In an essay that appears in a book he edited, Imaginative Apologetics, the theologian Andrew Davison tells about being in India and coming across a person with leprosy. As a Christian, he saw the leper and felt compassion and aided him, though much to the unease of Indians. It then struck him that those who believe in karma and reincarnation, as Hindus do, see a leper as someone atoning for past sins and doing what needs to be done for a future, and better, reincarnation. So they interpreted aiding the leper as doing something inappropriate.
Davison wrote, “We do not first see neutrally, and then interpret. The leper is seen as unfortunate, as someone upon whom to show pity, or seen as a miscreant, as someone to be reviled. Axioms operate at this very direct level as well as in more discursive reasoning.”
Professor Davison uses this illustration to show how our worldviews shape our interpretation of events and reality, to demonstrate how people can see the same situation and react to them in wholly different ways.
This doesn’t mean there is no such thing as objective truth. I’m not post-modern enough to believe that reality is something that is simply shaped by, and objectionable actions can be simply excused by, interpretation. But Davison’s illustration can help civilize our politics just a bit. Let me explain what I mean.
Most of us assume people see issues – abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, higher taxes on top income earners, entitlement reform, illegal immigration, climate change, judicial originalism, criminal justice, enhanced interrogation techniques, drone strikes, the Iraq war, and many others – through essentially the same prism we do. But it’s rather more complicated than that.
Our interpretative frame and intellectual and moral tropisms are the product of many factors. The philosopher Cornelius Van Til once said that there is no such thing as a brute fact. Our presumptions alter the way we interpret things, including justice. For example, if one views abortion entirely through the lens of a woman’s right to choose, then restricting abortions is a gratuitous offense. If one views abortion through the prism of the rights of an unborn child, on the other hand, then subsidizing abortion is a grave transgression.
Or take same sex marriage. Some believe championing gay marriage places one on the side of equality, tolerance, and human dignity, as heirs of the civil rights struggle. On the flip side, opponents of gay marriage often root their views in their understanding of male-female complementarity, procreation and the health of the institution of marriage. They are acting to defend what they believe are traditional and necessary social norms. The differences on this issue can be explained by reasons other than bigotry on the one hand or wanting to rip apart our social fabric on the other.
What happens is we tend to deny to those with whom we disagree any benefit of the doubt. We assume they see facts, events and justice just as we do, which makes their differing conclusions from us very nearly inexplicable. This in turn makes it easy to characterize one’s opponents as malignant. Only a cretin could hold views at odds with ours. See Paul Krugman’s attitude toward those who differ with him for more.
It really would help our political culture if we understood that every one of us has an imperfect angle on reality and that our presuppositions refract truth. That our perception of justice is always distorted, even just a little bit. All of us see through a glass darkly and know things only in part.
That doesn’t mean that some people aren’t much closer than others to apprehending truth, beauty, and goodness. Nor do I believe for a moment that efforts at persuasion are fruitless. I just happen to believe that Professor Davison’s illustration is a good one to bear in mind from time to time. If we did, our politics might be characterized by a touch more grace, a bit less anger, and a little more sympathy. There are worse things in the world.
This pious exercise would be more convincing if it were applied to the issue of Near East policy, and those who oppose the Likud line were not automatically tarred as anti-semites. n nAin't gonna happen.
It might be more likely to happen if anti-Semites would not try to excuse themselves by saying 'Hey, I'm just disagreeing with Likud", epsecially when they are disagreeing with policies or opinions that go far, far beyond Likud, and the disagreement is based on blatant distortions of history or canards about Jews (American or otherwise) in general.
But they they will camouflage themselves in that way and others too, e.g., pointing to Haaretz for support, which it regularly provides the "anti-Zionists."
