The Truth of an Illusion

Yesterday, in my introduction to philosophy classes, I taught my students about the three big theories of truth: the correspondence theory, the pragmatic theory, and the coherence theory. These three theories represent the basic positions on what truth is, although hermeneutic theorists like Heidegger and Gadamer certain offer their own visions, albeit in not so formal a manner. In any case, I was listening to Terry Gross this afternoon, and she had on Bill Maher and Larry Charles, the star and director of "Religulous." One of the things that Terry Gross asked was whether or not religion, even if one admits that it is a bunch of stories, can still be useful. Maher thought no, for ethical reasons (because of all the bad things that have been justified using religion), but Larry Charles said no, for theoretical reasons: the stories are not true, so one should not believe them. 

Of course this brings up a question for me: what is Larry Charles' view of truth? I would hazard a guess it's the correspondence theory. Like most of the so-called "new atheists" (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris), I would assume most atheists in this mold probably think of their theory of truth as the correspondence of our ideas to reality. If they do correspond, then everything is good (enter modern science); if the don't everything is bad (enter religion). This basic view entails a whole bunch of theories, like the theory of representation: to "know" something is to represent it faithfully, to re-describe "reality" in language. So when a biologist analyzes something into the language of evolutionary biology, they are representing reality faithfully in a different language - one that hopefully helps us to understand the world a bit better. 

There is only one small problem with the correspondence theory of truth, a problem that when it is pointed out, makes correspondence theorist merely shout louder: they beg the question of what "reality" is. In other words, if you define "true" by reality (in this theory, it is reality that makes a proposition or view true), you have not answered the question of what reality is like. If you try to answer that question, you immediately have to come back to say that this definition of reality is the true one, and not that. But if you use the conclusion as a premise, and then the premise as the conclusion, you're merely begging the question. 

In the case of Larry Charles' views, this would mean that however he defines "reality" (which probably excludes certain types of "supernatural" phenomena, an "immanent frame," as Charles Taylor puts it), he is merely assuming it is true, and then defining what things count as true based on this assumption. Why should truth be based on that particular assumption rather than another? If its not argued for and defended, we'll never know. And to me, that is one of the major drawbacks of the correspondence theory of truth. Most of these theorist do not argue for their picture of reality, because they want "reality" to be some inert thing that is absolutely untouched by anything human. It is just "there" and there's nothing you can do about it, is the attitude. 

One of my basic problems with this attitude, is that if you does not argue for your view of reality (and you can't with the correspondence theory - it would arguing in a vicious, not a virtuous, circle), then you're apt not only to be a totalizer, but to lump all things that just "seem" similar, together. Why? Because of a habit of thought. If you don't argue for reality, if you don't think about your own assumptions toward it, how well would you be able to reach behind yourself and to see how your own history, social location, economic standing, etc., help to color how you think of other things? If you are not use to doing this, why would you be able to be hermeneutically sensitive in your definitions of anything? 

Take religion. The very idea that there is one thing called "religion" is ludicrous. First, the history of the term is interesting. It developed in the 17th century to precisely describe a certain war, and so trying to decide what is religious or not is from the outset put in terms of Protestant and Catholic disputes (also, since this is the case, for most of history no one thought of themselves as "religious"). But how can you do that? Religions are so different as to be unrecognizable, and even within religions the diversity is so great that I probably have more in common with atheists than I do with a lot of Christians. The standard of Protestant Christianity becomes the standard for all "religion" (which standard is also a misrepresentation of Protestant Christianity). Yet someone like Larry Charles thinks that because their assumption of reality does not include this so called "religion" then this "religion" has no place in life. 

To me, this is just a case of "the superstition of science scoff[ing] at the superstition of faith," to quote James Anthony Froude (himself a famous apostate and Carlyle biographer). To have a view of reality without argument is just as egregious as believing in so-called "myth." In either case, it is standing on a foundation that ultimately does not have recourse to reasons and argumentation. This very well may be the human condition, but in my view, we ought just to be up front about it, and change a vicious circle into a virtuous one going beyond any such "correspondence" theory of truth. 

And if Maher and Charles want to know what a Christian like me thinks about "religion," then I offer this quote from Kierkegaard: "to stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going down on one's knees and thanking him."