Barbara O’Brien is doing a guest post for Glenn Greenwald, and she’s chosen to talk about religion—you can guess what her position is from the opening paragraph.
…sometimes I find myself defending Christians from the religion haters among us lefties.
I confess. That’s me, religion hater. Go ahead and read the whole thing. It’s interesting. It argues that we should tolerate Christians (I’m all for that), and that some Christians have very sensible secular views, and that some American Christians have been responsible for social progress. Sure thing! No argument!
However, nowhere in the article is any reason given not to hate religion. Pointing out that some people manage to overcome the handicap of superstitious thinking to live admirable lives doesn’t change the fact that it is superstition; nor does it excuse the fact that religiosity has become a de facto requirement for political advancement in this country. Where the article completely flops is in its failure to consider its premises…and here’s the central one, the big enchilada, the rotting hole in the center of all of the arguments of religion defenders.
But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane. But religion doesn’t have to be that way.
That’s backwards. The problem is that we have a well-regarded institution that is practically a mandatory component of public life that demands that people believe in the unseen and unknowable, that insists on an exemption from critical thought, that routinely proposes nonsense and expects its adherents to swallow it hole on the basis of traditional authority. O’Brien writes as if critics of religion think the only flaw in religion is biblical literalism, and that we think all religious people are fundamentalist kooks. This is incorrect. I think it’s obvious that even the most rabid fundamentalists pick and choose which parts of the Bible to worship, and pluck out whatever turd fits their inclination from that foul nest of inconsistencies; and I don’t care whether the religion is some soft and fuzzy grab-bag of noncommittal platitudes that fosters all kinds of humane and charitable activities. It still bears the damning necrosis at its core.
The problem is faith.
Faith is a hole in your brain. Faith stops critical thinking. Faith is a failure point inculcated into people’s minds, an unguarded weak point that allows all kinds of nasty, maggoty, wretched ideas to crawl into their heads and take up occupancy. Supporting faith is like supporting people who refuse to be vaccinated: they’re harmless in and of themselves, they may be perfectly healthy right now, but they represent fertile ground for disease, and they represent potential severe damage to the social compact. When you’re in a culture that worships Abraham’s insanity, you’re fostering the nonsense that enables the Son of Sam.
O’Brien misses the big flaw. She says, “somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped,” but there’s no “somehow” about it. It’s intrinsic to the nature of the beast. When the core of the institution is an acceptance of irrational, the ones who will climb to the top are those most able to exploit the delusions of the masses, or who are most earnest and unhesitating in their endorsement of foolishness. This is what religion does best: build a hierarchy of clowns and tyrants on the wishful thinking of the innocent. Why should we want that to be a model for a democratic political system?
What I see here is a kind of cynicism. One of the reasons George W. Bush made it to the top is by exploiting the religion loophole in people’s thinking, and by playing up his supposed god-fearing nature, he won over the least rational people…which, I admit, is a huge and powerful demographic. What the religious Left wants to do is simply replace the worm called “Bush & God” that is eating voter’s brains with a new worm called “Democratic Candidate & God,” which will have the same diet but might be coaxed into chewing up slightly different parts of the cortex. ‘Their disease is scabrous and filthy, but my disease is sweet and lovely and smells like fresh flowers’ is not an argument to sway me.
I will not support such a policy, no matter how pretty the maggot might be, or how good it makes its victims feel. I endorse a very strict deworming regimen for government, and I am dismayed to continually see what should be a secular political party playing games with favoring certain brands of delusion.
Well said, PZ!
It often disturbs me that the religious (and in this I include friends that are of that liberal-religious nature) don’t understand the basic inconsistency of faith with rational thought. They insist that atheists have “faith” in things too, but they misuse the term in that context. In common parlance it might be said that I have “faith” in what logic and evidence can prove, but that is a far cry from what’s meant when a religious person says that they have “faith” in a deity. The first relies on known and knowable factors, the second on unknown and (by definition) unknowable factors. Few people have the gumption to point out the difference, though I’m afraid that it’s thinking like O’Brien’s that makes that possible. She’s simply too nice to point out the inconsistency to her religious friends, no doubt considering it rude. Our problem often is that we’re not willing to be rude enough.
By the way, also well said about religion and politics. The only thing that can still practically guarentee a candidate has no chance of being elected in this country is the revelation that s/he is an atheist, while virtually nothing else will (even criminals can get elected, I’ve seen it happen, even when their criminal behavior included conduct directly tied to public office like bribery.)
One reason criminals can get elected to office is the unwarranted respect given to religious belief (which I’ve also never understood: any idiot can believe in god, and in fact, idiocy helps.) Caught with your hands in the till, breaking the law, taking bribes? Wrap yourself in your Cloak of Piety and say you did it for God, and no problem…you will get reelected.
It’s important, I think, to distinguish philosophical and political disagreement. PZ is exactly correct that faith is a “hole in the brain.” But if we impose a test of rationality on those with whom we ally ourselves politically, or even seem to do so, we’ll guarantee majorities for the right-wing extremists from here until doomsday, which given their leadership might arrive sooner rather than later. Those of us who are secular need to be able to say to religious liberals, “I’ll dissent from your faith in philosophical debate, but we share enough ethical and political values to work together against the religious right.” Faith is a hole in the brain. But sometimes the worm in that hole is toxic and pregnant and eager to devour the rest of the brain. And sometimes it is benign and content to rest just in that little hole.
“The problem is faith.”
The problem with this statement is that not all religious systems have a strong faith component. This doesn’t necessarily lead to reason and rationality, but it’s a bit simplistic to say the problem with religion is simply faith.
It’s not just that con artists in a religiously-centered society can win election through “holiness-by-association”, nor even that a major bloc of voters can be mobilized by appeals to ancient and neurotic but sanctified prejudices.
Religion is politically corrosive exactly because it cultivates the mental habit of “taking things on faith”, of accepting the premises of significant claims uncritically. While it may be too much to expect the electorate to demand evidence and careful reasoning for each assertion, a less reflexively credulous public might not be so eager to swallow non sequiturs such as “Because we’re America, and we’re Number One!” used to justify so many absurdities these days.
Todd writes, “The problem with this statement is that not all religious systems have a strong faith component.”
Why should a secular person have a problem with non-fideistic religions? Some Buddhists, for example, are also atheists. Their Buddhism is more an ethical commitment than any kind of positive belief. So where is the necessary disagreement between such a Buddhist, and any other kind of atheist?
The nice thing about PZ’s statement is that it identifies quite well what is so wrong about many religions, while not painting unnecessarily broadly.
Barbara is a Buddhist. She believes that sacred scriptures are stories, to be amended when they conflict with reality, mere tools to allow one to reach
Now, arguably, this is a rather different notion of “religion” that anything common to American political thought. Certainly it conflicts with basic Christian and Muslim positions on their respective sacred texts (for those who protest that they think otherwise, read my last paragraph). So I’m not sure that what she’s talking about really has any relevance to our crying need to get religion back where it belongs – which is away from the government.
That said, I’m also not sure that her brand of religion is anything different from Einstein’s – and, if you read her blog, where she (understandably) goes into much more detail, neither is she.
She closes that guest post with this:
I think we can all agree with that much.
But what I’d like to hear from others of “religion’s defenders” is some explanation for why they keep silent in the face of the Rabid Right. I hear one or two timidly saying, “we don’t all think like that” but I hear no thundering denouncements from the pulpits, no angry letters to editors, no full page newspaper ads. Until they stop playing the “well, it’s good to bring people to God however” game, stop pretending that they can put this genie back into the bottle once the evil secular atheist-and-unChristian conspiracy is destroyed, I can’t defend them too much, myself.
Perhaps we can rally these corporate sponsors in our push to deworm the population.
Perhaps we can rally these corporate sponsors in our push to deworm the population.
Religion is inherently irrational. What makes a belief religious isn’t the content of the belief, but the reason it is believed: the justification, in other words.
If you believe the Earth is an oblate spheroid because the available evidence clearly indicates that it is shaped that way, that’s rationality. If you believe the Earth is an oblate spheroid because your holy scriptures say so, or an invisible sky fairy told you so, or because the sphere is the perfect shape (because everyone *knows* spheres are the perfect shape), then that’s religion. It doesn’t matter whether the conclusion is right or wrong, what matters is how you reached it.
I wonder if reading this might advance the conversation?
