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I don’t think they should be able to teach religion until you’re 18 years old, and you know what? It would be a whole different world. Because if they weren’t pushing that shit into your head while it was still soft, you’d never buy it, not for a minute. If you’d never heard about the Bible and none of your friends had ever heard about Christianity and you just found a Bible in a used book store, oh, you’d jump right on that, wouldn’t you? ‘Oh, this sounds so logical, yes! The cave, and the ark, an oh, yeah! Hey Donny, I think I found the meaning of life here.’ No! You’d fucking chuck it in the waste basket, you would.
That is ridiculous. It not only completely ignores that many of the greatest minds in the world have converted to a faith rather than converted away from one, but it also pretends that theology isn’t an intellectually healthy exercise. Name a single great philosopher who knew not about the issues of theology.
I think you may have missed the point, @tylerjourneaux. I don’t think anyone was suggesting that “theology” not be taught at all; just not to kids. Kids will believe pretty much anything you tell them: tooth fairy, flat earth, water into wine, whatever.
Teaching mythology as fact to any kind of people who lack the ability to really evaluate such claims is a cruelty; forgivable only by assuming the “teacher” doesn’t know any better themselves..
Right, however I’m troubled by this move towards thinking that teaching children religion is unhealthy. If Religion is true, or else even if it helps Children engage the human experience more fully, then it seems difficult to imagine its being harmful. Of course, nobody should brainwash their children, but parents have not only a right but a duty to teach their children as honestly as they can, and to share with them the values they hold. Parents have a huge responsibility in this respect. Of course teaching false things is always either a heinous crime or a great misfortune, but religion isn’t special in this regard. It seems to me that if you teach your children as much by example as by what you tell them, then to adopt a secular presumption about religion is as much a religious education as the religious could provide – it tells children how they ought to understand religion in the most superficial terms.
Nobody should ever be brainwashed, and everyone should teach their children how to think critically, but that need not be divorced from religious education. The insinuation that a parent who truly believes in Religion is doing wrong in sharing that with them, even if they were wrong, where that same parent sharing what political, ethical or scientific views they truly believed in, even if they were wrong, wouldn’t be such a grave matter, implies that religion is in a special place. One has to argue that in teaching anything in favor of religion one is either teaching something which is likely to be wrong, or else more importantly likely to be harmful, and it seems to me in either case that it isn’t.
Doesn’t it bother you that there are people who are suggesting that religious education is child abuse, while they insist that the child should be brought up to take a secular approach to religion? Does anyone not see how hypocritical that is? I wonder.
Tyler,
I found something interesting in you post I wanted to point out. You said
“Of course teaching false things is always either a heinous crime or a great misfortune, but religion isn’t special in this regard.”
I agree with the first part of that statement but dispute the second. Religion is special in this regard. The religious education of children must fall into the category of “teaching false things”.
With regards to monotheistic religion there are few possibilities, none are true or one is true. As not all children are taught the same religion and each religion claims to be “truth”, then a super majority of these teachings must be false.
I don’t think that’s quite right, though I appreciate that you are, it seems, willing to think reasonably. First, it isn’t necessarily true that religion is false, anymore than it is necessarily true that some scientific theory is false. Moreover, the same can be said of scientific theories and religions in other regards, but I digress.
However, consider by analogy two scientific theories, both of which largely agree with one another. To the extent that they agree, and on the supposition that they are true, teaching either scientific theory would be to teach at least as much truth as was present in the other. Similarly where two religions are found to agree with each other, at least on the assumption that where they are agreed they are also correct, teaching either one would be moral to the extent that it was true.
Moreover, it isn’t clear that teaching falsehoods is immoral, but only that teaching what one knows or suspects to be false is immoral. Granted, we might argue that teaching anything for which we do not have any epistemic justification is itself immoral even when true (which is the argument of William Clifford, in that famous essay aimed against religion “the ethics of belief”).
I didn’t convert to Christianity until I was almost eighteen, and part of me agrees that kids should be taught to seek the truth and not just what is told to them. As a Christian, I feel like that would separate genuine Christians from the people who claim to be Christians just because they were raised that way. On the other hand, I am grateful that my childhood was full of Christian teachings. Looking back, I learned so much in that time, and a lot of it would have helped me in life even if I didn’t become a believer.
The message is a bit harsh, but its content is true.
How can you teach something like religion, which something based on faith… with faith being defined as a “strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof”.
So, is it logical to teach something that cannot be proved by any mean at all?
You are told to “just believe it.”
It makes no sense.
Why not teach kids the Greek Mythology instead?
If you are going to teach ANYTHING to Children, I say you have a responsibility to ensure what you are teaching is true before you teach it. If it is demonstrably true that the Christian God exists then it is okay to teach to children. If it is demonstrably true that we need to die in battle to enter Valhalla then that is okay to teach to children. If it is demonstrably true that eating vegetables and fruits makes you healthier that eating fat and sugar then that it is okay to teach to children. Religions should not be taught to children because faith is an admission that it cannot be demonstrated to be true.
A demonstration is not quite the same as a proof, and certainly demonstrations for each of those things could be provided. However, if you mean proof, then we wouldn’t be able to teach much of anything at all, since as Descartes showed us, there is no proof that other human minds exist in reality, and if Descartes failed then there’s no proof of the external world, or of the truths of logic. I think instead it’s more reasonable to say that only when a parent has responsibly become convinced that ‘X’ is true can a parent not only legitimately teach it, but has a moral duty to teach it, to their children.
“… certainly demonstrations for each of those things could be provided.”
Not just demonstrate, but demonstrate that it is true. I don’t think your statement holds up when held to that standard. The whole field of science is built on the idea that some things can be demonstrated and proved to be true or false to a reasonable degree of confidence.
