I read an old post of mine by chance the other day on how we know our religious beliefs are true. While that question is badly worded and doesn’t really ask the right thing, I had a whole series of thoughts that just ended up as one simple one after reading it again.
An extreme fixation on determining truth of religious belief, that the above question embodies, is really a fixation on falsifiability. It has its highest goal whether it can be demonstrated that a person’s internally accepted truth can be shown to others for consideration, like an observable object. Neverminding that this kind of positivism paradoxically has to rest on a series of unfalsifiable axioms, the biggest one of which (to me) being that the only meaningful truths are ones that can be subject to falsification, it’s also idolatry. Idolatry…that Old Testment-y concept that got God really riled up, and got really defined in the New Testament and its commentaries. We tend to associate the word “idolatry” with the Exodus 32 narrative. It comes off as inapplicable to us moderns.
Idolatry, though, is simple: it’s putting something in place of God. Think of it as knocking Him off the throne with an ersatz substitute. The iconic opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark is a wonderful visual analogy of this. It isn’t possible, in reality, to even begin to argue with God, much less displace Him ontologically, but acting as though we did is how idolatry is defined. As always, one can ignore reality but only at one’s own peril.
Positivism and its various flavors and incarnations, like scientism, puts man, with his material intellectual tools—even its mere chronological potential (“we’ll know all meaningful things some day”)—on the throne. Falsifiability uber alles is a type of twisted idolatrous solipsism, in that what is categorically true can only as such if it can be determined by and demonstrated towards, in all instances, the individual, royal “you.” Forgetting idolatry for a moment, it’s philosophically absurd…though I’m quite open to criticism that I’m strawmanning or reductio ad absurdum-ing here a little bit.