?

From the pope's most recent interview:

Violence in the name of God dominates the Middle East.

It’s a contradiction. Violence in the name of God does not correspond with our time. It’s something ancient. With historical perspective, one has to say that Christians, at times, have practiced it. When I think of the Thirty Years War, there was violence in the name of God. Today it is unimaginable, right?

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/full-text-of-pope-francis-interview-with-la-vanguardia/#ixzz34tg9MXUc

I think this Hegelian streak is deeply ingrained in the modern psyche.

He was as I must have told you received into the church one week efore he died. He was not a saint but he has some sound ideas and six children

No offense, but the Pope needs to read Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence.

This caused me to wonder about the source of that quote I've heard from progressives on this--something to the effect that "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." Well, here's the story. Pretty sure I've heard it as "history," not "the moral universe."

Robert Got I agree - that's what I was thinking

Which it will.

I don't deny, by the way, that there has been moral progress, though I sometimes wonder if there has been *net* moral progress. We don't know how it looks to God: does our sexual mess balance out our compassion in matters like criminal punishment in some ledger? What I get annoyed by is the idea that it's the work of "history," whatever that means.

Well, actually I'm not sure I agree 100% with Benedict here, either. Certainly his point about freedom always being a new beginning is true. But surely there is *some* collective progress. The big difference, I guess, is that barring some kind of civilizational collapse, the sort of thing that was postulated in nuclear apocalypse stories, we don't really backslide on scientific knowledge. Or at least we haven't for the last several hundred years. But moral progress is a very slippery uphill climb, and we're always threatening to lose in one matter what we gained in another.

I think Benedict's summary is spot-on. It does not surprise me that BO repairs to cliches. Kerry is older, has been in politics for a generation, and has seen some stuff in his life.

I wonder if he said that because that's the argument he could pull out of his hat at that moment to defend a policy that actually does not interest him, just like you wonder if the latest round of peace-process wheel-spinning in the Near East is really his idea.

Cross-posted--I was replying to Janet.

Art, is your second paragraph a reference to Obama or Kerry?

You're so optimistic, Maclin.

AMDG

That's how you got suckered in by the President.

That is one temptation with which I am not afflicted. I do remember being plagued by it when I was younger, though.

AMDG

It's just a figure of speech. No one actually thinks "history" is acting as an independent God-like being to make stuff happen. It just refers to the basic trends over time of human culture. And it can and will change also, because history is not revelatory, it is merely cumulative, and has a momentum within human affairs.

The fact is, countries invading one another to impose their will are on the decline worldwide. It's hypocritical for the US to criticize Russia for this, but not inaccurate, in that the US's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are good examples of why this trend is on the decline. And we can see a definite "arc of history" in recent centuries away from that kind of Clausewitzian "war as another form of diplomacy" standard that once ruled the day.

That trend in international relations could certainly reverse itself, but given the way the world is progressing in strictly technological and economic ways, it seems like a fair claim to make that wars like this are becoming passe.

The same is generally true on the human rights front. The fact that human rights violations continue to occur does not mean that the trend line of history is not moving away from such things. In fact, the extent of moral outrage over human rights violations in remote places around the world like Syria is testimony to the trend itself. At one time, no one cared about such things. Now, they are viewed as increasingly outrageous and illegitimate.

The phrase can certainly be overused, or turned into a circle form of logic for one's pet issues, but it's not inherently wrong to see history having definite long-term trends.

Yes, I did read that. But the trends of history are not only towards less religious-based war and human rights violations, but less of these altogether. People do eventually seem to learn from their collective mistakes.

Religious-based war has seldom been the dominant problem in the first place. It just gets the most attention because it is rooted in the realm of ideas and identity. Most war is about much cruder forms of selfishness. And as we make it easier to attain wealth and comfort by peaceful means, war becomes less attractive overall.

Ken Smith's comment from yesterday was in the spam catcher and I just noticed it.

"I think that Christians - and other eschatological faiths - do at least have a theoretical basis for insisting that something or other is on the "right side of history""

Indeed we do. What I meant to be suggesting at the end of this post was that the attempt to separate an eschatological view of history from an eschatological faith is muddled, to say the least.

"One thing I'll say with strong observational conviction is that one of the primary "directions" of history is towards empirical logic as the foundation for most everything else in our culture."