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/evangelicalevolution/transcript.shtml
She quotes Thomas Jefferson: “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
This is naive. Ideas always have consequences. People don’t just have a religion in their head, they act upon it. They discriminate. They ostracize. They kill. They slam planes into towers. They become intolerant of homosexuals. Religions promise salvation for the chosen and damnation for everyone else. You can’t just cherry-pick the nice bits the ignore the screwed-up basic premises.
I agree with PZ — of course there are religions which are more rational and reasonable than others, but it seems to me that their being so is mostly a matter of accident, that they adopt an underlying assumption that what makes sense in the world should trump any mystical revelations which don’t. But if supernaturalism is nothing more than a prop for what can be gained through natural assumptions, of what real use is it? Why take it seriously?
Imagine a society where people really truly took astrology seriously: the movements of the stars and planets reflect human events and concerns on earth, and they should be studied in order for us to make good choices in our lives. And then we get different schools of astrology. There is a bland, nice, reasonable one such as we see in newspapers, advising people to “be cautious lending money to strangers” or “today is a good day to get to those tasks you have been putting off.” And then there is a system which takes itself very seriously indeed and claims to be able to discover real facts not otherwise knowable — calling for wars, pograms, and “fire your employees, they are cheating you.”
As long as we try to argue against the “bad” astrology system by giving credit and props to the nice, sensible “good” astrology system, we’re still giving sanction to the system of astrology itself. Yeah, it’s fine to believe the positions of the stars are telling us something important. We respect that. Just be reasonable about it.
But once we imply that there is nothing wrong with the view that star positions tell us things, how do we tell what is reasonable? Why would it have to be the case that “of course, astrology doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t figure out without it?”
The problem is faith.
Faith is a hole in your brain. Faith stops critical thinking. Faith is a failure point inculcated into people’s minds, an unguarded weak point that allows all kinds of nasty, maggoty, wretched ideas to crawl into their heads and take up occupancy. Supporting faith is like supporting people who refuse to be vaccinated: they’re harmless in and of themselves, they may be perfectly healthy right now, but they represent fertile ground for disease, and they represent potential severe damage to the social compact. When you’re in a culture that worships Abraham’s insanity, you’re fostering the nonsense that enables the Son of Sam.
Is faith an intrinsic part of the human mind? The only use of the appendix seems to be to produce appendicitis, but railing against people for having an appendix is kind of stupid.
There is a simple matter of economics to consider – as innumerable inventors of improved mouse traps have found, it doesn’t matter what the supply is, if there is no demand. That would indicate some basic human need exists. Since popular culture does not make it “cool” to be religious, one cannot say that the demand is being created akin to what the cigarette companies did.
PZ Myers and some of us here are in a fortunate situation where we receive a daily innoculation against faith. E.g., PZ Myers deals with new science everyday. But the vast majority of people are not in that situation. What could innoculate them?
If faith (“faith-like behavior”) is intrinsic to humans, and we misunderstand it, then we run the risk of leaving room for something that might be far worse. Maybe like the Khmer Rouge ideology?
“Why should a secular person have a problem with non-fideistic religions? Some Buddhists, for example, are also atheists. Their Buddhism is more an ethical commitment than any kind of positive belief. So where is the necessary disagreement between such a Buddhist, and any other kind of atheist?”
I’m not saying that atheists should have a problem with Buddhism. All I’m getting at is that religious belief is far more complex than simply a matter of faith. That’s a purely Western viewpoint on religious practice.
On the other hand, Buddhism shouldn’t necessarily be given a free pass either. Buddhism has just as long a history of religious and political conflict as Christianity or Islam. A quick study of Chinese history should quickly dissuade America’s romantic mythologizing of Buddhism as being a religion of peace. This is where someone like Sam Harris really misses the boat. Any belief system, whether religous or not, can be used for very bad purposes. Yes, even Buddhism.
Faith is only part of the problem. It means believing something that is either not true or can’t be disproved, and that is merely an incompetence limited to the faithful person. Where religion fails is in the tribal impulse to corral people with roughly similar faiths, enforcing by guilt or other blackmail some surface conformity, and encouraging them more or less to chant “We all believe the same thing!” That implies that you out there who don’t believe the same thing, or at least decline to so chant, are the despicable Other. Benignly, tribalism affords masturbatory pleasure in mutual reinforcement. The downside is obvious. Woody Guthrie trashed the tribal lunacy by insisting that he belonged to all religions or none.
It’s nice how these bright conversatons turn up on Sunday.
Supporting faith is not akin to supporting people who refuse to become vaccinated. People have the right to decide what they will believe and how they will think.
Supporting faith is akin to not isolating a person carrying a dangerous and highly infectious disease.
he quotes Thomas Jefferson: “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
This is naive. Ideas always have consequences. People don’t just have a religion in their head, they act upon it. They discriminate. They ostracize. They kill. They slam planes into towers. They become intolerant of homosexuals. Religions promise salvation for the chosen and damnation for everyone else. You can’t just cherry-pick the nice bits the ignore the screwed-up basic premises.
Well, as long as we have the Bill of Rights, this naive idea will prevail (thank God or Jefferson or whomever!). Fortunately, naivete won the day back then. Otherwise, we could ban the theory of evolution because of its possible consequences. For instance, any number of racists used evolutionary ideas to justify their creed.
I cannot wait, for that Great Day, when medical science determines the part of the brain which should be surgically removed when someone goes mad, and starts bashing gays, or advocating creationism.
.
.
(Joking aside, I believe the best approach is to treat creationism, bigotry, and faith as treatable diseases, whose treatment we do not yet know.)
“Faith is a hole in your brain. Faith stops critical thinking. Faith is a failure point inculcated into people’s minds, an unguarded weak point that allows all kinds of nasty, maggoty, wretched ideas to crawl into their heads and take up occupancy.”
Those few lines brought a big smile to my face. Wonderfully stated.
Arun Gupta asks, “Is faith an intrinsic part of the human mind?”
I suspect the answer is “yes.” It is essential part of our childhood that we are intellectual sponges in our early years, absorbing all sorts of beliefs from the adults around us. Before you were five, you learned that fish swim but not cats, that girls wore dresses but not boys, that B follows A, that for breakfast it’s OK to have a bowl of cereal but not for dinner, that little babies don’t go to school but older children do, that the vaccuum cleaner and TV only work if they’re plugged into the wall, but some phoned do and some phones don’t, etc. If you questioned these things, it was more from psychology (“I want Fruit Loops for dinner!”) than from careful and critical thought. Indeed, you didn’t even distinguish the different kinds of claims these are.
You were a sponge. And there’s nothing wrong with that. When you were five.
Clinging to faith is a development failure, rather than a disease. Some people outgrow it. Others cling to it throughout their lives, the way Linus clings to his security blanket.
This response doesn’t seem to address O’Brien’s view, that religion is properly not a faith-based activity — that is what is meant by mysticism. Her view is, I think, similar to Sam Harris’, that direct experience of the divine is possible, where the precise definition of ‘divine’ is left up to personal interpretation – it could be a supernatural god, it could be Spinoza’s god or it could be a pleasant hallucination. How is this threatening to our political system? This blog post poses as a response to O’Brien, but it ignores her formulation of the proper role of religion, instead choosing as a target a kind of religion that she specifically disavows.
If she’s including direct experience of a supernatural being, then her disavowal is a lie. That’s logically impossible, and hence can only be justified by faithfully accepting that it is true.
If she’s leaving ‘divine’ to be defined by the audience, her statement has no real content.
“Faith is a hole in your brain. Faith stops critical thinking. Faith is a failure point inculcated into people’s minds, an unguarded weak point that allows all kinds of nasty, maggoty, wretched ideas to crawl into their heads and take up occupancy.”
While PZ’s thunderous prose is impressive, I don’t think this is the whole story. (Hole story? :-) ) I also agree with Russell’s developmental account, but I’d like to add a couple of points:
1) Neoteny, that is, retaining childlike traits (and behavior!) into adulthood is a specific hallmark of Homo sapiens. That’s why we can continue to learn as adults, even if we don’t always do so.
2) Russell attributes the “use” of faith as basically an aid to learning in infancy. But in fact, we don’t really lose it at all, we just start filtering new inputs to our knowledge base, according to whether it’s compatible with what we’ve already got. Those of us who “escaped” from religion did so because they had acquired a stronger faith in the self-consistency and stability of the universe(*) than in whatever “just so stories” they’d been told, and they continued from there.
(*) This is just another way to phrase naturalism.
