Agreement, Disagreement, and the Quest for a Coherent Worldview (Free)
Chapter 4 of The Grand Coherence
This post is chapter 4 of my book The Grand Coherence. For more links, see here. To listen to this chapter, stream or download from here.
We saw in chapter 2 how Bayesian rationality explains our easy agreement about lots of common sense knowledge. But one historical claim, the resurrection of Jesus, is a striking exception to this pattern of agreement. We saw in chapter 3 how diametrically opposed conclusions about the resurrection of Jesus can be logically traced to certain prior beliefs that people bring to the evidence. The question therefore comes back with more urgency: Where do Bayesian priors come from? That is almost the same as asking: where do people’s worldviews come from?
I think the sources of worldviews can be summed up in four overlapping categories: childhood, culture, coherence, and intuition. Coherence is the principal business of this chapter, and intuition, of chapter 6. But first, a few words on childhood and culture.
Concerning childhood, some of our biases, our propensities to believe one thing rather than another, were learned in childhood, so long ago that they may be unconscious. We can’t trace all our beliefs to their origins because of a mysterious phenomenon sometimes called “the amnesia of childhood.” We’ve long since forgotten the formation of our first beliefs, along with everything else that happened when we were babies or very young children. It’s not simply the lapse of time, since adults’ memories can go back for decades, while children are as unable as adults to remember when they learned that objects persist when not visible, things fall when dropped, we can move our hands and feet, Mama loves you, water ripples and splashes, pillows are soft, and so forth. Maybe we didn’t learn some things at all, but just know them by instinct. How could we tell? The origin of our first beliefs is well hidden behind the curtain of the amnesia of childhood.
As for culture, we saw in chapter 2 how we can learn from others, and this gives rise to what we might call cultures, meaning groups that communicate frequently and to some extent trust each other, so that they to some extent share a collective worldview. Individuals can learn some things on their own, but knowledge is usually a social phenomenon, and the vast majority of what we know, we learn from other people. This process starts in infancy, and penetrates so deeply into our minds that even our most private thoughts are usually expressed in the language we learned from society. For children, civilized societies organize education in order to make the process of transferring knowledge to the young more intentional and efficient, and so crucial is education to the acquisition of knowledge that “uneducated” is used almost as a synonym for “ignorant.” Education in the West does not tend to produce cookie-cutter conformism, and adults end up believing a wide variety of different things, but our beliefs, like our clothes, were overwhelmingly learned from others, manufactured and purchased, so to speak, not homespun. In the modern West at least as much as in any primitive society, the vast majority of what people believe, they learned from others, and in general, to think for oneself thoroughly and exclusively is at least as impractical as walking off naked into the woods to live on berries and acorns.
The resurrection of Jesus is not an artifact of culture in this sense, and Westerners are not especially culturally predisposed to believe in it. In some ways, Westerners are actually especially predisposed to doubt the resurrection, because they tend to have a particularly strong belief in natural laws. But that people don’t usually rise from the dead, and that people don’t usually engage in spontaneous lying conspiracies with nothing to gain by it, are obvious to people of all cultures. The resurrection of Jesus presents a similar challenge from every cultural perspective, and pastors and missionaries find easy converts and stubborn unbelievers in every culture.
Childhood and culture are more or less unchosen, but my third determinant of worldviews, the quest for coherence, has more to do with individual effort and choice. We all try to be consistent, though some try much harder than others. We compare our beliefs one with another, see if they agree. This goes on involuntarily in our minds to a limited extent, but for some, and especially for philosophers, it is also a deliberate pursuit. Sometimes the generalizations we make based on experience contradict each other in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. But logic must hold, and contradictory beliefs can’t both be true. So when we discover inconsistencies, we must fix them somehow. Much of the content of our worldviews arises from this effort to compare and reconcile and harmonize overlapping generalizations in pursuit of consistency.
A homely example will illustrate.
Imagine a little girl who thinks that teachers are mean and grandmothers are nice. She also knows that some of her women teachers have grandchildren. Do you see the problem? At first, she doesn’t.
Then one day, she realizes, with a start of surprise, that her beliefs can’t all be right. If some teachers are grandmothers, it cannot be the case that all teachers are mean and all grandmothers are nice. Some people are both teachers and grandmothers. From her simple perspective, they’re either nice or mean. If they’re nice, not all teachers are mean. If they’re mean, not all grandmothers are nice.
This little girl has discovered that she is inconsistent. What should she do? What will she do?
We probably feel she should change her mind somehow to make her beliefs consistent. And she probably will. She may not even be able to help it. Then again, she might forget, falling back into her old beliefs and forgetting their inconsistency. Sometimes people are lazy-minded like that, and believe in inconsistent things through a kind of mental inertia.