Strongly disagree. This leads to the complete rejection of metaphysics and to what R. Guenon called "the reign of quantity": only that which is measurable is true. It is simply a historical vestige of the positivism long rejected by science proper. It also makes a sham of free will.

"Those who choose religious doctrine over empirical observation as a way of knowing what is true in this life, are 'on the wrong side of history'."

False dichotomy. The group of people who reject empiricism is not limited to believers in "religious doctrine."

In addition, doctrine, taken to mean the essential truths of a given religion, can neither be proved nor disproved empirically, at least as far as Christianity goes. There is nothing in logic or science that can disprove the Nicene Creed, for instance. The notion that modern religious people "cling to their faith in spite of massive contrary scientific evidence" is simply a modernist myth.

I'm not at liberty to comment much at the moment. Maybe later today. But just quickly--Church Lady says:

"The notion of political, cultural, humanitarian, and even moral progress comes out of this same concept - that there is a way that reality works, and that human culture is not moving in some random, arbitrary direction, but towards a better understanding of reality. Which includes the reality of our evolutionary history as well, and the biological processes by which we have become human beings."

I can actually agree with this, to a degree and with some qualifications. Most especially, the qualification that "reality" is considerably more than physical reality.

Also, Church Lady, I imagine you came to this via Rod Dreher's link, right? A lot of the commenters over there seem, like you, to be taking my post as a more or less analytically-oriented attempt to refute Hegel, or something. But it's really only directed at the lazy equation of evolution/history with moral progress, which I don't think I'm unfair in attributing to our president. Your position is coherent, though I don't entirely agree.

And although it's not apparent from my excerpt, the Bowman quote is a long excursus within a piece which is mainly about current politics, not the philosophy of history, so he likewise was not making an exhaustive critique.

And "yes" to what Rob G says above. More later, I hope.

Well, that was pretty long for "not much."

And someone should fine the Dalai lam 25 cents - maybe the pantheon Lamar if he hadn't been kidnapped by the Chinese

Sorry this tablet substitutes nonsense words and in that respect is a poor example of cultural progress. I tried to write

Someone should fine the Dalai Lama 25 cents - maybe the Pan Chen Lamar if he had not been kidnapped by the Chinese.

Paul we could not make the Parthenon today for that matter. The Shard is all we can rise to, though our 'technology' is better

Grumpy's and Paul's comments support one of the points I wanted to make: that the idea of progress can't be separated from the question "toward what?" Answering that question requires the naming of principles, and that requires the moral faculty that evolution, considered as a purely physical process, can't provide.

That brings in the Benedict quote that Marianne posted, too: human freedom means that decisions for the right have to be made over and over again, the principles constantly examined and refined. There's nothing to stop any progress, real or imagined, from being reversed. Christians believe that the reversal will not be ultimate, with respect to Christian conceptions of what constitutes progress. But I for one don't regard as by any means inevitable that humanity will avoid some really dark stretches in the future, possibly the near future. And in fact there are plenty of examples around of developments which progressives consider to be for the better, and their acceptance as evidence of their being on the right side of history, but which many others regard as for the worse.

Exactly. Today's Americans are far tactically better off materially than the Spaniards who built those villages. But the strip malls which substitute for towns in which the former live are horribly ugly and express something a hot many of the lives lived in them, although of course not about the value of the souls. So it's ambivalent. So could one sYstematic the folks in the strip mall towns are 'closer to reality' than the Spaniards? I this k not

It's not my tablet it's my stepmothers. Fantastically not tactically. Neither of us know how to turn off the correcting feature

I seem to recall Maritain making a case that the process of history was one of ever-wider fluctuation. Fewer wars, but more destructive; less hunger, but greater individual reluctance to take in the destitute; that kind of thing. I might be misremembering. Clearly coloured by the experience of the Second World War, but in historical terms that only ended yesterday. There are plenty of people still living who remember it, even if few of them are now old enough to have fought in it.

It always surprises me to read something in the newspapers that indicates in passing that, for example, the army of Chad is operating in the Central African Republic. Not because there's a state of war between the two countries, but just because all sorts of random stuff is going on and they want (or need) to influence the outcome. Perhaps not very Clausewitzian, but surely this too is "countries invading one another to impose their will"? I wonder how many countries the British army is in at present, not for conquest or for national survival but for "security operations" or "humanitarian operations"? It's enough to say that wars and invasions are on the decline, if we just call them "interventions" instead.