3) I conjecture that faith may (also) represent a pragmatic response to natural constraints on learning and thinking. More specifically, it’s just not practical to carefully examine every idea you hear, and test it individually against all your previous ideas. Instead, we assemble a “world-map” consisting of basic principles and rules, then compare new stuff to that model (which is presumably optimized for the task). If your original model is sufficiently realistic, that makes it much easier to weed out garbage, but if your model is poor — say, if it only covers the motivations, priorities, and circumstances of your own tribe — then, you have a problem.
I am plagiarizing from another post of mine (excuse me if this is wrong to do), but I wanted to add to this discussion the other worm of religion:
I think the other worm in religion is lack of transaction analysis. Let me explain:
In general when making moral decisions and the like a theist thinks outside of individual transactions. The theist shoots for the broadest set of standards and spends little energy in evaluating life transactions. For example, many theists make the judgment that all pre-marital sex is BAD (for the theist it is NOT a case by case consideration; every individual transaction is BAD regardless of the facts). On the other hand, an atheist hopefully should be more transactional. Thus an atheist probably thinks like this: pre-marital sex is a transaction and is good if the overall true net value to the participants is positive, and it is bad if the net gain is negative.
This is transaction analysis is NOT hedonistic in the least. Rather an atheist simply recognizes the RATIONAL and REAL situational pros and cons, based on values, empathy, sympathy, fairness, etc. and weighs them rationally to make a judgment case by case.
Strict religious theists often refuse to recognize ANY facts about SPECIFIC transactions – they are not transaction oriented – they see and judge things in the broadest of terms – it allows them to minimize thinking.
So, gay marriage, or abortion, can be the abomination it is to them because they can cast it outside of any SPECIFIC transaction that may be overall positive and thus upset their beliefs. Atheists generally will evaluate things more on the value of the individual transaction to the participants.
To me this is another worm.
Hi. Scott Hatfield here. As a Christian, I have no problem with being asked to defend my beliefs, and I freely admit that many of my beliefs are taken on faith. Professor Myers is surely correct that faith, of a sort, stops critical thinking.
However, I demur to his claim that the core of Christianity is an acceptance of irrationality per se. Christianity is not monolithic in this regard. As a personal matter, I don’t accept irrationality as either inevitable or desirable. I do recognize, however, that some knowledge is gained by experience, and that some claims are (by design? chance?) not amenable to reason. Acceptance of this does not represent a commitment to irrationality as a preferred strategy, but simply a recognition of the limits of reason.
I might add that all of us hold certain beliefs on faith. Does Professor Myers accept that his so-called “loved ones” really love him because he has attempted to falsify said claims, and failed? I doubt it. Nor do I believe that Professor Myers accepts the claim of affection provisionally as the best, most parsimonious explanation of the data. I believe, like every other human being, Professor Myers at some level takes those claims on faith, relying upon his subjective experience as the best guide in such matters.
Does that mean I think that such a professor has a hole in his head? Not at all. The subject of this ‘thought experiment’ has merely taken the common-sense approach that this is not the sort of thing that he wishes to do science on. Many believers take the same view with respect to their beliefs.
Now, this not the same thing, I hasten to add, as giving Christians or other religionists a free pass. By all means, put the falsifiable claims of believers to the test in every arena: they have no right to expect that their viewpoint is privileged, nor should they be granted one in the interest of political expediency. I further think that it is interesting to note that many believers on both the right and the left recognize, as does Professor Myers, the danger of explicitly linking faith of any kind to the political platform of the moment.
I would remind all of us, however, that politics is neither safe nor an academic pursuit based on ideological purity. It is a game, and it should be played with the idea of winning. At the present time, linking the right with faith and the left with reason is a losing strategy for the left—and that’s unlikely to change.
Scott Hatfield
I’m sorry, but with the respect to the previous post I should’ve made it clear that I was speaking of a dichotomy between faith and reason. Obviously, I think this is a false dichotomy, but even if (like Professor Myers) one appears not to think that, it seems imprudent to me to emphasize this point in certain forums.
Scott Hatfield
If PZ Myers is too critical of the faithful, David Harmon is too charitable. I think there is a real sense in which the faithful either don’t question, or question just enough to form a fake foundationalist epistemology. I would add that I include Marxists and Objectivists and many other “-ists” among the faithful. The ellisional thinking that leads to Christianity and Islam can take many other turns, also.
“More specifically, it’s just not practical to carefully examine every idea you hear, and test it individually against all your previous ideas.”
Of course not. But what happens is that those of us who aren’t fideistic simply don’t have beliefs in the way that those who are, do. We recognize that the assertions we recall are each and every one just something stuck away, that when we recall it, either has some remembered provenance that helps us decide how to apply it, or becomes just something “once heard.” Each and every one can be questioned, and its related evidences and arguments (if any) reexamined.
Often, when a religious believer asks whether I “believe in evolution,” my response is that I don’t believe in any scientific theory the way that they believe in their religion, and that that kind of belief isn’t the purpose of a scientific theory. My “belief” in evolution is no more and no less than the a set of evidential claims about it that I have learned, which means, perforce, that my belief in evolution is much weaker than P Z Myers’s. But I hope even his isn’t like religious faith.
Well. I’m not sure I’ve explained things well. It really takes more than a blog post.
What represents your commmitment to irrationality is your willingness to go beyond reason.
People routinely hold beliefs that they haven’t rigorously tested, rationalists included. The difference between their belief and faith is that they don’t define those beliefs as true, and they don’t insist that they’re necessarily correct. Given the appropriate evidence, they will modify or discard their beliefs.
Faith does not modify or discard its tenets; it doesn’t encourage challenging the held beliefs. It defines the beliefs to be true and interprets everything that comes after it in light of those declarations.
With all due respect, this is nothing more than a bunch of vacuous gobbledygook.
You don’t need “faith” to believe that your loved ones love you. You need an accurate definition of love, and a proper understanding of the way human emotions work.
“Love” isn’t just a nebulous emotion, something that exists “out there” with no material basis to it. When someone loves you, they provide evidence of their love through their behavior toward you.
I know the honest state of the people who love me by the way they behave toward me. When I am stressed out, they help me relax. When I am unhappy, they cheer me up. They remember my birthday. They know I don’t like okra, and so they never make it for me for dinner. THIS is what love is, not some empty, namby-pamby substanceless expression of emotion.
I’m sorry if I seem riled up over this, but the crazy idea that love is an emotion with no material evidence is what enables spousal abusers to get away with their crimes for such long spans of time. The abused spouses are able to believe that their abusers “love” them, despite all evidence to the contrary, because of this ridiculous idea that tends to get promulgated by pop culture.
As far as holding beliefs on faith, the only beliefs I hold that I don’t think I could substantiate very well is that the universe exists independently of me, and that my sense data bear a consistent correlation to that universe. And because there isn’t a way to give those beliefs up without necessarily accepting on faith things which seem to be less tenable than these beliefs, I think I’ll stick with them.
Just don’t muddle the issue by implying that belief that other humans experience emotion much in the same way I do is a faith position. It’s irritating.
Hi, Scott,
It sounds pretty fair, what you’re saying – but let’s see what it leads to:
“By all means, put the falsifiable claims of believers to the test in every arena: they have no right to expect that their viewpoint is privileged, nor should they be granted one in the interest of political expediency.”
All right then – what falsifiable claims do believers make? Not all that many that I can think of. And when you do put those they make to the test – say, by checking whether or not it’s true that the earth is only six thousand years old – half of them will say your test was biased (fundamentalist creationists) and the other half that it doesn’t matter anyway (theistic evolutionists).
We do put them to a fair test. We say “prove that God really exists; back up your assertion; show us the difference between a world in which God exists and a world in which you believe he exists” and although Christians talk a good fight they’ve really got nothing to show for it.
When you say “put the falsifiable claims of believers to the test,” does that mean that the unfalsifiable ones should get a free pass? Claims such as:
Life continues to exist after death (but in no form we can detect)
Life goes to one of two places, very good or very bad (undetectable until you die)
There life is ruled over by two entities opposed to each other (undetectable until you die)
I say “undetectable”, but in fact believers claim to be able to detect it using a special perception we do not have access to – although they seem unable to distinguish the possession of this perception from the belief that you possess it.
and
That God answers all prayers with “yes”, “no” or “not yet” with the exact same frequency as blind chance.
So. I agree; we should put Christians to a fair test. What should we do when they fail it?
That’s interesting except for the fact that religion (in the forms that can be identified as objected to by secular liberals) is a form of tyranny over the mind; something over which we should have eternal hostility.
