Subjectivity and Objectivity in Religion and Science

A few months ago, literary theorist Stanley Fish published a thoughtful two-part Op-Ed in the New York Times critiquing the idea that science has direct access to objective truth while religion is hopelessly subjective. His argument can be summarized as follows:

"It is certainly possible to distinguish between [different] sets of arguments and to conclude that one is better supported than the other. And there will be many reasons that might lead you to that conclusion, including the fit or non-fit of the arguments with other arguments you already accept and the authority within a discipline or within the institutions you belong to of those who propose them. But one reason that cannot be given is that one set of arguments enjoys the advantage of being in touch with the world as it is apart from anyone’s beliefs, allegiances, assumptions and theories. No set of arguments can claim that advantage, although any set of arguments can claim a host of others."

Pointing out to people who place total trust in scientific empiricism that the scientific endeavor is shaped by history, culture, and politics predictably elicits defensive responses, as Fish's Op-Ed certainly did. While he addresses many of these responses in part two of the Op-Ed, he did not satisfactorily respond to those who critiqued him for abandoning any aspiration to objectivity. The problem with Fish's approach, therefore, is not that he finds subjectivity in the scientific method and in scientists themselves; rather, it's his disavowal of objective knowledge as such.

The way I see it, conversations about scientific and religious knowledge often operate within a false either/or binary: Either the knowledge obtained through them is 100% objective, or it is 100% subjective. Either we are capable of grasping the world "as it really is," or we're not capable of grasping it at all. This stark binary does a disservice to both science and religion, but it's certainly great for generating obfuscating polemics.

As I pointed out in my last post on the nature of evidence, religious claims are also subject to validation or discrediting by inquiring believers. It is simply not true--to use an objective statement--that once one leaves the "realm of science" one is entering territory where people no longer care to or can possibly verify what is true. Major religions did not gain converts only at sword-point, by authoritarian trickery, or with threats of economic or political disempowerment; they relied, especially at their very beginnings, on persuading people of their truth through evidence. To use only examples from the three great Abrahamic religions:  Moses outdid Pharaoh's magicians with a miracle of God; God parted the Red Sea, through which the Israelites actually passed; Christ/God cast out demons, healed the sick, raised the dead, and predicted the future; Muhammad, the illiterate and unschooled prophet, produced (through an angel of God) a work of high Arabic poetry whose inimitability persists to this day (although some great Arab poets have attempted to imitate it--precisely to discredit the revelation). These are all signs which believers have seen and, after deliberation, determined to be the work of God. But they all also encountered much disbelief and skepticism in the communities within which they occurred, as well as throughout all subsequent history.

What is at stake in accepting or denying these "signs" is nothing less than one important kind of objective truth:  for the religions above, whether there is a God and whether Moses/Jesus/Muhammad is His prophet or, as in the case of Christianity, His son or even God himself. Religions, like sciences, also aim to discover the truth by way of evidence; they just do so in ways that differ from the Baconian scientific method. Much of it relies on a kind of empiricism with which mainstream science is only beginning to grapple:  the mystery of intersubjectivity--of the direct (empirical) encounter of a human being with another human (or other-than-human) being. And this is only one empirical dimension of religious experience.

But here is the crucial point:  this does not mean that the scientific method is wrong or that it does not also lead us to some kinds of objective truth. We rely on the knowledge gained through this method in countless ways every day, ways which prove again and again that our trust is well-placed--so well-placed, in fact, that we are mostly consciously unaware of all the ways in which scientific truths underpin our most mundane activities, which often have life-or-death stakes:  driving a car; flying in a plane; getting vaccinated; using sterile plastics; drinking purified water; etc. However, the fact that our reliance on these truths is not conscious does not mean it is not there; the fact that most people don't understand or often think about scientific theories does not mean that they don't trust them. Stanley Fish appears to make this claim, which is mistaken. He writes,

What is difficult for many to grasp is the irrelevance of theoretical speculation about faith and evidence (or anything else) to the conduct of everyday life. As ja, a scientist, put it, an argument like the argument that both science and religion rely on “assumptions about their own first principle … seems to be of purely academic interest. Most humans spend the vast majority of their time worrying about practical … issues like the availability of food and water, the suitability of climate, maintaining health, and combatting illness.” Exactly! Not only is the argument that science and religion cannot be distinguished on the basis of fidelity to reality true (a word I do not shrink from for the same reason I do not shrink from the word “objectivity”), it is also harmless.

This statement is the opposite of the reality. Both science and religion are nothing if not ways through which humans resolve practical issues like locating food and water, settling on places to live, maintaining health, and combatting illness (especially the latter)! The word "religion" comes from the Latin religio which has connotations of discipline, practice, and method--its root has to do with binding, which is the action at the root of discipline that enables us to do anything skillfully. The Arabic word shari'ah, which is often translated into English as religious law, literally means a "way" or a "path"--literally the path to a spring of water, the source of nourishment in the difficult desert of life. Religion, in other words, is a method for living life skillfully and fruitfully, in a nourished, nourishing, and healthy way. It is not at all a stretch to say that science--and its sister discipline, philosophy--are to a large extent the same thing. What is interesting is that between and among them, they encompass so many different methods for doing so.

Moreover, against Fish, I would say that debates about the relative distance of science and religion from reality are by no means harmless. They shape the fabric of knowledge by which we, as individuals and collectives, know that reality (or those realities). And needless to say, that fabric is always being reshaped and reformed, often in terribly violent ways. It really matters how we access objective truth--because how we access that reality, as Fish so clearly demonstrates, often determines what reality (or realities) we access. The fact that the method mediates the object which it seeks to apprehend does not mean that the object becomes any less "objective;" it only means that there are multiple ways of apprehending the same object and multiple objects to apprehend, and therefore multiple objectivities. People can--and do--trust in more than one method for knowing the world (or worlds).

