It's In the Code Ep. 78: "Everyone Has an Ultimate Authority"
“Everyone has an ultimate authority.” You might encounter this claim in a discussion about the authority of the Bible, or in religious debates about LGBTQ+ inclusion, or the respective roles of men and women in church and society, or about evolution, or vaccines, or any number of other topics. But what, exactly, does this mean? Why will people with a particular view of religious authority make this claim? What attitudes or beliefs encoded within it? These issues are the focus of this week’s episode.
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a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I am your host.
Delighted as always to be with you, and as always delighted to hear from so many of you, thankful for the comments and feedback you give.
Going to talk about some things, discussions that I've had recently.
Including with some of you here in a few minutes, but as always just want to thank you and as always want to apologize for taking a long time to get caught up on all the emails and all of that.
This time of the semester and the holidays and some ongoing COVID fatigue and so forth have set me further behind than usual, but value the feedback that you give, the input, the insights so much.
Say it all the time because we mean it.
We couldn't do this without you, so thank you all.
I want to dive into the topic today, and it's a topic that's sort of been on my radar for a while lately, and today's going to get a little philosophical.
I hope that that's okay.
But it's a topic that I've run up against with clients, the people that I work with through the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I've had some interesting conversations just with friends and colleagues recently where this has sort of come up, and as I say, I've heard from some of you where this topic has come up.
And I've been thinking about this and a range of, you know, some other topics and things.
And I have a hunch that part of the reason that these things come up is because at the holidays, we spend more time, you know, sitting around and talking and sitting around and talking with people that maybe we don't see all the time.
Family members we might not see.
We talk about our hypothetical Uncle Ron a lot on this series, but there are a lot of other uncles and aunts and people like that that we run into, so I'm thinking maybe that's why some of these topics sort of come up right now.
I've also been reading evangelical theology recently.
It's not something I do a lot, but I've pulled a couple tomes of evangelical theology for some reasons we'll get into in some upcoming episodes.
We're going to talk about those, but these have me sort of thinking about this as well.
But here's the idea that I want to look at today, or the claim, and not just today.
I think we're going to spend a couple episodes on this, but it's the claim that everyone believes in an ultimate authority.
What's in view here really is it's, it's about God.
It's a belief in God.
Okay, fine.
But it's more about a notion of final or ultimate knowledge.
This, this is what philosophers might call, you know, a notion of epistemic certainty or something like that, that we can know for sure.
Deep truths about things like spirituality, religion, ethics, and so forth.
And so why am I tackling this topic?
I'm tackling it because the context of this claim is it has been in my experience it's often like discussions that involve competing uh competing views of religious beliefs or ethics or or related things issues related to practice or social policy or what have you and this claim comes up As a kind of philosophical or apologetic move in that discussion.
And here's how it works.
I've had real discussions like this more times than I could count.
I've come across them in written sources.
I've come across them online.
And I hear from some of you, and I know that you've had similar discussions.
And as I say, this might be why, you know, maybe this is on my mind around the holiday season, because maybe some of us are put in a position of having more of these discussions, as we engage in our around people that were not around all the time.
And so the way it works is that some point of disagreement comes up.
Maybe it's LGBTQ plus issues.
Maybe it's more abstract issues like, I don't know, views of the afterlife or something like that.
Maybe it's some discussion about the role of men and women in society or the family or whatever.
And the person you're talking to, and here we're talking about our hypothetical person who is part of, you know, a high-control religious group or another.
I focus mostly on conservative Protestantism in America.
I'm aware that there are other similar groups, but again, that's the group that I'm most familiar with and most comfortable thinking about.
I feel most qualified to think about is how I should say that.
So you're having this discussion and the person that you're talking to inevitably cites what, in their view, is kind of the ultimate authority.
They cite the Bible.
And I've talked a lot about the Bible on this series.
You can go back and look at some of those.
I'm going to talk some more about the Bible based on some ongoing questions and feedback I've been getting from folks.
