Topics Religion

Question I have recently become interested in the following philosophical idea, and am wondering if it carries much weight. It rests on the idea that there cannot be any such thing as 'religious evidence'. Any religious claim cannot be made without some sort of evidence - this may differ from what a scientist would term 'evidence' as it may involve the mere 'feeling of truth' rather than a demonstratable proof. However, here is the problem that currently interests me. For any religious claim to have some sort of weight, it must rest upon some sort of evidence. The nature of evidence in general is that it is either empirical or theoretical in form - however, the status of the latter is such that it allows for future empirical verification or falsification, and as such does not rule out testing. With evidence, we either demonstrate something to 'be the case' through example, or show how a method carries value. Let me bring in an example of a religious claim: "We look around and see an order and structure to the universe that could only have been brought about by a divine creator, and could not have been the product of chance" - the problem here is how to provide evidence for this claim that does not take a scientific form, and we have two main obstacles: firstly, if we allow 'feeling' to take the status of evidence, then we devalue the notion of empirical evidence because we remove its ability to demonstrate (someone who didn't want to go on empirical evidence would, in this case, not have to). Secondly, we also transform a religious claim into a scientific one by admitting such a notion of evidence, and as such bring about the impossibility of the truth of such a claim. I realise quite how long it has taken me to reach the specific 'question', but I wished to 'show my workings' as it were. The question is: given the above understanding of 'evidence', how can there be any truth in any religious claim or any claim that does not have as its grounding any theoretical or empirical evidence? On top of this, does every religious claim - through its mere utterance or even possibility - undermine itself in the above manner?

Accepted:
March 28, 2006

Comments

As I understand your argument, much of it depends on understanding the predicates religious and empirical as mutually exclusive. This allows you to infer that, if a claim is empirical, then it cannot be religious -- and that, if evidence is empirical, then it cannot be religious. If I wanted to argue against you, I would dispute that understanding and this inference.

Since you are making an assertion about all religious claims, your opponent is free to present you with any one such claim as a counter-instance. So, let me give you the claim that the prayers of truly pious people are very often answered: What they pray for very often comes true, much more often than what less pious people pray for. I say that this is a religious claim.

Now you ask me for evidence for this claim. To give you evidence, I ask you to join a group of people who together grade a randomly selected population of 2000 self-declared believers in terms of their piety. We do this by interviewing each of these 2000 subjects as well as his/her friends and family and religious guides and so on. After we've assigned a piety score to each of the 2000, we then ask them to tell us, just before any prayer, what they are going to pray for. And then we check each subject's "success rate."

If this "experiment" finds no correlation between assessed piety and success, then my religious claim remains without evidence. But suppose we do find a robust positive correlation of the kind I had claimed. Then (if I understand you correctly) you propose to say: "OK, there's empirical evidence for your claim. Your claim is thus an empirical one. And it is therefore not a religious one."

What if I accept your first two (imagined) sentences and reject the third? In other words, I insist that, empirical evidence notwithstanding, my claim is still a religious one. It is a religious one because it involves a religious concept (piety).

Now you may respond with the assurance that science will provide an explanation of the positive correlation: Some causal influence exerted by pious prayers upon distant events; or some causal influence exerted by distant events upon the prayers of the pious; or some causal influence exerted by some third class of events upon both the prayers of the pious and on the events relating to these prayers' fulfillment. Once such a scientific explanation is on hand, you will continue, my religious claim is transformed into a scientific one (in which the religious term pious will presumably no longer occur).

Let me accept this, for the sake of the argument. There still is the possibility that no scientific explanation is found, that we remain baffled by the fact that the prayers of the pious tend to be fulfilled. If this were to happen, then (I think) we would have a genuinely religious claim for which there is good empirical evidence.

To conclude. I have argued that your a priori argument fails, that there could be genuinely religious claims backed by solid empirical evidence. Nonetheless, I am sympathetic to your conclusion: I do not believe that there are any such genuinely religious claims backed by solid empirical evidence.