In his latest contribution to the Sullivan/Harris dialog (well worth following) about science and faith, Andrew Sullivan raises again the issue of contingency.
The question soon becomes one of relative contingencies. Is scientific thought less contingent than theology?
I find myself agreeing with much of what both have to say, oddly enough, but I do think that the question of contingency hides another issue that is more to the point.
There is a very deep sense in which scientific knowledge and the knowledge of faith are of different kinds. When the two sides debate, no matter what the issue, there seems to be an unconscious agreement to ignore that fact.
A rather clear example of this shows up in the dialog between Sullivan and Sam Harris, when they talk about the respective "truth claims" of science and religion. On the scientific side, these claims are ideas like evolution, or Newton's laws of motion. On the religious side, they are ideas like the divinity of Jesus, or whether the Messiah has come.
It's pretty easy to conflate these two very different kinds of knowledge in our culture, because we use phrases like "truth" to refer to both. For the average person, even the mode of verification is identical—appeal to an authority, whether it's a book, a person, or the internet.
But they are, in reality, quite different.
To get some idea of this difference, consider a couple of more or less mundane "facts":
-
Things fall downward.
- "C" comes after "B" in the alphabet.
Both are truth claims. Both are verifiable. Both are contingent. But there is an enormous difference in what they are claims about.
"Things fall downward." is a claim about the physical nature of the universe.
You can verify it by asking your parents, or looking it up in a book (if you are careful not to use too sophisticated a book), but if you want to go beyond that, you can experiment. You can drop things, as many times as you like, and note which way they fall.
If you do this long enough, under a wide enough variety of circumstances, and with an open mind, you will find yourself changing your mind, and coming up with a different "fact". You, may, in fact, discover that the authorities were mistaken.
This happened when Newton formulated the law of gravity, not in terms of "up" and "down", but in terms of the attraction of masses, and it happened again when Einstein tied gravitation into relativity.
It is the nature of this kind of knowledge to constantly change as real-world experience forces us to refine our understanding.
" 'C' comes after 'B' in the alphabet," on the other hand, is not a claim about the nature of the universe. It is a claim about human culture. It is a claim about how we have agreed to think.
You can verify it by asking your parents, or looking it up in a book (if you are careful not to use too sophisticated a book), but if you want to go beyond that, you are stuck.
Of course, you can observe others using the alphabet, and see whether they put C before or after B, but that really isn't much different from asking them—you're still only finding out what they believe. You may, if you search far enough, discover a country in which B comes after C, but that will not tell you anything about the order of letters in your culture—only that other people do it differently.
In the essay I referenced above, Andrew Sullivan says that he denies "Judaism's claim that the Messiah has not yet come", and posits this as a truth claim. It is a truth claim, but not of the same kind as "things fall downward". It is a cultural claim, closer akin to "C after B".
The word "messiah" is simply a title of the King of ancient Israel. Since the kingdom of Israel ceased to exist, there has been no King. But there has been a belief that one day a king would appear, and reinstate the kingdom.
A question of whether or not someone is king of a country is a cultural question—that is, it pivots, ultimately, on whether people are willing to agree that the given person is king. In the case of Jesus, a small group of first century Jews accepted him as their king, and redefined the kingdom as a spiritual matter: for them, he was king. That group eventually admitted gentiles and became the Christian Church.
So, for a Christian, Jesus is the messiah. And, for the Jews, who never accepted him as a king, he is not.
There is no contradiction here, anymore than there is a contradiction between Sullivan believing the Pope is the head of the church, and a baptist pastor believing he isn't. The Pope is the head of the Roman Catholic church, and isn't the head of any baptist church.
Of course Catholics sometimes talk as though there is only one church, but this is just rhetoric, no matter how much they want to believe it. It's political talk, just as Kings generally claim jurisdiction over everything in sight. It doesn't mean they actually have it.
It's possible that Sullivan thinks that there can be a real argument between Christianity and Judaism on the question of the Messiah, but there can't be. The connotations, and even the definitions of the term are completely different for both sides.
They are both truth claims, but claims about the structure of faith and practice within the respective cultures.
A debate over whether the Messiah has come, between a Jew and a Christian, would be as meaningless as a debate over whether C should come before B between an American and a Greek.
On the other hand, a debate between two scientists who hold to different views of gravity might be highly productive, because they are using a kind of truth claim that is about the physical world.
Both scientists and religious people, as well as those who try to bridge the gap, make the mistake of talking about these different kinds of truth claims as though they were the same, and about the claims themselves as though they could compete.
The result is that we have scientifically trained people who think that religious truth claims are bogus, and religious people who think their truth claims should be forced on other cultures (whether it's Islamic fundamentalists wanting to force the world into Islam, or Christian fundamentalists wanting to force students to pray in school).
And in the middle, we have guys like Sullivan and Harris, who, though they talk a great deal of very honest and very intelligent sense, still seem not to make the distinction between two very different kinds of truth.
At least, that's what I think today.
