Who needs faith when you can have statistics?

Willy nilly, the great divorce debate is on. Predictably, the opposing camps are the Church and its satellites on one side, and a few renegades and guarded think-tankers (whose reports 'do not necessarily reflect their personal views', of course) on the other. We can't say very much about politicians, who tend sporadically to break cover to mutter something about 'the family' and then go back to less trivial state matters.

My own opinion on whether or not Malta should have divorce legislation is similar to my views on whether or not tadpoles are young frogs, or Greenland is in the northern hemisphere. So, rather than bore readers with amphibian biology or primary school geography, I'll put my tuppence-worth elsewhere.

What I find fascinating is not so much the substance of the great debate as its form. Funnily enough, the Church has chosen to punt for social science rather than divine revelation. Its main criticism of the Today Public Policy Institute report, for example, is that the think-tankers 'got their statistics wrong'.

If we leave aside Radju Marija, there's surprisingly little mention of Matthew 19:6. The reason may be that the passage leaves the civil marriage flank exposed (it talks of pulling asunder what God, not the mayor, hath joined), or that churchmen realise that to most people the Gospel has become a 'Sunday truth', or both.

I'm not into criticising the Church. On this one, what interests me is, first, that the idea of using statistics to support Gospel truth is flawed and, second, that it tells us something about contemporary Maltese society.

On the first point, it may well be that the folks down at Radju Marija are right. It's probably wiser to be honest about spades than to attempt to work downwards to convert a dogmatic position into a 'scientific' one.

The logic can be witnessed among Hindus, especially middle-class types who like to avoid sounding 'obscurantist'. They will tell you that the reason why, say, cows are sacred to them, is actually scientific-rational. Cows, the 'explanation' goes, have for millenniums provided people with sustenance in the form of milk, dung (that can be used as fuel), and so forth. As such, it made sense to hold them in high esteem, indeed to think of them as sacred creatures.

Don't bother asking why cows are not sacred to non-Hindus (to whom they presumably render the same services), or why pigs - which are useful animals in their own right - are not extended the same formalities. You won't get an answer, because there isn't one outside of religion. Cows, in other words, are sacred due to ritual tradition. The scientific 'explanations' are a gloss and a pretty poor one at that.

I'm not saying it's stupid to venerate cows but rather that, try as one might to show otherwise, the real reason is rooted in tradition, not empirical observation or statistics about the bovine contribution to the economy.

This is all very applicable to the great divorce debate. Let's say we were debating witchcraft, and that the Church's position were that witches should be punished. Churchmen nowadays, being modern-minded, probably wouldn't say that their ultimate reason is Exodus 22:18, which tells us, somewhat unfashionably, that "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live".

Instead they would bombard us with statistics and psychological arguments to 'prove' that black cats cause great harm, that children whose souls are corrupted by bearded women suffer immense anguish, and that societies 'abroad' which allow witchcraft are going to the dogs.

These data would unfortunately be readily available, because there is no shortage of depressed pet owners, disoriented children and social ills. But the real, tacit basis of the argument would be Exodus 22:18 all along. No matter how many harmless felines and kindly hirsute women we might find, the churchmen wouldn't change their views. Such are beliefs rooted in dogma.

The problem, in other words, is methodological. It's not rare in science to start out with an idea, an inspiration even, and to work downwards looking for data that support it. That is perfectly acceptable, as long as one is prepared to accept data that disprove the original spark - not if the starting point is dogma based on what is thought to be infallible divine wisdom. In that case, the exercise becomes little more than a montage of data snippets cobbled together to 'prove' a point of faith. Think milk, dung, and sacred cows.

For my second point, we could do worse than travel to Ireland, which got its divorce legislation in 1996 after a long and fairly bitter national confrontation. When in 1986 the Fine Gael government proposed amending the constitution to allow for divorce, the Church used the argument of 'the future of the Irish family' as its main weapon.

Interestingly, anti-divorce groups such as 'Family Solidarity' used statistics about the poverty of families headed by lone parents in the US as an example of what could befall Irish women if divorce were introduced. (My source here is a 2001 academic article by Eugene McLaughlin.)

The similarities aren't so much due to Catholic universalism as to certain historical-structural factors we have in common with the Ireland of the 1980s, among other places. In Malta, the Church has been the main sponsor of both sociology and psychology. Nothing necessarily 'wrong' with that, but our sociology department at University was until very recently almost entirely a priestly preserve.

Psychology, too, was very much dressed in clerical robes, to the extent that I once heard a priest say on radio that "the greatest psychologist of all time was Jesus Christ".

It is therefore not at all surprising that the Church should resort to its two pet disciplines in order to make its point about (read 'against') divorce legislation. Again, though, psychology and sociology do not necessarily lend themselves very well as means to a dogmatic and predictable end. Or maybe they do, depending on whether one is rigorous or cynical/naïve.

As the great debate unfolds, we might want to keep one thing in mind: One cannot productively take part in a rational argument unless one is prepared, in practice rather than rhetorically, to change one's mind. I doubt any churchman can do that without paying a very high personal price.

mafalzon@hotmail.com