Some scientists are touting a 47 million year old primate fossil as potentially being a direct descendant of humans, though they admit that there is a lot more work to do before making that conclusion with certitude. What is not in dispute is that this lemur-like fossil is extremely well preserved.
Do not be deceived that the science of prayer underutilizes the modern tools of charts and graphs and pursues the metrics of metaphysics in less than thorough regard for the contemporary demand for logical breakdown of the very physics of divine petition. One need only look here to begin to glimpse the dedication to the Popular Mechanics model of spiritual presentation. In many ways, this reminds me of The Third Eye, with its fake Tibetan flowcharts and associational metaphysics. At the turn of the 20th Century there were many groups organized around the notion that spirituality was merely a forgotten science and that if the methodology of enlightenment could be found (in tradition Victorian faith-in-science manner) then we could all stop buzzing about churches and indulging fuzzyheaded scattershot traditional religions as a means of elevating ourselves to higher planes. The Victorians loved diagrams. Rather like patent applications, really, and that wedded them to invention and progress. So it only made sense to tackle this whole question of the afterlife and souls and such by the same sort of techniques---if one could reduce a question to a blueprint, as it were, one could get quickly to the center of the matter. Now we have the phsyiology of proper prayer. If nothing else, this could be good for one's posture---except for the constant bending forward, which could exacerbate a stooped shoulder aspect and aggravate osteoporosis... Well, I suppose there are drawbacks to everything. Enlightenment at the cost of a straight spine. Better, I suppose, than a renewed interest in self flagellation and scourging.
Recently on Dangerous Intersection, an article was posted about the problem of Power in relation to truth. I wrote a response and decided to post it here, at more length, as a short essay on the (occasionally etymological) problem of Truth. When people start talking about what is true or not, they tend to use the word like a Swiss Army knife. It means what they want it to mean when they point at something. Truth is a slippery term and has many facets. Usually, in casual conversation, when people say something is true, they're usually talking something being factual. Truth and fact are conjoined in many, possibly most, instances, but are not the same things. The "truth" of a "fact" can often be a matter of interpretation, making conversation occasionally problematic. The problem is in the variability of the term "truth"---like many such words, we stretch it to include things which are related but not the same. There is Truth and then there is Fact. 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact. It may, if analyzed sufficiently, yield a fundamental "truth" about the universe, but in an of itself it is only a fact. When someone comes along and insists, through power (an assertion of will), that 2 + 2 = 5, the "truth" being challenged is not in the addition but in the relation of the assertion to reality and the intent of the power in question. The arithmetic becomes irrelevant. Truth then is in the relationship being asserted and the response to it. The one doing the asserting and the one who must respond to the assertion. Similarly, in examples of law, we get into difficulty in discussions over morality. Take for instance civil rights era court decisions, where there is a conflation of ethics and morality. They are connected, certainly, but they are not the same thing. Ethics deal with the proper channels of response within a stated system---in which case, Plessy vs Fergusson could be seen as ethical given the criteria upon which it was based. But not moral, given a larger criteria based on valuations of human worth. To establish that larger criterion, overturning one system in favor of another, would require a redefintion of "ethical" into "unethical", changing the norm, for instance in Brown vs The Board of Education. The "truth" of either decision is a moving target, albeit one based on a priori concepts of human value as applied through ethical systems that adapt.
I have a question for readers and a request for guidance. My gut feeling is that political power has nothing to do with truth. It doesn’t matter that someone is encouraging me or threatening me to believe that 2 + 2 =5. The truth is that 2 +2 is always 4. Even if someone enacts tax incentives for me to say otherwise. Even if police officers put guns to my head. Even if every other person in my country ostracizes me and calls me immoral. It seems, though, that there are what seem to be (to many people) strange but unrelenting version of truth that are guided by the exercise of power. This occurs most often in closed systems. For instance, one would be scolded if one stood up and announced that Mary wasn’t a virgin while in a Christian church. If you take a megaphone at a Fourth of July picnic in middle-America, you’d better damn well say that the United States is the world’s greatest democracy, even though our voting rates are pathetically law and even though our political system is thoroughly corrupted thanks to legalized bribes termed “campaign contributions” (see this telling comment, which SHOULD shock us into starting a massive revolution). Within a closed social system, then, it seems as though political or social power can be used to make many people mouth many blatant untruths. After mouthing them for long periods, many of these people start believing these untruths. For instance, did we invade Iraq to confiscate known weapons of mass destruction? That idea served as truth to many people during the run up to the invasion (some people still cling to that falsehood). Now, with a new power order in place in Washington DC, the prevailing truth is that the Bush Administration intentionally conjured up fake evidence regarding WMD. This inter-relationship between truth and power reminds me of Thomas Kuhn’s suggestion that scientific fields undergo periodic revolutions ("paradigm shifts"), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. I’m also somewhat acquainted with various “post-modernist” writings that seem to address this general issue. For instance, consider this definition of postmodernism by Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler, which I pulled from Wikipedia:
A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.”… Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.
PZ Myers has produced a parable; an updating of the ancient saga of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The gist of every version of this tale is that several blind explorers each encounter one point on an elephant, and decide from that point what the whole must be. PZ presents a version with an intractable dissenting opinion among those considered as experts. After their consternation at their initial dissimilar conclusions about the true nature of an elephant,
The first three, being of a scientifical bent, quickly collaborated and changed places, and confirmed each other's observations; they agreed that each had been correct in the results of their investigations, except that there wasn't a hint of feathers anywhere about, but clearly their interpretations required correction and more data. So they explored further, reporting to each other what they were finding, in order to establish a more complete picture of the obstacle in the path.
"Feathers?" you ask. The fourth had suggested that it simply must have iridescent, transcendent wings. So as the others checked their evidence, he:yawns and stretches in the shade of a tree. "It has wings, large wings, that it may ascend into the heavens and inspire humanity. There could be no purpose to such an animal without an ability to loft a metaphor and give us something to which we might aspire."
The disagreements between those who explore and those who are sure, escalate. A worthy short read.