all very well, but it was, taken as whole, unintelligible, for at some point it had to reach out to be descriptive of some reality, and it would have to reach out at just those points where the reality it proposed was intolerable. I think she was right. Religion must lead, in the end, to unacceptable conclusions, and therefore cannot be commended by those who are committed to reason. However, I bid the reader to notice that much that I say here is not scientific, and yet has, I believe, the virtue of being true (or at least reasonably to be thought to be true). I think it is time for those who think that all that is true is comprehended exhaustively by the propositions of science began to make some important distinctions, and began to recognise, as a vehicle for truth, what we might call (if the word ‘knowledge’ is reserved for the empirical or the tautological) understanding, which includes what we come to know about the nature of our humanity and our emotions and feelings through art, literature, philosophy, music, history and other vehicles of personal experience and more general human understanding commonly included in what are generally known as the humanities.
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Note. The springboard for the above, though in the end I had no occasion to cite it directly, is to be found in Gordon Lightfoot’s HuffPo piece entitled “God and Grief.”
Posted on 1 January 2013, in Reason and Religion. Bookmark the permalink. 12 Comments.
Eric: “My own experience was different…”
Eric, I think you have had an “experience” and that experience is true for you. There are those who within the religious myth talk to God and God talks back, resolving the question of meaning within the myth differently and acceptably for them. And they like you also have an “experience”, many “experiences with God”, individually and collectively, that are just as real for them as yours was for you, for their minds have made them so, just like yours did. Would you because of your “true” experience verify their experiences as also being “true” using the same or similar inputs and reasoning? Let me answer for you: you have to. Otherwise you must explain how you making your experience a truth is different from them making their experiences truths.
You need a better example and better reasoning for your proposition to hold.
Einstein is quoted as saying “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
You could reasonably argue that the ‘why’ questions are positioned within the framework of an individual’s concerns – after all you can’t raise the same level of angst over a stranger’s search for purpose, even if most stories are variations on the Hero’s Journey. To answer your own ‘why’ questions you have to step outside your personal thinking and for many years religions have claimed to provide the answers. Too bad they normally kick the answer a little further down the road with a reference to ‘God’s Will’ without actually resolving it. Not really a different kind of thinking at all.
I suspect the Existentialists have a better approach. You have no external purpose before you live, you have no external purpose while you live, you have no external purpose after you live. You can only live as if you have your own internal purpose. That’s a different kind of thinking, and one that many people shy away from.
David, my argument was not an argument, as you take it, from private experience. My point is simply that there does not seem to me an acceptable way to resolve the problem of the goodness of god and the manifold evils of the world. It has nothing to do with private experience. I don’t know why you should suggest differently. My experience was different in that I had time in which to ask myself the questions, and explore the answers. Theologians say that, after the Holocaust, theology must be able to be done in the presence of burning children. I do not think this is a reasonable possibility, and my close experience of the suffering of someone that I loved greatly confirmed this for me. Some people suggest that the experiential problem of evil is a dead duck. I think the suffering of millions of years is simply too great. Darwin was convinced by the suffering required by evolution. Whichever way you look at it, it makes little sense to think of a good and gracious god and the existence of suffering on such a scale simultaneously.
Minor correction: I read your note above and was amazed that Gordon Lightfoot had written a HuffPo article on god and grief.
“much that I say here is not scientific, and yet has, I believe, the virtue of being true..”
Eric, before we go down that particular rabbit-hole again maybe you should explain what you regard as ‘scientific’ speech, and why, and ideally give some examples of how and why practicing scientists have explicitly ruled out or repudiated what you regard as your approach to truth or ‘understanding’.
Corio, I have no intention of going down that rabbit hole again. What I have said, I have said. I think it is evident enough from that what I mean. If it is not, then there is not much point trying to say the same thing in different words. Make an effort to understand. If you cannot, then it seems pointless for me to try again. The claim that scientific knowledge exhaustively accounts for all truth-functional speech, which is not itself scientific, should be enough to demolish the suggestion. Failing that, the point is clearly unintelligible to a certain set of mind.
