End of Year Plenary

One of the nice things about moving jobs (apart from the promise of free tea at break time) is it gives me a natural break to think a bit more about my subject – about what I teach and why, and whether at some point I should change what I teach at my new school.

If you’re one of my students, you’ll know that we teach Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at AS and A2 to make up our Religious Studies course. These two options are by far the most popular choices for British schools teaching A level Religious Studies. Both of these are interesting topics in their own right, and they are popular with students: from my distant memories of my own younger days, I’d say your teenage years are the time when you start to work out your own answers to some of the big philosophical and ethical questions in life – does God exist, or is the death penalty right or wrong?

However, Philosophy and Ethics aren’t the be all and end all of Religious Studies: actually, to me they are both more like branches of Philosophy than Religious Studies. If you go on to study Religious Studies at degree level, you’ll learn to study religion from a variety of perspectives, and the topics that got me most interested at University – the New Testament, Church history, the sociology of religion – weren’t philosophical or ethical, so unfortunately I don’t get a chance to teach them at school.

It would be nice at some point to play around with what I teach and experiment with something new, but on the other hand, there’s no point in planning a whole course on the secularisation theory or the New Testament if that’s just not what appeals to 16 year olds and nobody ends up taking RS.

So this is your chance to give me a bit of feedback – what have you enjoyed studying, and what haven’t you found so interesting? Would you have been more or less likely to have signed up for an RS A level if we had done something other than Philosophy and Ethics? It’s not easy, but try to think in terms of whether a particular topic raised an interesting set of issues or questions for you rather than whether you think it was or wasn’t taught well: that’s what being bitchy on facebook is for!

And if you’re reading this and teach Religious Studies at University, what would you like to see in your first year undergraduates? Do they need to have a grounding in particular topics, do they need a particular set of skills, or is it more just a case of producing students who have an interest in the field of Religious Studies?

Respect my Authoritah!

Well the good news is that there was enough interest in the Virtually University course I was planning on running on the existence of Jesus for it to go ahead (and so are the other two classes in RS, which is great).

If you’ve already read my introductory post on mythicism, you’ll know that mythicist view of Jesus (that he did not exist historically), is rejected by an overwhelming majority of experts within the field of Biblical Studies.

One of the interesting questions raised by mythicism is how far we should accept the authority of experts, and how far we should consider challenges to their views? An argument frequently made by mythicists is that those who accept the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth do so because they accept the authority of experts without question, and do not consider the evidence fairly or rationally.

And perhaps they have a point: Experts said that the Beatles wouldn’t make it, that Muhammad Ali could not beat George Foreman, that Sadam Hussein had a whole bunch of nasty WMDs. If you’re one of my students, you’ll know that we have a house named after Jane Tomlinson, who ignored the prognosis of her very well qualified doctors that she only had six months to live, and not only lived for another seven years, but also went on to compete in a number of marathons, triathlons, and long distance bike rides.

History is full of examples people who have successfully defied expert opinion, and it has even been argued that science progresses as one accepted theory is gradually challenged and ultimately overturned by a new one. So not only are experts and authority figures sometimes wrong, but those who prove them wrong are often – rightly – the very people we admire most.

However, just because the experts are sometimes wrong, it can’t be the case that everybody who disagrees with the experts is always right. From your AS level RS, you’ll know that there is group we call creationists who disagree with evolution, and if you study A level History, you should have heard of Holocaust deniers, who claim that the systematic murder of the Jews during World War Two never took place. If you study English, you might even have about a theories that William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Each of views of these views is rejected by qualified experts in the fields of, respectively, Science, History and English Literature, and (in my view) rightly so.

The problem is then, how do we distinguish between the next great theory that’s going to revolutionise our understanding and theories which are simply nonsense or worse, racist nonsense?

An obvious answer would seem to that if we just examine the evidence ourselves we can tell the good theories from the bad. But it’s not quite as simple as this: very often the evidence is complex or its value is disputed. So unless we are experts ourselves, at some point we have to rely on the authority of experts to interpret or assess the evidence for us.

