Pragmatic theories of truth are obviously false. But...

I can imagine a world in which Christian nationalist theocratic fascists get everything they want. I can imagine a cartoonish version where Young Earth Creationism is taught in every classroom, and all textbooks that teach the contrary are banned and destroyed, and all scientists who disagree are disbarred or killed. I can imagine belief in evolution being systematically selected out; all remaining humans either genuinely believe that the earth is 6,000 years old or are good enough at pretending as if they do.

 

Because there is a selection effect against belief in an old earth, it becomes pragmatically true that earth is 6,000 years old. But that doesn't change the fact that the earth is not 6,000 years old. So I see how pragmatic truth fails to capture the sense of truth I have in mind when I say the earth is billions of years old.

 

Here is where I sympathize with a pragmatic theory of truth: Whatever truth is, it has something to do with reality. Reality has to do with what exists. What exists has to do with what survives. What survives is that which has the power to survive. So we get the following equation: Power = survival = reality = truth. Power just is truth. Hence why a pragmatic theory of truth is a power theory of truth.

 

For some Germans at some time, Nazism was pragmatically true. Does that mean Jewish humans were subhuman? Nope.

 

For some Americans at some time, abolitionism was pragmatically false. Does that mean that abolishing slavery at that time and place would have caused America's economy to crumble, like slavers argued? Nope. 

 

Issues of justice show how obviously false pragmatic theories of truth are. Indeed, the only way I can make sense of the concept of injustice is that injustice is the disconnection between power and truth and between power and virtue (which is the same as saying the disconnection between survival and truth and between survival and virtue). 

 

Insofar virtue and truth are tied to power and survival, we have justice. 

When vice and falsity are tied to weakness and death, we have justice. When virtue and truth are tied to weakness and death, we have injustice.

When vice and falsity are tied to power and survival, we have injustice.

 

This is a consequentialist analysis of justice: When evil people get away with being evil, bad things happen. When good people are given free rein to be good, good things happen.

 

On a power theory of truth, there is never a disconnection between power and truth. So there is no such thing as injustice as defined above. But there certainly is injustice as defined above.

 

I see how power is able to enforce acceptance of falsehoods. Those falsehoods don't magically become true just because they are supported by power. A power theory of truth vindicates propaganda, and any theory of truth that vindicates propaganda is obviously false.

 

It is true that power = survival = reality, but it's false that reality = truth. Truth has to do with reference to reality. What counts as a reference to reality depends on what survives. When Trump says any of the insane things he routinely says, these insane statements refer only to fictional properties. They are false. No amount of power allowing Trump to get away with saying so many false things changes the fact that they are false. To be silly for a moment: pragmatic theories of truth are pro-Trump, so obviously they are false. (Trump did say something true when he said that smart people don't like him.)

 

Really, I bet what's going on when folks try to support a pragmatic theory of truth is that they are really supporting a pragmatic theory of happiness, which is not so much a theory of truth but rather a theory of which truths are relevant. Truths about the world that lead to my happiness are relevant (e.g., truths about how to make money). Truths about the world that don't lead to my happiness are irrelevant (e.g. truths about how many balls of yarn are in my neighborhood).

 

But what about painful truths, like the truth that a loved one has died? That truth doesn't lead to my happiness, but is clearly relevant to me. So it's more like: Truths that concern my happiness (and thus, that concern the happiness of those around me) are relevant to me, while truths that don't concern my happiness (or the happiness of those around me) are irrelevant to me.

 

So we arrive not at a pragmatic theory of truth, but a pragmatic theory of relevant truth. And this theory is true because the properties it references are non-fictional.

The Nietzschean critique goes both ways

The Nietzschean critique of Christian values goes like this: Christians find themselves poor, oppressed, and, basically, losers in this world. Christianity is an attractive worldview for losers because with Christian belief you get forgiveness for your sins and you get the promise of a good afterlife. So if you're miserable in this life, you have the next one to look forward to.

