Truthiness and the pope
It used to be everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. –Stephen Colbert, on the definition of “truthiness”
The stance of someone who argues from truthiness is, in effect, “facts can change, but my opinion will never change!” Yesterday, my pastor gave a sermon based on Colbert’s concept of truthiness, arguing that Unitarian Universalists ought not to rely upon truthiness in their quest for truth. She gave examples of “truthiness”, ranging from the tenuous connection between Iraq and 9/11 and the financial bookkeeping of the Enron corporation to the idea of intelligent design as science.
To these, I’ll add another: the idea that Pope Benedict XVI is a monstrous Islamaphobe.
Truthiness is basically wishful thinking, based on gut instincts or perception, which is forced upon others as unassailable fact-opinion. The problem is that the line between fact* and opinion has become blurred, especially in public discourse. At issue is not that religious claims are front and center (although the inclusion of ID in the list above might make one assume so), but rather than the central claims being made are not open to disconfirmation or discussion.
In the case of Iraq, Rev. Meyer cited an unnamed legislator who argued for the war in Iraq because “they attacked us.” When pressed–you know, don’t you, that there is no link between Iraq and 9/11, the legislator retreated to, “Iraq, Afghanistan, they’re all the same–the point is that they want to destroy us and we have to fight against them.” There was no way to reason with her, or advance contradictory claims that could possibly influence her opinon.
Oddly enough, the Pope’s speech, which has been reacted to so violently in the Muslim world, is an example of circumscribing discussions of faith within the circle of reason. His point, however, is that reason, as understood in the Western world, is reductionistic. It is positivism, scientific empiricism which has no “place for the divine.” His much-maligned mention of the “evil and inhuman” things which Muhammed introduced is within the context of arguing that violent compulsion to convert does not please god. You can find full text of his speech at the Vatican website (warning: it is dense, even translated from the German). If you read it, the citation in question is in the third paragraph, and is basically bracketed off by Benedict with descriptions such as “startling brusqueness.” He distances himself from the force of the quotation.
Aside from the question of whether Benedict agrees with the content of the quotation (he well might), notice that what he is arguing for: “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” Benedict argues that god has revealed himself as logos, or wisdom, and that while our reason cannot encompass god, neither can god be contradictory, or “beyond reason.”
His concluding paragraph, interestingly, goes beyond a specifically Catholic formulation of god and, in talking about the problem with positivism, says “the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.” More broadly, he says that “listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge.”
Granted, he must elevate Christianity to the truest expression of the divine. Yet it is interesting that, in a speech in which he is reviled for anti-Islamic sentiment, he is inviting “our partners in the dialogue of cultures” to the examine the “breadth of reason.”
So, what of truthiness? Well, the Unitarian Universalist understanding of reason in religion will be different from the Catholic. For us, the “revelation is not sealed”, which means that the Bible will not be a restraining hermeneutic as we interact with these religious traditions. The three prongs of our hermeneutic are reason, experience and moral intuition.
The challenges for a Unitarian Universalist (or, more broadly, religious humanist) epistemology include sketching out how reason and experience interact, and how moral intuition is construed so as to avoid truthiness. Broadly, a revelatory epistemology will claim that revelation ought to guide our interpretation of experience. In this way, revelation is thought to guide both reason and experience. (There is the troublesome question of how reason interprets revelation, of course.)
Central, however, to the idea of humanist epistemology as understood in Unitarian Universalist churches is the caveat that we are free not so that we can be “unrestricted in our beliefs,” but so that truth shall make us free.
This, naturally, begs the question of what truth is–and it is a question I hope to address this semester as I wrap up my master’s degree. I think there are some ways forward that navigate us between relativism and hyper-realism, in which truth is simple correspondence to reality.
*I’m not necessarily arguing for the existence of “brute facts” to which our statements correspond. I think that our perception of the world is tied up with our conception of it, in philosophically substantive and interesting ways. But the term “fact” implies something which can be subjected to questions and for which reasons can be given. It is the lack of this ability to exchange reasons about a given statement which makes it “truthy.”