Truth is not dictated*

An important year-and-a-bit in my journey from deeply Calvinist to... not that... was spent on the CARM forums. Someone special to me was Catholic, I had accrued a deep and wide knowledge of Catholic apologetics and theology, and so the part of the forums I spent my time on was debating Roman Catholics.

As I said then, and it's true now, the single most frustrating part of Catholicism is not any single bizarre dogma, it's their attitude to truth. If one is a dogmatic thinker, then that's the opposite of being open to new views, the opposite of being open to challenging one's own views. Nothing that is believed dogmatically has any right to be called "truth" because it's unfalsifiable, no standards have been applied at all to test the claim. It's merely dictated, and the sincere Catholics in the pews believe it. They genuinely believe that by being unswervingly committed to the claim that the believe without evidence that they are being virtuous and "putting truth first". But let me reiterate: truth is not dogmatic. It's the opposite of dogmatic.

But seeing the right-on-the-surface problems with Catholic epistemology provided cover for all the Protestants on the forum attacking them. After all, we Protestants don't swear blind featly to a Magisterium, we are not so blind. We think critically! But... reality is more complicated. My retired parents who read 365 Days With Calvin (no, wait, that was last year, this year it's 365 Days With Newton) as a devotional every day have no more thought critically about what they believe and why than the Catholic who is under the Magisterium. Religious belief itself is the thought-stopping technique. It doesn't require the overt dictatorship and authoritarianism of Roman Catholicism.

But in my Protestant apologetic days on the forum (from whence the title come from) I was fumbling around for the right words. It's much better expressed as "Truth is not dogmatic". And it doesn't take Catholic ecclesiology to be dogmatic; Protestants are too. But my choice of "dictated" is a reflection of where I was and who I was addressing. It's meant to be a critique of the Catholic attitude to truth which could never apply to me.

And that's a big part of what wore me down: realizing that it was hard to critique the other side with something that couldn't possibly apply to me. The more I cared about their shoddy attitude to dogmatic truth, and the more I wanted to be intellectually honest and take the high ground over them, the more apparent it was that the people on my side were just as uncritical and dogmatic and the things I was saying applied to my team too.

Truth is open to other views.
   

Making the data fit the theory

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." - Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia

I'll respond to some problems of rational thought in this. He does nail the draw of Catholicism. The social stability is a huge part of it.

https://medium.com/@MatthewSchultz/why-stay-protestant-435b5e1006a0

But first it's worth saying why such a piece interests me.

I grew up Protestant. Specifically in the fairly liturgical Church of England in South Africa (lately renamed to REACH: Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of Southern Africa) that, when my father leads the service at least, still uses the Prayer Book - analogous to a Catholic missal. The type you'll find in the pews is the soft cover variety, but on a book shelf close by is my very own Prayer Book in hard cover form, probably signed by the bishop. (I'm guessing. I don't really care enough to look. These are my confessions.) It's still a pretty Thing, either way. My family at various times have wished I'd go into the ministry.

On the Catholic side, some of my constant friends through childhood (not that religion was ever discussed) were Catholics. Nay, even more: they are SSPX Catholics. Some years later, and through these friends, I got to know a girl who is also SSPX. With a crazy and beautiful sense of humour with whom I could share my latent interest in growing roses and Gilbert & Sullivan and everything else besides, without it being weird. So the Catholic question became important to me. By this time I had already completed my degree in philosophy, and despite that equipping me with good mental tools I was still naïve and uncritical of my religion and loyally Protestant. I literally didn't even know that Catholics think their church was founded on Peter. (As an aside, Catholics catastrophically fail to understand the concept of the Church as Protestants do. For what it's worth, the Protestant doctrine is more biblical. But that's a vacuous truth that amounts to no more than being right about Dickens' use of the Meagles family in Little Dorrit.)

The above link is therefore interesting to me. It's a debate I'm familiar with. I'm curious to see how other Protestants, though I no longer identify as one, deal with Catholicism; and how they rationalize being Christian.

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From the link above, this is what intellectual dishonesty looks like:

... As a Protestant, I have two basic options when informing my study of the Bible. The first is consulting scholars who think the text is inspired and more or less inerrant. This comes with arguments or assumptions about the nature and quality of the Bible’s authorship: Matthew really did write Matthew, the disciples' memory of Jesus’s teachings is entirely or almost entirely accurate, Jesus really did make accurate prophecies, he really did miracles as described, and so forth.

The other option is consulting scholars who doubt or actively disbelieve all of the above propositions. They approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion. They doubt Matthew wrote Matthew. They doubt Jesus said and taught everything ascribed to him. Many claim that Jesus’s teachings were issued as a fallible man: given perhaps as a (mostly) good man, but certainly not as a divinely inspired God-man.

When it comes to Catholicism, most or all of the NT Catholic scholars I’m aware of fall somewhere in the second camp. Why would I follow a denomination that approves of or passes over scholars within its own ranks that seem to deny or doubt the reliability and authority of the Bible on such a regular basis? ...

If we look at the comment on the authorship of Matthew, as one example, see how that just begs the question: how does anyone come to this view of the Bible absent any textual criticism? Is it rational to collect all the thousands of religious writings from all ages and all cultures, put a blindfold on, choose one, and then cling to it as "the Truth"? Surely not. So by what principle should anyone believe the authority of the Bible if not through the means here rejected? What if in the structure of the text we see telltale signs that it isn't real history? The mentality quoted above reminds me of Aquinas, and Bertrand Russell's critique of him:

He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. 

Why listen to scholars who question the Bible? Because that's what curiosity is. Because that's the only way to know if you're throwing you life away believing a lie or not. Because if truth matters we don't presume we know everything and stick out fingers in our ears to block out anything that contradicts it. I can assure all believers that groups like the Branch Davidians or the Mormons also said and say among themselves "why would I follow anyone that questions the authority of what I know is true?" It's transparent confirmation bias: I'll only listen to those who agree with me. Yeah, but what if you're wrong?

If we want to believe more right things and fewer wrong things we don't start with the theory, we start with the data. And that's why scholars who don't presume the conclusion at the start are worth listening to.