© 1992 Merlyn Cox
© 1992 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
| Some Quotations from The Urantia Book | Spring 1992 — Index | Significant Books: “God and Religion in the Postmodern World” By David Ray Gritlin |
Macmillan, 1990, 162pp.
Mortimer Adler is probably best known as the guiding force behind the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Great Books series. He has also been called America’s “philosopher for everyman.” For many years he has been seeking to bring clarity of thought to fundamental issues in philosophy. Since the mid-seventies he has chosen primarily to address the lay person rather than the academic. The reasons for this appear to be at least twofold: to share with a wider audience issues that matter to everyone, and to defend common sense against the “perversions of modern thought”-the “philosophical mistakes, perplexities, subtleties and puzzlements he believes have arisen in philosophical thought since the end of the seventeenth century.”[1]
His lates book, Truth in Religion, follows in this tradition, in this case seeking to extricate the discussion of truth in religion from the subtle distortions he believes are pervasive in modern thought. His concern is how to think clearly about the issues involved, rather than bring his own personal conclusions into the process. He therefore wishes to write as a philosopher of religion rather than a practitioner of any of the world’s religions.
There are two main issues in the book: the plurality of religions and the unity of truth. “The doctrinaire liberals of the twentieth century espouse pluralism and tolerance as if they were desirable values on which no restrictions or qualifications should be placed when they are applied to the life of society and of thought.” Pluralism is desirable, he says, in all realms of action and thought except those in which unity is required. “When unity is required, pluralism must be restricted.” In matters of taste, pluralism is desirable and tolerable; in matters involving truth, it is neither.
He does allow the classic distinction between poetic truth and logical truth. Poetic truth is the kind of truth that prevails in art-music, narrative fiction, painting. Here pluralism is both tolerable and desirable. Such “truth” are not necessarily incompatible with each other. However, descriptive or factual truth, giving knowledge of observed phenomena, is another matter. Here the logic of truth must prevail. The line that divides fact from fiction and fantasy also divides logical truth from the poetic.
In dealing with questions of truth in religion, the issue becomes even more difficult. Articles of faith are simply not provable. “Religion has none of the ordinary means or methods — no appeals to experience or reason — for judging where the truth lies when it affirms, denies, or contradicts what is denied or affirmed in other parts of truth.”
However, Adler argues, that does not mean religious claims are exempt from being subject to the logic of truth; i.e., correspondence to reality, coherence and non-contradiction. Two contradictory claims cannot both be true (although both can be false). For example, the proposition that the universe exists everlastingly, without beginning or end (Aristotle), and the belief that creation is ex nihilo (Aquinas), are not compatible. Both cannot be true. “All the diverse parts of knowledge, including religious knowledge or knowledge by faith, must coherently form one and only one integral whole”; i.e., the unity of truth.
In our desire to be tolerant in a pluralistic world, there is a danger, he believes, of returning to “Averroism.” Averroes was an eleventh century philosopher who argued that there are two separate truths, the truths of faith and the truths of reason. and they cannot come into conflict. Aquinas challenged him on the grounds that the truths of faith were not just poetic, but logically true, factually true, in the same sense that truths of philosophy and science are true. You cannot have two truths.
It is on this point that he is critical of Eastern thought that adopts Western technology and presumably its underlying assumptions from the West, while seeking to keep religious thought in a separate compartment, unconcerned about possible contradictions that might arise between the two. “The principles of logic are neither Western nor Eastern, but universal.”
There can be no airtight compartments that protect questions of faith from the logic of reason. When religious affirmations, including articles of faith, contradict what is known with certitude in other parts of the whole of truth, such as in mathematics, science, and philosophy, they must give way. When such a belief continues to be affirmed, even though clearly incompatible with known truth, it is no longer simply an article of faith; it becomes superstition-counterfeit religion.
At the same time Adler warns against “the danger of dogmatic materialism so often found in modern science and materialistic monism in modern philosophy.” “It may be thought,” he says, “that such religious beliefs (as, for example, the belief in angels and in God as purely spiritual beings) come directly into conflict with the knowledge we have of the material cosmos through the physical sciences. But that is not the case… That assertion should be dismissed as sheer dogmatism. Angels for example, may not exist, but their existence is not impossible.” “While the philosophical arguments for the existence of God may fall short of certitude… the philosophical atheist has never been able to construct a logically valid argument that supports the opposite conclusion and thus constitutes disproof of God’s existence.”
Adler further explores what he believes is the confusion concerning religion and mythology in contemporary thought. He takes to task Wendy Donniger O’Flaherty, Joseph Campbell, Harvey Cox, and Hans Kuhn for contributing to that confusion by failing to understand and apply the logic of truth. For example: Campbell believes that all religions are simply misunderstood mythologies, that all of the world’s organized and institutionalized religions are nothing more than mythologies, having neither truth nor falsity in any logical sense. That leaves only poetic truth and no logical, factual truth at all. But Adler points out that this is itself a dogmatic assertion; he offers no scientific proof that all religions are really mythologies in disguise.
Adler also delves in to what he believes are mistaken philosophical assumptions in the modern scientific community itself, specifically in quantum mechanics and scientific cosmology.
Appendices at the end of the book include excerpts from lectures given at the Aspen Institute: “The Unity of Man and the Unity of Truth”, and “Human Nature, Nurture, and Culture.” Both further explore issues related to the unity of truth in a pluralistic world.
Adler has made it plain that he believes the current condition of philosophy in America, England, and Europe is in a near hopeless state, and that the 20th century is dominated by a philosophy that’s made a mockery of truth: namely, positivism. It has led to an indifferentism that affirms that all religious thought is equally valid and tolerance is the only certain truth. While that may sound appealing to many, it logically makes no sense if Adler’s points are correct. Adler will readily allow that all the major religions have truth in them (or, more correctly, may have), but he does not allow as a consequence that it makes no difference what one thinks or believes.
Another way of saying it, I believe, is that while that all human understanding of the truth may be relative, it does not follow that truth itself is relative. Truth is still one, and it is precisely what all religions, as well as all human philosophy and science, is seeking.
In my estimation Adler’s book is a breath of fresh air that does in fact address and redress errors we’ve grown accustomed to, errors that make neither logical nor common sense.
I look forward to his forthcoming work in which he will share his own personal convictions in matters of faith and religious truth-the culmination of his own life’s work, and, I take it, his own search for truth.
| Some Quotations from The Urantia Book | Spring 1992 — Index | Significant Books: “God and Religion in the Postmodern World” By David Ray Gritlin |
Mortimer Adler, Intellect: Mind Over Matter, (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 81 ↩︎