If she does try to figure it out, a lot of new guesses could be framed. She might reject one belief or both, doubting that grandmothers are nice or teachers are mean. Or she might carve out ad hoc exceptions to save her belief system. Whatever candidate solutions she comes up with, she’ll need to settle somehow what probabilities to attach to their being true. Evidence can help, but Bayesian priors are also needed. To guess how likely different possibilities are to be true, she’ll probably look for analogies, which is a way of drawing on her broader worldview to help her solve a particular salient question.
If all goes well, she’ll try to imagine herself in the teachers’ shoes. What’s it like to have a job, and responsibilities? What’s it like to manage a crowd? What’s it like to get interrupted while explaining something difficult and important? If she thinks along those lines, she might hit on the real reason why teachers are mean, at least from the perspective of a little girl inclined to fidget in class, and why grandmothers are nice. Teachers have to maintain order in a classroom, so they need to be pretty intolerant of noise and distractions that would be innocuous at home. Grandmothers, by contrast, usually have few disciplinary responsibilities, so they can indulge their affectionate impulses. This solution represents a big step up in nuance and subtlety and wisdom. If the little girl gets that far, she’ll be a wiser and better and happier little girl. She would still love to get invitations to Grandma’s house, but she would also behave well in class, not out of fear, but out of sympathy for a teacher doing a hard job. Such are sometimes the rewards for the successful attainment of a more coherent worldview.
By contrast, just following the evidence doesn’t do much to protect you from being inconsistent. That teachers are mean and grandmothers are nice are things the little girls doubtless knew, in a sense, by experience, from many scoldings, and many fresh baked cookies. But she was using the wrong generalizations to interpret her experience, and that happens to us all the time. Bayesian updating can lead you into inconsistencies, if you’re using the wrong generalizations as candidates for Bayesian confirmation. So it’s important, in addition to Bayesian rationalism, to engage in critical reflection. You should audit your beliefs for consistency, and then adjust, not just the confidence you invest in different theories, but the content of your theories themselves, the set of generalizations you treat as candidates for belief, in response to discovered inconsistency. Then you can test your new theories against old and new data.
In my undergraduate epistemology class, I learned about how the problem of justifying beliefs had sparked a long-running debate been two schools of thought called “foundationalists” and “coherentists.” The problem that both schools of thought were trying to solve is that the justification of beliefs tends to become an “infinite regress,” that is, an infinite series of follow-up questions that one can never put a stop to. If I believe that A, and you ask why, I might say, because B and C, but you can ask why on those, and if I answer, you can ask why on the reasons again, and so on, forever. The “foundationalists,” such as I was then, as was Descartes (1596-1650) in his day, held that some beliefs are “foundational,” just indubitably certain with no need for justification, and chains of justification should end in such beliefs. “Coherentists,” by contrast, if I understood about them, held that chains of justification could end by circling back to where they began, and somehow this avoids being the fallacy of circular reasoning if only the chain is long enough, the belief system sufficiently comprehensive and coherent. That seemed silly.
Looking back, though, on that debate in light of this study of the quest for a coherent worldview, coherentism has a certain appeal. While I don’t deny that there are foundational beliefs, such as the famous “I think, therefore I am” of Descartes, it’s not clear that there are very many of them, or that much knowledge can be justified from them. The quest for coherence is a more important aspect of our thoughts, and a more important contributor to the truth of our worldviews. But to say that any comprehensive, coherent worldview is true or justified, won’t do. Evidence must have its say. But evidence doesn’t just come in at the bottom, supplying foundational beliefs. It might come in at many different points in a belief system, confirming or challenging our beliefs. If we’re forced to abandon a belief by contrary evidence, that’s likely to damage the coherence of our worldviews, though we may not recognize it right away. Then we have to find ways to repair our worldviews, and in the process there may be far-reaching ripple effects, as beliefs not obviously related to the surprising evidence turn out to be implicated in generalizations on whose truth the surprising evidence casts doubt.
It seems clear that this quest for a coherent worldview is difficult. What techniques might enable individuals and cultures to be more successful in it? Habits of mind and conversation vary greatly, and some are much more conducive than others to the achievement of coherence. And at this point, we have an opportunity to better understand a feature of the Church that many find off-putting.
A basic distinction among conversations is agreement vs. disagreement. Sometimes a conversation is a succession of statements that support and build on each other. Each speaker believes the statements of the other and assumes that he is believed in turn. In other cases, speakers disagree, and the objective of the conversation is to “win the argument.” In many cultures and social contexts, disagreement is taboo in varying degrees, and speakers are expected to express agreement. Disagreement tends to be unpleasant and give offense.
