The Quinian Epistemology of Heathen Belief

by Brúnwulf Leornere

[The following article will appear in the forthcoming Blótmónaþ 2024 issue of Spellstów.]

When I came to believe in the gods of my Heathen ancestors from years of scientific and ‘rational’ atheism, it was not through reason or logic, resting on convincing arguments, which brought me here. On the contrary it was irrationality. There was not only a Kierkegaardian ‘qualitative leap’ or ‘leap of faith’, but a shift in how one understands the world. It is not new information which brings one back to Heathenry, but rather seeing the world through old eyes. This shift can be explained well through the model of epistemology (the study of knowledge) by the American philosopher, Willard van Orman Quine. Quine was a philosopher of the analytic tradition, a mathematician and an atheist, yet his epistemological model provides a useful heuristic tool to understand why we adopt an irrational spiritual worldview. It helps explain why it is so difficult to come to radically different belief systems through reason, especially something as contrary to modern sensibilities as Théodish Belief, which is ‘Retro-Heathen’ rather than ‘Neo-Heathen.’

While many nowtidely Heathens come from a Christian background, already raised with a religious and spiritual worldview, and able to move “horizontally” from one to the other, it is not so easy to move “vertically” into a religious worldview from atheism, as was my own case. How does one come to a mythic worldview from a scientific and materialistic one? How does a world become filled with magic again?

Modern atheism is the logical endpoint of a trajectory which began from several historical revolutions of thought, but most significantly through Platonism and Christianity. Platonism uprooted tribal traditions as the foundation of authority and truth, holding gods accountable to laws higher than their own and claiming that a single universal truth lay behind the world, thus all things were mere shadows of this single, ultimate truth. Christianity continued this in turn with Euhemerism and claimed that historical figures lay at the root of Pagan gods, and thus our ancestors were simply deceived by conjurers who claimed themselves to be gods (as also argued by Snorri Sturluson, especially in the Prose Edda and Heimskringla). Thereby the world has been stripped of its magic by being exposed as something other than it is, the ackchually-fication of mythology into a material hypothesis which can be tested and thence rejected. When the world contains only measurable propositions, what else is left? This caught up to Christianity in the end; for a religion which had rooted itself in quotidian real-time history to proclaim its single ‘Truth’ over all the world, itself became the victim of its own methodology against paganism and was tested and thence rejected by the modern science which it helped create.

So what does all this have to do with Heathenry and when does Quine come in? Analytical epistemology, or Logical Positivism, had once divided propositional statements about the world into Analytic and Synthetic. Analytic statements are a priori (before experience) and logically true by definition, such as statements about mathematics or logical tautologies such as “all bachelors are unmarried men,” but which tells us nothing about whether those bachelors exist in the world; while Synthetic statements are a posteriori (after experience) and are true or false by virtue of verifiable and experiential facts about the world, such as “my book is on the table.” However, Quine’s thesis, The Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), argued that this is not a meaningful distinction and descriptions of analyticity were circular, such as logical tautologies using non-identical synonyms (“bachelor”, “unmarried man”) which are not interchangeable terms, reducing this Analytic statement to yet another Synthetic statement. All Analytic statements must be verified by further Synthetic statements around it, but which we must first assume to be true before any such Analytic statement can be made.

Quine concluded that “truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact” and that this distinction is simply a “metaphysical article of faith.” This means that no proposition can be reduced to further a priori Analytic statements; there are no axioms of self-evident truths at the bottom of the chain upon which everything else depended. Instead, he proposed a model of Epistemic Holism where “it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement—especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore, it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may.” Therefore, all propositions depend upon another, forming an interdependent and holistic web connected by relationships of meaning, but where there is no self-evident a priori truth at the bottom.

This then follows that if no statement is analytically true, everything is subject to revision. Quine writes,

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision.

He adds,

Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections — the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement, we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves.

However, if it is “folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements” and “no statement is immune to revision”, how does one discern verisimilitude (proximity to truth) between different statements or beliefs? The statement “all bachelors are unmarried men” depends on many other beliefs and assumptions which act as auxiliaries and which inform it, but how do we discern between which of those beliefs and assumptions are themselves true without verifying them further in the same way? If we are given a choice between possible connections in this web, which do we choose and why? Quine was an atheist and claimed to reject the gods of Homer in favour of materialism and modern physics as the preferable worldview. He wrote that,

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries — not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

Thus, for Quine it is simply that a material worldview of physics is “epistemologically superior” than “other myths” to explain human experience. In this model, truths are connected to and inform one another as a systemic web, but the reason why we choose one belief over another, despite everything being open to revision, is not that it is more logical and rational, but rather that it is not anomalous and better accounts for the whole, cohering with one’s worldview and its wider assumptions and priors. Thus, in this model approximation to truth is based on cohesion of the whole, rather than a chain with some ultimate truth at the bottom, which is how Christianity has often framed this issue. When Christianity gained a foothold, it kicked the ladder out from beneath it, standing on the shoulders of Platonism and changing a holistic worldview of truth into an axiomatic one, while claiming that it had achieved this through the revelation of an ultimate truth at the bottom of the chain, rather than through changing the rules of the game. Many nowtidely Heathens still try to play Christians at their own game to keep up with their system and worldview, attempting to rationalise Heathenry with universal and axiomatic truth, lest its alternate be relativism and therefore not really true. This, however, is anachronistic to how our ancestors saw the world, which did not distinguish between myth and history, and must have been closer to holistic epistemology.

