Religion, Truth, and the Limits of Judgment

A long-form sketch of some issues

Truth is found in judgments, and it is of the very nature of judgments that no one can make a judgment in my stead and truly claim that, thereby, I, who have foregone making a judgment and have rather given this work to another, have come to know something, have come to stand in the light of the truth.¹ For instance, if I must prepare for an exam that will test, truly test, my knowledge of a subject, it is not enough for me to give over the work of mastering relevant material to another, to hand over the project of determining what I must judge of, the methods by which I am to come to judge of them, and to determine what the conditions for making the relevant judgments are and whether or how those conditions have been met, then, even if that other person gives me verbal expressions of the relevant judgments, in no way would those be my judgments; the other may thereby come to know what I should know for the test, but I will not have done so. To take another example, if it is my task to determine truly and knowingly which ships and which crews can safely take me and my loved ones across the sea, I have not fulfilled my task by giving my work over to some other, certainly not another person whom I do not already know, or have as good a reason as I can to think, to be an expert in such things. For to judge responsibly and truly, to affirm or deny that a matter obtains and to thereby be said to know what matter obtains or does not obtain, requires being able to render a valid and sound account of why a particular matter obtains or does not obtain; if I cannot say why a matter obtains or does not obtain, and accurately, then, even if I think I do, I do not possess knowledge but, at best, a true belief—although I am in no position to in fact know that my belief is true: otherwise, I would know and would thus stand in the light of the truth; I remain in the dark.

Of course, it is possible to judge truly and responsibly that I have good reason to think another knows and that I do not, that another is an authority in a matter in which I am in nowise an authority. I may not be able to know that he is an authority for not possessing the requisite knowledge to determine this directly—the knowledge of medicine or car mechanics, say, such that I can judge another’s true competency—but I can know that I have good reason to act as if he is one, to trust that he is one even if I cannot go further than that in the relevant matters pertaining to the truth. For instance, I can bring my car to a particular mechanic multiple times, and for multiple issues, and, on account of the results as I experience and understand them, judge that it is reasonable for me to consider him a good mechanic—or a bad one; that is, I can know that it is reasonable for me to trust him as an authority in the matter of cars and the fixing of cars—or, at least, cars of the kind I own. Another example: While I cannot know that a particular doctor has mastered the art and science of medicine (for not truly and thoroughly knowing this art and science for never having studied or practiced it), I can know whether I can be reasonably sure that the doctor in question is a good doctor: If I have friends and family members who have experienced true and lasting healing under his or her care from both normal and abnormal maladies, and I the same, then I can judge that I can be sure this doctor is a good doctor; if I and others have not experienced healing but no change in our respective conditions, or even a worsening of those conditions, under the doctor’s care, then I can be reasonably sure it is responsible to judge him or her a bad doctor.

In both cases mentioned above—that of a mechanic and a doctor—as well as any other case you please, whether it involve practical or speculative matters, arts or sciences and the practice or mastery thereof, to make a responsible judgment of a matter will always require that, in some way or other, I verify what the conditions are for making a responsible judgment and that those conditions have been met; this will, in every case, require a reversion, through an interpretive framework (that may or may not involve theory), to empirical experience: In the case of whether a mechanic is good, I must interpret and consider the empirically verifiable effects of his work; in the case of a doctor, I must interpret and consider the empirically verifiable results of being under his care; in the case of the sciences and theories developed therein, I must determine whether, properly interpreted, the data gathered through experiments or methodical studies is consonant with, and so serves to verify, judgments proposed by scientists regarding what is or is not the case; and in the moral and generally philosophical sciences, I cannot make a responsible judgment about reality through abstract considerations only but must revert to (well-interpreted) empirical experience in order to determine, say, whether acting in accordance with this moral philosopher’s claims lead to human flourishing, or whether physically acting as if what this or that metaphysician says is the very constitution of reality leads to improvements in my life, in my community, in my world—or the reverse. Even in mathematics, which might seem to some to be wholly abstract in its later developments, I must be able to lead back mathematical theory to the empirical experiences that gave rise to it in the first place and subsequently find those experiences richer or poorer—where those experiences being found richer would be one indication of a theory’s completeness and soundness. In nowise, then, can I responsibly judge of something, anything at all, without involving in my efforts, in some way, the work of empirical verification; to this extent, the empiricists are right.

