{"id":1301,"date":"2009-10-02T23:12:14","date_gmt":"2009-10-02T23:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2009-10-02T23:12:14","modified_gmt":"2009-10-02T23:12:14","slug":"know-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/know-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Know-all"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terry Eagleton has been a strong defender of religious belief, religious practice, and theology\u00a0against the attacks of the neo-classical atheists, as in this interview here<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0I have a great deal of sympathy with Eagleton’s aims, but he seems confused about performative acts<\/a>, actions which may or may not imply propositions, and, when they do, certainly rarely imply propositions reasonable people can agree on.\u00a0\u00a0 Normblog, here\u00a0first<\/a> and then here<\/a>, \u00a0attacks Eagleton’s account of religious practice.\u00a0 In his second post, Norm is responding to a post by Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling<\/a>, a post which defends Eagleton by discussing tacit knowledge and coming-to-know-something-through-experiencing-it.
\nI have argued before<\/a> (and here<\/a>) that many (perhaps even most) religious adherents have personal\u00a0encounters which they perceive to be of the divine.\u00a0\u00a0 These experiences, despite being\u00a0widespread (in apparently all human societies, and seemingly across all human history) have so far proven not to be objectively replicable, which therefore invalidates them as evidence for scientific claims.\u00a0 But this does not invalidate them as evidence for personal beliefs and actions.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, quite the contrary.\u00a0\u00a0 If I prefer the taste of drinking coffee to the taste of drinking tea, it is because of my personal subjective experiences of the two liquids; there is nothing that an explicitly-socially-negotiated activity such as science should have to say on the matter of my personal preferences or tastes.\u00a0 \u00a0 To argue otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of science as an activity as well as to intrude on my autonomy as a human person.\u00a0 (In other words, if Richard Dawkins chooses not to believe in a non-material realm, fine.\u00a0 But he has no moral right to tell other\u00a0people what they may believe\u00a0or practice, let alone to assert that they should ignore or discount their own personal experiences in deference to his.)
\nAll the writers here are victims of the bias in our western intellectual culture these last three centuries, a bias which is long-run consequence of the European religious wars of the 17th century.\u00a0 This bias favours beliefs over actions, favours propositions over other representations of knowledge, and (inter alia<\/em>) favours written accounts over other forms of communication.\u00a0 There are many ways of knowing besides beliefs, and other forms of knowledge representation besides propositions.\u00a0 For example:<\/p>\n