We're going to get to that in an upcoming series, but you can go back and check some of the other episodes we've done about the Bible and Biblicist traditions and things like this.
But they cite the Bible, and as I say, you've had these discussions.
You're going along and you're talking about it, and all of a sudden they're citing passages in Genesis or teachings of Paul or whatever it is.
And for you, of course, that doesn't settle the issue.
And the reason is, and you maybe tell them this, maybe this is a conversation you've had lots of other times, and you say, I get it, mom, dad, brother, sister, whoever you are, but the Bible, I just don't think about the Bible what you think.
It doesn't settle it for me that the Bible says this, right?
And all of us who've had conversations like this, as I said, I could not even count how many times I've had conversations like this.
All of us who've had these kind of conversations know that it can go a lot of different directions from here.
Sometimes people just drop it, agree to disagree, sometimes it gets really heated, sometimes, you know, you name it.
But here's one direction it can go.
It doesn't go this way all the time, but it can, and I think that it's a sort of an interesting direction and tells us some interesting things.
If you're engaging with somebody who's a little more philosophically minded, or who likes to read, you know, these are the people that maybe, maybe they've got some seminary training.
Maybe they like reading apologetics as a hobby.
That's one of their things, defenses of the faith.
Maybe they've just been geared up and getting ready to have this conversation with you and they've had some meetings with their pastor or, as I say, a seminary professor or somebody, and they've said, you know what?
Cousin Joe is going to say that they don't accept the Bible as an authority and, you know, we hit an impasse every time.
What do I do?
Whatever it is, they're going to come at you with something like this, okay?
And here's the response.
They will say something like, well, Everyone believes some ultimate authority.
And at least I know what mine is.
Mine is the Bible, it's the Word of God, etc.
And I'll bet you can't even tell me what yours is, and even if you can, it can't measure up to God.
And again, if you've never heard this line, stick with me.
I'm going to talk about why it matters, why it's important in both this episode and the next one.
But I know, as I say, from talking to you, a lot of you have run up against this.
And it throws people off.
So what exactly is going on here?
What do we do with a statement like that?
How do we kind of move forward?
And as I say, I've had this conversation before, and I know you have too.
And it turns out, as I was thinking about this, because a lot of you reach out and are like, this throws me.
I don't know what to do with this like I suddenly like I don't know how to respond to it and I've got all kinds of questions and we'll get into those.
But as I've thought about this for this episode, and as I say, I had to break it into two, I kind of got more to think about than I thought that I did.
So let's dive into this, because for me, this is a really interesting phrase.
And again, it's something like this that says, everyone believes in some ultimate authority.
Mine is the Bible.
I don't know what yours is.
You may not even know what yours is, but at least I know what mine is.
And, you know, it's inevitable that we have a source of authority.
So let's decode this a little bit because that's what we do and it's in the code.
We decode stuff.
The first thing to notice about this is that I think it's a really telling line of reasoning.
If this discussion comes up, if you're sitting here listening to this, be like, I've never had anybody say something like that to me in my life.
Cool.
But if you have, You're talking with somebody who has given some real thought to the criticisms of their religious and ethical views.
You're talking to somebody who is very aware that their views, as they understand them, are drawn from a particular reading of the Bible.
When they say it's biblical, they're not going to say it's a particular reading of the Bible.
They're going to say it's just the Bible.
That's simplistic, but for them, they think that this is what the Bible says.
They're aware that their views are based on a particular reading of the Bible.
They are very much aware that they are drawing on a certain view of its authority.
But they are also aware that not everyone shares those views.
They're probably aware that most people don't.
And they are probably, and this is interesting to me, they are probably also aware That there's probably nothing they could do to bring you about to their way of thinking.
They know it's unlikely that they could provide any evidence or argument that would convert you to their view of the Bible.
Okay?
But they don't give up.
If you're getting this line of reasoning, you're getting somebody who knows all of that, has run up against all of that, is trying to find a way forward, and you're encountering somebody who, as I say, has probably read some theology, they've probably read some Christian philosophy, they've read some apologetics, Well, they've talked to people who have because regular ordinary people don't sort of say things like this.