Another significant feature of this is that it helps to explain how the conversion to Christianity happened at all. Once an entire web-like system has been built up, it is difficult to replace an existing worldview completely with another, and like an immune system any idea which does not cohere with the whole is simply rejected as irrelevant. Russell outlines that “the fundamental distinction between a folk religion and a universal religion is one of kind, and not merely of degree” (1994, 48), suggesting Heathenry to be an entire worldview incompatible with Christianity, rather than a mere ideology or propositional belief, and that this could not be bridged through reason. Thus, before any major conversion could take place, the cohesion of the whole worldview had to be assimilated and modified from within, gradually replacing Heathen beliefs, attitudes, behaviours and values. The greatest difference between myself and Quine here is that I do not deem it an “error” to believe in the elder gods. I have not merely added new information to an existing worldview, but rather the kind of worldview has shifted, and it was not rationality which has facilitated it, but rather holistic consistency. This process of continual learning and unlearning Théodsmen call worthing and an important maxim among Théodsmen is “Everything you are taught is false, but everything you learn is true” (quoted in Ælfgár Þegn Húscarl, 2020, pp.24). When we worth ourselves, we are able to relearn the worldview of our ancestors, not by adopting certain beliefs or tenets, but by weaving that worldview into our own, into our daily practices, into our assumptions about the world.

Quinian epistemology shows that one does not come to accept a Heathen worldview and the Heathen gods of their ancestors through rational logic or argumentation, but rather is drawn to it through something deeper, seeking to reconnect with the entire world which underlies it. The truth of Heathenry lies in the whole, where, like the Quinian epistemological web, everything in it is interconnected, and therefore it works. Unlike Christianity, a propositional belief system akin to modern ideologies which anyone from anywhere may choose to adopt, Heathenry in the days of our ancestors was a self-contained, holistic system, inseparable from the tribal customs of a folk which we would now call ‘secular,’ it was simply ‘what the tribe believed,’ it was théodish belief. Religious thew was inseparable from its customary thew and the tribe’s sociobiological and sociopolitical needs. Unlike Quine, I do not believe in Heathenry because it is “epistemologically superior” and better reflects some abstract higher truth, but rather because it is the tribal belief of my ancestors, there can be no higher standard of authority than that.

However nowtidely Heathenry also reaches many problems because it finds an insurmountable gap between our elders’ worldview and those of modernity, particularly for ‘Neo-heathens,’ who are so firmly attached to modern behaviours, attitudes, beliefs and values that this gap must be resolved by reinterpreting the past to make it more palatable. As Þórbeorht Cyning wrote (2021, pp.20-22) about his experience of a moot with Neo-Heathens; “It was apparent that their pagan practices were almost fully informed by modern philosophy, psychology, and politics—things which were utterly unknown to our ancestors and seldom considered by Théodsmen today.” He adds,

We know nothing of a Right or a Left. There is no -ism in our understanding. […] In our earnest effort to reconstruct the ancient religion of our fore-elders, we feel no need to project the inventions of Modernity onto the past. […] [A]side from the belief in the tribalism and sacral kingship known to our fore-elders, our religion is without politics. […] It may very well be then that the ancient wisdom that we have sought to embrace will offend the outside observer’s modern sensibility.

This emphasises further the distance and incompatibility between Heathenry, especially Théodish Retro-Heathenry, with modern sensibilities and its concerns. The Overton window may move this way and that, it came for Heathenry in the past from the Right during the ‘Satanic Panic’, and it has come for heathenry in the present from the ‘woke’ Left by its refusal to be progressive and inclusive, but Heathenry remains standing by the World-tree, at the centre of our world, not theirs. Some heathens may try to keep up with Christianity, imitating it, seeking to ‘prove’ their beliefs with modern ideas, perspectives and ideologies, all while wondering why it fails to fit together.

As this essay has outlined, heathenry is not simply a belief for anyone, but it is the belief for someone, a particular folk in a time and place. It is unlike Christianity in kind and quality by being an all-encompassing worldview. This can be well understood through Quine’s epistemological model, where the truth of any proposition lies not in some ultimate axiom at the end of the epistemic chain, but in the consistency of the whole epistemic web; our beliefs are true because they cohere with the assumptions of that worldview. We are but primitive Heathens who understand the world as living mythologies, woven webs of wisdom and wyrd. W.V.O. Quine did not expect his logical and materialistic philosophy to be used to explain its exact opposite, but when the ship has been unmoored from the strand, it does not have full control over wherever it may be cast adrift.

Bookhoard

Ælfgár Þegn Húscarl, 2020. ‘Théodish Belief: Are You In Or Are You Out?’, in Spellstów vol.2, no.2. Þrimilce 24-26, Háliggyld Books.

Quine, W.V.O. 1951. ‘The Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, https://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html (accessed 04/09/2024)

Russell, James C. 1994. The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation, Oxford.

Þórbeort Hláford. 2021. ‘Before the Wéofod: Our Primitive Paganism’ in Spellstów vol.3, no.2. Þrimilce 20-22, Háliggyld Books.