Commentary 04 on
Karl Jaspers Forum, Target Article 18, 15 June 1999
ON SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS TRUTH
By Varadaraja V Raman
HIERARCHICAL TRUTH
by Paul Jones
3 August 1999
Notation:
{ } paragraphs of the source text
The distinction between the fact and the truth as drawn by
Prof. Raman deserves careful attention and apprehension.
Yes, comparing religion and science, one could notice
the difference in their attitudes and their products
and this difference has to be explained somehow.
V. V. Raman has suggested a model worth analyzing.
In this commentary, I would like to ask my questions,
and refer to a different approach to the problem that
might prove more adequate in the further development.
After having read V. V. Raman's article, one might wonder
about the different relation of science and religion to
facts, which has not been touched at all, the focus of the
article being on the difference of religious and scientific
truths. It is not clear, why the "distinction between fact
and truth is of the utmost importance in any discussion
on science and religion." {10} Also, it not convincing
neither that religious truths are endopotent (everybody
knows the influence of religions on the culture, and
there have been enough examples of the marriage of the
church with economy), nor that scientific truths are
exopotent (it is only a bad scientist who had never tasted
the feeling of deepest satisfaction and joy raised by
scientific research). In general, it is not evident
that we should compare science and religion without
indicating their relation to other fields of human
activity and creativity (productive work, art,
philosophy etc.).
The main result of V. V. Raman's attempt to reconcile
science with religion is that they have become more
opposed to each other, being given different domains
that do not intersect in any point. This is the
usual outcome of an approach trying to explain anything
"from within", while the only possible way of integration
is to find a common framework allowing to compare the
apparently different things. In V. V. Raman's scheme,
there is a sphere of "external" activity, which is
being serviced by science, as opposed to the sphere
of "internal" processes, which have nothing to do with
science and hence have to be farmed out to religion.
Starting with this picture, one will quite logically
conclude that religion must exist for ever since
nothing else is allowed to touch the realm of the soul.
However, as it has been mentioned above, it would be
illegal to attribute all spirituality to religion,
and I could even declare that the humanity has reached
the stage of development when religion becomes opposite
to spirituality, and antagonistic to it.
According to V. V. Raman, the principal distinction
between truth in science and religious truth can be
formulated as {14}:
"(a) We need scientific truths for deriving practical benefits.
(b) We need religious truths (truths from the humanities) for deriving inner peace and satisfactions."
Let us consider these statements in more detail.
In many cases, statement (a) applies to both science
and religion. There are two ways of employing religion
for "deriving practical benefits". The direct way
is to use the economic and social power of the church
to impose the directions of activity profitable for
one person to a number of other persons. For instance,
Christianity has been a tool of mass exploitation
for many centuries, the struggle between different
Christian schools reflecting the economic interests
of certain social groups. Other religions served to the
same purpose, in their specific regional forms.
There is also an indirect way of making profit on
religion, when being religious conforms with the
current social norm and hence provides a religious
person a kind of social (and virtually economic)
preference before those who do not esteem the tradition.
In the same way, statement (b) is also not specific enough.
First of all, I would not identify all the humanities
with religion: for instance, there have been many
examples of music, painting and literature inspired
by quite different things, and even anti-religious.
Using the word "religion" for any instance of creativity
or reflection would cause nothing but term confusion,
which is certainly profitable to the priests, but is
contrary to human reason. Also, Prof. Raman tends
to mix religion with philosophy {13}, which is quite
profitable for those who would like to present class
struggle as mere theosophical debate. One could observe
that "inner peace and satisfaction" can be obtained
from almost any activity, provided there is a kind
of devotion, which should not be necessarily related
to faith. Moreover, most inspiration from religion
is in fact not religious at all, merely taking the
form of religion under the social pressure.
Second, the ability of religion to bring "inner peace
and satisfaction" is questionable. V. V. Raman himself
indicates that "in some instances priests and theologians
may even detract from the deep-felt religious experience" {5},
and "the general practitioners of most religions derive
immense spiritual satisfaction and fulfillment ... without
inquiring into or trying to understand their esoteric
symbolism, historical roots, or doctrinal bases..." {2}.
In other words, for most believers, their "rites and rituals"
are nothing but a sort of meditation technique, and a good
psychotherapist could well replace a cleric with the
same (or even better) psychological result. Moreover,
the church has always treated too zealous believers with
caution, since their individual faith could easily come
in conflict with the institutionalized tradition.