But the West, ancient and modern, has been distinctive in nothing more than in its love of disagreement and debate, and its conviction that “critical thinking” is the high road to truth. Two great characteristic Western practices, philosophy and democracy, exemplify this Western tendency to permit, encourage, honor and institutionalize disagreement.
In the city-states of the Greek peninsula, as they slowly come into the light of recorded history sometime in the first half of the first millennium BC, there was already great freedom of speech. It was needed, probably, for self-government amidst endemic warfare, in a mountainous terrain that favored very small polities. But whatever the reason, free speech and debate trained the Greeks to use words, explore concepts, and think critically in a way that no one had ever done before. It culminated in Athens, the world’s first democracy, in the 5th century BC, when the Greek intellect reached a kind of zenith. There, as we have seen, Socrates (470-399 BC) philosophized, questioning everyone and exposing their incoherence, and finally dying as a martyr to doubt and becoming a secular patron saint of free inquiry. Socrates supplied the model of inquiry for his disciple Plato (maybe 428-348 BC) in particular, who split himself into many personalities in order to pursue truth through writing dialogues. The West was born in a crucible of debate and argument.
It was typical of philosophers, as was mentioned before, to accept nothing on authority, to question everything, and to refine endlessly the art of critical thinking, leaving no assumption unchallenged and no stone unturned in the search for truth. Philosophy waned in the Roman Empire, though some philosophers found in the Christian Church the fulfillment of philosophy, the answer to all their questions. At any rate the societal collapse and scarcity of literacy in the Dark Ages cut the conversation short. Philosophy re-emerged in medieval universities, but in attenuated form, for it did not question everything as in ancient times, but deferred to the authority of the Church. Modern philosophy was born with Descartes, with all the ancient zeal to question everything.
Nowadays, not many people call themselves philosophers, yet most of the classic disciplines taught in the universities began as branches of philosophy. The typical pattern is that philosophers wander freely, asking questions, following the winds of inquiry wherever they blow, but sometimes they find some answers, and settle down to refine them, and thereby found a discipline. Thus Adam Smith (1723-1790) began as a moral philosopher, but honed a way of thinking that became economics and made Smith the first economist. In the same manner, the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) founded sociology, while natural sciences like physics and biology can trace their roots to Aristotle (384-322 BC). As these disciplines develop, they become more specialized, and usually a little more dogmatic, losing some of the spirit of philosophy. But they remember their debt to it and respect it, which is why there is nothing that the college-educated intelligentsia of today approves of so uncritically as critical thinking.
Democracy, too, was born in ancient times, lost in the Middle Ages, and re-emerged in modern times, and today is nearly universal in the West, where it is regarded almost as the touchstone of governmental legitimacy. It is a form of government that relies on endless disagreement and debate to supply the party competition that is needed in order to conduct elections in which voters have choices. Of none of their institutions are Westerners, especially Americans, so eager to extol and insist on the virtues as democracy. In democracy, anyone may challenge authority, and democratic constitutions rely on people to do so, in order to hold rulers accountable, and ensure that if a large majority disapproves of the government, they have options for replacing it at the next election. Thus injustice is checked and revolution prevented. Government takes the form of a never-ending debate.
But the Church is not an academic seminar and not a democracy, and that, I think, is why some Westerners can’t take it seriously. They are loyal to the Western tradition of questioning authority, and they have a deep, inarticulate conviction that critical thinking is the path of truth, and that an honest man has a duty to live his life as an endless debate.
The Church is an alien element in the West in one obvious way, for its Bible is a document of the ancient Middle East, full of its landscapes and peoples and history and thought-ways. More importantly, it is alien in that it is a community of agreement, where people are expected to defer to old doctrines and old explanations and old mysteries, where questions are sometimes tolerated but doubts are profoundly unwelcome, an island of dogma in a sea of critical thinking. We in the West, some feel, know better than to let our minds submit like that. We insist on the right, indeed on the duty, to disagree, and we trust no doctrine further than is warranted by its being continually tested in the arena of debate.
So a defense is needed of Christians’ right to agree with each other.
Even if the road to truth were above all paved with disagreement and debate, the destination can’t be like that. Inquiry must be able to arrive at some grand coherence of the truth. Inquiry is no more an end in itself than thirst, and inquiry ought, in the end, to be satisfied with truth as thirst is with water. When truth is gained by all, disagreement ceases.
And anyway, is debate really so conducive to the acquisition of truth?
