Is Theology Easy or Hard?

This is the first of several draft chapters on applying Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations to theology.

Is truth easy to recognize, or difficult?

Popper opens Conjectures and Refutations with this question. Certain kinds of truth, like many of the truths of math, are easy to call “true” because they need not touch the real world. That two and two make four is easy to recognize as true, because “two” and “two” and “four” are ideas that just work together. But what about statements that are about something? Are two apples and two oranges “four?”

Theologians, like mathematicians, do make some statements that are easy to recognize as true. A theologian may say, “all thieves are sinners,” and anyone can see why this theologian is right. If theft is sin, then all thieves are sinners. But – is theft sin? And what about a particular person? Is Robin Hood a thief? If Robin Hood steals only ill-gotten wealth, is he therefore a sinner? And what about the king’s tax collectors: if they take unearned wealth, are they thieves? These are questions about the real world, and they press for some kind of answer. Say a clever theologian claims that Robin Hood’s theft is not sin. We may want to believe the theologian. But what makes it true? How should we decide?

Popper brings us to this question first, because the way people decide on truth tells us about how they relate to each other.

Some ways of recognizing truth are easy. We can quickly check our own values and see if a moral statement agrees with them. If I have already decided that it is fair to return property to its rightful owner, I can quickly agree Robin Hood is not a thief in the sense that matters. Also, we can quickly recognize contradictions. If I am going to join the Merry Men, and one of them tells me that Robin Hood both is and is not a thief, I will ask for an actual answer. Again, we can quickly see if statements make sense together. If the Merry Men tell me their stories, I would notice that each tale involves injustice and a quest to make things right. Again, we can use our senses to check certain things for ourselves. If the rumor is that I can only join the Merry Men by defeating Robin Hood in personal combat, then I know how to find out if the rumor is true!

Certain of these easy ways of recognizing truth are inward. To recognize a contradiction, I only need to check the two ideas for myself. I do not need to test either one to know one of them is not true. Others of these easy ways to recognize truth are outward. The only way to find out how to join a secret society, like the Merry Men, is to try. An experiment or test is needed.

But, inward or outward, all of these ways of recognizing truth are easy enough for one person without help. The question Popper wants us to ask is whether there are not certain kinds of truth (perhaps many kinds) that can only be recognized with difficulty or cost.

When important truths are not easy to recognize, then individual people are not likely to recognize truths on their own. They may need to resort to organizing into complex systems or institutions to discover truth and to preserve it. A single person, working alone, would probably be unable to recognize truth where these large institutions had failed.

So, appeal to authority becomes common and necessary. Authorities are needed to settle the many difficult and ambiguous questions that people cannot answer for themselves.

But when important truths are easy to recognize, then each person can seek out truth without support from others. The Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment came to pass as people of Europe sought to recognize truth for themselves.

But, Popper saw, people to wonder why they were personally so ignorant of so much. People ask, “why was I so blind as not to see the truth from the start?” Some part of human nature must be masking truth, so that people cannot fully receive truth from their insights or observations. Popper calls this realization the “conspiracy theory of ignorance.” Dark forces – prejudice, unfaithfulness – must be conspiring to keep me ignorant; otherwise I would always recognize truth.

If important truths are easy to recognize, but some dark forces keep me from recognizing them, then clearly, if I want truth, I need to be purged of the dark forces first! Then, I need to return my mind to how it was before I was trapped. For a scientist, this means getting rid of personal prejudice about how an experiment might go. For a theologian, it might mean keeping the true faith, or living a morally pure life. C. S. Lewis writes somewhere that if theology means observing God, churches are the telescope. Keep the churches free of smudges, and you sharpen your theology. But more on this later.

Popper rejected the idea that purified people easily recognize truth. In his own field of science, and in medicine, Popper was aware of many powerful errors of belief that had lasted for generations because they sounded right, or had a draw to them, like the notion that the Earth stands still while the Sun moves around it. One does not need dark forces of error to explain error; the very marks of ‘truthiness’ can lead people to untruth. So, Popper came to believe that there are many important truths in science that are not easy to recognize.