And what is empirical experience? Is it simply touch, taste, sound, smell, and sight? It cannot simply be just these or the perceptual dynamic flow that is the experience of any of these senses in their sensual immediacy, for while we can attend carefully and in stillness to each one—and even the synthesis of the manifold of all of them—they are only experiences for us insofar as we are conscious of them, aware of them; and awareness, consciousness, is infinitely more than mere and immediate sensual flow: It is not only sense experience but, if only for the unreflective confusedly, the site and source and point of return of the entire dynamism of intelligence, which is conscious life, thought, love—and the endless expanse of memory. The empirical, then, is not merely the sensory, for the merely sensory is an abstraction; that is, it is not real except as found in isolation in the work of intelligence reflecting on itself and its activities. The empirical, then, and thus conscious empirical experience—which is almost too much to say, for experience, true experience, is always conscious experience—includes all that makes it actual and concrete, makes it to exist as what it is here and now—and for all time.

But while empirical experience is more than the merely sensory, it always includes the sensory. That is, there is no empirical experience—of either what is sensuously immediate or, say, the reflection upon the sensuously immediate—that does not involve sensory activity and sensory givens. These sensory activities or givens may exist in different modes—as remembered, for instance, or as modified or metamorphosed in imagination (which is a department, if one will, of memory)—but there is no empirical experience without them. That is, there is no escape in thought or love, or any personal activity involving or leading to judgment, from the senses, their activity, and what is given through them precisely as sensed: One departs from the senses and launches off into reflective thought, carrying the senses and what is given through them all the while; and, at last, to verify what must be verified in order to make a responsible judgment, one returns to them, their activity, or what is given through them precisely as so given. Out of empirical experience and back—this is how embodied intelligence, which is the only intelligence we know, operates.

Empirical experience and what is given in empirical experience, however, are never given in their meaning straightforwardly; rather, they must be interpreted. The interpretation of empirical experience and its givens can be correct or incorrect, reasonable or unreasonable, complete or incomplete; but both must be, and in fact always are, subjected to interpretation whether we realize it or not. As empirical experience and what it involves always requires—no, always involves—interpretation, how this or that experience is interpreted is always open to being subjected to questioning: whether an interpretation is correct or incorrect, reasonable or unreasonable, even true or false, is something that must be judged of; for the presentation of an interpretation as correct does not make it so, nor does the insistence that this or that interpretation is the true interpretation make it so. That this or that is an interpretation or understanding of empirical experience is one matter, and whether it is correct, reasonable, etc., is another. That a shaman, prophet, or priest insists against a scientist that rain now falling is holy water falling as a result of a direct act of God (or the gods, or a particular god) and not simply a natural function of weather patterns that would have unfolded whether these or those deeds had been committed is to present an interpretation of a shared empirical experience; one must then determine which party, if either, is presenting a reasonable interpretation of the empirically experienced event in question, and no amount of violence from the side of said shaman, prophet, or priest, or their followers, would change this.