"I agree with you that reality is more than merely physical, but we might disagree on how to find reality. The standard Christian approach is to resort to revelation for our views on reality, but I would suggest that the long historical trend is away from that, and towards an empirical approach."

How does one "empirically" find these non-physical aspects of reality?

"Revealed dogma, however, does not adapt well, and when the tension between the dogma and the observed reality becomes too great, it's the dogma that breaks down, not the empirical observations. At least in the long run."

Dogma, by definition, cannot "break down." Applications and interpretations may adapt, but the dogma is the dogma. You either reject it or accept it, but there's no question of it "breaking down." As I said above, something truly dogmatic, like the Nicene Creed for instance, cannot by nature be either proved or disproved empirically.

Church Lady says "It's fine to ridicule superficial and purely self-serving uses of that idea, but my basic point is that there exists a legitimate basis for it, that should be acknowledged before criticizing those abuses."

That's a fair point in the abstract, but as I said before I wasn't attempting any sort of full treatment of the subject.

As a Christian I do in fact have a strong sense of history as having a moral logic and a direction, but it's pretty different from the progressive "right side of history" idea, which I think actually owes something psychologically to Christianity as well as to evolutionism.

I like Reality too and I'm inclined to think that I'm more in touch with it than the kind of people who use the phrase "on the right side of history."

How does one "empirically" find these non-physical aspects of reality?

Through religious and spiritual observation and experience. Just as observation and experience of the physical world yields knowledge of it, the same goes with religious and spiritual and psychological experience. One can actually investigate one's own spiritual relationship to the world, and also observe and interact with other people and their spirituality. One can read and study the subject, and compare the various dogmas and see which seem to describe the reality of spiritual experience better.

That's of course hard, but no one said finding reality would be easy.

If the implied argument is that these sorts of things simply can't be experienced or observed or made the subject of empirical study, it raises the question of why one would believe in them in the first place, other than convenience. After all, someone, somewhere, must have had some kind of experience of these things to form an idea or a dogma about them that corresponds to reality even if in a limited form.

The rise of empiricism in mundane matters of life has led to empiricism being applied widely to just these sorts of things. That's one of the primary reasons for the decline in religious dogma and affiliation. People have been observing for themselves whether or not various forms of dogma are actually experientially true, and often finding a conflict between experiential reality and dogma.

I like Reality too and I'm inclined to think that I'm more in touch with it than the kind of people who use the phrase "on the right side of history."

Sure, I think most everyone likes to think they are more in touch with reality than others. The question then is, "how would you know?"

Revelation and Dogma proceed by claims of authority for particular sources. If you adhere to those sources of authority, you then feel that you are on the right side of reality, and of history. Religions like Christianity are teleological, believing in a Divine Plan that is carried out through historical processes. Those who have faith in that, are "on God's side", which is similar enough to saying one is on the side of reality, or "history". So I fail to see how one can be against "people who think they are on the right side of history" and not also be against Christianity, or other teleological religions.

It's worth noting that not all religions are teleological. Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, believe in a cyclical universe, not just in the sense of reincarnation, but in vast cycles of time. They believe God moves in cycles, not in linear progressions, though in the shorter term (which can still be many thousands or millions of years), there are stronger trends that sweep humanity along as those cycles oscillate in big and small waves.

Some of them (same-sex marriage) pretty much fly in the face of reality, which, even more than nature, bats last.

This is not nearly as obvious as you seem to think. Gay people are a reality that can't be denied, so I'm not sure what you mean here. Empirical science shows that the whole point of sexuality itself is diversity of genetic outcomes. So homosexuality is merely one of many possible outcomes that naturally occur when sexual reproduction is the means for a species propagating itself.

Now, one could argue that homosexuality doesn't contribute well as a behavior to reproductive success for the species, but even this may be incorrect at the genetic level, in that its persistence through time suggests that whatever genes or their expression may be involved, they must confer some benefits also, or they'd have been selected against long ago.

But regardless of the origins of homosexuality, the persistent fact of it remains, and the moral question arises as to what to do with that fact. Do we regard it as an unnatural sin to be repressed or punished or forbidden, or is it merely a part of the human sexual diversity machine that we should socialize and acculturate? I think the empirical approach strongly suggests the latter, as we cannot find any strong empirical evidence that homosexuality, in itself, is a negative thing. While it may seem unnatural to some heterosexuals, it sure does seem natural to most homosexuals themselves. And the observation of nature seems to agree with the homosexuals.

