Mother Teresa and Truth
Sean Carroll wrote a piece about Mother Teresa and her doubts about faith. Such doubts as she expresses seem perfectly normal to the broad swath of Christian experience, of which John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul is perhaps the best record. Shouldn't people be self-reflective about their lives, and shouldn't we expect that self-reflection to be crushingly uncertain from time to time?
But anyway, the sentence that I'm writing about here is: "...beliefs should be judged on whether they are correct or incorrect, not on whether they cause people to do good or bad things." What does it mean for a belief to be correct or incorrect? That's the question for today (for a Saturday, of all things. I need to learn to turn this off on the weekends.) I suppose it means that a belief should be judged by whether or not it corresponds to "truth".
OK, I've never given that much thought to what "truth" is. In our classes, we discuss, briefly, the theories against literalism in Biblical interpretation especially in, say, the creation stories. We talk about metaphor and analogy, and about the possibility of any human-created record of myth and transcendent experience. We talk about authorial agenda and strategies of redaction. In the Episcopal Church, we haven't really tended to take a literalist perspective and we don't bandy around the term "truth" much, I think because it feels dangerously certain to do so, and the Anglican tradition has tended away from doctrinal rigor in favor of community discipline. The Wikipedia article lists more than a half-dozen theories of truth. So, anyway, when CW and I head into the City for a walk today, I'll be looking for a book about truth.
As if I don't have anything else on my plate. :-)