Pleading the Truth?

Religion and the Varieties of Truth Experience

In a recent Substack post by

Yehuda Mishenichnas

that grew, in part, out of a series of exchanges I and others had with him, I’ve been accused of “special pleading” because I suggest that a different standard should be applied to the truth of religion than, say the truth of technology.¹

In truth, I had to look up “special pleading,” because in some 40 years plus of writing argument in the Humanities, I’ve never come across that term. Apparently, it’s a logical fallacy in which a person “pleads” for “special” considerations that would excuse him from a universally accepted set of standards. A (ridiculous) example would be the child who, after murdering his parents, pleads that the court should go easy on him because he’s an orphan.

Special Pleading.

My form of “special pleading” goes something like this, according to the author. If somebody gave the wrong formula for the composition of water, I would correct them, but if they assert the existence of God who may (or simply does) not exist, I would not correct them because, I plead, belief in God is useful in some way, regardless of whether it is true. My special pleading, the author believes is an error in logic.

I suspect the author is using a tool he’s borrowed from Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, one that he’s been assured can skewer the defenders of religion. But let’s consider this “logical flaw” for a moment. Because it is not on the same level as, say, an Ad Hominem attack, which I discuss myself in a post on argument. My “special pleading” is not “off topic.” It is, in fact, simply requiring that the audience consider a broarder, relevant view.

Special pleading is not always an error of judgment or argument. Sometimes special pleading is justified.

For example, if I have a badly injured person in my car and need to rush them to the hospital, I may discreetly run a red light or two. Let’s say I do that safely being sure to look in every direction. The traffic cameras record my traffic infraction and issue me a ticket.

Would it not be reasonable to plead to the judge that, though I broke the law, I had a good reason for doing so, and the law is not more important in this case than saving a life?

Or let us say, we have a person facing imminent death, and they believe in an afterlife and draw solace from that. Why should I disabuse him of that idea even if it is false? Wouldn’t that go against the greater good of easing his fear and anxiety? (And are we not all facing imminent death?)

What is Truth?²

The assertion of truth, simply for the sake of truth, as opposed to the assertion of truth for an end that is good is itself a practice that is neither true nor untrue. It simply reflects one possible hierarchy of values.

If I view truth as a means to an end rather than an inherent good, it is perfectly logical and consistent—and smart—to choose when to hold things to a truth standard and when not to.

I may decide that it’s for the greatest good that all things technological should conform with objectively verifiable truth because otherwise technology fails us, planes crash, lights go out, my ukulele strings break etc.

But I may also decide that when it comes to complex human relations, there are times when truth is not the greatest value. Telling a Nazi the truth about a Jew hiding in the attic is the most obvious example of the truth that lacks of value in itself. But there are many less extreme ones.

It’s also true that a lot of disciplines present themselves as equivalent to technological science with its factual basis, when they are in fact, based on fallible theories and hypotheses. Economics, sociology,³ psychology, all present themselves as scientific when, in fact, their truth claims are dubious compared to the far more testable technological claims of science. And yet, there is no question of here of “special pleading.” Wise people simply understand the truth claims of these disciplines are not the same as the truth claims of, say, a plumber about my stopped-up sink.

And even hard sciences, when they investigate the distant past cannot claim the same level of truth as the sort of science that produces a computer. They have limited ways of testing their theories, no form of direct observation, and as a result, their theories often change, so that what was once considered ridiculous, e.g. the Big Bang, can be accepted as established science and yet could well be repudiated at some point in the future.

So we tolerate a lot of what you might call, fuzzy truth, truth that can’t meet the standards of technological science. And even technological science can be controversial as for example, you see in all the controversies over the Covid virus and its treatment and prevention.

So the realm of clear unambiguous truth is actually fairly narrow. And we don’t apply that standard to a wide range of social phenomenon.

A Space for God

And there are also some truths that are simply beyond human understanding. There’s no rational way to account for a universe that always existed. Because everything as far as we know has a cause. And yet, if we assert a first cause, we must ask what caused that and how it can be an exception to the rule? The fact of our existence is a puzzle that neither science nor logic can solve.⁴

And that opens a space for the existence of something that runs counter to our understanding of cause-and-effect and of the universal laws of physics. And that opens a space for God.⁵

Moreover, if we take an evolutionary approach, then we may well make a scientific argument that religion serves a vital evolutionary role. How else to explain its near universality? It may well be that the human brain is designed with a proclivity towards religion and that religion serves a purpose in the propagation and survival of the species.