Scott Hatfield repeats one of the hoariest — and frankly, more silly — lines of religious propaganda, when he asks, “Does Professor Myers accept that his so-called ‘loved ones’ really love him because he has attempted to falsify said claims, and failed?”
Now, I cannot speak for PZ. Perhaps his spouse shows him utterly no affection at all, and yet he continues to believe she loves him. That would indeed be faith. It is quite visible in dysfunctional relationships. Any marriage counselor can tell you about couples where one stays in the marriage from a wrong belief that they are loved. Wrong, in the marriage counselor’s eyes, because he can see — from the evidence! — that that is not so. Believed on the abused spouse’s part as a matter of faith.
I hope PZ is not in such a relationship. As for myself, those who I believe love me, show it in numerous ways. I have no need for faith on that issue. And those manifestations of love are tangible and observable, not just by me, but by third parties who are close to us. As is normal in a healthy relationship. I fear Scott’s views of relationships has been warped by his relationship with his god. Who is not visible. Who won’t say a literal word to Scott. (And no, I don’t mean what Scott thinks his god has said to others, in the Bible. I mean what his god speaks, literally, to Scott.) Who requires faith, not just to believe his love, but to believe that he is.
So no, there isn’t anything close to an analogy here, between what is real, tangible, and amply evidenced, and what requires a good imagination to believe.
Scott –
“I do recognize, however, that some knowledge is gained by experience, and that some claims are (by design? chance?) not amenable to reason. Acceptance of this does not represent a commitment to irrationality as a preferred strategy, but simply a recognition of the limits of reason.”
This has already, I think, been worked over a little, but I’m curious if you might elaborate on what precisely you
mean by this?
The first question I have is what you mean by the notion that some claims are not amenable to reason. This is puzzling, because I’m not sure how to make what this is saying any more explicit without defeating your point. We might say that some claims are not capable of being justified (since reasons are what justify things, and thus if some claim is not one to which reasons stick, so to speak , it is unjustified). But if this is what you meant the above paragraph would be farcical, and you can’t have meant that. (It would go something like “I do recognize that there’s a place for reason, but there are some statements that cannot be supported in any way by evidence but which I still wish to believe. So reason cannot perform the function of giving me a justification for all the statements I wish to believe. But I intend to believe them all the same. I’m not going to give up generally being able to justify my beliefs, but I am going to do so in these cases.” I hope, at least, that this is not what you intended to mean by that, as it’s crazy.)
On the other hand, if what you meant is that there are some statements which, in principle, cannot be dealt with rationally at all. But reasoning is not a strictly delineated area: the fact that something or other is a reason to believe some statement says nothing more about it than that that thing means that the statement is more or less likely to be true. In fact, the only statements that I can think of that would qualify as ones that cannot be dealt with rationally are ones that are, simply, gibberish. (Nothing, after all, could count as a reason to believe “griw esodugn eftygidjoonguw wekjogskebn eeiiiied” because that is not a meaningful sentence (and so cannot be true or false in the first place – and here see the above point about reasons)). But if this is what you meant, and again I doubt that it is, it’s hard to see what is being said at all.
“Nor do I believe that Professor Myers accepts the claim of affection provisionally as the best, most parsimonious explanation of the data. I believe, like every other human being, Professor Myers at some level takes those claims on faith, relying upon his subjective experience as the best guide in such matters.”
Finally, I know you’ve been beat around about this paragraph above, but I do have to point out here that while I have no idea about Dr Myers’ personal situation the initial sentence describes precisely how it is that I claim knowledge of the fact that, say, my parents love me. I know (remember, knowledge requires justification) they love me because they act like they love me, and because in general human beings are such that parents love their children, and because I have yet to discover any reasons that call the notion that they love me, or that the above two reasons validly apply, into question. There’s no problem here. I also trust them – but trust is not like knowledge, though here I think claiming that I do know that they love me makes my trust more reasonable.
As well, I’m not at all sure what you mean by stating that all humans take the love of the appropriate people on faith – surely this simply has to be false, yes? Even if you might want to suggest that they ought to do so, it’s hardly the case that they do.
Finally, I’m not entirely certain what you mean by the last sentence here: he may well take his own subjective experience (it is hard to imagine what a non-subjective experience might be like, though I think here it is often suggested that that is precisely what mysticism amounts to) as a guide to something or other. There is no problem here: the fact that one subjectively experiences such-and-such is a reason to believe that such and such is the case. Of course, if there are also reasons to believe it is not the case, or reasons to believe that this is a case where experiencing such-and-such is not a reliable indicator of such and such being the case (say, in the case of optical illusions or the ideo-motor effect) then it would certainly be irrational to believe that such and such was the case. But the notion that somehow a reason to believe something, or believing something on the grounds of some reason or another, is to be distinguished from believing something on the grounds that one subjectively experiences it to be so is rather odd indeed, I would think. Is this what you meant to suggest? (Again, here, I am not at all sure – on the one hand I think it looks as if this is what you are arguing, but on the other hand I suspect I must be misreading you, as you would be rather dramatically wrong to argue this.)
Me, charitable? Aw, shucks ;-) I agree that Marxism &al propagate by the same “faith based” pattern, but…
“Of course not. But what happens is that those of us who aren’t fideistic simply don’t have beliefs in the way that those who are, do. We recognize that the assertions we recall are each and every one just something stuck away, that when we recall it, either has some remembered provenance that helps us decide how to apply it, or becomes just something “once heard.” Each and every one can be questioned, and its related evidences and arguments (if any) reexamined.”
I’m sure you do this quite a lot — I know I do. But if you think you’re doing it with everything, then I think you’re kidding yourself. Consider that a lot of even your scientific knowledge probably came from teachers, books, or magazines, earlier in your education– or it depends on data that did. How much of your high-school chemistry education have you actually managed to verify by experiment? Inevitably, you’ve declared both certain sources, certain principles, and even certain collections of data, as “trusted” info. If you didn’t, you’d need to review your entire education for every cocktail-party conversation! (Have you read Heinlein’s late novel, J.O.B.? The conceit there is relevant, but too far a digression for this hour of night.)
And even with those limitations, your “habit of doubt” is not without costs… most likely, you make decisions more slowly than the less skeptical sorts. (Sometimes, it really is more important that you do something, now, than it is to do “exactly the right thing”.) Perhaps people have considered you to lack confidence because of those slow responses. Reviewing and changing your beliefs might get you tagged a “flip-flopper”, or at least unpredictable. I know I’ve gotten hit with all of those….
Despite my own beliefs, I’d have to say that the “habit of faith” is much more representative of the “human norm”, than the “habit of doubt” is. That may be changing, slowly — but it’s way too soon to tell if the new way will continue to spread, or be left to a niche in the memetic ecology.
Dr. Pretorius: The first question I have is what you mean by the notion that some claims are not amenable to reason.
I got one. Fashion. That’s an area that’s not rational is it?
You can do science on it but will that ever explain the rationality of relaxed jeans? Pants are meant to stay on. I thought Scott Hatfield’s comment was very good and I thought yours was very whiney.
Scott the vacuous here. With respect to Jillian’s comment, it is certainly true that abused spouses seem convinced they are “loved” by the abuser despite positive evidence to the contrary. It is also possible to imagine a person who appears to love you, based on all manner of tangible signs and choices, but whom in their heart of hearts cares nothing for you at all. In other words, its a phenomenological problem, akin to Descartes’ worry about an ‘evil genius’.
Now I know that many folk regard any attempt to traffic in phenomenological language as bordering on vacuous, but there it is: there is always the possibility that other agents, like our senses, might deceive us. In fact, from an evolutionary point of view there’s a lot of data that suggests that our species is unusually skilled at deception.
Now, as a practical matter, unless we’re paranoid we don’t give this line of reasoning the time of day in our personal lives, not necessarily because we’ve made a conscious decision that it’s non-parsimonious (not to mention absurd) based on our experience. Rather, we consciously choose the interpretation that we are loved. It’s not just that it’s simpler to believe it; it’s what we want to believe. Jillian is irritated by this line of reasoning, in part because she is afraid that it legitimizes abuse, but let me suggest it might do the opposite: it helps explain why victims often choose to stay with an abuser, and this understanding is probably key to the victim’s recovery, and (not incidentally) the prosecution of the abuser.
Russell characterizes this line of reasoning as “religious propaganda,” but let me point out that nature has no obligation to choose either the simpler explanation or the explanation that we prefer. The same line of reasoning could be used to attack claims of religious experience, for example; in fact, I note in passing that I made no claims on behalf of my particular set of beliefs. My interests here are phenomenological, rather than apologetic.