I'm one of apparently a pretty small number of people who aren't really familiar with the Church Lady skits. I think I did see one, once. I'm also one of the pretty small number of people who quit watching SNL after the Ackroyd/Belushi et.al. period. So there are a lot of references I don't get.

Isn't Church Lady the one who said "isn't that special?" It's very puzzling when suddenly half of one's acquaintances start repeating a phrase like that and you don't know what it's supposed to signify.

Revealed dogma, however, does not adapt well

There is some truth in this, in that changing social practices lead to some dogmas not making sense, or seeming at odds with reality, for people living within particular cultural configurations. I think this is what leads to all those great upheavals of heresy: there's something about Protestantism that seemed intuitively "right" to 16th-century Europeans, and something about Albigensianism that chimed with the perceptions of 12th-century Europeans, and made them think they could jettison the parts of the deposit of faith that didn't fit. In that sense Catholicism is almost always on the wrong side of history, because it has to carry a lot of baggage to fit all times and places, so might not be the best fit for any particular time and place.

Still, to have been on the "right side of history" circa 1150 one should have become a Cistercian monk. In a few hundred years any current "right side of history" will no doubt seem as quaint and archaic (or creepy) as monks must seem to those who now use the phrase.

It's also natural to read all previous cultural configurations through the lens of the current one (giving greater coherence to the scope of the past than it ever actually possessed), but that's a habit academically trained historians are supposed to have been taught to break. Or at least to neutralise through self-awareness.

Church Lady, I have to say that there is a fair amount of question-begging in your advocacy of empiricism. I'll just note the one involving homosexuality: your statement that "Empirical science shows that the whole point of sexuality itself is diversity of genetic outcomes."

The whole point? Empirical science doesn't show any such thing, and can't, unless you're starting with a materialist/naturalist view that is a philosophical and ethical choice, not something derived from empiricism itself.

"Gay people are a reality that can't be denied, so I'm not sure what you mean here."

Of course they are. I didn't say "gay people," I said "same-sex marriage." And this is a question where I think dogma is indeed attempting to override empirical facts, with many people believing that history is on the side of the dogma. That two men or two women can be said to be "married" in the sense that a man and a woman can is just a brute-force assertion, akin to asserting that there are no meaningful differences between male and female. Well, I say there are, empirically, and that in the long run this attempt to override facts with dogma will fail. You could call that being on the wrong side of history, but I prefer to say that it's just wrong, period--factually wrong, leaving ethics out of it.

As you say, “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext” shows rather a startling ignorance of the past decade's news. It certainly isn't what might be called an empirical statement.

I'll just note the one involving homosexuality: your statement that "Empirical science shows that the whole point of sexuality itself is diversity of genetic outcomes."

The whole point? Empirical science doesn't show any such thing, and can't, unless you're starting with a materialist/naturalist view that is a philosophical and ethical choice, not something derived from empiricism itself.

Yes, the study of evolutionary biology does indeed show that there's really no value in sexuality as a means of reproduction other than to create a highly diverse population which has many, many different kinds of survival and reproductive strategies, so that the whole population cannot be easily wiped out by any one threat.

The basic question for biology is "why sex?" when asexual reproduction is far more efficient, and worked just fine for billions of years before sexuality emerged. The costs of sexual reproduction are just huge - half the population can't have children at all (men), and the difficulties of making sex work out are just huge. So that cost has to provide a huge benefit to make it work out in evolutionary terms. The answer is that immense diversity in the population in virtually every respect, including all the behavioral aspects of sexuality. If everyone did sex the same, it would diminish that diversity, and thus endanger the species' long-term survival. And the same goes for everything else, including most especially having a highly diverse immune system that allows that even superbugs will leave someone surviving.

Now, if there are some metaphysical explanations for our sexuality (and I for one think there are), these would still have to be evident in the physical organism. That's why I conclude that God is not opposed to diversity of sexuality, or in much of anything else. Being someone who believes in God and a metaphysical relationship between the physical world and the spiritual one. We can empirically deduce some important things about God from observation of the created world. And one of those is that sexuality is here to create a high level of diversity, and not conformity.