Eric: “However, I bid the reader to notice that much that I say here is not scientific, and yet has, I believe, the virtue of being true (or at least reasonably to be thought to be true). I think it is time for those who think that all that is true is comprehended exhaustively by the propositions of science began to make some important distinctions, and began to recognise, as a vehicle for truth, what we might call (if the word ‘knowledge’ is reserved for the empirical or the tautological) understanding, which includes what we come to know about the nature of our humanity and our emotions and feelings through art, literature, philosophy, music, history and other vehicles of personal experience and more general human understanding commonly included in what are generally known as the humanities.”
This part of your essay clearly is the part that *argues* that those “who think that all that is true is comprehended exhaustively by the propositions of science” should “recognise, as a vehicle for truth what we might call… understanding”. And within that understanding you provide a list of things “we come to know” that are simply experiences. So, you say clearly what you say and you say in your essay in a very circular but specific way that coming to know experiences is a way, a vehicle, of understanding truth. And hard as I try, I can’t think of a way that “understanding truth” is not “knowledge” though you dismiss that particular word.
Eric, by the quote above, it is clear that you went further than finding evil irreconcilable with God. And I did not *suggest* such a thing, you specified it and I responded to it. I am not in the habit of making straw man arguments, they are a waste of time and provide no fundamental clarity; they just demonstrate one is more interested in “being right” than learning, communicating or understanding ideas or truths. Again, I think your *argument* fails. If in your response you are backing away from what you said originally, then so be it. I will now take your new meanings for what you say them to be rather the the post’s original meanings.
David, you may not be in the habit of making straw man arguments, but that is what I think your argument is. When I speak about experiences, you must take the surrounding context into consideration: “what we come to know about the nature of our humanity and our emotions and feelings through art, literature, philosophy, music, history and other vehicles of personal experience and more general human understanding commonly included in what are generally known as the humanities.” There is a way of objectifying our experiences in poetry and literature and other vehicles which help us to share our emotional apprehension of things and situations. This is not the same as simply speaking about experiences, as religious people sometimes try to do by way of justifying their religious beliefs, basing them on supposed “religious experiences.” You may not find what I say compelling, but that is an entirely different question than the one you put in the first place, when you speak of my having had an experience and its being true for me. That is not the claim that I was making, and not the context in which I was making it. Indeed, some people’s experiences, expressed in poetry or music, are often trivial and artificial, and can be seen to be so, and so not an effective expression of the truth about being human.
As to the question of the compatibility of evil with the existence of a good god, this is not based on experience, but on fairly clear reasoning. John Hick would say that we cannot know, from our present point of view, that the evil and suffering that exist cannot be taken up into a larger good, which may be true. There is, however, no clear reason why we should believe that it is, given the extent and the depth of the evil and suffering that there is. I am not disputing anyone’s experience, if what they are saying is that, notwithstanding this, they feel the comforting and uplifting presence of god. I may believe that they are deluded, but I cannot dispute their experience qua experience, nor did I mean to do so when I said that my experience had been different. My experience referred, perhaps ambiguously, to the reasoning which followed, about the overwhelming amount of evil, and the inability of religion to deal with it. Hume’s argument (after Lucretius) is still, I think, good.
I might add that I do not find your tone particularly helpful.
Eric, what you regard as ‘scientific’ — and why — is certainly not obvious to me, and if it IS obvious to anyone else here then I’d be grateful if they can explain it to me.
“The claim that scientific knowledge exhaustively accounts for all truth-functional speech, which is not itself scientific, should be enough to demolish the suggestion.”
We’ve been over this, haven’t we? Why is this claim ‘not itself scientific’, other than the fact that you don’t happen to believe in it? What for you constitutes a ‘scientific’ claim, and why?
