Belief
2003–2004
Topic Director: Carol Muller, Associate Professor of Music, Penn
"Seeing is Believing"
is the phrase that perhaps best sums up twentieth century
scientific rationalism. Materiality has formed the basis
of much scientific and, indeed, humanist analysis. The
binaries of twentieth century modernity such as science
versus art, rationality vs. irrationality, truth versus
belief, objectivity versus subjectivity, materiality
vs. non-materiality, masculinity vs. femininity have
shaped regimes of value inside and outside of the academy.
The visual has been privileged over the aural, writing
over sound, logic over the seemingly inexplicable.
In considering Belief,
The Penn Humanities Forum seeks to probe the non-material
dimensions of human existence, and the places where
the physical and metaphysical intersect. This 2003-2004
Forum provides a contrasting topic for humanistic exploration
to its forerunner: the Penn Humanities Forum on The
Book, the fully material, omnipresent objective
form.
Belief is most conventionally
examined within the realm of religion, theology, or
anthropology, where the sacred remains separate from
the "secular." In the academy, belief as a
cultural practice has been construed as the leap of
faith individuals make to join religious communities.
So defined it has remained marginal, or feminized, in
humanistic and scientific examination. Despite this
position, recent post-colonial scholarship has begun
to examine ways in which colonized peoples have incorporated
the world of the spirits in battles against colonial
powers and industrial regimes. Similarly, subaltern
studies remind us that in communities in India, Malaysia,
and Africa and elsewhere, large sectors of urban and
rural communities, peasant and elite, continue to assume
that gods and spirits are coeval and co-present with
human beings. In these contexts, being human is inextricably
tied to the question of being with gods/God and spirits,
indeed to the matter of belief.
Furthermore, the September
11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States has shaken
a core belief in mainstream America: that US citizenship
provided a space of sanctuary from war and international
terrorism. The attack has been constructed by the media
as a jihad or holy war of Muslim fundamentalists against
American belief in capitalism and the superpower force
of the US in the global economy.
In contrast to the
terror instigated by the beliefs of some, religious
belief has performed a more positive, though certainly
contested, function in the nation-building project of
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
led by Nobel Peace Prize winner and Anglican Archbishop
Desmond Tutu in the mid-1990s. Some might argue that
in cultures where belief in individual rights supercedes
belief in the collective good, in places where retributive
justice is privileged over restorative/ rehabilitative
justice, the process of national and individual healing
desired by the TRC might not have been attainable. Rather,
in the South African context, a juridical and political
process was shaped out of the core of a locally embodied
but globally present belief system that translated into
a moral guide in the TRC context.
These three examples
suggest that however much we would like to assume that
believing is a cultural practice peculiar to religion,
or that belief is the residual practice of pre-modern
peoples, it is nonetheless ever present as a force that
has to be considered and reckoned with in contemporary
global politics and struggle.
In this Forum we hope
to create a conversation about the nature of belief
as it shapes, and is integral to, both humanistic and
scientific research and investigation. This inevitably
raises the question of how we define "belief."
What is the relation between belief and truth, between
belief and experience, belief and history, between belief
and theory, or beliefs and hypotheses? Science may have
traditionally been uncomfortable with the non-material
dimensions of human existence, dismissing the realm
of spiritual belief for its lack of "objective
evidence." Without doubt all scientific engagement
clearly operates on a set of beliefs or hypotheses verified
through experimentation, and through "seeing"
the results. Moreover, those who are members of religious
communities may well posit that their belief system
is indeed systematic; that belief is based on what they
have experienced, on their own empirical evidence, individually
and collectively witnessed.
We might then ask quite
simply, what are the beliefs, the core assumptions that
constitute the epistemological foundations of our disciplines,
and how have we come to these beliefs? The philosophical
critique of belief has played a major role in examining
the objective underpinnings of logic, and of the sciences
more generally. Natural scientists believe for example,
that all natural laws/assertions/beliefs can only be
explained by testing hypotheses through controlled experimentation:
that scientific knowledge is the result of the interplay
between ideas and observation. Statisticians believe
that the natural world can never be fully known, that
one can only know the world in all probability. Geneticists
believe that the cell is the basic unit of life; astronomers
that the earth revolves around the sun; economists that
the capitalist market operates on the humanly driven
principles of supply and demand. Some linguists insist
on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that language shapes
reality. Geologists believe in the idea of continental
drift; cultural anthropologists in cultural relativism;
archeologists and historians of the ancient world in
the uninterrupted continuity of cultural forms and practices
through time; ethnomusicologists that all musics have
equal value; political scientists in the essential goodness
of democratic government, in "one person one vote";
and cognitive psychologists that the human mind operates
most efficiently in known systems. Central to modern
physics is belief in the theories of relativity and
quantum mechanics.
Finally, we might consider
the relation between histories of belief and developments
in new technologies. New technologies have tended to
distance the role of the human body and the senses in
understanding the natural world by privileging more
object-ive mechanisms of discovery: ever more
powerful microscopes, telescopes, and high performance
computers. How are these new technologies reshaping
belief in human inquiry? How might they be used to bridge
the divide between science and humanity? Pioneering
work in neuroscience on religious experience and the
brain is one way. There may be others.
Clearly, belief can
no longer be sidelined as irrelevant to the humanistic
agenda of the academy. We are hoping that by unraveling
discourses on the subject of belief in the sciences
and humanities we might present a new possibility for
creating intellectual links between these two sectors
in the academy, and indeed the communities within which
we live. This Forum on Belief is thus both timely and
extremely relevant both to humanists in the academy
and to the world at large.
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Programs & Fellows
2003–2004
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