“Truth” is a subjective feeling, before it ever was a philosophical principle.
The philosophical notion was built up around the internal feeling. The personal intuition that people have that a certain statement is either “correct” or “incorrect” came first, and in our minds still comes first today. All the philosophical wrangling in history came about because of our ever-conflicting personal intuitions about what things might be true or not. Only when intuitions about truth conflict do we reach for logical argument.
But logical argument remains psychologically secondary. The feeling of truth comes first.
This is easier to see with vivid examples. We can come up with a crazy hypothetical, and our minds will IMMEDIATELY render a verdict about whether that idea is true or not, far before any deeper mental struggle to offer up post hoc “reasons” (rationalizations) why the determination was made. Example: Was the universe created last Thursday? Including all of our memories of before last Thursday, which are false memories since they were also simultaneously created with the rest of the universe last Thursday?
The emotional reaction is IMMEDIATE: there’s no fuckin way that’s true. But it’s only after that initial reaction that people struggle with the reason why it’s false. A common first response to the idea is “Falsifiability!” But this is usually a dead end, as far as determining truth or falsehood, because falsifiability is merely a reason why a statement is “scientific” or not (according to a particular definition of “science”). But potentially, a statement can be both non-scientific but still true. The actual sophisticated answer is, of course, the razor. But then the question becomes: how do we actually define “simplicity”? Simplicity itself can be defined logically (mathematically), but it can also be defined intuitively (psychologically): an idea is to be preferred, as a simpler explanation that fits the available facts, if it is intuitively easier to grasp.
This intuitive version of the razor will rule out Last Thursday as the beginning of our universe. Waaaaay too complex and unintuitive. But it might also rule in some notion of “god”, for people who perceive the notion of god – however ill-defined – as psychologically elegant and “simple”.
And this finally explains the puzzle.
People don’t accept “science” as true because they’re intimately familiar with the procedures and philosophy of science. No. Even many scientists are extremely hazy on the epistemological principles on which mathematical statistics is built. People run regressions only because they need to run regressions to get published. The vast majority of people who run regressions do not understand the philosophical principles of what they are doing. Statistics isn’t at core math. It’s at core epistemology, dressed up in mathematical clothing so it can be run on a machine.
People who say “I have faith” are essentially saying “I am intellectually sophisticated enough to realize that the means by which I determine something to be true are internal to me – the notion of Truth as an internal feeling – while simultaneously realizing that this does not work for scientific purposes as human history has shown.” I used to roll my eyes at that sort of “I have faith” statement, but that’s actually an extremely deep thought when you get down to it. It’s evidence of a deep internal struggle between competing notions of epistemology. Even if the struggle isn’t happening on an explicit level, it still exists. That’s worth something.
Frankly, most people can’t manage that. Most religious people, too. They go with “Truth” as an internal feeling, without wanting to admit that to themselves. They go by “science” as something “true”, too, but also purely by feeling because they recognize that “science” has attained deep significance and social status in our society because of its past successes. “Science is true” can be a matter of pure human intuition, a matter of purely illogical human feeling, without any knowledge whatever of logical reasoning or the history of science. Just more feeling out what’s true. And their primitive feelings iron out all of those differences: what they feel to be true must obviously also be “scientifically” demonstrated to be true. After all, if “science” is actually true, it can’t go against their true internal feelings, can it? Therefore “science” must necessarily back up what they already feel to be true. Therefore: we can “prove the Bible”.
And so their version of science becomes a cargo cult.
They ape the superficial exterior, because they believe (by feeling! by intuition!) that they are faithfully following the Ritual of Scientific Truth. There’s no contradiction in their minds because “Truth” for them has always been, and will continue to be, nothing but a psychological feeling that they experience when they encounter certain statements. They don’t perceive a difference between “faith” and “science” because they don’t even know what the principles of science are.
It’s worth remembering that some of the highest principles of epistemology were only properly formalized as late as the 20th century. In a very real sense, these ideas are babies. They’re not easy, either, and so for many people, the notion of “truth” remains fairly primitive. When the notion of “truth” doesn’t get past the feeling stage – which, let’s be frank, is the case for most human beings – then people believing they can “prove the Bible” is exactly the sort of thing that will just naturally and inevitably happen. One source of truth is not going to contradict another source of truth. This is also, historically, why so many medieval scholastics earnestly wanted to “prove” the existence of god with their personal logical system. They weren’t trying to build up evidence for god with this logical “proof”. God was already established. They were trying to build up evidence for their personal logical system by showing that their system had successfully proven something that everybody already knew was true.
Historian Ada Palmer makes this point, which was a jump start for me on much of the rest of these thoughts. And in fact, Palmer goes on to point out the idea of knowing God only by faith and not from any sort of logical proof is itself sort of a new idea. Faith-based religion is new. It is a response to the epistemological problems with religion that the scientific enterprise has dug up over the centuries. The more classical response was always: “There are no problems here! Every method of discovering Truth will back up every other method!” And this classical response is essentially what the prove-the-Bible folks are trying to preserve. They believe – they feel to be true – that all methods will back each other up. And that belief strongly mimics the medieval way of thinking about things. (Although it’s worth noting that real medieval theologians were far too smart to believe that everything in the Bible was to be taken literally.) Christian Fundamentalism is very modern, very 19th century, very post-Darwin, very ignorant.
Like Christian Fundamentalism, faith-based belief is a response to scientific advance. But it’s the more sophisticated response, because it acknowledges – at least implicitly – the epistemological tension that science has uncovered. The prove-the-Bible folks simply aren’t on that level. They’re still operating on a nearly pure “the truth is what I feel” level (no matter how much they might deny that). If the Bible is true (and it is! they know it!) then that truth can be proven by multiple methods. Including by “science”.