And so they trot out this line.
Okay.
And here's why I think it throws people.
This is why I get questions about this.
It's a line of reasoning that has a veneer of sophistication to it.
And I do say a veneer and somebody will say, that's really dismissive.
Yep.
It sure is.
And I'll get to, I'll get to the why of why I'm being dismissive of this.
But it has a veneer of sophistication to it, and I think it has multiple aims.
One is, it's intended to make their position seem eminently reasonable.
In other words, I think when people say this, what they are trying to say is, yes, I'm a person of faith, and we talk about faith, and we talk about believing, and we talk about, you know, faith versus knowledge, or faith versus reason, or something like this.
But what they want to show you is say, My faith is reasonable.
It is rational.
My basing it on the Bible is a rational thing to do.
Religion is not the opposite of rationality.
That's what they want to communicate.
And I think that it's also, and this relates to it, intended to communicate a degree of philosophical sophistication that I think is supposed to effectively end discussion with most people.
I think that oftentimes when somebody brings this out, It is supposed to bring us up short.
We are supposed to not know what to say to this.
It's a kind of conversation stopper.
And I think that this is exactly the experience lots of people I've talked to have had.
It's intended to place the person advancing this argument who said, well, you know, we all have some ultimate authority.
I'm just being open about what mine is.
I'm not smuggling anything into this conversation.
I'm being open and honest about what my ultimate authority is.
I know what it is.
At least I'm owning that.
You, secular non-Christian or different kind of Christian person or whatever, whoever you are, You, you don't even acknowledge that.
It's intended to place them in a position of kind of superior philosophy, of better thinking, of essentially being more rational and more reasonable than you as a critic of their understanding of religion.
And so I think, and this is why I situate it so much in terms of apologetics, when somebody brings out this line, I think what they're implicitly saying is that their faith in the authority of the Bible, it's not only reasonable, it's more reasonable than your rejection of it.
They're going to say it is inevitable that people have a source of ultimate authority.
I'm just owning mine and being open about what mine is.
You're sort of pretending you don't have one or something like that.
And so I'm more reasonable.
You critics dismiss our faith as simplistic or superficial, but we're the ones who are really reasonable or rational.
I think that's the rhetorical move.
That is being made by the, when they make this statement, it's being made by them.
Why do they make this claim?
Why does it give them this sense of superiority?
I think it's because they acknowledge a reality that they will say the rest of us refuse to acknowledge that everybody has some source of authority for their religious or ethical views.
But so that that's part of the code.
It's a coded way of claiming that religion, as they understand it, is actually more rational or reasonable than what they understand as a rejection of religion, or at least a rejection of their form of religion.
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It is also a kind of coded way of passing judgment on those of us who don't accept that authority.
Philosophically speaking, they would say that it's passing a judgment on what they see as an epistemic failing on those of us who engage them.
In other words, we either are not acknowledging an absolute authority or maybe we lack one entirely and so we don't have good reasons for the things that we believe and so forth.
And they are more rational.
That's the rhetorical work that's going on.
That's part of this, part of what makes this coded language when you dig down past the sort of philosophical approach to it.
Okay?
So not everybody will have run up against a reflective defense of somebody's religious or ethical beliefs like this.
I get that.
But for those who have, it can throw us, and I've had discussions with people that go something like this.
Somebody will say, you know, I feel like they say that, and I feel like that line of reasoning can't be right, but I'm not sure what's not right about it.
Or I've had people say, maybe they are right.
Am I really failing to be rational?
I've always thought of myself as a rational person.
Part of the reason why I'm not the kind of Christian they are or I left evangelicalism or authoritarian religion or whatever is because, you know, I view myself as a reasonable person and I've always thought that it was very dogmatic and not reasonable.
But I mean, are they the ones that are actually being reasonable and I'm not?
