Topics Religion

Question I've had many discussions with religious people and they seem to be very fond of some kind of ''optimistic'' reinterpretation. For example, they will use the morals, knowledge and science of today to argue the veracity of their scriptures, when it seems likely that the morals, knowledge and science of today were, I presume, alien to the people who lived back then. They will try to make ''modern'' common sense compatible with their scriptures, when these scriptures seem static and fixed in time. A never ending series of reinterpretations. I think it resembles Popper's so-called ''immunizing stratagems''. Is this a real phenomenon? Does it have a (philosophical) name?

Accepted:
February 6, 2016

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You might have already identified the term you are looking for: a theory or position that is immune to falsification might simply be referred to as unfalsifiable. There is an informal term that is sometimes used to refer to a philosophy that does not allow for any (conceivable) challenge: all the wells are poisoned. In other words, there is no access to untainted counter-evidence or arguments. I suggest that a plausible case of this is the thesis that all human action is self-interested (directly or indirectly). This position is sometimes advanced with a definition of "self-interest" that makes it virtually impossible to describe a counter-example (people sacrificing their lives for others that seem profoundly non-self-interested can be readily re-described as even selfish).

On sacred scripture, however, I think we are exploring a somewhat different matter. First, in most world religions that have sacred scripture, their meaning is often understood as living (this is the term Christians use) and dynamic as opposed to static and fixed in time. So, for most (but not all) Christians today, reading Genesis one and two is taken as allegory and metaphor, reflecting an abiding commitment to belief in the Creator (and Redeeming) God, but not reflecting a quasi-scientific portrait of cosmology. In fact, there are key elements in the text itself which strongly imply this should be the reading of the text (Adam speaks of having a father and mother, whereas in the narrative he has neither, the son of Adam and Eve finds a mate --where did she come from?). So, this would be a case of when the Edenic (after "Eden") narrative was probably originally intended by the believing community as a hymnic celebration of creation and then a hymnic, poetic portrait of an aboriginal turning against the Creator, but it came to be believed to be quasi-scientific (young earth people). But more importantly, there might be different times in different places when elements of scripture may be re-conceived in ways in keeping with a living religious tradition, e.g. in the 19th century, for example, the story of Eve being formed from the side of Adam was interpreted as teaching us that women are equal to men, whereas this teaching was not drawn on in, say, the 13th century. Within Christian tradition, some (but by not means all) Protestants who believed in "sola scripture" (scripture alone)were and are committed to a more fixed interpretation of scripture that does not admit of progressive stages of interpretation. Anglicans, however, usually think of divine revelation as a matter of three factors: scripture, reason, and experience. You can find a similar breadth of interpretation in Judaism, Islam, and theistic Hinduism. Probably Buddhism, as well, but the texts of Buddhism are usually not thought of as divine revelation that might be either fixed in time or dynamic and evolving (but this is because Buddhism is, for the most part, non-theistic as well as not focussed on a non-theistic concept of God as in Brahman).

Back to your observation about morals, knowledge, and science, and the interpretation of ancient texts, I suggest that in many texts (whether sacred or what we might refer to as "secular" or a bit of both) we seek to identify what is the enduring core of some text and not reject it out of hand because the ancients did not share all our moral values or know what we know scientifically, etc. This is true of Homeric texts, Virgil, Dante, and so on. It might also be true of our contemporary literature (sacred or secular). People in the future may have advanced ethics, hyper-knowledge and super-science and yet be able to enjoy Tolkien or JRR Rowling or Thoreau....