If you don’t believe me, have a crack at reading Einstein’s original paper on the special theory of relativity.

Mythicism for Dummies

I’ll take a leaf out of many an RS essay here – in talking about mythicism, I’m going to start with Wikipedia.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry for Jesus, and compare it to the entries for other figures such as Julius Caesar, Socrates, or Pythagoras, you might, if you read carefully, notice something interesting: there is a section devoted to the question of Jesus’ existence, and to the “mythical view”, that Jesus did not exist. In fact, there is a separate, and fairly extensive, wiki page devoted to the topic. But there is nothing similar for Caesar, Socrates, or Pythagoras: their existence does not appear to be in doubt. So is the existence of Jesus less certain than that of these historical figures?

There is a group of people who say that it is. These people are most commonly known as mythicists, and the Virtually University course I am hoping to run (if enough people sign up for it – subtle hint) is going to be about the mythicism and the question of Jesus’ existence.

One important thing to understand is that when we discuss Jesus’ existence, we mean the historical existence of a person called Jesus of Nazareth. Saying that Jesus existed historically is not necessarily the same as saying that every story found in the New Testament or every Christian belief about Jesus is true, just as saying that Muhammad lived is not necessarily the same as saying that every Muslim belief about him is correct. Since the 18^th century, Biblical scholars have attempted to use historical methods to detach the “real”, historical Jesus from the Christian portrayal of him, with varying degrees of success – or perhaps more accurately, with varying degrees of failure.

Mythicists, however, claim that there is no historical person to detach: they deny that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived. For mythicists, the person of Jesus is nothing more than a religious or literary invention of the Christian church. As evidence for their views, mythicists point to the unreliability of the Christian New Testament as a historical source, the relative lack of ancient references to Jesus from non-Christian sources, and to similarities between the figure of Jesus and characters of Pagan and Jewish mythology.

It needs to be stressed here that mythicism is rejected by the overwhelming majority of Biblical scholars: by this I mean people who have advanced qualifications in and/or teach Biblical Studies at University level. In turn, Mythicists are usually critical of these scholars, arguing that the academic discipline of “Biblical Studies” is compromised, because the methods used by Biblical scholars are flawed, and because Bible scholarship reflects an implicit pro-Christian bias. In fact, one prominent mythicist, Richard Carrier, has rather charming described the whole discipline of New Testament studies as “f****d”. Please note: his words, not mine.

I’ll be open here and say that I’m not a fan of mythicism as a theory or the way that mythicists go about their work. I even have a few problems with the name “mythicism”, and think that other terms should be used instead.

Nonetheless, mythicism raises an interesting set of questions: about the Bible, about how we study Jesus from a Historical perspective, and about how and why certain groups of people deny the consensus position of the academic community. For me, this last question is perhaps the most interesting one, and for A level students, I think it touches on the important problem of how to tell the difference between legitimate academic views and fringe or conspiracy theories.

So... that’s it for my shameless plus for my Virtually University offering. I’ll post some more about my views on mythicism before or during Virtually University. If you’d like to find out a bit more about the mythicist case, you can check out the website of Earl Doherty, a well-known mythicist writer. If you want to understand how New Testament scholars feel about mythicism, you might wish to look here or here. 

Do Babies Know Maths?

In our AS Philosophy course on Reason and Experience, we've been looking at the empiricist conception of the mind as a tabula rasa at birth against the rationalist view that we are born with innate knowledge. 

This short video suggests that babies might be born with some kind of mathematical understanding – it seems that they just don’t like it when the Maths is wrong. As Professor Spelke, who is leading the research says, this could suggest that:

“The mind is not a blank slate... we are born with a host of cognitive capacities and the building blocks of the concepts that stand at the centre of the school curriculum are innate”.

Interesting stuff. You can find out more about Professor Spelke’s work here.

