In the perennial culture war conflicts between real science, and religious attempts to defend dogma with fake science, falsifiability is the obvious (and frequent) thorn in religion’s side. If science is to have any meaning or applicability in the real world, it must be subject to testing, to be proved right, or wrong. Because religion finds whatever validity it has outside of the natural world, it can never rise to this challenge: no matter how comforting it may be, “God tells us so” is not a scientifically useful explanation. To the responsible scientist, then, falsification is useful, if disappointing. But even in the best of times, for the religious, trial through falsification is either irrelevant, heretical, or (sometimes) both.
In the worst of times, though, falsification and controversy become proof that the falsified or controversial ideas are correct, and beyond dispute. Take the Catholic doctrine of the “sign of contradiction,” which reads controversy against a “holy” individual or idea as confirmation of its divinity. Under this theory – for example – the fact that non-Catholics disagree with the idea that the fetus is fully human (and that abortion is therefore evil), means that the fetus is a sign of contradiction and therefore unassailably human. Similarly, when the Vatican was deciding whether to beatify Mother Theresa (now “Blessed Theresa of Calcutta”), criticism by secular luminary Christopher Hitchens only proved her blessed nature. Dissent bootstraps holiness into irrefutable holiness.
Now – though I know some of my liberal/agnostic peers on the internets will disagree – I have the utmost respect for Catholicism. But doctrines like the “sign of contradiction” work to subvert rational discourse, replacing reason with a persecution complex run amok. You may disagree with this assessment. But that just goes to show you, I’m right.
I was unaware that this was so explicit. Very interesting. I’m looking at the Wikipedia page, and it seems to be saying that, at least officially, a sign of contradiction shouldn’t be judged as one until after the thing being contradicted has overcome the opposition, but it goes on to list other things (like embryos) that are taken as such signs without having overcome their opposition, so it’s a bit confused.
It’s a good observation that this is a somewhat generalizable attitude. I’d never looked at it in quite those (useful) terms, but it’s a pretty general problem. I think that the “don’t test God” stuff is like this, as is the theodicy expressed in Job. Because the Bible (sometimes) seems to predict a lack of evidence for God, and because it announces that bad things can happen to good people, such things are taken as confirmation that the Bible is true.
It’s a good impulse, too, which is the really sad part. It seems like the religious ‘theory’ makes predictions (lots of people will reject Jesus, etc), and it seems reasonable to take the fulfillment of these predictions as evidence for the theory. The problem, of course, is that religious belief wouldn’t be impacted at all by the failure of these predictions (suppose everyone were to be Christian, or that God appeared to us all every day) and that these claims are the equivalent of me running to the teacher and saying “Susie broke the swing, and if you ask her she’ll lie and say it was me”. Personally, I find that these claims are themselves evidence against the religion that makes them, just as I would expect the teacher to immediately become suspicious on the playground.
Posted by Gotchaye | February 25, 2009, 11:20 amAnd here I thought they just had a persecution complex.
Posted by ScooterA | February 25, 2009, 11:58 amHey Ames! I know beating a dead monkey trial is fun, but can we get a follow-up on the Summum case? I worked on it all summer for the City’s side and the opinion is out today.
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/court-allows-religious-monument/
Posted by Collin | February 25, 2009, 12:59 pmOoh. I need to look back at my earlier post on the subject. Would you like to do a commentary on it from two perspectives? Obviously you could only comment on facts within public knowledge, but your perspective would be nice.
Welcome back!
Posted by Ames | February 25, 2009, 1:13 pm@ Gotchaye: thanks for confirmation, I was worried I was taking this too far, because you’re right, the OFFICIAL doctrine seems crafted to prevent it from leading to the ridiculous results that I noted, but as applied, it seems to do that anyways.
btw, “Theodicy” = great word.
Posted by Ames | February 25, 2009, 7:49 pm