Lecture 6.6 - Case studies from religion: transmission of revelation

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From the course by The University of Edinburgh

Philosophy, Science and Religion: Philosophy and Religion

151 ratings

The University of Edinburgh

Philosophy, Science and Religion: Philosophy and Religion

151 ratings

Philosophy, Science and Religion mark three of the most fundamental modes of thinking about the world and our place in it. Are these modes incompatible? Put another way: is the intellectually responsible thing to do to ‘pick sides’ and identify with one of these approaches at the exclusion of others? Or, are they complementary or mutually supportive? As is typical of questions of such magnitude, the devil is in the details. For example, it is important to work out what is really distinctive about each of these ways of inquiring about the world. In order to gain some clarity here, we’ll be investigating what some of the current leading thinkers in philosophy, science and religion are actually doing. This course, entitled ‘Philosophy and Religion’, is the second of three related courses in our Philosophy, Science and Religion Online series, and in this course we will ask important questions about the age-old debate between science and religion, such as: • What kind of conflicts are there between religion and science? • Does current cognitive science of religion effectively explain away God? • If there is a God who has made us so that we can know him, why do some people not believe? • Is belief in science also a kind of fundamentalism? • What makes us good at getting, giving, or sharing, knowledge? Is this different when it is religious knowledge? The first course in the Philosophy, Science and Religion series, 'Science and Philosophy' was launched early in 2017 and you can sign up to it at any time. The third course —‘Religion and Science’—will be launched early in 2018. Completing all three courses will give you a broader understanding of this fascinating topic. Look for: • Philosophy, Science and Religion I: Science and Philosophy https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-science-religion-1/ • Philosophy, Science and Religion III: Religion and Science Upon successful completion of all three courses, students will: (1) Understand the main parameters at stake in the current debate between science and religion. (2) Have some familiarity with the relevant areas of science that feature in the debate—including cosmology, evolution, and the neurosciences—and will have begun to engage with them conceptually. (3) Have encountered key philosophical approaches to the interface between science and religion, and will have had the opportunity to engage them in practice. (4) Have embarked constructively in cross-disciplinary conversations. (5) Have demonstrated an openness to personal growth through a commitment to dialogue across intellectual and spiritual boundaries. You can also follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/EdiPhilOnline and you can follow the hashtag #psrmooc

From the lesson

Epistemic Virtues and Vices in Science and Religion

In this lecture, Professor Mark Alfano discusses the role of epistemic virtues and vices in science and religion. The lecture has three main sections. First, Alfano distinguishes four types of epistemic virtues and vices. Source virtues such as honesty make someone an excellent primary source of knowledge. Receiver virtues such as intellectual humility make someone an excellent recipient of knowledge provided by sources. Conduit virtues make someone an excellent conveyor of the knowledge they receive from others to third parties; these dispositions might include a willingness to gossip carefully in order to protect others from a sexual predator, as well as the virtues that journalists try to embody. Echo virtues make someone an excellent sounding board for others. Along the way, Alfano mentions various vices that can attach to people in the role of source, receiver, conduit, and echo. In the second part of the lecture, Alfano uses the notions of source, receiver, conduit, and echo virtues to make sense of scientific collaborations and trust in science by laypeople. In section three, he shows that unless we have unreasonably high credence in very long chains of conduit virtues, we should not accept testimony in favour of miracles or divine revelation.

Lecture 6.1 - Overview of the lecture4:06

Lecture 6.2 - Introduction to epistemic virtues and vices17:05

Lecture 6.3 - Case studies from science: scientific collaborations4:57

Lecture 6.4 - Case studies from science: trust and distrust of science by laypeople9:49

Lecture 6.5 - Case studies from religion: miracles7:24

Lecture 6.6 - Case studies from religion: transmission of revelation7:38

Meet the Instructors

Dr Orestis Palermos
Research Explorer
School of Philosophy
Dr Mark Harris
Senior Lecturer in Science and Religion
School of Divinity
Professor Duncan Pritchard
Professor of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Dr J Adam Carter
Researcher
Epistemology - Philosphy
Dr Mog Stapleton

Turn now from miracles to the topic of

Revelation--of God's speaking directly to humans and telling them what's good,

what's right, how they should live, and so on.

Most religious traditions have a kind of revelation story about them.

So for instance we can see here,

Moses bringing the commandments down from Mt.