"This extended model of the existing model more closely fit the data and until Kepler, few disputed that line of reasoning." n nI must ask, in what light must we now view Kepler and Galileo since the appearance of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR) in 1915? The GTR established as black-letter physical law that all motion is relative, including accelerated, orbital motion such as the earth–sun system is said to undergo. Properly understood, GTR places the statement "the earth is at rest with the sun orbiting it" on the same footing epistemologically, not to mention scientifically, as the statement "the sun is at rest with the earth orbiting it." n nPhysics offers no principled objection to either statement—so long, I should emphasize, as the assertion of one is not accompanied by the denial of the other. Relativity leads to the conclusion that no possible datum can, or will, refute geocentrism and establish heliocentrism simpliciter; that specifically includes phenomena such as the retrograde motions of the planets. All motion is relative to—without exception or qualification—the frame of reference chosen to be "at rest" in which said motion is described, a choice that is completely arbitrary in principle. Equivalently, inertia can be reinterpreted as gravitational force without loss of generality. n nThere is no (scientific) appeal from that precept without doing utmost violence to physical law, namely, without making physical law dependent on the state of motion of the system being investigated. Einstein called the principle "general covariance." A more current approach might be to describe GTR as a theory exhibiting a particular "local gauge" symmetry (technically: redundancy with respect to selection of a cross-section of the tangent bundle over a Riemann manifold). If you know anything about the history of the theory of relativity—either the general theory or the special theory, it matters not—then you also know that GTR was summoned into existence in Einstein's mind by his refusal to countenance any such dependence. Virtually all of current physical theory endorses his judgment, and there is more than ample experimental confirmation of the theory. It's quite useless, as well as scientifically illiterate, to insist in kantian fashion that, relativity to one side, it is, of course, really the earth that revolves around the sun. When it comes to motion, there is no such thing as "really." Relative motion is all we've got or are entitled to. That might change, but it is where matters stand today. n nYet, if I recall correctly, Kuhn's book, which appeared long after GTR, seems to prefer a heliocentric theory over a geocentric one on first principles rather than, as is actually the case, as a matter of convenience in calculations. n nOf course, as we all know, a lot of water has gone over the dam when it comes to that particular controversy. For two centuries at least and in furtherance of their pugnacious metaphysics, radical Materialists have made a good deal of pointlessly heavy weather over the alleged savage persecution of Galileo, whose own heliocentric theory, it is rarely pointed out (or conveniently omitted), was in outright conflict with contemporary astronomical data because he insisted for wholly metaphysical reasons, che brutti, that the planets orbited the sun in circles rather than ellipses; i.e., the Church had sufficient scientific reasons to question Galileo's ideas. n nThe current scientific truth is that the motions of the planets and the sun in space–time follow neither ellipses nor circles: They move inertially along "straight" trajectories known as geodesics. By mapping the "motion" of celestial objects relative to spatial position alone and, of necessity, excluding time intervals, ellipses appear. Since the relativity of time is inescapable on this mortal coil, we should remain deeply skeptical, to say no more, of the ontology of any model of our solar system, for example heliocentrism tout simple, that emerges after suppressing it. That was Einstein's great contribution, his marvelous insight, which modernity has not really come to terms with in its increasingly tiresome and ignorant assault on the Medieval Church. n nFinally, assimilating GTR to the so-called virial theorem of cosmology, the following assertion is now, relatively speaking, indisputable: n nOur earth is stationary at the center of the universe. n nDoesn't THAT sound familiar? It seems that true "openminded-ness" may demand a good deal more of the committed Materialist than he had anticipated. n nFinally, one also feels entitled to ask why, apart from an adolescent urge to indulge the nihilistic impulse, would anyone choose any another frame of reference?
Peter, Interesting points and a perspective more would do well to consider. Brute facts vs. our presuppositions and our ingrained biases, indeed. As an aside, it's worth thinking of how Jesus dealt with the situation of "helping", i.e. healing, a leper. The Jews of his time had a similar understanding to that of Hindus. n nThe lesson of that healing – that the "disease" of sin which supposedly caused the leprosy of the outcast is the common disease of us all which cannot be removed or healed except Someone stoops down to help. Without that Divine condescension we all remain outcasts.
In support of Annadessima, n nPeter Wehner writes, "In an essay that appears in a book he edited, Imaginative Apologetics, the theologian Andrew Davison … Most of us assume people see issues … Some believe nOnly a cretin could hold views at odds with ours. … All of us see through a glass darkly and know things only in part. That doesn’t mean that some people aren’t much closer than others to apprehending truth, beauty, and goodness. " n n"Imaginative, see issues, believe, views, see, truth, beauty and goodness." – Wehner and Davidson, along with most of the public, ignore the primacy of evidence. n nEvidence showed since the 1980s, that AIDS symptoms were evident, over 90% in homosexuals and IV drug abusers. No evidence shows that homosexuality, lesbianism, among GLBTUCIT2SAAPPHO, etc. , are determined by genetics. No evidence defines a three month, unviable fetus as a 'child'. nEvidence shows that fertility-enchancing drugs used by women over age 30, to conceive, harm their children, throughout their lives. Epidemiological evidence shows that homosexual sex and drug abuse, shortens the lives of homosexuals and is a disease vector for the remaining 99% of the population. nEvidence shows that women's physical and intellectual capacities fall significantly below men. Therefore, government imposed quotas harm all the population. n nThe conclusive elements of social debate must rest on objective evidence. Whener and Davidson, by ignoring the primacy of evidence in social and political analysis, reinforce ignorance, lapse into moral relativism and justify arbitrary choices. n… n