Too much agreement has its dangers, to be sure. When two people agree, it’s often a sign of trouble. One may be flattering the other for some advantage. Both may be flattering each other, forming a mutual admiration society, full of pride and exclusiveness. Two may agree in hating a third, and each hate him much more because of the other’s encouragement. They may be dealing in platitudes so vague that they don’t have enough meaning to collide in contradiction with anything, even as they are evading important duties and urgent questions. People often need to be challenged to stay healthy, to encounter some disagreement to provoke them to clarify and refine their opinions. The West has some very good reasons for its love of debate, disagreement, and critical thinking.
And yet disagreement, too, has its dangers, its characteristic temptations to betray the truth. It tends to create an aristocracy of the articulate, and the articulate have their interests and their biases. It tends to steamroller subtle introspective truths. It can at times articulate too many distinctions, and miss larger, ineffable unities. These risks are least problematic with respect to things that are— forgive the jargon but this is important— intersubjectively observable, i.e., things many people can see in the same way, such as leaves and rocks and skies and birds and physical nature generally, but not thoughts and moods and feelings. This is because disagreements about intersubjectively observable things can be settled by experiments and facts, which limits how intractable and destructive they can become, how much they can corrupt minds through partisan passions and manipulative rhetoric. And so the secular West, with its passion for critical thinking, has become unusually wise about physical nature, but not so much about the ways of the human mind and heart and spirit.
The Church, by contrast, maintains its unique wisdom in spiritual matters by not particularly encouraging believers to doubt or criticize its own doctrines. It can’t let the sanctuary become an arena of debate, for in a debate, the shy fall silent, but the Church wants to hear the wisdom of the meek as well as the cleverness of the eloquent. It thinks it has the most important truths already, and the purpose of inquiry should be to better understand those great truths, or perhaps to learn about lesser matters on which doctrine has not ruled. If inquiry of the kind that doubts everything breaks out in the heart of the Church, it can at best lead back to it by a long and difficult road, and is likely to lead out of truth into incorrigible error. The Church will debate at need, but it prefers a freely given faith. In this respect, the Church follows the example of Jesus, who was willing to debate with hostile scribes and Pharisees, and who took time patiently to instruct the friendly but skeptical Nicodemus, but who approved most warmly of those who believed in Him swiftly and wholeheartedly, without laborious persuasion.
That the Church is a community of agreement explains some features of the Church that are often misunderstood.
Almost all Christians today understand that the violent persecution of heretics by medieval inquisitors was desperately wicked and unChristian. Faith must be free. But modernity objects not so much to the persecution of heretics as to the concept of heresy. It often speaks as if even the peaceful expulsion of heretics were intolerably intolerant. Why shouldn’t churches permit dissent and disagreement as freely as academic seminar rooms do (at least in theory)? But academics are trained to hold their own in a debate, and they go to the seminar expecting to hear views they disagree with. People go to church expecting to agree with everything they hear. They are not on their guard. And many churchgoers are unsophisticated, intellectually untrained people who couldn’t doubt or debate false doctrines even if they were on high alert. So if error penetrates the sanctuary, it can propagate dangerously fast and become terribly deep and stubborn, alienating people from the truth and dividing the Christian community. That’s why the Church has often responded with great energy and intolerance to what seem to outsiders like arcane disagreements over fine points.
Even more importantly, the peculiar status of the Bible in Christian churches must be understood in light of their character as communities of agreement. Christians sometimes say that the Bible is inerrant, in the sense of being free of errors. But it isn’t. It contains many errors, such as the speeches of Job’s friends when they come to accuse him of sin. Inerrancy is a desideratum fit only for multiplication tables and train schedules, texts full of mere facts where all words mean in the same simple way. The Bible, by contrast, is divinely wise, and it fits infinite wisdom into a finite text by being a rich tapestry of genres and perspectives that mean in different ways and are often in tension with each other. “Proof texting,” the silly practice of taking random biblical phrases out of context to settle arguments, is a disease of the ignorant.
And yet it’s true that Christians never quote the Bible to disagree with it. And when the Bible is quoted in church, churchgoers expect to receive the passage as true. The Bible must be quoted carefully to warrant such treatment. Above all, the use and interpretation of the Bible must be guided by Church traditions. Wise Christians use the Bible in ways that strengthen the church as a community of agreement in possession of great and joyous truth, reaffirming and elucidating the grand coherence of Christianity. That the Bible lends itself so well to such use reflects its peculiar divine origins as the Word of God, but Christians who try to use the Bible like a train schedule, a compilation of facts that saves them the trouble of thinking for themselves, go far astray. The Bible is not a book that saves anyone the trouble of thinking. On the contrary, it is the most thought provoking book in the world.