I don't want to focus on the gay issue, but this is one of the reasons that SSM is becoming such an easily accepted matter among so many these days, with increasing speed. People are basically seeing the world as a naturally diverse place, not a conformist place, and a God that demands everyone do things the same way, or they will be punished for being sinful, just doesn't make much sense anymore from an empirical point of view.

The idea that mankind was created by some sort of primordial blueprint, the Adam and Eve ideal, and that anything diverging from that blueprint is aberrant, wrong, even sinful, has simply been rejected by empirical science. I don't think that means that we should say there is no God, but we can certainly say that if there is a God, he created a world that is not built by that process described, even metaphorically, in Genesis. He created a world that evolves in very strange and unpredictable ways, not according to a model of what human beings should be, but according to a process that naturally produces immense diversity as a positive feature, not a negative one. And that part of that diversity includes homosexuals.

But you are right that this is not, in itself, conclusive about something like SSM, which is a human cultural issue. It's just that this empirical understanding that diversity is a generally positive and natural thing has removed much of the basis for excluding gays from getting married. Not all of them, but certainly enough to swing the tide in the direction of supporting gay rights and SSM.

The argument, of course, is not that there's no difference between men and women, it's that there's so much difference within both men and women, that we shouldn't discriminate against people for being different, or for feeling a natural pair-bonding sexual attraction to people of their own sex, when this is largely a product of the human proclivity for diversity in most everything. And this resonates with people because most people know that there's all kinds of areas in which we are all different from the norm, and want the freedom to live that way without being discriminated against or excluded from the same institutional and social and cultural protections and opportunities the more "normal" folks have. And so SSM not only seems fair and just, it also seems to protect a general principle which benefits most people.

Normalaity cannot be established empirically

Church Lady, I think your philosophy is best described not as empiricism but as utilitarianism. I'm a little surprised that you don't seem conscious of its materialist foundations, as in your discussion of the purpose of sex. Utilitarianism has its utility in limited sorts of ways, but it leaves out an awful lot, and has produced a civilization of great achievements and equally grave defects. And I think your triumphalism with respect to religion is misplaced; you're mistaking the currently dominant culture for History.

How are those people who are "on the right side of history" out of touch with Reality? They do not recognise the actual evils of divorce, particularly for children. They do not recognise the evils inherent in separating the sex act from procreation. They want to make irreligion the basis of society, in spite of the fact that most humans are religious. And although they claim to be all about free speech and diversity, they want to silence those of us who diagree with them by the use of evil laws - thus they violate their own principles. And that's just for starters. :/

An African visiting Europe stood in front of a Gothic building and, to the amusement of his European hosts, said in awe, "Can they still build things like that?"

No they can't. They haven't got the heart for it.

I think there has been very little real progress at all and if anything it's all gone backwards. Except for modern dentistry and indoor plumbing. I like those. :)

I would like to see a list of all those things which are seen to be on the "right side of history" and then we could evaluate each of them. I'd be interested to see how much I do agree with Church Lady.

Even religious people are doing this, as in cafeteria Catholics. That's often looked down upon by dogmatic Catholics

All you're really saying here is that some Catholics are rejecting dogma and others still accept it. So what? That's the nature of dogma. You either accept it or you don't. In my observation, people reject it when they want to break (and to keep breaking) one of the Ten Commandments - typically, Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery (and any practice which comes under that general heading). Also in my observation the breaking of this commandment (or any of the others) leads to long term unhappiness for someone. Whereas - as one of my "dogmatic" friends says - "if you live according to the catechism, who do you harm?"

That's how I know I'm in touch with Reality. How do you know you are, CL?

"How is your marriage going to be injured if two gay men get married?" That's the kind of glib but shallow argument that can pretty much be relied upon to carry the day in our culture.

Glib or not, it's still a good question, if expanded to include all of us, and not just you. It gets to the actual, empirical evidence of harm that most people look for to see if something is wrong or not. If something cannot be observed to do actual harm (either in the particulars, or overall), in what way can it be said to be wrong, or at least wrong enough to be discriminated against?

More fundamentally, I think, and experience supports this, that if a person doesn't immediately see the logical absurdity of saying that a marriage can consist of two husbands or two wives, or two "partners" of any of 50 different "genders", he probably isn't going to understand or accept any mere argument against it.

