Shaun McGonigal's 2009 essay, "Truthiness of religion," also brings into focus for us the nature of religious thinking. In what may be the key sentence in the essay, he writes, "Our creative powers which provide us with the transcendent, sublime emotions, and inspiring ideas are a great tool for the creative process, but not for attaining truth. If we want to know what is real, we need to be critical, meticulous, and scientific." The clear implication throughout his essay is that religious thinking fails the test of being critical, meticulous, and scientific. Religious ideas do not help us to see reality because they are products of our minds, and thus while they may have their uses they cannot lead us to truth.Let us put religion aside for a moment and turn to historiography, the study of the past. In the past, a rather serious debate has raged over historiography's scientific bona fides. In some ways, it is similar to the methods used by the hard sciences, but in other important ways it is not. Where a physicist, ultimately, can't select her facts a historian very definitely can—and must. Historians study something that, by definition, does not exist and cannot be recovered as it originally existed in the past. All any historian can ever do is to select from a basket of facts, many of which are disputed, and do her best to paint a picture (caricature?) of what he thinks actually happened. It is a slippery business at best. The historian's own prejudices and perspectives get all tangled up with whatever bits of data from the past happen to have survived down to the present. History is a craft more than a science. And, therefore, by McGonigle's test, it does not lead to truth.
That doesn't work very well. Historians, in actual fact, have a good deal to teach us about the reality of the past so long as we remember that what they teach us always provisional. The truly great historians develop an instinct, a "sixth sense" for the truth embedded in the left overs of the past. They practice a craft, an art. And their work has a good deal to do with truth.
Theology is not that different. As Christians, our central focus is on the person of Christ. There are historical questions about him that we have to wrestle with, including what he actually taught and did as well as the nature of the gospels as historical documents. These questions are only a beginning. We must also critically and meticulously study what his words and actions—and those of the earliest generations of Christians—mean for us in our own context. When Jesus taught that love of God and love of neighbor constitute the greatest commandments of the Law, we are constrained to discover what he meant in his time and what his words mean in our time. We must think critically and meticulously. Buddhism knows a great deal about all of this. Buddhist thinkers tell us that they do not put their trust in faith or beliefs but rather in a critical, reflective method for discovering the truth about the self and about reality. The truth is that "self" does not exist, that wants and desires are illusions that only create suffering.
Religious faith thus necessarily has its own standards of critical thinking. In some ways, they parallel those of science. In other ways, they are unique to their own faith. For Christians, Christ lies at the heart of that critical thinking. He is the measure by which we measure other truths. Amen.