 

In other words, the values of Christians are suspiciously convenient. In the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, the rich man gets to have his fun in this life but then is tortured in punishment in the next life. It's a power fantasy for the oppressed. Actually, it's the rich and powerful who are losers! They are evil, greedy, selfish, blind to the spiritual truths we have access to, concerned about silly worldly things like material goods. Christians, following the teachings of Jesus, flip the script: power, money, and material happiness are bad while weakness, poverty, and spiritual happiness are good. The rich and powerful are at once happy, but too easily, demonstrating their shallowness and impoverished spirituality and virtue (C.S. Lewis' notes in The Weight of Glory come to mind when he mentions how too easily satisfied we are by boring things like worldly success), and yet at the same time the rich and powerful are secretly miserable because true happiness comes from closeness to God. Christians get to delight in their perceived moral superiority and superior happiness.

 

The critique is an accusation of dishonesty. If Christians were honest about how pathetic their lives are, about how awful it is to be poor and oppressed, then Christians would be miserable. To avoid that misery, Christians choose values that place them on top in some way, allowing them to feel good about themselves when otherwise they would feel bad about themselves.

 

The Rick and Morty moment comes to mind when Hologram Rick gets the opportunity to become real. When Morty says, "I thought you were proud to be a hologram?", Hologram Rick says "That's because I had to be one!"

 

Right. If Christians were to suddenly come into money, says the critique, they would stop lying to themselves, radically change their behavior and language, and would be honest about their true values, because now they have the option to be honest when they didn't before – not without incurring great pain.

 

Problem 1: Not universal

 

The first problem with this critique is that it won't apply to every Christian. There are wealthy, successful Christians who don't shed their "intellectually dishonest values" and adopt their true secular values. Rather, they use their wealth and influence to support churches, missionaries, Christian programs, and Christian politics. Their Christian values are not held out of convenience, but conviction.

 

Problem 2: Undergenerating reasons

 

The second problem with this critique is that it assumes there are no good reasons to hold Christian values, and thus the only explanation for why Christians do hold their values is because it protects their egos and avoids the pain of facing up to difficult truths.

 

But there are good reasons to hold to various Christian values, and these explain why these values are held. Greed is evil. Oppressing others is wrong. The "conqueror's mentality" of the rich and powerful is a stupid mentality. The way the rich and powerful do great evils and get away with it is not something to be admired, but abhorred. The beliefs and behaviors of the rich and powerful are failures of understanding of the goodness and badness of things, failures to maximize flourishing. This leads into Problem 3.

 

Problem 3: The critique goes both ways

 

The rich and powerful don't believe that greed is evil. Or if they do, they don't believe that their particular excess counts as greed. The rich and powerful conveniently rationalize their own greed and entitlement and refusal to help others. If the rich and powerful took a step back and viewed their exploitation of others, their Darwinian cynicism of "the poors", their insatiable greed, their cruel delighting in their domination of others others, their egotistical competitiveness, their psychopathic lack of empathy for those in need, their hateful "f* you I got mine" and "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" attitudes toward those less fortunate, and their lack of contentment with anything less than absurd gluttonous excess, then maybe they would feel something vaguely resembling guilt or a desire to put away the embarrassing ego-driven bullsh* and instead do the right thing and help others. But that doesn't happen. The rich and powerful are just as guilty, if not more so, of arriving at suspiciously convenient beliefs and values that allow them to feel good about themselves when otherwise they would feel bad about themselves were they to look at things more honestly and objectively.

 

The critique is completely right that if your values are suspiciously convenient, then you should introspect and ask yourself why you hold the values you do. If you discover that you hold onto them purely to protect your own ego, then you will have discovered that your values are bullsh*. If you discover that you hold onto them for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting your own ego, but are grounded in facts outside of yourself, then the Nietzschean critique does not apply to you, and someone who tries to apply such a critique against you is making the mistake of undergenerating reasons leading to a mistaken psychoanalysis.

 

This applies to the topic of virtuous despair as well. The idea is that despair can be virtuous if the despair is caused by virtues such as the virtues relating to the refusal to conveniently dismiss or ignore difficult truths. The Nietzschean critique says that for the person who views their despair as virtuous, this is a convenient belief; you want your despair to be virtuous so you can feel good about yourself. If you were given a position of success, your despair would disappear, showing that your despair wasn't caused by your virtue, but by you being a loser.

 

But the first and second responses to the critique apply here as well: This psychoanalysis will prove false for those whose despair sticks even with success, and someone can introspect and see their despair sticking because the despair is attached to permanent factors beyond the self, such as cynicism about human nature, pessimism about the fate of the world, and the fact that the foundation of the world is not good, and so the rampant injustice and tragedy we see in the world is baked into the very fabric of the universe.

