Stanely Fish, Truth, and Worldview Apologetics

To recap from yesterday: Stanley Fish, riffing on Barbara Hernstein Smith's new book on science/religion conflicts, highlights a recurrent theme of his thought--the surprising irrelevance of Absolute Truth to human life and thought. This is an argument he's made before (see "Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter." Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 389-416. Print.), but it's not one he's applied to the science/religion theatre of the culture wars.

I'm fascinated by Fish's arguments because I see them as posing an intriguing challenge to evangelical worldview analysis. As I've written about before, worldview analysis is a somewhat new (or at least resurgent) trend in some corners of evangelical thought. Drawing loosely on 1930s-style presuppositionalist apologetics, worldview evangelists posit that human beings move through the world with the help of worldviews, founding philosophies that on conscious and unconscious levels shape values, actions, assumptions, and reactions. Within worldview evangelism, Christians (a particular variety of Protestant Christian, at least) live within the "Biblical Christian" worldview. This worldview competes with other philosophies, be they alternative religions (e.g., the Hindu worldview, the Islamic worldview) or secular belief systems (e.g., naturalist materialism, marxism, postmodernism).

For worldview evangelists, of course, only the Christian worldview enjoys epistemic validity. It is True in a way that other worldviews are not. The task of the Christian, according to the worldview approach, involves 1) becoming conversant with the Christian worldview, learning to live it out more fully; 2) learning about competing worldviews, including how and why they are untrue; and 3) becoming adept at engaging people living within other worldviews, hopefully guiding them to a realization of the inferiority of their native worldviews relative to Christianity.

Fish--by no means a worldview analyst--presents a potent challenge to worldview analysts' assumptions. On one level, he is what most worldview evangelicals would call (or dismiss) as postmodern. That is, Fish does not (at least in his public writings) endorse the idea of Grand Truths that transcend particular times and places. One can believe in them with all one's heart. One can kill for them, die for them, and/or base one's whole life's work (artistic, political, philosophical, religious, what have you) on them. But what one cannot do is demonstrate once and for all that such Grand Truths really are Grand Truths. (Fish clarifies that he is actually referring to grand, philosophical truths and not to specific, mundane facts like "the sky is blue"). The point is that humans lack access to some Unambiguous Guarantor of Truth whose intervention and judgment would convince any and everyone of the truthiness of the Truth.

Worldview analysists tend to simplify such postmodernist beliefs: "Postmoderns don't believe in truth at all." The core of the worldview version of Biblical Christianity, see, is that Truth does exist, it comes from God, and is revealed more or less clearly and completely in the Bible. Other belief systems are flawed ultimately to the extent that they depart from, modify, or deny altogether Biblical Christianity's foundational truth.

Postmodernity, then, is especially scandalous, claiming not only that the Biblical Christian lacks the Ultimate Validity it claims, but that no worldview has such Ultimate Validity. Why? Because either such Ultimate Validity doesn't exist, or (at least) humans lack the ability to access the core of Transcendent Truth in an unmediated way.

Worldview evangelism departs at this point from other forms of Christian outreach and apologetics by refusing to go down the obvious avenue of direct engagement. Faced with a challenge like "I don't believe in Ultimate Truths" (or perhaps "Moral Absolutes"), worldview evangelists do not say "Well, they exist, whether you believe them or not!" Rather, worldview tactics train evangelists to ask questions, to probe the unbeliever's unbelief, catching them finally in a logical contradiction. The favorite for postmoderns? "Isn't the claim that there's no Ultimate Truth itself an Ultimate Truth?"

That's clever enough as it goes, but Fish's arguments are more radical than "there's no truth." At the end of the day, Fish contends, it really doesn't matter whether you believe, deep down, in Absolute Truth or in non-absolute, contingent little-t truths. Why? Because humans don't move through life double-checking every action, reaction, or thought for its conformity to some grand philosophy or worldview. Instead (I quote from Fish, who in turn is quoting Smith), "the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting" (qtd. in Fish, "Must").

In other words, most people live by doing and believing what seems to work, what proves "true," in localized contexts--not by fidelity to specific, all-encompassing philosophies. Science--operating empirically, deductively, via hypothesis and experimentation--works very well for some areas of life. Faith (or art, or sports, or love) works well in other areas. The fact that science and faith are mutually incapable of addressing each other's areas does not prevent people from drawing on both of them (sometimes at once, as when I pray while waiting for a medical test's results). This is as true, Fish insists, for postmodernists as it is for non-postmodernists. Holding and living by (at least potentially) logically contradictory sets of beliefs are just part of human existence.

For worldview analysts, though, logical contradiction within a worldview equals a death-blow for that worldview. Ditto non-comprehensiveness. Biblical Christianity (properly interpreted, of course) has no contradictions, explains everything exhaustively, and is therefore a superior worldview. The worldview evangelist assumes that, being brought to face a logical contradiction within their native (non-Christian) worldviews, nonbelievers will be shocked and disconcerted (and thus ready for the Holy Spirit to guide them into belief in Christ).

To be fair, many atheists place a similar trust in the power of their rhetoric to force believers into looking at the logical contradictions in Christianity (e.g., an all-powerful, loving God who allows earthquakes to devastate Haiti).

Fish, on the other hand, suggests that both die-hard atheists and die-hard evangelicals who make this assumption are in for a shock: most people are actually OK living in paradox, living without the unity of an all-encompassing, utterly harmonious philosophical system.

All this is not to say I agree totally with Fish. I do think there are reasons why faith or non-faith in Ultimate Truths do matter.

More tomorrow,

JF