This leads me to my final point:  No matter how conscious or unconscious, people all carry within themselves theories about why things are the way they are and work the way they work--in other words, about objective truth. There is no such thing as an a-theoretical person. As John Maynard Keynes once wrote,

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back... soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."

-- John Maynard Keynes, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money"

Since everyone is an amateur theorist about many things (meaning that everyone operates based on socially conditioned ideas about what is true and uses socially influenced methods in order to arrive at that and other truths) that means that everyone is operating by balancing subjectivity and objectivity in their own ways. In the same way, "official" discourses of science and religion also balance subjective and objective data and claims. Without any notion of objectivity, there's no point in seeking positive knowledge, and without any notion of subjectivity, the stakes for every truth claim become immeasurably high. As an anthropologist, I am always balancing my desire to be faithful to each individual's subjectivity and capacity for error (including my own) with our shared human desire to make positive, reliable meaning out of our existence on this earth. My hope for the conversation about science and religion is that it continues to interweave subjectivity and objectivity in ever more complex and interesting ways. The days of binaries, I hope, are numbered.

What is "Evidence?"

People who have unexplained experiences often find themselves in a curious position when they share what happened to them with self-proclaimed rationalists or skeptics:

"There's no empirical way for us to determine whether or not spiritual experiences are real," the rationalist will often say, echoing a position long popular in the anthropology of religion and still popular in many academic and non-academic circles. 


"What do you mean by empirical?" asks the person who had the experience. "It happened to me, didn't it?"


"I mean measurable," the rationalist will often reply, "by one of your five senses, or by a scientific instrument." 


"But when I say I heard a voice say, 'Turn left,' I mean I really heard it," insists her interlocutor. 


"How can anyone know you really heard it if no one else heard it?" comes the retort. "If there is no measurable sound entering your ear canal, it's probably just a brain twitch or memory or something else. Who knows?"


"But I was alone in my car when it happened - I don't know if it was just inside my head or if someone else would have heard it too." 


"Listen, you may want to get yourself checked out for hallucinations." 


"But the voice saved my life - if I had turned right, I would have gotten in the major car crash I saw in my rear-view mirror just after turning." 


"Well then you probably already saw the situation getting dangerous and your subconscious just steered you away from it." 

"But I didn't even see the intersection clearly yet when I heard it. The situation seemed totally normal."


"The fact that you weren't conscious of it doesn't mean that you weren't picking up signs beforehand."


[Silence]



"Does your subconscious ever sound like a human voice in your head?" asks the person who had the experience with defeat in her voice.


"The brain is a strange thing. We don't even know how it works. I don't rule out the possibility that it could." 

And so it goes. This conversation reflects a few common but mistaken presuppositions:

 1) Science is the realm of empiricism.
 2) Spiritual experiences are totally subjective and unverifiable.
 3) When they are verifiable, spiritual experiences are most likely the results of neurochemistry (a brain-deterministic view) or the subconscious (a psychoanalytic view).
 4) If a spiritual experience has a positive outcome for the person to which it occurs, it is probably being engineered, consciously or not, but that very person.


These assumptions are quite widespread in our culture among both religious and non-religious people. The first two assumptions, that science is the realm of empiricism while religious experience is not, produce the contradictory claim that experience is not empirical, yet empirical evidence is only that which can be directly experienced. The converse of this contradiction is the blanket trust in empiricism:  that everything that earns the label "empirical" counts as solid gold evidence which forms the foundation of Science. In short, these presuppositions create an inability to talk about the evidence of experience itself--namely, how experiences can be evaluated to make different claims about reality. By both dismissing and valorizing experience, the worldview reflected by the presuppositions above labels some experiences as "evidence" and others as "non-evidence."

This labeling often proceeds based on a priori but unarticulated criteria, like "Can this experience be reproduced publicly, in a lab, for everyone to verify?" If not, the experience either must not be real (and if it's not real it can't be evidence!) or it is simply irrelevant to the advancement of human knowledge.

One wonders how this worldview would have dealt with someone like doubting Thomas in the Christian tradition, who would not believe in the resurrection of Christ until he put his own finger into Christ's wounds. Many rationalists would likely say, "His experience was of a religious nature; therefore it is completely unverifiable!" Yet for Thomas, no greater verification could have been provided for his faith. But Christ chastised him for needing that degree of evidence in the first place, believing that he had already, during his lifetime, provided enough evidence for his closeness with God and therefore for the trustworthiness of his promises. What we have here, at the heart of the Christian tradition, is a controversy about evidence--about what God's signs are and what they mean for people living in the world.


Of course, these debates about evidence are by no means limited to the Christian tradition. People rarely, if ever, believe something they consider to be untrue or completely unsupported by any kind of evidence. This doesn't mean that people don't engage in all kinds of complex self-deception about what they do and do not believe; it only means that people rarely will say from a place of full integrity that they trust in a falsehood or a lie. This is why you hear many people stating that myths are "true" even if they know they didn't "really" happen:  the myths articulate truths about the world which are larger than the veracity of a particular historical occurrence, and they continue to express those truths in the lives of those who trust in them. Some may even divide "the" world into worlds, arguing that while they myths didn't happen in the world of living human beings, they happened in the underworld, or the spirit world, or another world entirely. These are only two highly generalized approaches to the many ways that people evaluate the truth or falsehood of spiritual experiences.



I would like us to move beyond simplistic understandings of evidence which state that evidence is only that which can be reproduced under the conditions of a controlled experiment. That is one particular kind of evidence--and a very important one--but not the only kind of evidence there is. Before we can start to make judgments about the veracity of people's spiritual experiences, we first have to suspend judgment long enough to listen to their stories and pay attention to the effects those experiences have on the world around them.