As the above helps make clear, and as the astute reader has no doubt already noticed, as all empirical experience and the interpretations thereof are as finite as we human beings are, as submerged in and conditioned by our time and place as each of us is, the understanding or interpretation of empirical experience we arrive at at any one time, either singly or communally, is always open to revision, always open to being supplanted by different interpretations as we travel through time and experience more of, and learn more about, ourselves and our world. It is always possible that we may learn at a later date—as many of us learn at some point regarding, say, the blueness of the sky—that interpretations we received or were formed to make of this or that experience were incorrect, incomplete, unreasonable, or simply not to the point or plain nonsense. As a result, while we can become quite confident of the operations—of cognition, of love, of affection—involved in all our experiences and the interpretation thereof, our interpretation of what those operations are reaching or have reached here or there, or what the determinate contents or objects of those operations mean here or there, is always, from the standpoint of intelligence proceeding intelligently, potentially up for revision and supplanting. For instance, one can accept, as Eben Myers did, that a particular understanding of a particular substance and its use—here, radium—is correct, act according to that understanding, and at first find that understanding apparently verified—until matters force one and others, by dint of newly-occurring damage or destruction, to revise their interpretation of the relevant substance and its use. There is no other way: to proceed, as intelligent, through time and space, from culture to culture, from this place to that place, is to risk the upending of past or received interpretations, even cherished interpretations, that have and must follow upon empirical experience if one is to attain true understanding, real knowledge, in a judgment of any matter whatever.

With all of the above kept firmly in view, we can immediately see where religion of all forms faces insurmountable difficulties insofar as it claims for itself supremacy and absolute truth vis a vis other religions—to say nothing of the whole of life!—as well as insofar as it insists that one must adhere to it in order to, for instance, attain a supernatural happiness after death or avoid perpetual pain in the afterlife. For, as in anything, if I, say, am to proceed intelligently, I must, in whatever way makes most sense, verify empirically whether I can affirm that this or that is true or whether it is reasonable to proceed in this or that way. While we must certainly form children from a young age to act in ways we think most conducive to their well-being, it does not follow that what I, say, received as a child or was formed to believe or do as a child is therefore true and reasonable; it is proper to a mature adult to reflect on what he or she has received and been formed to believe and to think in order to render a responsible judgment about it: in the final analysis, no one is responsible for the living of my life, of your life, or anyone else’s life other than the one whose life it is; no one is ultimately responsible for what I, you, or anyone else affirms or denies to be true than the one whose power of judgment it is. It is no doubt correct to say that one can determine that it is reasonable to affirm that this or that person is, say, an authority in matters pertaining to cars, medicine, or anything else, and that it is thus reasonable to believe what they say about the matters they have knowledge about or mastery over, but I, you, or anyone else cannot reasonably say that this or that person is an authority in whatever matter until we have verified what the conditions are for making a judgment about said authority and that those conditions have been met, and this using whatever method(s) happens to be most appropriate. But each and every religion is what it is precisely insofar as it makes claims about what is “beyond” what is empirically verifiable for being the source, sustaining ground, and transcendent end—fundamental realities, if you will—of what is empirically verifiable, as well as how we should relate to that source, sustaining ground, and transcendent end: Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity—all of these religions, and all others besides, are united in being ways of understanding the source, sustaining ground, and transcendent end of ourselves and of our world and sets of communally-sustained and -enforced sets of practices whereby singular persons and the communities of which they are a part are understood to orient themselves properly thereto; each religion, in some way or other, understands these fundamental realities differently, and understands them to be different, than other religions do, but each religion is properly united with every other within the same general category for being such an understanding. On account of what religion is, then, the truth of each and every religion’s claims as religion are ultimately unverifiable for being empirically unverifiable (empirical verification, again, necessarily being a part of the total verification of anything), and thus the reasonableness of the practices that each religion as religion prescribes is ultimately unverifiable; thus, both the truth of a religion’s claims as religion and the reasonableness of a religion’s practices are, strictly speaking, unknowable. Moreover, each and every religious authority considered precisely as a religious authority, because his or her authority rests on the claims of the religion he or she represents being true, is ultimately unverifiable as a true religious authority for being an authority only if things that are unverifiable as true are in fact true. In respect to the power of judgment, which I, you, or anyone else can only fully exercise reasonably through the work of empirical verification, all religions as religions are in a real sense equal: for each and every judging subject, the truth of every religion as religion cannot be known.