But this belief left Popper with a problem. As a liberal and humanist thinker, he knew he needed to safeguard the human desire for truth. But error, he saw, was powerful, and truth was hard to find. In these conditions, people choose to skip testing their beliefs, and they appeal to authority instead. If truth is hard for individual persons to recognize, is it possible to find truth without appeal to authority?

Popper proposed this ingenious solution: Instead of trying to recognize truth, people should try to find truth by recognizing falsehood.

Popper’s idea has power because it changes the role of authority. If the job of authority is to establish what is true, then people can point to the authority to decide truth. “The Bible says it,” etc. But if the job of authority is to establish what is not true, what has been investigated and disproved, then people can avoid repeating the errors of the past without blindly believing the errors of the present.

I cannot pause here long on the question of sources. If authority is not there to prove truth, then, says Popper, the source of a belief tells us nothing about its truth.

Now Popper developed this entire argument with the natural sciences in mind. Theology is not a natural science. Before I use any of Popper’s reasoning in theology, I need to identify some point of relationship that makes Popper’s reasoning valuable to theological work.

The strongest point of relationship is that scientists and theologians are both human. Both enterprises are human academic endeavors. Almost all Christians recognize that academic theology is not really what God is about. God is about being God and doing God. Certainly, if Jesus is the image of the invisible God, then God does speak about God. God is a theologian, and Jesus is a rabbi. But Jesus did not order the production of an academic literature. That was not his program, nor his followers’ commission.

Let me propose that there are three kinds of reasons to study theology, and that there are three similar kinds of reasons one would study the natural sciences.

First, there are people who study science because they are just plain curious. Some people just have to know why the sky is blue, or what particles matter is made of. Likewise, there are people who study theology because the subject brings joy. They just have to question everything.

Other people study science because they want to make a profit and to do good for humanity. I studied science like that – as an engineer. Likewise, there are people who study theology because they need to know how to execute their God-given mission. The abolitionists fought slavery with theological tools – some of which they derived from Darwin. Today’s constructive theologians are often in this camp.

But then, there are people who study science in order to tell stories about it. Science writers and popular figures like Bill Nye and Sir David Attenborough are in this camp. Some of them start out as scientists; others make no pretentions to the title. Similarly, many people train in theology in order to become pastors. They are not necessarily out to produce new theology, though they might. Nor are they necessarily theologians because they love the discipline, though again, it may bring them life. What they are, are authority figures. They are proxies to pass on truth, to defend their churches from error.

And here, we see two problems in the practice of theology, problems that have parallels in Popper’s ideas.

First, graduate theological schools train faith leaders to lead from their masterful personal spiritual role, personally interpreting heritage and context into actionable guidance for for their churches. This whole method only works if the important theological truths are easy to see when one is pure of heart. If it turns out that purity of heart is not a guarantee of theological success, then this method will fail – and none of its practitioners will realize it is failing. I will argue later that purity of heart is necessary for theology, but hardly sufficient. Theology requires more than innocence. It requires shrewdness, too. For this reason, academic theological education is built on sandy ground.

Second, if authority means protecting truth, and not detecting error, then the skills needed to be an authority figure are quite different from the skills needed to be a scholar. To be a scholar, one must be good at asking hard questions that prove past beliefs wrong. To be an authority figure – in the bad sense – means to guide what questions ought to be asked, to keep the theological heritage safe from error. But if the heritage is not safe from error, the authority figures – in the bad sense – will not discover it.

The same paradox can be seen in science. The best scientists are not necessarily the best communicators of science. Indeed, they may be the worst communicators: universities have to go out of their way to teach communication skills to engineers. (I have never heard of a university that went out of its way to teach engineering skills to journalists. The unfortunate journalists have to teach themselves.) So, a person who watches Cosmos on PBS and reads science books ‘for the lay person’ could come away with an inappropriate confidence in what scientists know. Scientists themselves report no such confidence. The most knowledgeable scientists know their own ignorance the most deeply. Their job is to disprove theories, not to spin them.

So, if the skills of authority are different than the skills of scholarship, theological schools have chosen the wrong skills. As we saw before, graduate theological schools are designed to produce leaders, not scholars. With the rock-bottom job market for theology Ph.D’s, it’s hard to blame them. But with the sky-high job burnout rate for pastors, it’s hard not to.