One of those purposes, for example, is that religion advocates for the propagation and survival of the species whereas without religion, one could easily make an argument against survival and such arguments have been made and continue to be made by irreligious.⁶

Though one can point to times and places when religion seems to have had a destructive effect, one can do the same with the absence of religion. And there certainly is an argument to be made that religion has a mitigating effect on human aggression.

While the anti-religious may point to evangelical opposition to abortion as some sort of moral outrage,⁷ they tend to ignore the moments of human history when religion stood on the side of empathy and humanity—for example, the religious opposition to slavery in the United States and all the work that organizations such as Catholic charities continue to do.

The anti-religious also tend to ignore the religious roots of liberal morality, seeing such morality as natural human nature, when it may be anything but. Certainly there are some rational materialist arguments that could be made for everything from capital punishment to genocide to ethnic cleansing to social Darwinism.

A world based solely on demonstrable truth could easily justify all sorts of atrocities as was done, for example in Soviet Russia and communist China.

The religious world, of course, is not perfect. And there are deleterious side effects of the religious point of view. It may cause people to be closed minded. It may cause them to limit freedoms in ways that inflict suffering.

But the secular world also is not perfect, and there are also deleterious side effects to the sort of freedom that liberalism advocates. The existence of sex trafficking, pornography, mental health contagion, deaths of despair from drug use, alcoholism, and suicide, the trauma of divorce, exploitation of the weak and vulnerable. And even vulnerability to truly pathological religions and cults.

The list of dystopian outcomes could go on and on.

The House of Meaning

For me and many others, religion has been a source of positivity and helped us to lead a more meaningful life, or at least one that feels meaningful in comparison to the alternatives. And in my case, I’ve tried the alternatives, so I speak from experience, not from theory.

And, to clarify, although I’ve characterized my religion as one of Orthopraxy, it would be wrong for me to claim I don’t believe or even am agnostic. I have what you might call an uncertain belief or an inclination to believe or the feeling of belief plagued by doubt, much of which is attributable to the influence of atheistic culture discourses to which I’ve been exposed and in which I have swum. I feel like God is very much present in my life in ways that I see almost every single day, and I try to live that way.⁸

As for the, “truth tellers” such as Yehuda Mishenichnas, they do, despite their protests to the contrary, have a responsibility to think about the alternatives to the so-called untruths they are tearing down.

If you tear down my house because it doesn’t conform to some theoretical truth you hold dear, you had better have a place for me to live or I certainly will oppose you. If you tell me to give up a beautiful and meaningful lifestyle simply for the sake of “truth” and offer nothing in return but the uncertain satisfaction of truth, I’m going to oppose you. If you tear down the fabric of culture that has enabled the very sort of truth telling of which you are so enamored, you had better have a real alternative.

In the end, truth in its narrow sense is not an absolute value. It is a means to an end. It is a tool. And we use tools selectively. A person who goes around seeing everything as a nail to be hammered is misusing the hammer. A person who takes it upon himself to dismantle falsehoods without concern for the outcome, is misusing the tool of truth.

My inclination on this topic is to “post and ghost.” I’ve made my statement and will try to avoid the endless debate to which this topic is prone. I’m hoping that any further comments I make will simply be to clarify what is unclear or correct what is (literally) incorrect. Wish me luck. . . .

1. I would also, by the way, maintain there is a different standard of truth for art, stories, which are not, obviously, unrelated to religion, but that is for another time.

2. "What is truth? Is truth unchanging law?” asks Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar. “We both have truths? Aren’t mine the same as yours?” I don’t mean to echo this famous bad guy, but “what is truth” is, indeed, a complex question once you get beyond what I would maintain are obvious truths, such as that I exist and you exist and the ground is solid beneath us, and Buffy is the greatest network TV show of all time.

3. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, there’s a recurrent fantasy that sociology can predict the future and solve all human problems . But that faith in social science has proven unfounded.

4. And how much less so can these things solve the riddle of what we are to do with our existence. That question is entirely in the realm of speculative philosophy and art, to which we cannot apply the same truth standards as we do to mathematical equations.

5. Does it prove God’s existence? Certainly not. But it gives us permission to believe, which is all we really need.

6. One that I frequently reference is Thomas Ligotti’s atheistic argument against procreation in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but there are countless of pop culture versions of this argument.

7. Though why it should be construed as such is a moral argument that holds little “scientific” backing. Without religion, one can only make legalistic arguments, but human laws are subject to change at the whim of governments and judiciary and circumstances.

8. Including today when something borderline miraculous occurred—more on that if it pans out.