I'd like someone to explain to me why it is so necessary to their faith that every word of the bible be literally correct. Please don't try to convince me, I'm an avowed heathen and quite happily so. But I must admit to confusion about why literalists are literalists. If someone could explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.
It is partly because of science's success--not just in curing diseases and developing new technology, but in overturning the theocratic medieval paradigm. Biblical literalists since the eighteenth century have felt threatened by this, but they have also been mightily impressed.
They want the same results for religion. They have Science Envy.
Jung suggested that the human psyche has four functions for apprehending knowledge. This model has proven useful in diagnostic tools such as the Meyers-Briggs test. The functions, listed from the most conscious to the least conscious, are:
1. reason
2. sensation
3. emotion
4. intuition
The scientific method deals with acknowledged facts. The method thus accepts only the top two functions, reason and sensation (observation is a sensory function), as valid scientific knowledge. It's no secret that individual scientists make use of the other two functions on a personal level, to get projects going. But their projects cannot end with these, because these functions do not prove anything in science. Reason and sensation are more fully conscious ways of knowing. They are more easily controlled and monitored and explained. They more readily lead to conclusions that connect with the observed world in ways that can be replicated and accepted by others.
The scientific method is psychologically skewed. It does not fire on all four cylinders, as it were. It trades balance for specialization. But that's okay. This approach has yielded innumerable practical benefits that satisfy on every level. A cure for cancer will be developed through reason and sensation, as the scientific method demands. But no one would deny the immense emotional satisfaction to be found in the result. When human beings use the scientific method, we voluntarily concentrate our ways of thinking into two functions for the purposes of the task at hand. But we remain human.
The other functions still get their due. Science is not the only thing humans do. We have art, we have relationships, we have exercise, we have philosophy. A well-rounded life, like a well-rounded education, runs on all four cylinders.
The kind of knowlege we get from the other functions, emotion and intuition, is more personal. Science can show me I'm 96% chimpanzee. It can demonstrate this in a way no reasonable person can refute. My emotional function tells me how I
feel about that fact. As it happnes, my kinship with other creatures on the planet strikes me as a cool idea to reflect on. I have valid emotional knowledge. But the result is personal; it defies easy replication. Others may feel horrified by the idea. In their revulsion they also gain valid emotional knowledge. We are all experts in the matter of our own feelings. In the realm of emotion and intuition, then, more than one valid answer can exist.
Literalists are literalists partly because, as the products of a scientific age, they admire the scientific method and accept the psychological skew of its method (often without understanding its provisional nature). They value reason and sensation over the other functions because these promise results that can be replicated.
And replication is crucial to anyone whose goal is to evangelize the world. Evangelists want to place their religious propositions in a realm that yields uniform consensus and resists questioning. They believe that achieving this in modern times requires selling their ideas as a kind of 'science.' Appealing to the functions of reason and sensation seems to promise better chances of replication. It helps invalidate competing beliefs by implying that these have somehow been falsified. The precepts of the religion cannot be based in the main on 'personal' functions such as emotion and intuition. These functions allow multiple meanings and yield more than one valid answer. If more than one valid answer exists, why evangelize at all?
The result is that literalists set their sights lower than truth. Their own faith interests them only to the extent that they can believe it to be
fact. This way it can appeal to the same functions used by science and gain (they hope) something of the credibility science has earned.
Their religion ends up as a sad parody of science. In the process it loses its balance, and much of its humanity.
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Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo repair.
Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo repair.
Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typos, clarity.
Archer
All species are transitional.
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