This indicates that faith as a system of beliefs is
only one component of any religion, not necessarily the
dominant one.
One would rather say that religions use special
psychological techniques to achieve their goals,
and the ignorance of the people who haven't been
taught the simplest rules of self-control makes
them the instrument for the priests following their own
interests. And no religion can last longer than people's
ignorance about its doctrine and means of influence.
That is why blind faith is eulogized by the church.
It should also be noted that there are two opposite
ways of attaining internal comfort and peace. The
animal way is to hide from the problem, drive it out
of consciousness; the human way is to understand and
solve the problem in a creative way. The former
is practiced by religion and some psychotherapeutic
schools; the latter way implies external activity,
collaboration and communication with the others,
and the aspiration to make the world better.
Returning to V. V. Raman's definition of truth as
an interpretation of facts {8}, one might doubt that
the word 'truth' is applicable to any religion at all.
Since religious revelations do not need neither facts
nor investigation, since they do not allow critical
analysis and adjustment to reality, they should be
called dogmas rather than truths. Certainly,
dogmas grow from some past truths, and may retain
a limited amount of truth to speculate on. Still,
this disguise cannot eliminate the anti-truth
nature of any dogma, religious dogmas included.
As I see it, human activity is always associated with
a definite product, which is certainly an object
possessing existence independent of its producer,
but also a materialization of the subject's intention,
goal and purpose in this latter aspect, the product
can only exist within the human culture. It should
be noted that any activity results in some material
changes; however, there may be different levels of
material changes, some of them affecting the 'state
of motion' of material things rather than the things
themselves. In particular, there is no activity
without communication, and the state of the collective
motion of the human society will change as a result of
people's activity. Such products could be called
'ideal', and they have to be accompanied by certain
material processes, though they can never be reduced
to them. An important class of ideal products is
composed by the essentially nonlinear modes of motion
of human bodies driven by the collective effects of
a larger scale, and thus reflecting social processes
in an individual and providing an individual a mechanism
of self-reflection. This class of phenomena is what
distinguishes a human from the rest of nature, and
it might be called 'spirit'. The description of the
hierarchy of spirit, including the levels of soul,
mind and mentality, as well as the description of
how this collective effect manifests itself in
human activity as a hierarchy of consciousness,
requires special treatment. For this commentary,
it is only important that culture as a collection
of all the products (in contrast to nature as
a collection of objects and their interactions
culture was often said to be the 'second nature')
includes both material things (the sphere of material
culture) and ideal products (the sphere of spirituality);
there is also the sphere of 'praxis', encompassing the
ways of using the products of activity by the other
people as a special class of products, including the
ways of creative transformation of the praxis itself.
Already at this point, one could distinguish various
'subjective experiences' (as ideal products) from
their institutionalized forms (as a part of praxis).
For instance, using religious rites for achieving
psychological balance may have nothing in common
with religion no more than borrowing the theme
of a work of art from Christian mythology makes
the artist a faithful Christian. Also, using
science-like language and complying with the style
of an academic journal is not enough to make a
piece of work a scientific investigation, though
it may become a part of institutionalized science
for quite a while. The lack of distinction in this
aspect is the main source of the common talk of
the dogmatism of science or inspiration from
religion; in fact, institutionalized science
may lose its relation to rationality and become
a kind of religion inversely, within religion,
its practitioners may break its spiritual tenets
and get engaged in artistic creativity or scientific
exploration.
Following the general line of development from
syncretism, via analyticity, to synthesis, one could
suggest the following scheme for the hierarchy of
spirituality:
1 syncretic spirituality (dogmatism)
2 analytical spirituality (creativity)
1) intuition (art)
2) rationality (science)
3) wisdom(philosophy)
3 synthetic spirituality (ideology)
In the institutionalized form, in the praxis,
syncretic spirituality is the basis of religion,
the levels of creativity correspond to the spheres
of art, science and philosophy, while ideology
becomes institutionalized in the forms of common
moral, law or social activism. It should be
stressed that, while the hierarchy of spirituality
has a universal significance and hence will be
unfolded in any culture in the future, the forms
of its institutionalization are historical and
changeable from one society to another. Moreover,
the dominance of the higher levels in the hierarchy
may make institutionalized forms of the lower level
unnecessary, as soon as the society has developed
enough.