Caledonian’s comment reminds me of something Steven Deutsch emphasizes on his rather substantial web site, which is that he insists upon engaging believers upon the question of what, if anything, would cause them to modify their beliefs? The distinction Caledonian makes between faith and belief reminds me of the creationist canard that contrasts the changeable nature of scientific theories with the “unchanging” word of God, with the implied (and of course false) subtext that the latter is supposedly superior.
For purpose of discussion, I’ll agree with Caledonian that what he describes as faith really is irrational. My question to him would be: if a believer held their beliefs provisionally, as his described rationalist might, should we describe their belief as ‘faith’ or as something else? I’m interested in the question, because I am convinced that on more than one occasion my beliefs have (ahem) evolved, hopefully for the better.
Interested Atheist is concerned about the consequences of my objection, asking, in effect, what do we do about the non-falsifiable claims, the ones that must be taken on faith? Well, that’s easy: if they do not interest you, or offer no meaning for you, or pose no immediate threat to your liberty, you ignore them.
If, on the other hand, they are offered in such a way that you feel bound to respond, then you attempt to falsify the claims that are falsifiable and you propose other explanations (hopefully more parsimonious and/or to some degree falsifiable) for the non-falsifiable claims. And, if any of this poses a threat to your liberty, you couple your response with a very firm assertion of your legal rights!
But, in any case, I do not see that the consequences of the objection are relevant to the question of whether the objection is correct. That’s the question that interests me. If, as I assert, there are quite a few things that can not be ultimately ‘proven’ but which almost all of us accept not merely as provisionally demonstrated, but as truth, then all of us (even those who of us who believe themselves emptied of superstition) do take some things on faith.
If that’s the case, a general fulmination against faith strikes me not only as politically unwise, but somewhat pointless.
On the other hand, if someone can point to something fundamentally wrong with the argument as stated, I’m open to correction. I think that I am still capable of changing my mind. I have my doubts about the electorate, though.
Peace…
Scott Hatfield
Religion is a virus of the mind. Just about every religion virus gets transferred vertically to unsuspecting offspring, but the most successful religions also get transferred horizontally (Christianity: over 2 billion adherents; Islam: over 1 billion adherents).
Evolutionary principles apply extremely well to organized religions: religions develop offensive mechanisms such as evangelism, defensive mechanisms such as labelling those who are not converted as infidels or devil-worshippers, and generally acquire a set of tools that helps them succeed in the global competition for human mindspace.
The percentage of atheists in American society has been increasing for decades, and as our scientific understanding of the Universe advances, and our educational system improves (hopefully), religion will lose its harmful grip on humans.
Scientific knowledge paired with the ability to think is an effective anti-virus, and the existence of tools like wikipedia will help accelerate the rate at which humans cure themselves.
Teacup says:
“This response doesn’t seem to address O’Brien’s view, that religion is properly not a faith-based activity — that is what is meant by mysticism. Her view is, I think, similar to Sam Harris’, that direct experience of the divine is possible, where the precise definition of ‘divine’ is left up to personal interpretation – it could be a supernatural god, it could be Spinoza’s god or it could be a pleasant hallucination. How is this threatening to our political system?”
While O’Brien’s post has some problems, I think PZ and Seidman does a reasonable job.
There has been discussions, here too, if all religions are fideistic. I believe that Buddism is so, if marginally. I don’t think it matters however, since a solid character of religion seems to be that it is reasoning, even philosophy, which is largely disconnected from facts.
It is true that religion is more than faithbased reasoning, it is also faithbased practices without much personal reasoning invested. For some the later is all they use. But the point for PZ and Seidman is that the core of religion is fideistic. Whose faithbased practices are rightly a token of the faithbased reasoning. And for PZ and Seidman this is a bad practice.
There are some small problems in Seidman’s article. He leans strongly on Avalos. Avalos is keen to propose close translation of texts as a large problem for religions. When he describes the basis of “group privileging” as based on christian texts, he doesn’t describe the freer interpretation I see christian groups do in my neighborhood. He is however correct in that there is a relative sense of group privileging. Therefore Avalos main conclusion that problems stems from real or perceived scarcities of resources stands up, in a relative sense.
O’Brien doesn’t adress Seidman’s concerns at all. She prefers to claim that literal thinking isn’t a problem for religions. That isn’t what Seidman says.
Having grown up in the shadow of BYU, PZ, I am perhaps a bit more familiar with the problem than you (see the link from “least rational people” in the original post). This fight against irrationality has been with me my entire life.
I’m working a bit to avoid offense, too. I am a believer, after all, and for most intents and purposes, the discussion at Greenwald’s site and here are directed at me. I suggest careful consideration of a few pieces of contrary evidence.
First, if we’re going to indict liberal religious influence, we are left denying the base that really drove the civil rights movement, and we are left with a description of that movement that is not accurate. Martin Luther King, Jr., did not seek to force people to worship God in a way he found appealing, but instead sought to make people live up to a moral code our nation chose years earlier, using religion as a means of persuasion. If nothing else, the civil rights movement demonstrated that religion need not be a brain-eating worm, but can instead appeal to the rational part of all of us. Non-violence agitation for change, especially, shows how religion can be used rationally, and perhaps how it should be used rationally. The Christian call for justice is powerful, and one that many of the religious nuts you rightly impugn seek hard to avoid. I’m not convinced that a religious call to justice is not the best way to bring those people back into the Christian life they have unwittingly abandoned.
Second, I think a case can be made that the best things ever done in this nation were driven siginifcantly by appeal to faith in good things, in justice and personal responsibility, for example. The religious fervor that assisted in the founding of this nation was a good thing; the religious basis for abolition of slavery was a necessary counterpoint to the religious arguments in favor of racism and slavery.
The call to get religion out of politics is a lot like a call to get arithmetic out of politics. Sure, some politicians lie about and lie with numbers; but numbers are not liars themselves. They are tools. In the hands of a just and wise people, faith can be a good thing.
Injustice is injustice, whether advocated with or without religion. Injustice is the enemy we should be working against.
I also see some specific problems in both Seidman’s and O’Brien’s articles.
Seidman first. He says humanity is the universe’s first successful attempt to understand itself. Even if we currently seem to be alone we have too little observational evidence to judge either way. He also defines naturalism in a much too narrow way.
O’Brien last. She refers to Karen Armstrong, which claim that “I think some scientists are writing a new kind of religious discourse, teaching us to pit ourselves against the dark world of uncreated reality and pushing us back to the mysterious. They’re resorting to mythological imagery: Big Bang, black hole. They have all kinds of resonances because this is beyond our ken.”
This is crap due to insufficient knowledge. Neither bigbang or black holes have names from mythology, nor are they wellnamed.
Bigbang is the beginning of our universe expansion. It isn’t properly an explosion since everything expands, including the emerging spacetime, but the name is a forceful imagery and it stuck. We can observe the initial inflation that started fractions of a second afterwards, so we aren’t studying something mystical here. If the objection is that this observation is twice removed since we look at radiation that emerged freely much later, we can also look at primordial nucleosynthesis. It took place a few minutes after the bigbang. How close to an explosion do we ordinarily observe, while still recognising it for what it is? ;-)
Black holes are also a misnomer. At the time they were predicted the main idea was that these singularities in general relativity gravitation devoured everything including radiation. Ir was Hawking et al that later realised that they indeed radiate thermally so they aren’t totally black. (Or rather close to thermally, if probabilities are to be preserved.) Massive black holes and their distinct effects are observed in the center of most galaxies including our own, so they too aren’t mystical beasts.
O’Brien also refers to Einstein’s view of religion. He abstracted religion to leave morals and the scientific sense of awe for new discoveries, thus being compatible with science. While this seems compatible with O’brien’s view I think philosophers would say that Einstein is making a category mistake.
Neither Armstrong’s misplaced religious imagery or Einstein’s category mistakes help O’Brien. Instead they are supportive of PZ’s and Seidman’s view of the errors of religious reasoning.
David says:
“Russell attributes the “use” of faith as basically an aid to learning in infancy. But in fact, we don’t really lose it at all, we just start filtering new inputs to our knowledge base, according to whether it’s compatible with what we’ve already got. Those of us who “escaped” from religion did so because they had acquired a stronger faith in the self-consistency and stability of the universe(*) than in whatever “just so stories” they’d been told, and they continued from there.
(*) This is just another way to phrase naturalism.”
There are several problems here.
