{"id":13,"date":"2021-07-11T19:21:11","date_gmt":"2021-07-11T19:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/?p=13"},"modified":"2021-12-26T19:41:27","modified_gmt":"2021-12-26T19:41:27","slug":"only-wanna-know-judas-iscariot-skepticism-and-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"“Only Wanna Know”: Judas Iscariot, Skepticism, and Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice\u2019s Jesus Christ Superstar<\/em>\u2014a rock opera loosely retelling the story of Jesus\u2019s crucifixion\u2014contains a curious scene not referenced in the Gospels. In this scene towards the end of the second act, the soul of Judas Iscariot returns from the dead to confront the dying Jesus, in one of the show\u2019s most memorable songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cSuperstar<\/a>,\u201d the traumatized ghost vents his frustrations with his beloved teacher, shouting the questions that still plague him even in death, and begging for the answers he thinks will finally give him peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOnly wanna know,\u201d he cries, again and again. Know what, exactly? Whatever will make sense of the whole mess: the loss of his friend; his own betrayal; the last few years of his short life, and its brutal ending. Did it all mean anything? What was the point? What do I do now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a small request, really\u2014a straight answer. A few words, that, when spoken, would cause everything to fall neatly into place. A parting gift of certainty. Surely, that wouldn\u2019t be too much to ask of an omniscient God made flesh. If Jesus really is \u201cwhat they say [he is],\u201d then he must know how to answer his disciple\u2019s questions in a way that will allow him, at long last, to rest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Jesus says nothing. He just stands there, watching, while Judas pours his heart out. He offers only silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Judas, we want certainty. Definitive answers to the questions raised by this story of a man who got nailed to a cross, and the tradition that sprang out of it. The questions raised by our own brokenness. But certainty is the one thing we can never have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Geniuses and Vats<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we\u2019re dealing with the Big Questions of life and death, it\u2019s hard to find answers that satisfy our curiosities\u2014or calm our fears. We have our doubts. We look for explanations. We collect some very nice ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in at most a few years, we run up against the limits of human knowing. We find that our worldviews are mostly unprovable assumptions about the nature of God and the afterlife, the purpose of this current life, and so on. We\u2019ve realize we\u2019ve put together a mismatched jumble of cherry-picked Bible verses, empirical observations, and ideas from movies, and called it \u201creality.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We realize that, for one reason or another, it is at least possible to question every single one of our beliefs, and that no particular text, idea, or feeling is beyond doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9 Descartes, in his \u201cFirst Meditation,\u201d illustrates the problem with a colorful thought experiment. He supposes that some malevolent, omnipotent being\u2014an \u201cevil genius<\/a>\u201d\u2014might, at this very moment, be using Descartes\u2019 very senses as his playthings: projecting sights, sounds, smells, etc. into the philosopher\u2019s mind, thereby creating for him an entire illusory world. A more recent materialist update to this same thought experiment imagines the subject as a \u201cbrain in a vat<\/a>,\u201d being manipulated by an evil scientist through chemicals and electrical impulses rather than magic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In either case, the end result is the same. By following the thought experiment through to its logical conclusion, we come to understand that there is reason to doubt all of the information that we feel we are gathering through our senses\u2014that is, every piece of information we have ever gotten, ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse, there seems to be no surefire way to dis<\/em>prove the existence of something like Descartes\u2019s evil genius once and for all. We haven\u2019t found that one, satisfying thing that would establish the reality of what we perceive to be the external world\u2014the one proof that would banish this kind of global doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seriously. People have tried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Missing Criterion<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Radical skepticism\u2014hardcore doubt about our very ability to \u201cknow\u201d things with certainty\u2014predates Descartes by at least a thousand years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism<\/em><\/a>, likely composed around the second or third century CE, Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus lays out a way of thinking that, unlike Stoicism, Platonism, or Epicureanism, has never managed to sell many books<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t surprising. Unlike the other Greek and Roman schools of thought, Pyrrhonism\u2014like radical skepticism in general\u2014leaves its adherents without a clear path forward in life. Doubting everything, it makes no firm statements about anything, least of all what people ought to do with themselves. As a philosophy, it\u2019s short on practical recommendations, and long on navel-gazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this reason, British philosopher Bertrand Russell understandably described radical skepticism as \u201cpsychologically impossible,\u201d a way of thinking characterized by a \u201cfrivolous insincerity.