“However, if you mean proof, then we wouldn’t be able to teach much of anything at all…”
Science and math show your assertion to be baseless.
Let’s not be silly; speaking in philosophical rigor ‘demonstration of truth’ cannot be epistemically distinguished from a demonstration of something which appears to be true. If we define ‘demonstration’ as applying only to truths, then science never demonstrated Newtonian physics, as is obvious from the fact that science moved beyond it. Similarly all theories in science for which some empirical demonstrations existed at some time, would no longer be ‘demonstrations’.
Moreover, science cannot prove anything in the strong philosophical sense anyways – science presupposes philosophy. I do agree with you that there is no sense in the suggestion that mathematical statements might be false. However, there is always plenty of sense in thinking that a scientific proposition fail to hold. In fact, again, Empirical proof is a philosophical oxymoron. Proof, in the strong sense, implies deductive closure. That means, more simply put, that if something has been proven, then there is no logically possible world in which it fails to hold, given that stipulations of the demonstration hold. Can you think of a single scientific proof which is or could be that strong? – go ahead, impress me.
It is disconcerting that some people are willing to simply point vaguely to ‘science and math’ in order to act as though they have managed to dispel all philosophical issues. It is an indication of just how profoundly philosophically illiterate people in our culture are on the whole.
“If we define ‘demonstration’ as applying only to truths…”
Your exercises in building straw men are exasperating. I didn’t say “only”. The extreme statements you make after that are futile.
“Moreover, science cannot prove anything in the strong philosophical sense anyways….”
Then speaking of proofs in the “strong philosophical sense” is counterproductive. If the purpose of examining any idea is to determine how true it is, then having an absolute or nothing standard for proof paralyzes attempts to find knowledge. Science deals in a finely graduated scale of probabilities of the likeliness of ideas to be true. A probability that is very high is sufficient to treat it as proved, and then action can be taken based on that proven truth.
If the action to be taken is to teach to children what we know to be true then we have developed a way to show, or demonstrate, which ideas are proved to be true. We call it science. By the same method we also know which ideas are false.
One of those ideas that fail to show any signs of being true is the existence of any gods. I think it is safe to say that not once in the history of mankind has any hypothesis for any particular god been shown to be true using the kind of careful controls proved to be so useful in science. Something which fails to be proved so extremely should not be taught to children as true.
Thank you for your reflective comments. If I may, I’d like to say a few things in response.
First, you say “Your exercises in building straw men are exasperating.” to which I have to reply that I was in any case not intending to exasperate you, nor to obscure the issue or create any kind of straw-man. Rather, I was simply demonstrating (or attempting to) that if we did define demonstration as applying only to truth, we would run into some trouble.
Moreover, your comments in the following three paragraphs are well taken, and I would just implore you to read the literature – the arguments for the existence of God are better than almost any other philosophical arguments for almost anything. Surely, if that gives us the right to teach science it gives us the right to teach ‘Theism’. Now I note that Theism doesn’t entail religion, but it isn’t a far stretch once one allows for the logical possibility of revelation.
Demonstrations of the proposition “God Exists” can be found more readily than just about any other arguments in the enterprise of philosophy. Consider Leibnizian Cosmological arguments, or Thomistic cosmological arguments, or Modal Ontological arguments, or the argument from reason, Teleological arguments. Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli count something like 25 arguments for the existence of God in the third chapter of their book, which is a good introduction to them regardless of whether people agree or disagree with any particular argument presented (the authors don’t even agree with all the arguments presented, but they presented them anyways simply as an exercise in intellectual honesty). You can also look to the “Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology” for some of the best arguments for the existence of God, a sampling of which you might find in reading the first chapter by Pruss: https://bearspace.baylor.edu/Alexander_Pruss/www/papers/LCA.html
Moreover, it seems to me as a matter of philosophy, science itself cannot demonstrate that science is true, and though this may seem like a philosopher’s trick, it’s actually an important point, since it implies that ‘first philosophy’ must provide us with the necessary metaphysical commitments which will allow us to do science. What presuppositions undergird science? Historically the presuppositions have been explicitly Theistic, and the alternative is not scientific realism, but something like Stephen Hawking’s model dependent realism (which isn’t realism at all).
Finally, it seems to me that you may not be appreciating how tentative science is – almost everything we believe scientifically is, given its track record, more than likely to be overturned and superseded in the future, and therefore we are almost positive that very little of what we today call science is also true. Now, I am not intending to attack science here – I think its our best shot at certain kinds of truth, and therefore we should teach it as such. However, I see no reason why religion, which has just as many good reasons for accepting it, must be treated differently.
Let me say that if you do not understand the significance of this point, it may not be worth while to continue going back and forth – with all respect. It seems to me that if one isn’t willing to recognize that science is tenuous and religious is equally tenuous, that demonstrations exist both for scientific theories as well as religious propositions, and that reasonable people dissent in both arenas, then it seems to me there is a gap between us, since I take it that any well read educated philosopher (even an amateur) will be able to appreciate this point.
At very least I suppose you would agree provisionally that IF I could provide demonstrations of some religious proposition such as ‘the soul exists’ or ‘Jesus rose from the dead’ and the arguments were as strong as accepted scientific demonstrations, for instance that ‘light is the speed than which nothing faster can travel relative to other objects in the same space-time”, then you would accept that I would have a moral right, if not a duty, to teach my children both science and religion. In my submission, religious arguments can logically be as strong (or – are as strong in some logically possible world) and also are sometimes as strong (are in the actual world).
Remind me why we think it is a good idea to limit people’s freedom of religion and lifestyle, provided it doesn’t harm anyone?