For the Christian Church has its own manner of critical thinking, which overlaps that of Western philosophy, but has a different emphasis. The philosopher criticizes theories about the world, and looks with cheerful curiosity into the natures of things. But the Christian criticizes himself, and looks with scrupulous dread into his own conduct and motives and feelings, to see how he has sinned and fallen short and offended God. Christians have certainly been prone to the perils of too much agreement, of complacency and pride. Christian churches have often been the friends of oppressive rulers, and acquiesced in unjust institutions. But that only happens when Christians are lax in their Christianity. Always the Bible lies in wait, ready to shatter all complacency, to challenge the powerful with ideals so perfect that all fall short, and threaten sinners in high places with the torments of Hell. And so Christendom has ever been haunted by the challenge of the faith, driven on to evolutions and revolutions towards freedom and justice and mercy, as Christian sovereigns and subjects alike seek to save their souls. Christianity urges each Christian believer to disagree, not with Christianity or other Christians, but with his own conduct and feeling and thought, inasmuch as it betrays the sublime and perfect standard which Christianity teaches.
To sum up this chapter, people ought to have a coherent worldview, free of inconsistencies and self-contradictions. It’s a matter of basic honesty at least to try to do this. Someone who is lazily indifferent to his own inconsistency, ready to say now one thing and now another on the same question as fancy or interest dictates, doesn’t deserve for his opinions to be taken seriously. And yet people have great difficulty achieving such coherence on their own. Unless they are great geniuses, they need the help of some culture or school of thought to harmonize their beliefs into a coherent system. In the West today, and indeed throughout the world to some extent since the Western intellect has long been so dominant worldwide, there are two belief systems on offer that make serious bids for coherence, comprehensiveness, and truth: Christianity of an orthodox and traditionalist sort; and scientific materialism, the reductionist worldview that explains everything that exists scientifically, in terms of matter and energy governed by natural laws. The rest of the book will focus on these two candidates for grand coherence, showing why scientific materialism fails, and why Christianity succeeds.
But most people, as far as I can tell, subscribe to neither worldview. Instead, they have a mix-and-match personal worldview composed of ideas they picked up at random that happened to appeal to them. My casual impression that most people, aside from orthodox Christians and austere scientific materialists, are rather muddle-headed and full of irresponsible, groundless opinions that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, is surely not worth much. It would take much labor by a modern-day Socrates to interrogate people and expose their inconsistencies with questions that lead them into open self-contradiction. And yet I’ve seen recent polls that make the point rather efficiently. Some recent polls show that three-fourths of Americans believe in God, and that the Bible is the Word of God. Other polls show that three-fifths of Americans believe that premarital sex isn’t wrong at all. It follows mathematically that at least one-third or so of Americans hold both of these beliefs. And since the Bible clearly, consistently, and emphatically condemns premarital sex, these Americans are inconsistent. I think this is only the tip of the inconsistency iceberg. At any rate, it suffices to prove that inconsistency is a problem.
The resurrection of Jesus helps to clarify the difference. It happened, or it didn’t. It’s a physical fact, or not. There is no ambiguity about what it means. If it happened, then scientific materialism is wrong. If it didn’t happen, then Christianity is wrong. So there’s no use treating both Christianity and scientific materialism as having some intellectual authority and trying to find a compromise. One of them at most is true. Of course, Christians can learn from science, and scientific materialists can like Jesus’s ethics, but that doesn't change the fact that these are irreconcilable worldviews that see the ultimate nature of things completely differently. You can’t have one foot in both. You have to choose between them, or perhaps try to reject them both and be a genuine freethinker, discerning everything for yourself. But you’ll probably have difficulty achieving a coherent worldview if you try to go it alone like that.
It's difficult to organize a book. I've set myself three tasks in this book: first, to craft a workable theory of knowledge; second, to apply it to scientific materialism and show why it fails; and third, to put Christianity to the same test and show why it succeeds. But while reading is a linear process, left to right, line after line, page after page, ideas are connected in more complicated ways, forcing an author like me to skip and double back. Instead of closing the epistemological stage of the argument before venturing into the scientific, we'll have to begin our inquiry into the history of science before we can complete our theory of knowledge. And so chapters 5 and 6 represent a kind of overlap between the first, epistemological phase of the argument, and the second, scientific phase.
One way to put it is that the epistemological ship we've been building needs to be tested, in chapter 5, on a pilot voyage through the early history of modern science. We'll learn a good deal on the voyage, but we'll also find out why the vessel is not yet seaworthy. Then, in chapter 6, we'll haul the ship back into port for repairs and upgrades, after which our apologetic voyage can begin in earnest.