The Brunch Table

The Flying Spaghetti Monster reminds me of an old argument about comparing religions, something I picked up from Simon Blackburn’s excellent intro-to-philosophy book Think. If I get it right, it goes something like this:

1. A purely religious proposition, by definition, can be neither proven nor disproven…

2. …but religious propositions from different religions do disagree with each other.

3. So, while you can start with religious propositions and come up with some theories about the physical world…

4. …you’re in effect only arguing for all unproveable propositions, not just the ones you personally prefer.

5. So you can’t really win the argument until you can explain why your propositions are correct, and your rival religions’ propositions are wrong.

This, Blackburn says, is the problem with Pascal’s famous Wager. By proposing an infinite reward in Heaven and an infinite punishment in Hell, he can convincingly argue that you’d better go to Mass. But this logic only works if you’re already a believing Catholic like Pascal. What do you do if you’re a Protestant, and believe that Mass is, at the very least, a less-than-optimal way to attain the reward and escape the punishment? The very fact that Protestants repeat their own version of the Wager, with Pascal’s specifically Catholic instructions edited out, is proof that it doesn’t hold up. How can it work as an argument for one specific religion?

And when it comes to Intelligent Design™, we’re dealing with an even narrower fan base than Pascal’s. Ever wonder why the U.S., alone in the industrial world, has remained unaccountably suspicious of the science of biology? It’s because of John Darby, a 19th-century British preacher who came to America to spread his “Darbyist Heresy” in peace, attracted, ironically enough, by our relative religious tolerance.

Today known by the more polite name of Dispensationalism, the Heresy proposed a precise 6,000-year historical timeline ending in the Rapture, in which good Darbyists will be transported bodily up to Heaven to escape the Apocalypse. (Interestingly, while Darbyist version of doomsday has no real precedent in Abrahamic theology, it bears a remarkable resemblance to Ragnarok, the end-times scenario in western Europe’s old Norse religion.) So unlike stalwarts like the Anglican Church, which gradually dropped their more abstract objections to Darwin (he was an ordained minister, after all), the Darbyists have a serious, specific problem with an old earth–it means their train, so to speak, isn’t arriving on schedule.

The problem is, of course, that any argument you can cite in defense of Darbyism also opens the door to the FSM. Blackburn wraps up the Darbyist Heresy with great bit from David Hume:

…a man who follows your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert or conjecture that the universe sometime arose from something like design. But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard, and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance. It is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors. It is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him…And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.