Professor Volokh has two posts up at the Conspiracy (here and here), each of which asks a series of interesting and important questions — some for “religious” readers and some for “irreligious” readers — about (inter alia) the sources and foundations of our moral beliefs, claims, and commitments. Both posts raise provocative questions that are, I think, well worth taking the time to wrestle with.
For “irreligious readers”, Volokh’s question, in a nutshell, is:
Many of your beliefs might flow logically (perhaps not syllogistically, but using logical argument) from other beliefs. But at some point, you must reach what one might call a moral axiom that you can’t logically demonstrate. You doubtless find this axiom appealing. Yet why do you accept it?
For “religious readers”, the question is:
I suspect that you are a normally and healthily skeptical person. If someone claims that he has seen something that doesn’t normally occur in our experience — for instance, seen a werewolf, a ghost, or even an extraterrestrial — you’re probably pretty skeptical. . . . Why then do you believe the factual assertions that form the basis of your religion? If, for instance, you wouldn’t believe a claim that Joe Schmoe rose from the dead, why do you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead? My sense is that irreligious people really do want to know this.
Volokh describes his motive or aim in asking these questions as helping both groups understand each other better. Well done, Eugene.
Speaking only for myself — and not, I admit, really answering either question — I think Eugene is quite right to expect religious believers to give an account of (a) the place of facts, and the work facts do, in their religion and (b) the basis for religious believers’ claims that some of their claims are fact claims. (Of course, religious believers often disagree between and among themselves about which of their religious traditions’ claims are fact claims.) After all, as Flannery O’Connor might have said, “if it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.”
Posted by Rick Garnett on December 2, 2005 at 01:45 PM
Comments
Sorry for the delay in responding, Randy. I guess I’d say that I embrace the “factual assertions that form the basis for my religion” primarily because those assertions have been proposed and embraced by persons and institutions that, in my view, have earned my confidence. (“But Rick, haven’t they earned your confidence precisely by embracing and proposing those assertions?”)
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Dec 5, 2005 7:56:05 PM
And your reply to his query is?
Posted by: Randy Heinig | Dec 2, 2005 1:57:40 PM