Uh or somebody else might say how do I wow what they're right like they really got put on the spot by uh let's say let's say it's not Uncle Ron this time because you know Thanksgiving or Christmas or something it could be uh my Aunt Jane uh I really felt like I was put on the spot by Aunt Jane and all of a sudden she's like fine so what's your ultimate authority where do you get your ethical views from where do you get your religious views from I didn't have an answer I couldn't tell her what my
My kind of ultimate authority for that was, and you know, she took that as confirmation that she's the one who's really being rational by believing the things that she does, and you know, whatever.
These are the kinds of conversations I've had with people, and if you've had this conversation, maybe you've had that experience.
I'd love to hear from you if you have.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Would love to hear it if you've had that kind of conversation.
So the question is, how do we respond to this?
I've sort of decoded some of what's going on there.
But how do we respond to it?
Or what's going on there?
Why, if we feel like something is off about this, why do we?
I think the first problem we encounter is that we accept the terms of the argument that's being put forward.
And I've, you know, when people say, well, I just couldn't identify this, what my authority is.
That's where we've already gone wrong.
Okay.
And the reason is, it's an inherently flawed idea.
The issue isn't that they can identify their ultimate authority and we can't, right?
The flaw is in the assumption that everyone has to have or has some ultimate authority in their lives.
That's the flaw, right?
They're fundamentally like the premise of their discussion that this is a universal feature and that everybody who's thinking well, at least, has Ultimate authority for the things that they believe or think or value or what have you that's a flaw, right?
I think it's just untrue Philosophically speaking and this is where as I say like if you go and you read some evangelical theology or you read evangelical apologetics and I'm not as Philosophically trained, you know as some other people and whatever but I feel confident saying this virtually no one of any philosophical orientation accepts the view of what philosophers call epistemic authority that's at play in this formulation.
In other words, the notion that our religious beliefs can only be Believed or we only have reason to believe them if we have a kind of absolute authority, absolute, what we call epistemic certainty, absolute knowledge that what we say is true, that they're only justifiable then, or that all of our ethical views can only be justified if we have this kind of, of absolutely indubitable reality behind it that guarantees their truth.
Almost nobody of any ethical persuasion accepts that model of knowledge anymore.
It comes through clearly in conservative theology and apologetics.
There's often a whole section, if you read these kind of books, that will talk about this.
But virtually no philosophers hold to that view anymore.
And so if you read these, you'll often read these engagements with philosophy that they feel very, just frankly, naive and dated.
They're not sort of as philosophical as they claim to be.
And that's why I say that there's a kind of veneer of philosophy here.
But more importantly, for those of us who are not, you know, philosophers, I think it also isn't true practically speaking.
Sure, we all depend on authorities for beliefs that we hold or for information to inform decisions we have to make and whatever.
If somebody asks us why we hold a particular ethical view, we'll give them reasons.
If people ask why we believe certain things, we'll give them reasons.
Those reasons will take us to some sort of evidence we're citing or some sort of authority.
It's all true.
We cite authorities.
But that does not mean that we cite any of those as quote unquote sort of ultimate or absolute authority.
Number one, we recognize that different authorities inform different areas of our lives.
If I need medical help or medical advice, I'm going to go to a doctor.
If I need help thinking about grief and what I do with that or whatever, I'm going to go to somebody who specializes in that.
If I've got issues with emotions and feelings, maybe I'll go to a counselor or a psychologist or somebody like that.
My car breaks down, I'll go to a mechanic.
The point is, we recognize that there isn't one authority, but that there are lots of different kinds of knowledge, lots of domains in life that require authorities beyond ourselves, and we go to different authorities.
And the second one is, I think we also all operate with a kind of implicit awareness that those authorities are ultimately fallible.
We go to the doctor, we get some feedback, yeah, we go get a second opinion.
Or all of us are aware of things like medical advancement, the medical science changes, the best information we have at a given time, the things that we're more sort of justified in believing or taking as true or thinking is the best course of action, those can change.