\u201d At the same time, however, he admitted that the system was \u201clogically impeccable<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The logic he\u2019s referring to, as presented by Sextus Empiricus in the Outlines<\/em>, is a methodical, step by step cutting-away of any firm conviction or certainty that a reader might hold regarding everything from ethics to the very nature of reality. At the root of the skeptic argument is the fact that we lack what Sextus Empiricus calls a \u201ccriterion\u201d\u2014an ultimate principle or standard by which a given philosophical position may be judged as absolutely true or false.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lacking this criterion, the responsible philosopher feels compelled to suspend judgment\u2014to say, whenever presented with an assertion about the way things really are, \u201cI determine nothing.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not the same thing as completely denying the possibility of knowledge\u2014that would be a dogmatic statement in and of itself. It is simply the expression of the skeptic\u2019s inner state, which is a lack of final, complete confidence in any particular worldview (even the skeptic worldview, which could in theory be overturned at any time by the discovery of an infallible criterion). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without a criterion that could nip our infinite chains of questions in the bud once and for all, the skeptic feels that we don\u2019t have a very good reason to claim definitive knowledge about anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judas the Skeptic: Religious Doubt<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Judas, the questioning religious person can\u2019t help but feel that we\u2019re all walking around without our clothes on<\/a> when it comes to questions of what is <\/em>or is not<\/em>, claiming to have answers about reality when what we really have are descriptions of experience. Craving knowledge, we turn to scripture, commentary, tradition\u2014but more often than not, our digging winds up undermining the very worldviews we hoped to save. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The questioning Catholic, for instance, might start out by wondering what the authority claimed by the Church ultimately rests on. Unsatisfied by the answer that the Church is guided in its actions by the Spirit, she might set out to learn where the Church\u2019s teachings originally came from, and trace her way back through a long history of debate, translation, and politics to the men who wrote the books of the New Testament and its various commentaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, she starts running into real obstacles. Jesus of Nazareth, the star of the show, seemingly never got around to writing his own book. All the evidence she has of this man\u2019s life and words is an echo off a canyon wall\u2014a wave on the surface of the water, rather than the breeze that caused it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even assuming that the apostles and church fathers captured his life and the meaning behind it perfectly, she finds herself wondering how she could know whether Jesus\u2019s<\/em> words were expressions of truth in the first place, assuming there\u2019s a truth to be expressed. At the end of the day, she\u2019s being asked to trust an experience of divine revelation allegedly undergone by a consciousness other than her own\u2014an experience which she can only guess might be made up of the same sense impressions, ideas, and gut feelings that compose her own experience of the world. And that\u2019s a problem, because by this point in her journey, the skeptic is having a hard time putting faith in her own senses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Doubting Thomas, who was satisfied with bloody fingers, the skeptic can\u2019t accept empirical evidence at face value\u2014or deny it, for that matter. Elementary school science projects have shown her how easy it is to trick the senses<\/a>. She is aware of how radically a person\u2019s behavior, and perhaps their experience of reality, can be altered by physical changes in the brain<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps she herself has had subjectively profound spiritual and mystical experiences. On what grounds would she confirm or deny their truth\u2014that is, their alignment with some ultimate reality\u2014given that these experiences were composed of the fickle ingredients that seem to make up all her experiences, namely sights, sounds, feelings, scents, and tastes, along with the ideas that follow those sense impressions? How would she know whether these experiences actually point to what she thinks of as \u201creality\u201d? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How would Jesus <\/em>have known?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reason, she discovers, leads her to suspend judgement\u2014to say \u201cI determine nothing\u201d\u2014rather than affirm a neo-scholastic theology and the teachings that follow from it. She is forced into an encounter with the numinous\u2014with religious horror<\/a>\u2014and realizes that she can neither confirm nor deny the Church\u2019s claims…about anything. If there is such a thing as \u201ctruth,\u201d neither she nor the Church can seem to reach it through logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The skeptic is disturbed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice\u2019s Jesus Christ Superstar\u2014a rock opera loosely retelling the story of Jesus\u2019s crucifixion\u2014contains a curious scene not referenced in the Gospels. In this scene towards…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84,"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/84"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}