In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it. So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.
Stanley Fish on Science and Religion
Stanley Fish has an interesting review of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. “Must There Be a Bottom Line?” makes some helpful points regarding the (ridiculous project that is the) culture wars. But ultimately, the essay reads like Pragmatism for Dummies. Here’s a snippet:
The assumption she challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God.
It is within the context of such a desire that science and religion are seen as in conflict, in part because the claims of both are often (but not always) totalizing; they amount to saying, I am the Truth and you shall have no other truths before me. But if religion and science are not thought of as rival candidates for the title “Ultimate Arbiter,” they can be examined, in more or less evolutionary terms, as highly developed, successful and different (though not totally different, as the history of their previous union shows) ways of coping with the situations and challenges human existence presents.
Fish makes the point throughout the essay that the value of science and religion is based on their usefulness. He quotes Smith on the matter:
“what gives the cultural form (or set of ideas and practices) we call science its epistemic authority is not the putatively transcendent truth of its theories, but the fact that its models of the operations of the material-physical world enable us to predict, shape, and intervene in those operations more effectively in relation to our purposes.”
Science is useful when dealing with the physical world.
Were our purposes otherwise — say, to deal with trauma, political hopes and fears, the project of community building — we might have recourse to other models and ideas from literature or philosophy or religion or even sports.
For Fish, religion is useful—and therefore has some truth (?)—in the same way that philosophy or literature might be useful. I think he’s right on some levels, but I think that his argument is also the best a non-religious person can muster. Literature, philosophy, and sports do not necessarily make strong claims on our lives, especially in regards to redemption and salvation. Fish, almost refusing to believe that one can have strong religious beliefs and see the value of science, would say that I am one of “Those strong religionists who believe that the overweening claims of science (or scientism) must be denounced daily” who dislikes his argument because it “says nothing about redemption, salvation and sin, and gives full marks to science’s achievements.” (I’m all for giving full marks to science’s achievements, though, yes, I do think there’s something to be said for redemption and salvation.) But I have to agree with Karl Barth who says that “the knowledge of God as confessed by faith is objective in the sense that its basis lies not in human subjectivity but in God.” That is, there is truth in religion beyond its usefulness.
Update: I should say that I stole the Barth quote from Roger Lundin’s book From Nature to Experience, which spends substantial ink talking about Fish and Rorty.