Our knowledge is limited, it's fallible, and we do the best we can with the information that we have.
So we also recognize that what and how we know changes.
So the first thing I think about this is it's just a flawed argument, this notion that everybody has or has to have or should have some ultimate authority.
It's a mistake to accept the terms of this argument.
I think the disconnect that we feel, the point where people say something about this is off and I can't name it, is the implausibility of those appeals to a totalizing authority that they imagine within that kind of religious mentality.
We just don't find it convincing.
Why?
If you're philosophically minded, philosophers have long kind of given up on that notion of certainty.
But practically speaking, none of us live that way.
There's also something paradoxical about this.
If you are philosophically minded, you really want to take on, you know, Aunt Jane in this.
There's some paradoxical stuff about this.
It's interesting to me, here's one, that when somebody says that, they're appealing to the ultimate truth of the Bible, but they're appealing to relativism to do it.
In other words, they're often not saying that they can prove that the Bible is what they say it is.
They're not claiming that they can prove it's the source of ultimate authority.
And we're going to talk more about this in upcoming episodes, okay?
But they're actually making a relativistic claim that all people appeal to different sources of ultimate authority.
Built into that is the idea that if you have a source of ultimate authority, you can't justify it or prove it because then something else would be more primary or more ultimate than it.
And so the idea is we all have these different sources of authority, they're competing sources, and there's sort of no way to prove that one is truer than another and so forth.
So, there's an irony here in claiming that they possess ultimate truth, but they make that claim based on the fact that everybody has a claim to an ultimate truth and we can't really judge between them.
I think it's also ironic or paradoxical or contradictory.
I think these claims are also contradicted in the way that most of these people, most of the Uncle Rons, most of the Aunt Janes in the world, actually practice their religion.
Because like most of us, despite all of their talk about the Bible as an ultimate authority, they also depend on a lot of other things.
They depend on spiritual advisors and other people to help them make sense of reality.
They depend on medical professionals to tell them things.
The point is that they can talk about having one absolute source of authority, but in practice, they don't look that much different from the rest of us.
So those are some thoughts for this.
I got to wind this up.
That's what I'm going to do is spend a couple episodes on this.
The first thought then is that there are some real problems with this notion that everybody has an ultimate source of authority.
And the long and short of it is, I don't think it's true.
I don't think you need it.
We'll talk a little bit more about this next time.
Even if you wish it were true, that doesn't mean that there has to be one.
Would it be nice to have absolute certainty about everything?
Sure would.
Does it follow from that that there is some source of information that gives us that certainty?
Nope.
Doesn't follow at all.
So philosophically, there are problems with this.
Conceptually, there are problems with this.
Trying to highlight that.
But here's the more interesting question for me.
The more interesting question for me is, given how implausible these kinds of claims to authority are, why do they persist?
What's the draw?
If they're so implausible, if they have shaky foundations, why do the Uncle Rons and the Aunt Chains of the world, why are they drawn to this sense that they need to have ultimate certainty, absolute certainty about something?
What does that do for them?
And just as significantly, what does that mean for the way that they practice religion and the kinds of religious structures that come out of that?
That's the stuff we're going to dive into next episode.
So we're going to continue this idea of appealing to an ultimate authority forward.
Today, again, if you're a philosophically minded person, if you dig that kind of stuff, I, you know, I hope we're on good ground.
If that's not your jam so much and you're like, I really rather know like, you know, more of like why it is that Aunt Jane just won't listen to anything I say, We'll get into that more next episode.
As I say, in the meantime, I've got to wrap this up.
As always, again, thank you for listening.
Want your feedback, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Going to, as soon as I can get past final grading and things like that, I am going to really dive in and come hell or high water, get caught up.
on responding to all the great comments and feedback that so many of you have given.
So here in the next couple weeks, hope to do that.
In the meantime, please be well.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for your support.
Thank you for all the continuing well wishes after my latest little COVID bout here.
Thank you all and be well until we have a chance to talk again.