About the Blog

I've set this blog up primarily for my own A Level Philosophy and Religious Studies students, and for other students studying these courses. There are a couple of things I'm planning to use the blog for:

Firstly to give my own thoughts on some of the topics we study in A Level Philosophy and Religious Studies and to give you an idea of how to approach exam or essay questions on these. Secondly, to highlight other topics or issues in Philosophy and Religion that I find interesting, and that you might find interesting too, particularly if you're considering studying Religious Studies or Philosophy at university.

Comments are welcome (and might even be part of your homework if I'm feeling particularly mean), but please observe the following house rules:

1) Remember that this is a public space. If you are one of my students, or a student at another school, please make sure that your comments do not reveal your surname or any other personal details about you. If you use an online profile to post your comments (e.g. a blogger account), again make sure that this does not contain any personal details, photos, etc. If anybody tries to make to contact with you via the blog, you must flag this to me (or another teacher) immediately. They might seem nice, but they are very probably candidates for a stranger danger warning.

2) If you are not an AS/A level student, then you are still very welcome to post your comments, but please note that any comments that fall below the standards I would expect of my own students when debating an issue (in terms of courtesy, relevance, and academic content) will be deleted.

Thanks and happy reading. 

The Via Negativa

You are one.

You are everything.

You are no one.

You are not one.

You are not everything.

O, You who bear all names,

What shall I call You?

You Unique Unnameable,

You Surpassor of all.

Gregory of Nazianzus

In this post I’ll be outlining how the via negativa tries to solve the problem of religious language and explaining why, with a few caveats, I feel that the via negativa is a useful approach to religious language. I’ll also give a few pointers on how you might respond to an exam question on the via negativa or make use of it in assessing secular criticisms of religious language. The via negativa doesn’t seem to have come up in an exam since 2002, so we’re probably overdue a question on it.

The Problem of Religious Language

When religious people make statements such as “God is love” (1 John 4:8), are they really conveying knowledge about God? The sentence “God is love” looks very much like statements such as “the bachelor is unmarried” or “Mr Regnier is beardy”: like these it contains a subject (“the bachelor”, “Mr Regnier, or “God”) and a predicate – the part of a statement that tells us something about the subject (“is unmarried, “is beardy”, or “is love”). But is a statement like “God is love” really using language in the same way?

Religious language has been challenged by secular philosophers. For example, from your A2 course, you’ll know that according to the verification principle, a statement can only be considered meaningful if it is verifiable by sense experience, as with “Mr Regnier is beardy”, or is a tautology, as with “the bachelor is unmarried”. Since the statement “God is love”, is neither empirically verifiable nor tautological, we would have to reject it: it is a meaningless non-statement, and not the sort of thing responsible philosophers should concern themselves with.

But religious believers have also recognised that using language to convey knowledge about God is problematic, albeit coming at the problem from a different angle: How can human words, that sometimes struggle to deal with apparently mundane tasks such as accurately describing the taste of marmite or expressing just how awful the Twilight movies really are, adequately describe something as wholly other as God? Within Western theological tradition, philosophers have tried to communicate something positive about the nature of God either through developing (or adapting) a technical philosophical vocabulary, or at other times by using metaphors or analogies. We call this approach cataphatic theology.

The Via Negativa

An alternative approach, popular within Eastern Christianity is the via negativa, or apophatic theology, developed by theologians with cool names like Pseudo-Dionysus and Maximus the Confessor. Via negativa means “negative way”, while apophatic comes from a Greek word meaning “to deny”. The approach of apophatic theology is to communicate what God is not, rather than what God is. While in your religious language unit, we’ve mostly been looking at religious language within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it’s worth remembering that a similar approach has also been employed by thinkers from other religions - we’ll come back to this point later.

The via negativa arose primarily from a spiritual / monastic background and draws upon mystical experience in its approach to describing God (think about the quality of ineffability that James identifies as a characteristic of mystical experience). The via negativa stresses that we are limited in how far we can use language to describe God, and that we cannot know God by reading or hearing a description of his qualities. Language can be useful in indicating what God is not – in the same way that a sculptor may chip away at a piece of marble to reveal the rough outline of a figure. However, at some point we must go beyond language, and come to know God through experience and union with him. By stressing direct acquaintance with God, the via negativa suggests that talk about God is only meaningful in terms of an encounter and relationship with God.