My main concern is that there is no component of faith in science. Rob Knop has said something similar on his blog, but it is an error. What we have is a method that we can see is highly reliable for several reasons. It always checks its conclusion against facts and with peer review. It is very easy to either trust it based on experience with peer review, or personally crosscheck its conclusions and the method itself. I have had the opportunity to do so, and I can safely say that it works and gives tru facts. Trust me. ;-)
A larger concern for a philosopher can be the solipsism that Jillian mentions or Last Thursdayism. But they take everything on faith and have unnecessary mechanisms. The first characteristic is less trustful than realism and the last is more complicated than realism. So they don’t stand up as objections.
It is much more fruitful to recognise that these areas are based on facts than conflate them with faith. Yes, there are aspects of trust and concerns with interpretations and deceptions, especially in the larger view that David and Scott discusses. But it isn’t helpful to make a category mistake.
Let us instead continue with the smaller concerns.
The filtering model. It may be appropriate, but it doesn’t seem to suffice. We don’t have an explicit and consistent knowledge base as individuals, nor is it always stable. Kuhn’s paradigm shifts isn’t a good model for science, but they may be that for our personal behaviour.
On naturalism. In the same manner that we state an observation when we say science is trustful, we do it when we observe that the universe is compatible with consistent formal theories and stable. There are a number of general observations that we make. Some of these the methods of science relies on, like stability, some it would be less practical without, like universality.
Naturalism can be defined in a number of ways, but some are more general. The most general description is probably the simple labeling that nature is what is observable by the methods of science. In other words, naturalism seems to basically be an observation that a set of similar methods works well and following this some general observations we do with these methods, rather than a set of assumptions.
I should perhaps expand on the problems of making a category mistake between faith and fact here, since it feels simple and philosophical.
Something that we can learn from science IMO is that reasoning which are based on observational facts can be made to work successfully. So even if part of an endeavour, be it love life or politics, have evidenciary and trust problems and in practice must be provisionary based on portions of faith, there is also areas where we are much helped with facts and where we can independently observe that it helps.
This supports rather than detracts from the conclusion that we are helped by facts IMHO. Faith may be a scaffolding we have to use at times, but it should be replaced with the solid walls of factbased reasoning whenever we can. Which comes back to religion, of course…
Worms
Given the available evidence, there is no rational justification for holding the tenets of existing religions even provisionally. There is in fact massive evidence, both empirical and logical, that demonstrates specific religious doctrines to be untrue. Ignoring that evidence and believing the doctrines anyway rejects the reasoning that underlies ‘provisional’ belief.
If in fact you belong to a religion whose doctrines *can* be rationally accepted on a provisional basis, tell us which religion it is and what those doctrines are, Scott Hatfield. I’m sure we would be most interested to learn what it and they are.
Scott writes, “It is also possible to imagine a person who appears to love you, based on all manner of tangible signs and choices, but whom in their heart of hearts cares nothing for you at all.”
‘Tis true, that people get fooled and emotionally played. This is a common trope in novels romantic or criminal. To work well, the author has to demonstrate a modicum of psychological realism, the story revealing eventually the psychology or motives of the pretender. To do this, the author must work from plausible ideas about the range of human behavior, gained from observation. One of the purposes of courtship is precisely to suss out your partner’s character, and the nature of their feelings. Faith — of the sort we’re discussing — leads to dysfunctionl relationships. It causes people to develop an unrealistic vision of their lover, unrealistic because it is based on faith rather than on their lover’s behavior.
“In other words, it’s a phenomenological problem, akin to Descartes’ worry about an ‘evil genius’.”
Not really. The parsimonous explanation for people’s behavior is that we are animals with a particular emotional make-up. There’s no more need to imagine extra-human demons in thinking about people’s behavior, than there is when thinking about anything else.
Most importantly, this analogy, however much we work it, doesn’t fit your purpose. While you can raise the phenomenological issue with regard to human behavior, that behavior at least is real and observable by us all. In contrast, your god’s behavior is not, except in stories whose provenance is lost at the borders of history. If your god revealed himself to us, literally, and spoke to us, literally, and interacted with us, literally, and thus had a behavior that we could observe, literally, then we would have the phenomenological issue of thinking on a god’s psychology. Until he does so, that question is moot, and your analogy broken. That is the point that really needs to be pressed, whenever this chestnut is raised.
David Harmon writes, “But if you think you’re doing it with everything, then I think you’re kidding yourself. Consider that a lot of even your scientific knowledge probably came from teachers, books, or magazines, earlier in your education– or it depends on data that did. How much of your high-school chemistry education have you actually managed to verify by experiment? Inevitably, you’ve declared both certain sources, certain principles, and even certain collections of data, as ‘trusted’ info. If you didn’t, you’d need to review your entire education for every cocktail-party conversation!”
Well, I knew I was writing too curtly. And I’ll do so, again. The question is belief, right? I’m playing a game of trivia, and some issue comes up, and I happen to recall that Afghanistan has the highest population growth rate of any nation in the world today. Does that mean I believe it? Well, no. I obviously heard it or read it someplace, and remembered it, so the fact that it got past my filtering mechanisms means something. But no more than that. If I remember the source — the CIA World Factbook — that means a bit more, because I have some notion that the CIA puts some research into what it publishes there. But, again, no more than that.
The point isn’t that we research everything back to its roots, but the attitude we take to the factoids floating around in our minds. The Believer believes he is working from some foundationalist epistemology. The rational person does not.
OK, still too curt. ;-)
“The filtering model. It may be appropriate, but it doesn’t seem to suffice. We don’t have an explicit and consistent knowledge base as individuals, nor is it always stable.”
Agreed, the models I’m talking about aren’t the whole story, but they represent an important layer in the “cognitive stack”. If you ignore them, you’re left wondering about their consequences in higher layers.
“On naturalism. In the same manner that we state an observation when we say science is trustful, we do it when we observe that the universe is compatible with consistent formal theories and stable.”
Faith enters by way of the “conclusion” that this stability is a permanent condition! This is why few of us would give even lip service to somebody claiming, say, aliens had just stolen the Taj Mahal. We have faith that the universe just doesn’t work that way. Even if we saw photos of the spaceship, we probably wouldn’t believe it — and even if we personally saw that the palace in question was reduced to bare ground, we’d be looking for more “sensible” explanations, like terrorists. However, this faith in stability depends heavily on our life experience here in the well controlled, “civilized” sections of the world. Things are a little different for say, an isolated tribe or town, subject to “arbitrary” famines and other disasters. Even here in America, every disaster brings the religious types out of the woodwork….
Consider this: For several years, I considered myself a Neo-Pagan, and participated in many interesting variations on communal and individual realities. In various trance states, I have personally spoken with “spirits” and occasionally “gods”. Some of my peers took such experiences as “hard proof” that those entities were as real as anything in “objective” reality. I didn’t, because of my own prior history. I had already learned that my perceptions were distinctly fallible, and also that there are “real” things whose “perceptual reality” is misleading. More to the point, I had enough faith in naturalism that I was willing to challenge my own perceptions and examine them for self-consistency.
Among other issues, my observations of these spirits &al, strongly indicated that while they were definitely not simple fantasies, neither were they “independent actors” like my fellow humans, or even animals. That was a broad hint about how to “explain” those experiences, while keeping my faith in objective reality. My growing knowledge of cognitive science and psychology provided tools to theorize about the true nature of the “spirits”. But without the faith in reality and the knowledge of science, I might well have taken the spirits at face value, and trundled off into la-la-land.
I drop into this conversation cautiously as I believe a variety of posters are likely either smarter or more researched into these areas than I am.
I consider myself to be an agnostic theist, although that may be a mangling of the words. It is by way of saying that I would like to believe that there is something more but I do not believe in any organized religion nor in the concept that a supernatural being either sporadically or routinely has any physical effect on our Universe. Probably what drives my refusal to drop into atheism is some combination of fear, sadness and ego. The idea that when I die that my memories simply extinguish is very sad, the idea that when I die that my existence simply vanishes and the Universe continues as if I had never been here is perhaps what frightens me more than anything, and both feelings are probably driven by ego, but they are ones I cannot merely jettison. And so, without evidence, I fall back on hope–that the lack of evidence is not necessarily proof that nothing is there. Maybe, as some prior poster surmised, it is a developmental failure . . . my mental “woobie” (wasn’t that the name of the blanket in Mr. Mom?).
