PZ asks in comments whether "a disciplined adherence to a set of arbitrary rules" can be considered rational. But the whole point about Sayers’ argument, which I have never elsewhere seen so clearly put, is that she does not see the dogmas of Christianity as arbitrary. They correspond, she says, to the truth about human nature and the universe, and this correspondence becomes apparent when we test them. This isn’t, she says, an argument for the existence of God. What we say about God might simply be a way of describing the facts of human nature. But, either way, it would not be arbitrary. It could be tested – and it is.
This point matters because it strikes at what seems to me one of the central atheist misunderstandings of the religious, which is that their beliefs are arbitrary.
Sayers distinguished between the historical and theological assertions of Christianity. Theological assertions she regards as more testable, which, is counterintuitively true if they are assertions about the state of the universe, as she believed. The truth of an asserted one-off happening like the resurrection simply can’t be tested directly. In the end, we make up our minds by deciding how well it fits with the rest of the evidence. On the other hand, we can test the truth of an assertion like "to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" or "it must needs be that offences come, but woe unto that man by whom the offence cometh" and experience suggests that these are very often true. Indeed, the second is an excellent short definition of tragedy.
I repeat, the point here is not that saying them proved that Jesus was God or anything like that; what these statements disprove is the Pharyngular assertion that religious talk is by its nature arbitrary and untestable.
I am aware of the countermove that says these things aren’t really religious if they are reasonable and testable. I just think it’s disgraceful and indeed anti-scientific. We don’t distinguish between essences and accidents in biology. Why do so in sociology, which is what the scientific study of religion comes down to? So the objection that theological statements are not really theological if they turn out to be statements about the universe seems to me arbitrary and unwarranted. You have to ask first how these statements are intended, and, at least in the tradition of European Catholic philosophy, they seem to be intended and understood as statements of fact about the universe.
This is, I think, what Cardinal Schönborn was saying when he denied that the argument for a designer was a matter of faith and said it derived from a philosophical truth. But Sayers puts the point better. Her own words will be in the next post.
Hi-
I’m not convinced that Schönborn’s third way between science and faith as a way to get at the truth is a sound move – I always took philosophy to be a process of asking better questions, clearing up conceptual confusions, etc., not for getting at truth in the way science does or “faith” claims to.
If your example of a theological assertion, “to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” is truly intended as a statement of fact about the universe, then many follow-up questions come to mind. Most importantly, what is this assertion really saying? i.e., what is its logical form? That every person who owns something will always be given something more? That is clearly not true. It is often true, but so what?
Secondly, what is it that makes these statements theological assertions in the first place — just the fact that they occur in texts deemed holy by believers? It occurs to me that someone like Benjamin Franklin could have written these lines too; in fact, if one were to sprinkle some of Ben’s maxims along with some biblical maxims and present them to a theology student, would they be able to sort the theological statements from the non-theological statements? I hope you can see my point: as an atheist, I see no non-arbitrary reason why the two statements you offer are bona fide theological, and “a stitch in time saves nine” – which is also often true but not always, is not theological (or is it?). I don’t think that all religious views are necessarily arbitrary either, but this is only saying that there are some parts of religious belief that do make logical sense on their own terms (e.g., if you accept “all angels are good”, and “Gabriel is an angel”, then it is not arbitrary to accept “Gabriel is good”).