My conclusion is not a straw man argument; it is a comparison argument using the same reasoning, examples and tools as you use to make yours. I believe I do take into consideration the arguments you make surrounding experiential truth which is how I matched and surrounded my religious comparison argument. So that if my argument fails then yours must fail also.
I now repeat and expand it. Religious people do the same exact things that you mention, using art, literature, theology, music, poetry; additionally they use shared experiences of worship, whether tongues, prayer, fasting, testifying, rejoicing, myth making all which may objectify their experiences so that a member of the same denomination or sect in Korea, Brazil and Alabama knows the same tunes and prayerful upliftments which elicit the same emotions and hopes in eternity or the same rush of genuine understanding of shared sacrifices. That these experiences can be objectified does not make coming to know them into either knowledge or truth. Knowing them may reinforce taught stories and their attendant experiential cues that elicit like emotions, all truly experientially communicated. My conclusion here would be that one exact same thing — the experiential truths you specify — cannot be something; and the other — the exactly similar religious experiential truths I compare — be something less.
My quest was if they are different that you say exactly how they are and I don’t believe you have done so sufficiently. I am not sure that holding out a continuum of “trivial and artificial” at one end and “effective expression of the truth about being human” on the other is sufficient to make your point. There are whole populations who would argue over whether J.S. Bach’s “Passion of St. Matthew” is more trivial or truthfully human than Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”. And how would one experiential “know/understand”? Intuition? Whose? And is it a regression analysis or a vote yea or nay? I maintain that no matter how precisely experience is objectified, it becomes once again subjective when taken in by another human rendering it neither knowledge or truth but keeping it in a category all its own: Experience. And this *encountered* experience may be a category even broader and deeper than knowledge and truth, containing them both, along with their polar opposites, lies and myths. Cue: Jimi Hendrix: Are You Experienced!
My contention remains that the statement “coming to know experiences is a way, a vehicle, of understanding truth” is a not a good conclusion; and that is because coming to know experiences is also a way, a vehicle for understanding and believing lies and myths.
I never questioned or even commented on your clear reasoning regarding the incompatibility of evil with the existence of good. I am insufficiently learned in Theodicy to easily parse your comments and I did not want to do the work. I simply referred to the matter as a contextual statement.
I try very hard to reflect the tone in which I am addressed. In these instances I believe I have been careful and precise. If not and you point out where I have not been, I will happily and meaningfully apologize as I do not mean to offend my host.
David, you say, with some justice:
Yes, indeed, this is all true, but it still does not establish true statements, except insofar as supposed “religious” experiences are concerned. There are certainly ways in which we can establish the objectivity, and thus the truth value, of religious experiences, qua experiences, but this will lead us to question their status as religious, except insofar as some religions simply are about such states of mind. Buddhism, in some of its forms, as well as Confucianism, are examples of this. But we cannot use those experiments to establish the objectivity of religious propositions regarding any mind-independent existence. That was my only point. But, insofar as religious experiences establish factual knowledge about the nature of human experiences and yearnings and other suchlike “religious” aspects of human nature, they can be taken to establish the truth about us, just as literature, art and music establish what may reasonably be thought to be objective understandings of the nature of human emotions (etc) and thus give us some insight into the human nature and the refined and complex experiences which add much to our understanding of ourselves and our relationships with others. But so far as such experiences are taken to establish the existence of mind-independent existences they are valueless. And that is all that I wanted to say, but I did want to say at least this much, that the light that art, literature and other humane studies throw on what it means to be human is not only important, but may be thought to have a truth value even though it does not measure up to the canons of scientific proof. And we can indeed distinguish between lies and myth and reliable expressions of the depth, vitality and refinement of human experience. Of course, there will be disagreements, but these are matters that can be and are discussed with reasonable substance by those who especially “in the know” about such things. Reading literary, art or music criticism can contribute greatly to our own ability to discern the true from the false and meretricious in
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