I am probably a gigantic hypocrite in that I go to a Methodist church, largely to please my wife who is actually, at least superficially, a Christian. Anyway, this past Sunday’s sermon was about God being real in people’s lives, and the pastor had three people come up and talk about times when they felt God had been “real” in their lives. Two talked about experiences they had when close relatives died, and another had a sort of tri-fecta of experiences that each involved a rainbow.
I guess by way of my point is that most people are not rigorous scientists. Their standard of proof is met when unlikely coincidences reinforce beliefs they have been taught since childhood–My father died at peace seconds after I read him his favorite Psalm; Just when I was feeling despondent about the thought of never being able to have children, I looked out my window and saw a beautiful rainbow, three weeks later I found out I was pregnant, etc. These are examples of the experiences that were related during the service on Sunday.
Faced with what they believe to be proof of the supernatural, most people choose to jettison what is unknowable under that model (all of the “why” questions) but consider their belief structure supported by evidence. Telling them they are not being rational doesn’t work, because as far as they are concerned they have proof of their structure.
Scott Hatfield wrote:
Thus holding the educational and political system hostage to whatever
religious group that can scare it’s followers into funding an “Institute”
and filling up the court system with lawyers. Scientology has a long
history of lawyer interference in the courts.
Maybe next it will be the Baptists Anti Cotton-Candy Crusade or Christians
United Against Flying Saucers From Uranus, or whatever group that can get
the money…..
Take a look at the following list:
Wikipedia: List of Deities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deities
Why should nonbelievers have to accomodate the myths of
Yahweh and not the others-because the followers of the god of
Abraham have their hands on the levers of power and not because
their metaphysical view is the right one. Why should nonbelievers
have to put up with your historical amnesia about religions as well?
You and your friends, while following a supernatural philosophy, are
sinking further into the material world with the current preoccupation
with political concerns. The “rapture” is always, always just around
the corner, a perpetually postponed catastrophe just close enough
to scare followers into doing the (materialist) bidding of the leaders.
Nice little “Terror Alert” thing you’ve got going there…..
Interested Atheist wrote:
Stand by and watch in horror……
————————————————————————————-
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2006-06-05T133715Z_01_L05642927_RTRUKOC_0_US-UKRAINE-LION.xml
Lioness in zoo kills man who invoked God
Mon Jun 5, 2006 8:31am ET10
Email This Article | Print This Article | Reprints
[-] Text [+]
KIEV (Reuters) – A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.
“The man shouted ‘God will save me, if he exists’, lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,” the official said.
“A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery.”
The incident, Sunday evening when the zoo was packed with visitors, was the first of its kind at the attraction. Lions and tigers are kept in an “animal island” protected by thick concrete blocks.
————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Russell:
“The point isn’t that we research everything back to its roots, but the attitude we take to the factoids floating around in our minds. The Believer believes he is working from some foundationalist epistemology. The rational person does not.”
True enough — though, just what makes you confident in the veracity of the CIAWB? But my real point was that this “attitude we take” isn’t globally superior to the human norm, it just represents a different set of tradeoffs: precision, detail, and reproducibility, at the expense of decision speed, confidence, and communicability. Much better for our pastimes of examining and manipulating the nonhuman world… not so good for influencing, or even studying, our fellow humans. That’s why psychology &al got off to an apparently-clumsy start — complexity aside, the questions involved are less tractable to the methods of science. Not a total barrier to study, but surely a continuing handicap….
You can do science on it but will that ever explain the rationality of relaxed jeans?
Yes.
Relaxed fit jeans actually fit my butt. Now if you can explain why the fashion industry tries to convince millions of women that, because the industry refuses to make jeans that fit women with actual hips, these women are in some way inferior and in need of unhealthy diets, that’d be something.
Scott Hatfield chiming in again. This has been a very helpful discussion for me. I appreciate the many comments directed my way, and I hope that the reader will forgive me for not quoting past posters in the interest of brevity.
I posed a hypothetical to Caledonian. It’s a sincere question, not a rhetorical ploy. He quoted the hypothetical but didn’t respond to it. Instead, he affirmed his belief that there is substantive evidence that calls into doubt the claims of organized religion and challenged me to present the doctrines that I assent to.
I’m reluctant to do that, because that would effectively cast me in the role of proselytizer, and that’s not why I read this blog. As I said, my interest here is phenomenological, rather than apologetic.
Further, If I gave Caledonian or others the impression that I was laying the ground work for making privileged claims with respect to this or that outfit’s doctrines, I’m sorry to disappoint and beg to be excused. Even if I WAS interested in “defending the faith”, I’m keenly aware that my interests and my views are my own, rather than that of the Methodist church I attend.
With respect to Caledonian’s question, I don’t claim that churches of any stripe, much less the Methodists, affirm any doctrine provisionally; that seems like a contradiction in terms for me. But I do feel that, whether I am in a classroom or whether I am in pew, that as an individual I am free to accept, reject or suspend judgement as to any claim that I might hear. That includes doctrinal claims. As a personal matter, I choose the last strategy more often than not. The moment I affirm this or that as categorically foundational, I limit the sort of questions that I can consider in the future.
Within Methodism there is a tradition that within certain bounds honors reason and suspends judgement: Wesley famously said, ‘Think, and let think.’ Not that this makes Methodism the ‘truthiest truth’, all I’m saying is that as an individual I’ve reached a certain comfort zone wherein I feel free to consider claims without affirming them.
Now, this was offered as an explanation for my interests and my attitudes. I want to make clear I don’t give a hoot about converting anyone to anything. I could just as easily have referred a reader to E.O. Wilson as to Wesley and if the truth be known, I spend a hell of lot more time reading evolution-related materials than the Bible. So, again, if anyone has received the impression I’m here to convert, I’m sorry to disappoint you. If you really want to see me do something like that, you should visit my classes (I’m a high school teacher) when I cover evolution.
Dark Matter made a string of non sequiturs which seemed aimed at impeaching the character of some Christian Right straw man derived from my post. For the record, I’m not a post-9/11 alarmist, a “Left Behind” apocalyptic doomsayer, etc. I specifically pointed out that (like PZ) many Christians are profoundly disturbed by attempts to explicitly link faith to this or that party, and I think the things that Dark Matter cited are appalling examples of that trend.
Russell makes a distinction between beliefs based upon observable human behavior and beliefs based on unobservable supernatural claims and proposes that this distinction renders the question I raised moot. I’m not sure this follows. If we believe that people love us because of their behavior (as Jillian suggests), and we observe that part of their behavior might be to inculcate this or that belief system, or to report some sort of supernatural encounter (as many do) then the clear distinction Russell proposes becomes a little murky.
As a scientist, I’m going to reject supernatural claims within science as non-falsifiable; outside of science, who knows? I submit that, as with the alleged affections of loved ones, we tend to accept the moral prescriptions and supernatural claims of those we love. It seems that both of these things are likely to be entangled, and thus both are to some degree positions taken on faith.
I agree, however, with T. Larsson that whenever possible we should abandon the scaffolding of faith and take fact-based positions. Reasonable people can disagree, I think, about the degree of scaffolding required to hold this or that view. I suspect that many of you think that I need more scaffolding than you require. There’s a certain irony in that: I get much the same response from creationists who feel that there’s a lot of scaffolding in the Darwinian view of life. This is usually followed by the incredible claim that it takes “more faith” to “believe” in Darwin than in the Bible.
I don’t agree, of course—even though I was exposed to much doctrine as a younger person to that effect. In my ignorance, I can even recall nodding my head in agreement with the thermodynamic argument! Something changed, and the question of how one’s ‘faith’ can evolve to not merely accomodate, but to enthusiastically advocate Darwin is, for me, the most interesting question since it speaks to my personal history.
Peace….
Scott Hatfield
There’s so much smoke blown by people too shrewd to commit to any traditional (and obviously false) set of religious dogmas, yet still desperate to retain their “spiritual” delusions, that I’m surprised the resulting reduction in solar energy reaching the earth hasn’t yet completely cancelled out anthropogenic warming. Keep it coming, guys- humanity needs you!
David Harmon asks, “just what makes you confident in the veracity of the CIAWB.”
Just to be clear, I wasn’t not suggesting that a factoid should be believed, just because it came from the CIA WFB. I was pointing out that if I recalled that as the source of some claim, then I knew more about that claim than if I recalled it without any remembrance from whence it came. Depending on what related facts one recalls, that might actually weaken the claim. “Oh, wait. That came from a speech by Bush.”