So is it any good?

Of course, it should be remembered that the kind of theological statements that are produced by apophatic theology are no more verifiable (or falsifiable) than the positive statements produced by cataphatic theology. Look at the quote from Gregory of Nazianzus at the top of this post: would any of these lines pass the scrutiny of Ayer or Flew? So if you wanted to criticise the via negativa in an exam question, approaching it from the perspective of the logical positivism could be a fruitful approach to take.

Another problem is that the via negativa is only a viable solution to the problem of religious language if we accept that God exists, so it can’t be entirely separated from wider questions about the existence of God. If God does not exist, or if we take a more agnostic position and argue that we can have no ultimate knowledge about the existence of God, then we would have to conclude that the via negativa is no more successful that other religious ways of talking about God: it is still saying nothing about nothing. More specifically, since apophatic theology often (though not always) stems from mystical thought and experience, a proper assessment of the via negativa as a way of communicating something about God would also need to consider the strengths and weaknesses of religious experience and whether such experiences can give us genuine knowledge of God. If you make this point in your exam, be sure you don’t go too far down the road of writing a “religious experience” essay.

Nonetheless, if you want to approach your essay from a more theistic perspective, or make a critical comparison between the via negativa and other religious approaches, such as the use of symbol or analogy to talk about God, then the via negativa has a number of strengths. Perhaps most obviously, the via negativa preserves the otherness of God: In describing what God is not, we avoid the risk of anthropomorphism – making God seem too much like us and so bringing God down to a worldly level.

I also wonder whether the approach taken by the via negativa – talking about God on the basis of experience – might neatly sidestep some of the criticisms of religious language made logical positivism. Since apothatic statements may derive from personal experiences of God, it might be possible to argue that these statements can be considered meaningful, since they are verified (at least subjectively) by experience. However, we would still have to question whether such experiences are indeed the result of an encounter with God or simply of some unusual mental state.

Another way to consider this point might be the distinction that exists between propositional knowledge and acquaintance knowledge. Propositional knowledge is “knowledge that”, while acquaintance knowledge is “knowledge of”. Think about the difference between the sentences “I know that Mr Regnier has a beard” (propositional) and “I know Mr Regnier” (acquaintance). Propositional knowledge is subject to error and propositional statements are subject to verification and falsification (you could look to check whether I do or do not have a beard), but it is hard to see how acquaintance knowledge could be verified or falsified – a statement like “I know Mr Regnier” is a description of the contents of your own mind, and in this respect would seem to verify itself.

For Russell, knowledge by acquaintance is indubitable – we cannot doubt our own experience or the contents of our own memory (which is not to say that our experiences or our memories cannot be mistaken. For example, when I perceive an elephant, it is possible that I am hallucinating, or when I remember my own A level exams, some of my memories may be inaccurate). In this respect, we could argue that by focusing upon acquaintance knowledge, or knowledge of God, from religious experience, and avoiding attempts to convey knowledge about God through propositional statements, the via negativa would seem to avoid some of the objections to religious language raised by the logical positivists. Interestingly, although atheists, both Ayer and Russell seem to have had some sympathy for mystical experience: Russell seems to have had a had a mystical experience of sorts in 1901, while Ayer had a near death experience that may him slightly more receptive to the idea of life after death.

In stressing the importance of experience, and avoiding statements about what God is, apophatic theology can also make it easier for philosophers from different religious traditions to talk to one another about God. The via negativa has similarities to streams of thought within non-Christian religions including Shia and Sufi Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and apophatic thinkers from these different traditions have been able to engage each other on theological issues in a way that would not be possible between theologians taking a more dogmatic, positive approach. From this perspective, you could use the via negativa as a way of criticising Wittgenstein’s language games theory, which would seem to rule out the possibility of meaningful dialogue between different religious traditions.

Given the history of violence and division that has resulted from quite small distinctions within the more positive theological approaches, it should be obvious why we might prefer a way of theologising that enables a more tolerant and inclusive approach to talking about God.