Now you're getting at the nub of the problem. Assuming that "logical absurdities" should carry the day would make the computer you use to send these writings of yours to others impossible. Nothing is more logically absurd than quantum mechanics, and yet it works extremely well, as you can see. That's an example of how empiricism triumphs over logical deduction from first principles. A close examination of how the world actually works shows that it doesn't conform to what we often assume to be logical means. Human brains do not immediately grasp the true principles by which the universe operates. They have to use a lot of creativity and mind-twisting to see how nature's logic works. And that's not just true of physics, but of biology, psychology, sociology, and even religion and spirituality.

I'm not sure what foundation your "logical absurdity" argument rests on, but whatever it might be, the reality of life will trump it every time. Gay couples exist. Gay couples with children exist. Legal marriage between them exists. If you find that logically absurd, well, fine. I'm sure they don't need to satisfy your logic to live as couples or raise children or go to work and so on. Same way computers don't need to satisfy someone's sense of logic to work. If what you are suggesting merely boils down to some semantic argument about what "true marriage" consists of by some ideal definition, rather than an observational status, it's basically academic.

And you're perfectly right that, absent real-world evidence, more and more people aren't going to accept logical arguments all on their own. There was a time when one could make logical arguments, and if they agreed with the social norm, they could be accepted prima facia. Now, because empiricism is becoming so deeply embedded in the culture, that's not longer the case. One can still make the logical argument, but it simply becomes another hypothesis that needs to be supported by the evidence. So logic is no longer the key determinant of reality, but evidence is. Logical conclusions unsupported by the evidence are considered to be false or fanciful.

Why is why the question of what harm someone's SSM does to anyone else is quite relevant. And for what it's worth, I wouldn't suggest that no possible harm could come of it. I'd just want to see the evidence for it, and weigh it within the overall context of benefit/harm ratios and other legal principles.

so all this talk about getting closer to reality is actually about statistical probability? Statistical probability which has nothing to do with normativity?

In my observation, people reject it when they want to break (and to keep breaking) one of the Ten Commandments - typically, Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery (and any practice which comes under that general heading). Also in my observation the breaking of this commandment (or any of the others) leads to long term unhappiness for someone. Whereas - as one of my "dogmatic" friends says - "if you live according to the catechism, who do you harm?"

I think this is a more complicated question than whether one accepts a dogma wholesale, or in part, or rejects it wholly. Most people who reject the dogmas or catechism of the Church don't do so wholesale. Generally, they see it as partially right, and partially wrong, and are looking for that middle ground.

For example, most people these days, religious or not, are accepting that sex before marriage is morally neutral. That it's okay, within reason, to have sex before committing oneself to one partner forever. But most people also aware that this can be abused, and be a negative thing as well. And it can also be a very positive thing. It depends on how one does it.

But most of these same people would also say that cheating on someone, married or not, is morally depraved and harmful. It may or may not ruin the relationship, but it certainly harms it. Unless, of course, the couple has an open marriage. But even that is generally considered harmful, and it is felt that most marriages would not survive that kind of arrangement.

As far as long term unhappiness goes, plenty of married couples who don't suffer adultery also experience long term unhappiness. That's one of the reasons for divorce. And a lot of adultery happens because the couple is in a marriage where they are experiencing long-term unhappiness.

So what's unclear in all this is how the Ten Commandments or the catechism are the standard by which we should judge whether people are moral, religious, or doing harm. There are a whole lot of people who don't believe entirely in those things who live very happy lives. There are people of other religions living happy lives as well. And moral, religious, and spiritual lives. Ahimsa, the principle of "do no harm to others" has been a major teaching and practice in Buddhism and Hinduism for much longer than it was in Christianity. It's not even mentioned in the Ten Commandments. So I hardly think we can see such things as some exclusively Christian virtue. Secularists tend to think in similar terms themselves.

I'm not sure that people "seeming" to be something is exactly "empiricial."

Are they "decent" or not? How do you define "decent"? I'd suggest that the gay lifestyle (as opposed to the mere attraction towards the same sex) is generally very indecent.

I'm not refering to empiricism in the laboratory sense of scientific experiments, but of the ordinary, grassroots empiricism of people simply looking around at the world and forming their notions of reality from that. That's a highly inexact but also highly human process, where a lot of things just "seem" to be a certain way.

