Hey, SCOTUS: faith ain't internally consistent

From Slate's coverage of the Hobby Lobby trial:

Kagan questions [the] claim that one tenet of the Green family’s faith requires that they provide all their employees with health care while another tenet requires that they deny contraception.

What's to question? I am unaware of any reason from epistemology or philosophy of religion to assume, prima facie, that the tenets we commit to when we adopt a worldview to our purposes won't be mutually exclusive. It is fruitless to look for a hidden consistency in any ethics, be it supernaturalistic or not.

Yeats recognized early on that the challenge in life was to hammer his thoughts into unity; we all face the same difficulty. Sure, a person who wishes to live  "rationally"* is going to pursue self-consistency in their ethical and epistemic commitments. But the trick is in realizing that epistemic unity is only ever imperfectly obtained. With that insight, one realizes the needful thing for humans to learn is how to be comfortable and ethical even  with that limitation.

This paradox at the heart of a self-aware life reminds me of a line from David Milch's wonderful television series Deadwood: "I believe in God's purpose, not knowing it." I'm content, atheist that I am, to let the word "God" suffice here for the illusion of a predetermined course of a events in the universe. I believe: in not knowing the point of my life. I believe: I'm free to determine a purpose for myself, in that absence of a higher plan. I believe: there's no reason to think my purpose-driven commitments will be, on first or second or further consideration, consistent among themselves. I believe: a good person embraces this state of affairs, and learns to muddle through, seeking their purpose, despite their self-contradictions.

* and we mean by this, pace Clifford, to live according to a system of beliefs each of which was acquired in a sufficiently informed fashion.

Louis CK on practical epistemology

In his feature-length stand-up show Live at the Beacon Theater, comedian Louis CK lays bare an oft-overlooked fact concerning the relationship between belief and behavior:

I have a lot of beliefs, and I live by none of them. That's just the way I am. They're just my beliefs. I just like believing them. They're my little believies.

The show is available on Netflix (at around 6 minutes in) and may well be on YouTube.

*

Don't doubt for a moment that there is an ethical dimension to the lack of conformation between what one believes and what one does. As a good introduction, dial over to Infidels.org, and read William Clifford's 1877 essay, "The Ethics of Belief." The infamous, and terrifically portable, summary of his position on the matter: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." A corollary: Since humans are all always guilty in one way or another of holding beliefs (of some sort or scope) that aren't warranted by sufficient evidence that we ourselves have worked through, it is the case that we (yes, all of us) are living always in a state of epistemic failure (here I almost wrote, "epistemic sin!). Knowing this is the beginning of rationality.

*

A corollary from Oscar Wilde: “The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.” Contrast this to the wisdom theme of H.P. Lovecraft's tale, “The Call of Cthulhu”: “ he most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” If there were a divinity of perfect rationality, would we not have to call this being either insensate as a stone, or wholly mad? (See also Borges' story "Funes the Memorious" for a case example of how a perfect omnimnemonic could not in practice survive with his reason intact, free to live a life we could call human.)

The (acceptable) limits of verificationism

Charles Taliaferro, Evidenca and Faith: Philosophy and Religion Since the Seventeeth Century, Cambridge UP, 2005, p.350, under the heading “Contra Positivism”:

Ayer, Schlick, and the others wanted to rule out what is untestable, partly because they were opposed to radical skepticism. […] For the positivists, the demon hypotheses (or brain in vat scenarios) are to be rejected for they are not verifiable. […] To insist on verifiability as a requirement for meaning seems to rule out meaningful narratives of how one might be systematically and irrevocably deceived. 

Emphasis mine. The word “insist” in the last sentence above is too strong. That “comprehensive Cartesian skepticism advances (at least initially) the possibility that one’s sensory experiences may all be systematically mistaken” (ibid.) entails a limitation, not the ruin, of verificationist positivism. The more charitable interpretation of the verifiability requirement is as a methodological, rather than an (ideological?) act of insistence.

The Cartesian possibility—that our sensory data corresponds to a deceptive pattern of electrochemical signals, and not to some functional engagement with the world we think we perceive—surely limits the confidence we may responsibly feel in our physics or metaphysics. However, a practical epistemology doesn’t demand logical certainty. We may proceed with intellectual confidence, and some degree of moral assurance, if we possess warrant sufficient for our beliefs. This principle would make epistemology a relative system, as sufficiency is relative both to the claim in question and the evidence for that claim. Well, a relative epistemology needn't be thought a useless epistemology! The incompleteness theorem did not paralyze either mathematics or computer science; there is no reason we cannot make use of a verificationist epistemology in such circumstances that are not weakened by this foundational limitation.