 

The third response also applies: It's impossible to participate in this world or to be happy in this world without in some sense accepting this world and celebrating it. But how can someone accept or celebrate this world knowing the injustice and suffering that makes up its bricks and mortar? You are not happy because you are a winner, but because you are too small-minded to see the big picture, because you care more about protecting your own happiness than about believing what's true, and because you have thrown empathy out the window and have refused to acknowledge and empathize with the sheer suffering of our world. When a great deal of empathy leads to despair, it's easily predicted that there will not be a great deal of empathy.

 

Eh. Both psychoanalyses look ridiculous to me, and the truth is in the middle: Some of your despair comes from your virtue, and some of it comes from your failure in life; some of your happiness comes from your failure to contend with difficult truths, and some of your happiness comes from your success. You must introspect, throw away any self-deception, and with brutal self-honesty see for yourself to what extent the Nietzschean critique truly applies to you. How suspiciously convenient are your beliefs?

Five Question Test for the possibility of happiness

1) What do you want?

2) How badly do you want it?

3) Is it possible to stop wanting it?

4) Is it possible to get it?

5) Is it possible to substitute it for something you can get?

Depending on your answers to these questions, happiness will be easy, difficult, or impossible for you. Good to know!

Do children have special theological insights?

Matthew 11:25 (NRSVUE) says: 

At that time Jesus said, “I thank[h] you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants;

Problem 1: Many translations of this verse use the term 'children' instead of infants. But νηπίοις is arguably better translated as 'infants' or 'babies', which is presumably why we find that translation here in NRSVUE. But why would other translations use 'children'? Maybe because while it's hard enough to believe that children have special theological insights, it's even harder to believe that infants have special theological insights.

 

But maybe 'infant' is a metaphor for a new believer? New believers have insights from the Holy Spirit. 

 

Problem 2: Revealed what to infants? What does 'these things' refer to? The text doesn't say, and none of the surrounding verses are helpful.

 

Problem 3:  

 

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NRSVUE):

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

Children are poor at truthseeking because, as Paul says, thinking and reasoning like a child is something to be cast off.

Jesus does not merely say that we ought to be child-like for the sake of innocence, humility, and dependence – or, what I get from Paul's  verse, accepting the Kingdom of God with the kind of giddy joy that children have – but that things have been revealed to children. But as far as I'm aware, this just isn't true. There's no reason to believe that children have special insights or an enhanced sensus divinitatis.

Problem 4: 

 

Christians will happily say that their views on God changed dramatically from when they were children. Philosopher Josh Rasmussen, for example, says in the beginning of his book How Reason Can Lead to God that he is grateful that his childhood views of God were destroyed, because they were too simple. Many Christians report maturing in their spiritual understanding over time, and don't report having any special insights as a child, only dreadful ignorance.

 

Problem 5: 

Maybe if there were many reports of angels visiting children, but not adults, and having conversations with them, then there would be evidence of this claim. Or if there were reports of children who knew things they shouldn't be able to know, and when asked how they knew these things they would said "God told me", then that could be evidence. But there are no reports of these kinds.

 

Problem 6:

You could try to give the following kind of argument: Because of the noetic effects of sin, and because children haven't had the time to sin all that much, children are more likely to have a stronger sensus divinitatis and thus believe in God.

I don't know of the empirical research on children's belief in God. For all I know, there are more children than not that don't believe in God, or maybe it's 50/50. That would discredit the idea that children are specially positioned to "know" that God exists.

Even if research showed that children do disproportionately believe in God, there could be naturalistic explanations for this. Children raised by parents who believe in God will disproportionately believe in God not because of an enhanced sensus divinitatis, but because humans are wired to believe testimony, especially testimony in trusted individuals such as your parents.

There is much disbelief in the Christian God in China, Japan, India, southeast Asia, northeastern Europe, and the Middle East. If children in those countries had a tendency to believe in the Christian God despite their social environment, then that would be powerful evidence that yes, God reveals Himself to children. But as far as I know, children in these countries tend to believe what their parents believe, exactly as naturalism predicts.

 

Problem 7:

Another confounding variable could be that children struggle to delineate imaginary figures with real life. So even if humans tend to lose belief in God as they age, this might not be due to the noetic effects of sin but rather to the adult ability to sort imagination from reality, and, more generally, due to the adult ability to examine one's beliefs and scrutinize them.