On the lowest level, one can already realize that
the subject plays an integrating role in the development
of the world, and there is much that depends on people's
activity; however, one still cannot distinguish
reflection of the world from its transformation,
and the product from the object, which leads to all
kinds of the identification of nature with spirit,
so that any activity becomes mystified and transformed
in a kind of magic rite. The ideal product of this
level takes the form of various beliefs, myths etc.
Since there is insufficient distinction between the
people's actions and their effect, there can be no
reason for further reflection and revision of the
syncretic view of the world, which makes the
formations of this level essentially static; when
directly or indirectly imposed on an individual by
a social group, they become dogmas. Dogma could be
considered as a lowest-level (traditional, common)
truth, since it reflects the stable core of the usual
activities it has its origin in.
The level of syncretic spirituality is the earliest
stage in the development of consciousness, and the
institutionalized forms of it are the most ancient.
The roots of spiritual syncretism are in the low degree
of the separation of primitive people from the group
(tribe, kin etc.), which is a natural consequence of
the low level of economic development rarely allowing
an individual to produce any culturally significant
without the co-operation with the others. In the
modern society, this stage often precedes practically
coping with a serious problem, taking the form of
prejudice, superstition, skepticism, agnosticism etc.;
this is a reflection of the insufficiency of the
current means to solve the problem and the necessity
of a creative approach to produce such means.
The level of analytical spirituality is characterized
by the recognition of the people's ability to produce
things that are different from those existing in nature,
and the dominance of creativity over passive reflection.
In contrast to syncretic spirituality, creativity is
never static, always striving for something new, yet
unknown and there are no limits to exploration.
Logically, the first level of creativity makes stress
on the productive ability itself, with fantasy and
expressiveness determining the specificity of the product.
This kind of spirituality becomes institutionalized in
the arts.
As a dialectical negation, the level of science shifts
the accent to the objective side of creativity, demanding
that the product reproduce the essential features of
the currently accessible part of the world in an adequate
formalism. While the artist can create anything he/she
feels worth creating, the scientist's creativity is
constrained by the demand of applicability, which is
obligatory for any science, no matter how fundamental.
Finally, the highest analytical level is to restore
the integrity of spirituality, considering both
production and reflection as the components of the
process of creative reproduction of the world and
synthesizing art and science in a qualitatively
different activity, which is institutionalized as
philosophy.
All the three levels of analytical spirituality can
be associated with certain kinds of truth, in accordance
with their relation to the human activities they reflect.
Thus, artistic truth is what makes one live with a work
of art, feel it as something personal addressed to
one's soul in a very individual way. Art must be true
to be art that is, it must be socially relevant, or
actual. However, truth is only one of the components
of true art, and not necessarily the dominant one,
when a specific aesthetic phenomenon is regarded.
The level of rationality supports a different kind of
truth, mainly related to applicability one might
call it validity. In science, something can be true
only if it is applicable to a class of problems as
a means of achieving a practically acceptable solution.
It will certainly be not true beyond the limits of its
applicability, and no science can pretend to give
absolute solutions for all times. Indeed, all the
activity in science is directed to the determining
the region of applicability for the formally
constructed statements (hypotheses). Finally, the
level of philosophy is characterized by a kind of
truth, which I would call consistency. This is
a synthesis of actuality and validity, demanding
that every philosophical inquiry should be correlated
with the current trends of economic and social
development, while being based on the rational
understanding of the world. Philosophical truth
(wisdom) cannot, however, be neither immediately
applicable, nor treating the particular events of
the day. Universality is the inverse side of
consistency, and the truths of philosophy can be
useful in innumerable situations through many
centuries.
The synthetic level of spirituality forms an immediate
subjective basis for activity, and the principal
form of the ideal product on this level is idea.
Ideas can be expressed as artistic images, scientific
concepts, or philosophical categories inversely,
ideas can influence the creativity of an artist,
a scientist or a philosopher, in the same way it
determines the direction of any other activity.
It is on this level that one can be said to be
right or wrong, and the synthetic level of truth
might be called rightness.
To summarize, there is a hierarchy of truth, and
every particular formation in human spirituality is
associated with all the kinds of truths arranged in
a characteristic hierarchical structure, not necessarily
coinciding with the primary sequence related to the
stages of development. I did not consider the relation
of truth to other aspects of spirituality (e.g. beauty),
and the vast field of epistemological functions of
truth (objective and subjective truth, absolute and
relative truth etc.) has been left for another time.
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