Beauty, Truth, and Authority

We finished up last time with the idea that beauty confronts me with an experience that takes me beyond myself, that originates with something or someone other than me.

In the world of theology, we would call this revelation: something that takes me beyond the capacity of my five senses and opens up my experience, knowledge, and emotion (the whole of who I am) to the divine.

I also promised to say something about beauty and why it's a better starting point for theology than truth (at least in our time, and maybe for all times). It's been a tough one to write! But here we go. As Samuel L. Jackson said in Jurassic Park, "Hold on to your butts."

In the 21st century, truth has its own problems more or less baked-in. Nowadays we're hyper-attuned to constant lies, distortions, half-truths, agendas, bias, and fake news in politics and media. But instead of going there, let's start with the question of perspective.

Perspectivalism acknowledges that although there IS such a thing as objective truth that is 'out there' (Fox Mulder, anyone?), it's just that we are limited by our own subjectively held beliefs, perceptions, ideas, and experiences.

We all noticed different details during the car crash or the bank robbery. Was he wearing a blue shirt or a gray shirt? We all saw it from our own subjective standpoint, and that experience became 'truth' for us. We could be wrong, who knows? In that sense, we are also fallibilists (for the most part), or people who are willing to be proven wrong when it comes to the details at the scene of the crime. If we saw the video, or whatever evidence there was, we'd be willing to change our belief.

One key aspect of perspectivalism is the acknowledgment that there's an objective realty out there, and that it can (and should) inform or even change our beliefs in conformity with it. Thus if I have rational, scientific, or historical evidence for something, that's good grounds for believing it. In other words, I'm looking for a source of authority that's universally true for everyone, and not just my own experience.

All this is due to the fact Modernism, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution used logic, reason, and later, (because of its explanatory power) scientific evidence, to replace a faith-based knowledge that was grounded in religion, revelation, and personal experience of the divine. Universal reason and empirical evidence (primarily mediated through conclusions drawn based on the scientific method) became the primary source of authority for understanding the world we live in.

Show me the evidence. The universally-true, accessible to all, scientific evidence.

I think you'd agree that Science still thinks of itself as pretty important. Important enough to capitalize itself as new kind of religion and even savior. Check out this video from Pfizer that I saw while watching Survivor last week (April, 2020).

Gosh, I love that video, it proves my point exactly.

In the midst of a global pandemic, Science oozes confidence. Carl Sagan, with his great Cosmos series on PBS in the 70's, was famous for his creed, "The Cosmos is all that there is, all that there was, all there ever will be." And he had that hair, blowing in the wind like a dandelion seed, and he was so confident in his scientific understanding of the universe.

And it's not that I'm against science (maybe I am against capital "S" science), because that would be silly. I just want to point out how authority is functioning in our world today.

When it came to the pursuit of truth in the 20th century, Science and religion adopted a warfare model in their campaign against one another. And it had to do with this argument about authority. What American Fundamentalism did in response to Modernism (circa 1907-1920, in a series of pamphlets aptly names The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth) was to say that some truths are indeed absolute, infallible, and non-perspectival (universal).

And, the fundamentalist adds, we know which ones they are, and we have the Bible verses to prove it.

Whether they are revealed in the Bible, or an authority structure like the Church, or a confession like the Apostles' Creed, confession, or doctrinal statement, what the fundamentalist believes comes directly from God. This is also a non-fallibilist perspective, because the fundamentalist is not willing to be proven wrong. She doesn't believe she can be, because she believes what she does with certainty.

A kind of certainty not altogether different from Pfizer's or Carl Sagan's Science.

I mentioned in another post how I come from a fundamentalist background. In fundamentalism, you believe things very strongly (not that there's anything wrong with that) because, well, they are the fundamentals.The basics.The truths that are true because they have been revealed to you. And they are so true, and true-to-life, that you believe them with certainty.

The critique leveled by Modernism against religion a hundred years ago applies just as much if not more today: powerful institutions controlled people using (seemingly) arbitrary doctrines of heaven and hell, moralism, conservative social norms, and fear to attempt to control the thinking and behavior of a population and to hold on to power. Familiar story, right?

Only today, the shoe is very much on the other foot. Science (capital "S") has taken the place of Christianity as the dominant worldview of the culture. But by identifying their ultimate authority in Truth, whether that be scientifically or religiously defined, both scientifically minded moderns and fundamentalists have assented to something that applies (or ought to apply) to all humanity universally and absolutely. Something that stands outside of, or over-against, our experience.

This impasse was best on display during the Ham-Nye debate a few years ago. Bill Nye "The Science Guy" (also of little-known Speedwalker fame) was invited to the Creation Museum to debate Creationist (read: fundamentalist) Ken Ham. During the three-hour affair, both speakers, appealing to the exact same evidence, nevertheless interpreted the evidence differently from their own uniquely absolutist worldviews.

There was no room for common ground, because both perspectives interpreted the truth as they saw it (based on the evidence) absolutely differently. They were working out of fundamentally different worldviews.

Let me be clear: it's not that I believe truth doesn't exist. Nor do I believe there's no such thing as objective truth. It does, and there is. The question is how, and the extent to which, we can know it.

All I hope to point to here is the way that beauty, and our subjective (but uniquely shared, and human) experience of beauty, points to a category that exists outside of the modernist-fundamentalist debate over truth.

In any claim to an ultimate authority, there is a spiral at work. A black hole of gravity, pulling toward a logical singularity. That this is what is confirmed. This is what is real. This is what is true. Something acknowledged, confessed, assented to.

Beauty does this in a way that, at least in our day, truth cannot.

Isaiah the prophet put it like this: "Truth has stumbled in the streets." Maybe it's comforting to know that this isn't a new problem.

I may no longer trust the nightly news to give me fair, unbiased, objective coverage of what's actually out there. Which raises the question: where do you go for authority? To what extent do you trust the news? The findings of science? Do you have faith that it will eventually get us somewhere? Where is that, exactly?

But I do still trust my senses, and I'm guessing you do, too. We trust the transcendent experience of beauty.

Does it have to be one or the other?

Could we hold truth in one hand and beauty in the other?

Everyone pledges allegiance to something, whether it is the conclusions of whatever passes for Science in our day, our own experiences, or their own autonomous, rational self as the ultimate arbiter of morality and truth. Fundamentalism proposed its own answer: the absolute truth of Scripture in all circumstances.

But what if the metric of reality, and of authentic human experience, were beauty instead of truth? Would we be on firmer ground? Would it change how we lived? How we approach the things that are most valuable in life?

These are just some of the questions I'm pursuing. Thanks for hanging in there with me!

Until next time.

Grace and peace,

Mat