Sinai, we can see Mohammed receiving the words of Gabriel in the cave,

we can see Joseph Smith receiving the revelation from the angel Moroni,

we can see Vashistha,

the Hindu sage, and we can see L. Ron Hubbard's book Dianetics.

Each of these is treated by some individuals as a source of revelation,

but not all revelations are recognized by every religion,

and even within a particular religion

some alleged revelations are rejected by some groups.

So for instance in the center here,

we see the first page of the Gospel of Thomas,

which came from the Nag Hammadi Codex number two which was recently discovered in Egypt.

This is an alleged fifth gospel of

the Christian New Testament which both Protestants and Catholics tend to reject.

So when it comes to revelation it's not just a matter of there being, some revelation.

Every religious tradition wants to include all and

only the relevant revelations that come with its tradition,

and that means that even between for instance Protestants and

Catholics the recognized canon differs.

The Catholic Church recognizes seven books of the Old Testament along with

additional verses in two other books as part of the canon that the Protestants reject.

These include for instance the books of the Maccabees.

So even within the Christian tradition there is

disagreement about what counts as revelation and what doesn't.

That means that we need some way of tracing back the texts that we have now to

their original source and distinguishing

reliable and trustworthy sources from sources that are unreliable or untrustworthy.

And that also means that unless we can track the conduits carefully,

we won't even be able to identify the sources in the first place.

This was a topic not just in the Christian tradition but also in Islam,

where the sayings of the Prophet known as Hadith were a very important topic.

Hadith, were meant to be the first person report of things that Mohammed

said and that means that in order to authenticate a Hadith as legitimate,

one had to be able to trace from oneself to the person who told one about a Hadith,

all the way back through a reliable chain of testimony to one of Mohammad's companions.

And a whole tradition of Hadith scholarship,

much of which included women conduits in North Africa,

sprang up in the centuries after Muhammad's death.

Avicenna, arguably the most important philosopher of the Islamic world,

created what might be

the first social epistemology partially in response to Hadith scholarship.

He was upset that Hadith scholarship tended to become too quantitative,

in other words that as long as three sources could

be identified for a given Hadith then it was treated as authenticated.

And he said that just counting the number of conduits is not adequate.

In addition, we need to know about

the trustworthiness of the conduits and of the sources in themselves.

In other words, Avicenna said that in order to accept testimony third,

fourth, or fifth hand,

we need some kind of account of the intellectual virtues and

potentially intellectual vices of

the other nodes in the network of the source and of the conduits.

Avicenna had very interesting social epistemology that is

similar to certain epistemologies that we have in contemporary analytic philosophy.

He argued that knowledge always depends on some kind of second order doxastic state,

which means in other words that when you believe the truth,

that on its own doesn't count as knowledge,

you also need to believe correctly that you're believing the truth.

So you need to have a second order belief about your first order belief.

And he distinguished various sources as

justifying different levels of confidence in the second order belief.

He thought for instance that introspection was highly

reliable and that if you arrive at a first order belief through introspection,

then your second order belief about it might count as

certitude or as a strong kind of knowledge.

He distinguished from this various other sources that are less reliable,

including intuition where he thought that if you have

an intuition perhaps you can have a second order belief in it.

But it should be less strong than the one based on introspection.

And then even less confident beliefs should come

from experience and from chains of testimony,

and we should in general be not confident at

all in our beliefs based on mere common opinion or authority,

which in his tradition is known as Taqlid.

An alternative to focusing on conduits for revelation has to do with focusing on sources.

For instance, early Buddhists who were criticizing Hindu traditions

claimed that various sages were ignorant of the true path to union with Brahma,

and that because the original sources of alleged revelation were ignorant,

in other words because original sources lacked the required epistemic virtues,

the revelation itself could be disregarded.

By contrast, Hindu logicians who opposed

this argument held that the Buddha too was fallible because he was human,

and that the only trustworthy source is God,

who is infallible and morally virtuous.

So they held a very strong position that the ultimate source of revelation

and testimony about Revelation must not

just be intellectually or epistemically virtuous in some way,

but must be outright infallible.

That's a very strong requirement that we don't tend

to expect about other people, of course.

So what this suggests is that to responsibly believe in either miracles or revelation,

one needs to count on a chain that includes an intellectually virtuous--perhaps even

infallible source--and intellectually virtuous conduit or multiple conduits,

and intellectually virtuous receiver,

in other words one's self.

And that means that if any of these links in the chain is broken we

should disbelieve in reports about miracles or revelation.

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