How does anyone know whether someone else is a decent person? Well, generally we just get impressions from knowing them, interacting with them, working with them, and so on. It's not a lab test, it's just human life.

When it comes to gays, most people until fairly recently never knew a gay person, or thought they didn't. The obvious gays were the outliers, the guys in bars and maybe at some point in lavish parades. But then gays began coming out of the closet, and people began to realize that many of the people they actually had known as decent people in their work, their neighborhood, even their own families were gay. It wasn't just that crazy mob of Castro Street queers who were gay, it was also doctors, bankers, store clerks, friends, neighbors, family members.

This is what has really turned the tide towards gay rights. The noticing that a whole lot of gay people are just decent, hard-working, honest, reliable, and moral people. What you call the "gay lifestyle" probably refers to an actual group of gays living in a rather debauched manner. I'm not going to deny that such a sub-group exists. But it's really not representative of most gay people. And those aren't the people wanting to get married anyway.

And as far as it goes, let me remind you that there's a huge sub-population of heterosexuals who live a pretty debauched lifestyle as well. I don't see that as a reason to deny heterosexuals as a class from getting married.

I, like Janet, don't have time to delve into this conversation, but I would say that a cogent response to the question of the relationship between observation/experience and dogma can be found in Newman's A Grammar of Assent, which was written in response to Hume's skepticism (or, if you like, scepticism). Luigi Guissani also addresses it in The Religious Sense. I think Blondel works the same topic in A Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma.

The bottom line: there is a difference between evidence and proof. Dogma can't be proven from observable data, but it can be (and, indeed, must) shown not to contradict available evidence, both in generally and personally. The preponderance of evidence can be seen to point to the probability of the truth of a dogma--making a rational basis for an act of faith. The question of whether dogma corresponds to observed and experienced reality is a valid one--one that we should ask with all due humility about our own intellectual ability.

Grumpy,

I think you are correct that empiricism supports moral relativism, and that it doesn't have some fixed definition of right or wrong by its very nature. While correct as an observation, I don't see how this is a fault in empiricism, rather than a virtue. Can you tell me why that would be the case? Honestly, I mean that out of all sincerity.

I'm not quite understanding the need for some absolute right or wrong by which to measure all things. I don't know anyone or any system which doesn't take into account all sorts of relativism in its assessments of right and wrong. Even the Bible and Judaism and Christianity come up will all sorts of nuances based on context and observed facts. So it's not a question of relativism vs absolutism, its a question of how much relativism. And that itself is a relative matter.

As for slavery, I cited that because it shows that even people who believe in absolutes can support some pretty abominable things, and then change their tune. The southern culture which supported slavery to the death was a highly religious, moral, Christian culture. It saw nothing wrong with slavery, and much right and justified about it. And yet, other Christians disagreed vehemently and couldn't understand how these Christians could support such a thing. So religious values are hardly some kind of fixed matter either. They couldn't tell us for sure that slavery was wrong either. So I don't see why you are picking on empiricism for not being able to tell us anything absolute about morality. Religion can't either, even if it claims that it can. At least empiricism doesn't make those kinds of absolutist claims.

If you take 'normal' simply to mean 'happens quite a lot in a culture' there is no rational way for you to assert that the practices in human culture are getting closer to reality.

Sure you can. If the norm says that the earth is flat, and that changes over time to the norm saying that the earth is round, that's progress towards reality. Even better if they say it's an oblate spheroid, but that's getting a bit more technical than necessary for practical purposes. Unless you're a NASA scientist working a satellite orbit for GPS synchronization.

If a culture is doing rain dances to affect the weather, and at some point they realize that doesn't work, and that they are better off with satellite-based weather forecasting, and using irrigation methods to keep their crops alive in drought, that's also a sign of progress towards reality.

It does get trickier with more complicated questions of human culture, but even there I'd suggest there's a definite movement towards realism than can be observed, as well as movements away from realism. But I certainly admit that's tricky, and that within traditionalism there's plenty of genuine realism at work than can be appreciated by empirical methods.

Of course you can carry on and on asserting it but you are not being rational.

I wouldn't say that all human practices are moving towards reality. Some, perhaps many, are not. What I'm saying is that empiricism helps us separate the wheat from the chaff, and that life itself does a similar job in the long run.

