Thin and thick dialogue
A guest post by James Garth a Fellow of ISCAST with an active interest in the science/faith interface.
In his acclaimed work on religion and violence, the distinguished Yale University theologian Miroslav Volf argues that the cure for religiously induced and legitimized violence is not less religion, but in a carefully qualified sense, more religion. Drawing a distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ religious practice, Volf argues that a ‘thin’ practice of the Christian faith, vague but zealous, is likely to foster violence, whereas a ‘thick’ and committed practice helps to generate and sustain a culture of peace.
Volf’s carefully argued thesis is intriguing and deserves its own analysis. However, in this article my purpose is to harness his idea of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ practice and apply it to discussions on religion-vs-atheism. I suggest that we might be able to improve the dialogue by promoting a transition from ‘thin’ to ‘thick’ engagement. By ‘thin’, I mean an engagement that is reflexive and remote, by ‘thick’ I mean a higher quality, more consciously informed engagement which is committed to genuinely understanding the position of the other.
I think we all know what ‘thin’ dialogue looks like. Perhaps we’ve posted a comment on social media, with the best of intentions. A believer might share a thoughtful example of a time when they sensed the presence of Something More. A non-believer might share an example of when an honest search led them to conclude a certain religious claim didn’t really hold water.
About thirty seconds later comes the reply. “Fallacy XYZ!” screams the atheist or believer, consulting his helpful Fallacy Wall Chart. Like the painfully funny adventures of Fallacy Man, the response is amusing because the respondent has unwittingly revealed their biases under the guise of reason. What he truly yearns for is intellectual combat.
The engagement is ‘thin’ because the other party hasn’t really taken the time to absorb the full strength of their opponent’s position. So quick to jump in and judge, they haven’t given the other the full dignity of allowing time for their arguments to soak in.
Worse, this sort of reflexive response fails to acknowledge that the other party understands their personal position from the inside out. It doesn’t give due honour to the fact that a thoughtful person who has embraced a theory for a long time is like the renter who has lived in the same house for years; they know where it creaks and leaks, but they also know its pleasant and its hidden spaces.
Joel Primack, Professor of Physics at University of California Santa Cruz and a leading contributor to cosmological discussions, makes this observation regarding how important it is to appreciate a theory from the inside:
“Anyone who has ever rented an apartment or bought a house knows there is no matter how carefully you inspect the place beforehand, you never discover all its problems until you actually live there. Nevertheless, it is much better to move in than live on the street.The same is true of theories. It is crucial to commit to your theories, even while knowing they might be wrong, because it is only the act of moving into the theory with all your intellectual furniture and living there that lets you find its problems and limitations - or its secret passageways. If its problems turn out to be insuperable, we will find out much faster, and with luck a solution may be down one of the secret passageways. But we would know neither the problem nor the solution if we had been afraid to move into the theory in the first place. Our theories are our way of understanding what is real. To demand Ultimate Truth rather than scientific theory is to choose homelessness because no house is perfect.”
Notice what Primack is and isn’t saying. He’s not saying that we need to arbitrarily embrace a theory, hoping that it’s true without any evidence. No, he’s arguing that to fully appreciate a theory sometimes you need to tentatively move into it, fully acknowledging your own limits of knowledge, to press and pull on it for a bit, to have some patience and see how it holds up in the real world.
Now let’s apply this concept to our desire for ‘thick’ engagement on religious-vs-atheist dialogues. Suppose we shifted the emphasis away from rapid-fire rebuttals and more towards offering an invitation to the other party to enter in, to consider our position in its fullest and most well-expressed form.
Dr Alan Gijsbers gives a helpful example of how this might be done in his article in Christian Perspectives on Science and Technology:
Why are you an atheist? I would like to push behind the ten knockdown reasons why a person is an atheist to ask the more genuine question, what was the journey you went on? Where did it start and why did you take the turnings you took? My aim would be not to find the weak points in the argument in order to deliver a knockout blow but the more modest aim of seeking to understand that person’s position and the emotional, relational, and circumstantial forces that led that person to their commitments today, with all the irrationalities and emotions that drove that decision.
When was the last time you gave yourself the luxury of enjoying a genuine, rich, ‘thick’ engagement on the big questions of life?
As a great example of a ‘thick’ dialogue, I heartily recommend the recent discussion between theoretical physicists Ard Louis and Max Tegmark at the Veritas Forum. It’s a wonderful exchange, inspiring, honest, compassionate, thought-provoking and at times very, very funny. I personally found Louis’ presentation of the elegant universe and the evidence for the Christian worldview to be powerful and persuasive. And yet, I also appreciated Tegmark and found myself respecting his epistemology and honesty.
On a more local and unashamedly self-promoting level, I very much enjoyed my recent discussion with Jack Scanlan on the Pseudoscientists Podcast and thought that it helped to move the engagement in a very profitable direction. In particular, I recommended it both to my religious friends (who may only think of ‘skepticism’ in a negative, pejorative sense); and to my non-religious friends (who might be concerned that science and religion are intrinsically irreconcilable). If it manages to diffuse either of these intellectual roadblocks, our quest for a ‘thick’ dialogue has succeeded.
So, over to you! What is your personal favourite ‘thick’ dialogue between an atheist and a believer?
"Image courtesy Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net"
Resources:
Volf, Miroslav: Christianity and Violence, Boardman Lecture XXXVIII, 2002, URL: http://repository.upenn.edu/boardman/2/
Primack, Joel and Abrams, Nancy: The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos, Riverhead Books NY.
Gijsbers, Alan: Towards a post-modern apologetic, Christian Perspectives on Science and Technology, ISCAST, 2011, URL: http://www.iscast.org/Gijsbers_A_2011-08_Post_modern_apologetic
Tegmark, Max, and Louis, Ard: This Elegant Universe, The Veritas Forum, 2013, URL: http://veritas.org/talks/elegant-universe/
Scanlan, Jack and Garth, James: Science “vs” Religion, The Pseudoscientists Podcast, 2014, URL: http://youngausskeptics.com/2014/03/the-pseudoscientists-discussion-with-james-garth-about-science-and-religion/