One does of course find religious communities and their respective accepted authorities making what are ostensibly empirically verifiable claims for the sake of supporting their respective claims to have or to know or to practice the true religion, to believe truly about fundamental realities and to know how to rightly order things in relation to those realities. Judaism makes claims about what Moses and other prophets physically did in support of their claim that they worship the true God; Christians claim that Jesus of Nazareth performed manifestly wondrous signs to support his claim of being the anointed one of God, as well as that he physically resurrected from the dead and that his resurrection was in fact empirically verified by his disciplines; and Muslims claim that Muhammad physically ascended to heaven and then miraculously traveled about in space; and others, including Christians, have claimed to witness, or believe others who have told them about having witnessed, miracles and other extraordinary happenings that seemingly validate their and their community’s religious commitments. An issue, however, is that how one interprets what is given in sense experience is very much informed by and bound up with one’s history, one’s temperament, one’s set of prejudgments, and the total cultural-social context in which one undertakes the work of interpretation. For example, even accepting that Exodus provides an accurate historical account of things, it is heavily interpretive: Hebrew/Jewish (and, later, Christian) tradition understands the so-called ten plagues recounted in Exodus 7-11 as being the result of direct Divine intervention; but the empirical givens interpreted this way by these religious traditions can, if they indeed occurred, can be understood as the natural working out of geological and ecological processes that would have occurred whether the Egyptians had given the Hebrews they purportedly held in slavery what their leader Moses had requested. In fact, all major religions have taken as indicative of their truth miracles and other extraordinary phenomena that have purported manifested within the conscious experience, collective and singular, of their adherents; but while the adherents of various religions, inhabiting and thinking in and through the interpretive frameworks that they do, will interpret this or that as miraculous, preturnatural, or of Divine origin, these same givens are open to rather mundane explanations. Even when one has an age seemingly rife with miraculous events, such as the European Middle Ages, one can always find another way of understanding the relevant supposed empirical givens—such as, in the case of purportedly wondrous events that occurred in Medieval Europe, in light of findings that people at the time were imbibing psychoactive compounds, such as those found in the herb henbane, without necessarily knowing it. Where one starts, then, and depending on the interpretive framework within which one works, one can interpret empirical givens in this context as having religious significance or has having a perfectly mundane significance; as, truly, there are no facts but only interpretations when it comes to empirical experience, no empirical experience, nor any given or sets of givens of empirical experience, necessitates a religious interpretation by those not already committed or raised in this or that religion’s interpretive framework, and thus no empirical experience or set of givens of empirical experience necessitates, from the standpoint of intelligence proceeding intelligently, submission to this or that religious authority as religious authority.

If all religions are equally unverifiable in their truth with regard to the power of judgment, and if no empirical experience or what is given in it can necessitate commitment to any religion or obedience to any religious authority, how is one to determine whether it is reasonable and responsible to walk the way of this or that religion despite not being able to verify its supposed truth? If what I have sketched in this essay is sufficiently correct, however one does it, one will have to revert to empirical experience and the givens of empirical experience in order to determine whether one can know whether it is reasonable to believe that a religion is true and whether it is responsible to walk the way laid out by that particular religion and its adherents. But how does one do this when the truth of the basic claims of any religion as religion cannot be verified as true? One can ask whether this or that religion harmonizes and resonates with what one already knows, or has good reason to think he or she knows, about oneself and the world: Does this particular religion make the experience of things more or less intelligible if true? That is a start. More concretely, one can ask: Does practicing a particular religion, or practicing it in this or that way, augment one’s life or constrict it? Does it lead to a fuller, more flourishing life as a human being, or does it lead to a more diminished human existence? Does it leave me kinder, wiser, better—or the opposite? No doubt, these are at times hard questions to answer, both because answering them takes time and care and because a great deal of multiform pressure can be put on one by his or her community of origin to answer them in a particular way. But, if one is committed to being him- or herself, if one is committed to proceeding intelligently and responsibly, then one will strive to answer these questions to the reasonable best of his or her ability; for that responsibility is no one else’s but one’s own.

1. Header image: Anonymous, Ships at Night near a Lighthouse (19th c.).