On the other hand, I must admit that something doesn't have to literally be true for it to work. Religion is an example of that. The literal claims of religion don't have to actually be true for belief in them to confer benefits. The "binding together" element of religion confers very strong benefits to a culture, regardless of what its metaphysical beliefs might be. The Druids or whoever built Stonehenge may have believed all kinds of strange and untrue things about why the stars and planets were moving as they did, but if that helped them sustain an observational grasp of how the seasons worked and how the sun rose in the sky so as to properly time the planting of crops, so much the better. It worked for them, whereas if they didn't have that kind of religious awe towards the heavens, they may not have tracked the movements of the sun and stars so closely.

And the same goes for a lot of things. There's plenty of good practices in traditional religion that are sound for reasons that can be affirmed empirically. And then there's those that can't, but which still help bind people together in communities, which helps quite a lot. Part of the problem with modern empiricism is not being able to tell the two apart, and not being able to appreciate the value of unsupportable beliefs that nevertheless confer positive benefits.

And that in effect makes it impossible for human culture to be progressing toward 'reality'. You can have the ethical relativism or the progessivism but not both.

This certainly makes sense in a logical vacuum, but not in the real world. And that's the problem with trying to solve real world problems from a purely theoretical logical perspective.

The way out of this logical conundrum is to recognize that we, as human beings, don't need to know beforehand what reality is in order to progress towards it. Reality is a kind of "strange attractor" that we can't help but move towards in our own stumbling manner. At best, we can notice a certain direction being taken. We can do experiments and tests. We can see all of human history as a series of experiments and tests that help us stumble towards reality. Maybe like drunken sailors much of the time, but even then, with a certain direction that emerges merely from the process of bumping into real stuff.

Empiricism accelerates this learning process. That's it's value. We'd get there anyway, eventually, even by sheer random wandering, but it's quicker if we make tests to guide us.

The vanity of some forms of religion is that it already knows the destination and the map, and all we have to do is follow it, and that we shouldn't subject that map to any testing, because it's just true. But if the map really is true, it should be verifiable by testing it empirically. And if those empirical tests show the map to be faulty, what to do? Believe in the map anyway?

Robert,

The bottom line: there is a difference between evidence and proof. Dogma can't be proven from observable data, but it can be (and, indeed, must) shown not to contradict available evidence, both in generally and personally. The preponderance of evidence can be seen to point to the probability of the truth of a dogma--making a rational basis for an act of faith. The question of whether dogma corresponds to observed and experienced reality is a valid one--one that we should ask with all due humility about our own intellectual ability.

I agree with this whole-heartedly. But what happens when the empirical findings strongly contradict the dogma? Which do we go with? Do we still defer to the dogma, and presume that we are simply not intellectually gifted enough, or do not have sufficient observational data to see how true it is? Or do we reject the dogma, or at least those parts of it that are contradicted by the evidence or fail to find sufficient evidence to support them.

so all this talk about getting closer to reality is actually about statistical probability?

No, it's not. I merely point out that what is called a "norm" is a numbers game. What most people do. It doesn't make it right or wrong, it's just the norm. Slavery was the statistical norm for black people in the ante-bellum south. That doesn't make it right, but it does make it the norm.

In other words, my reference to statistical norms is just a way of measuring what cultures believe in and practice at any given time, and then using that to measure the changes against it over time, to give some reality to any notion of progress one is positing.

Statistical probability which has nothing to do with normativity?

Statistical probability has everything to do with normativity. It's basically the definition of the term.

No-fault divorce materially damages many marriages b/c we know how easy it is to divorce now and when couples hit very rough patches - as most will do - it is more likely than in former decades that people will seek a divorce. What they have not yet worked out is that divorce tends to create more problems than it fixes, but meanwhile marriage in general is harmed. Now, if you introduce something so bizarre as same-sex "marriage" into the equation you further destabilise the family, and marriage, by destroying notions of mother and father and the link that is supposed to bind them to their children.

So the question "what will gay marriage do to harm your marriage" is pretty easy to answer. The answer is quite simply that it destabilises all marriages. I'm sorry to be the one to point this out but any marriage can be destabilised (and seemingly destroyed) if one of the spouses develops a mental illness or something similar, becomes unhappy and then mistakenly thinks that their spouse is to blame. I've seen this more times than I care to think about. This can happen even to people who are good, and who have had a strong marriage, and who have normally behaved like responsible adults.

D'oh! Forgot the !!