It might be the case that the CIA purposely fudges some of the data in its WFB. If it does this, though, I suspect it does so carefully, so as not to openly discredit that work product. I also suspect there are nations where many of the statistics are hard to estimate. Still, we all know quite a few political facts about the CIA, so the fact that a statistic comes from the CIA WFB — a fact that anyone can check! — says something about the original claim, in some ways positive, in some ways negative, more than just “Russell pulled it out of his butt.” That’s why we give any cite, right? :-)
It’s not just that. In my experience religious people commonly report religious experiences; perception of the divine in some manner. And I reckon few people are aware of just how susceptible the human perception system is to illusions. But more to the point, being a critical thinker and believing only that which has been proven are two very different things. PZ Myers says “Faith stops critical thinking”, and through my knowledge of several Christians, I know that to simply not be true. Yes, many Christians use Faith as a pretext to stop thinking, but not all. And though this is more a matter of values than of critical thought, not all are fertile ground for “Son of Sam” nonsense.[1] I have heard more than one Christian say that they would feel morally required to oppose God were he abusive/evil (as some fundamentalists conceive him).
[1] Ironically, “Son of Sam” may not be a case of hallucinations at all: One interviewer of David Berkowitz says he admitted to simply making the “hallucinations” up.
Scott Hatfield, back for one more comment.
Steve LaBonne follows my most recent post with the suggestion that some on this thread are ‘blowing smoke’, refusing to spell out their beliefs out of a ‘desperate’ need to retain ‘spiritual delusions.’
Um, Steve, that well’s already poisoned, I think. If it strikes you that I am one of those folk who are ‘blowing smoke’,then it seems to me it is incumbent upon you to explain why you think that, rather than to make assumptions (largely unwarranted, as far as I can see) about my motives in raising certain questions.
I think that both of us deserve more than that. We deserve questions and replies that address the substance of the discussion. In other words, tell me why what I’m doing is blowing smoke, not what you think motivates me to blow smoke.
Just a suggestion to promote dialogue. . .
Scott
After all, one could speculate that your motive for responding as you did was disappointment; how much more satisfying for you if I would just spell a set of beliefs that are easy to lampoon. But, even if that was your motive, it would have no bearing on the correctness of any reply that addressed the question raised.
Paragraph after substance-free paragraph is precisely my definition of “blowing smoke”, Scott. What’s your point and what’s your stake in the discussion? I’ll lay my cards on the table: any kind of belief in the actual existence of a “spiritual” realm, however defined, which is supposedly inaccesible to the senses aided by reason(i.e. “science” very broadly construed), is foolish. (The emotions we think of as “spiritual” or “religious” are accessible to study, and in principle explicable, without reference to supernatural causes.) I do not distinguish, in and only in that carefully delimited respect, between you and Pat Robertson, so doctrinal vagueness doesn’t help. That’s my long-and-carefully-considered position. The question is, why do you care so much what people like PZ or I think that you keep coming back for more? If you think you are somehow going to get us to grant legitimacy to whatever irrational beliefs you do hold (whose nature doesn’t especially interest me), you are doomed to disappointment. I may come to think you a fine fellow in any number of ways, but I will continue to hold that you are irrational, and to that extent less than admirable, in that particular respect. (That is how I feel about many people whom I do know well and admire deeply. We are all imperfect human beings and I can certainly forgive them that just as they forgive my shortcomings. What I can’t do is actually admire them for it. PZ has made this same point over and over.)
Steve, here’s the thing. Say an angel comes down from Heaven and shows you in ways that you can’t dispute that the beliefs of (let’s say) Judaism are true, Yahweh exists, following Orthodox laws are what God wants, and so on. You knwo this. But there’s no way to replicate this. No scientific way to show anybody else why you believe this.
You’re going to think you’re crazy. You’re going to actually deny what your own senses tell you to be true b/c of your belief in atheism – that religion is superstition and irrational and so on. You’re going to get taht irrational belief (in Judaisim) cured. Or not. I can’t judge from this side of the monitor
Do you begin to see why people who actually have faith and beleive may want to try to get a little slack from radical atheists? None of them are saying you atheists are crazy for not believing in Christianity. WOuldn’t you find that a little insulting, and want to get them to stop?
Say an angel comes down from Heaven and shows you in ways that you can’t dispute that the beliefs of (let’s say) Judaism are true, Yahweh exists, following Orthodox laws are what God wants, and so on. You knwo this. But there’s no way to replicate this. No scientific way to show anybody else why you believe this.
Ok, let’s say the angel tells me those things. You seem to think that “belief in Judaism” automatically follows from this revelation. Why, if millions of people around me get along just fine without following Orthodox laws? Should I not be a bit suspicious that the angel has singled me out from all those people?
Did the angel tell me something I couldn’t have known myself, so I know he isn’t a hallucination? If he did, I can use this information to find out more about this phenomenon.
You’re going to actually deny what your own senses tell you to be true b/c of your belief in atheism
There is no “belief in atheism”.
Do you begin to see why people who actually have faith and beleive may want to try to get a little slack from radical atheists?
Not really. If I would start seeing angels, fairies or gnomes, I´d probably _want_ people to cut me some slack too, but it would be best if they didn’t.
None of them are saying you atheists are crazy for not believing in Christianity.
Yes, some of them are saying that.
tydanosaurus writes, “Say an angel comes down from Heaven and shows you in ways that you can’t dispute that the beliefs of (let’s say) Judaism are true, Yahweh exists, following Orthodox laws are what God wants, and so on. You know this. But there’s no way to replicate this. No scientific way to show anybody else why you believe this. You’re going to think you’re crazy. You’re going to actually deny what your own senses tell you to be true b/c of your belief in atheism – that religion is superstition and irrational and so on. … Or not. I can’t judge from this side of the monitor.”
Let me begin by agreeing to an extent. There is the very real problem of how to evaluate singular experiences, or even repeated experiences that for some reason only you can observe. I have some sympathy for the believer whose god or demon or angel visits him each night, as directly observable and testable as anything else he sees in his room, engaging in literal conversation, but always disappearing before anyone else can observe, and leaving behind nothing that anyone else can test, such as specific prophecy. If that is the reason for your belief, I don’t know what to say. Maybe you’re crazy. Maybe you know something that none of the rest of us know. Or can know.
“Do you begin to see why people who actually have faith and beleive may want to try to get a little slack from radical atheists?”
No. Very few believers claim that such observation is the reason for their belief. I have some sympathy for those few. Maybe they have special revelation. Maybe they’re crazy. But they aren’t the typical believer. The typical believer practices faith, as all can see by writings by them and for them, which speak about faith, and how to cultivate it, about small, quiet voice within, about why to excuse the lack of testable evidence, and about similar nonsense. They are simply irrational, as proven by their own words.
Now, if George Burns visits you each night in your boudoir and performs miracles, you might have real reason to believe. You’ll understand, of course, that I don’t have that reason, since the only occupants in my chambers are myself, my spouse, the occassional unwanted insect, and the geckos that we welcome to chase the previous. You won’t try to convert me on faith, since your belief is based on experience, not faith, and that experience is private. I won’t question your experience, because I know nothing about it. That’s quite different from the usual conversation between believer and atheist. If that is the basis for your belief.
If.
Everything I said was in response to that question, and everything I said negated the possibility that you asked about. The question presumes erroneous assumptions, and anyone with even a basic grasp of English can see that I denied your hypothetical. I can only presume that you are either lying in an attempt to make your position look more reasonable, or are so overcome with faith that your reason has become wholly defective.
There’s an old story that I think is appropo:
There were once a man and wife who lived quite happily together, but eventually the wife fell ill and died, asking her husband never to remarry. At first, he honored her request, but as time passed his dedication flagged, and finally he met and wed a new wife. The marriage was not a happy one, as the man perceived the ghost of his wife to appear each night and rebuke him for not keeping his oath, and he could get no rest. Holy men were called into to bless the house, the bed was moved, he begged the apparition to leave; nothing helped. Finally the man saught the advice of a great teacher.
“You must ask your wife a question she does not know the answer to,” the teacher told him.
“But she speaks all night of the things I have seen and done during the day,” the man responded, “and there is nothing I know which she does not know.”
The teacher instructed him to put a sack of rice next to his bed. When the wife appeared, the man was to put his hand into the bag, pull out a fistful of rice, and ask her how many grains were held in his hand.
The man did so, and as he asked the wife faded away, and the man was left in peace for the first time in many years.
I must say, I’ve been reading this with interest. Lots of stuff to say, but this kind of caught my eye:
“Do you begin to see why people who actually have faith and beleive may want to try to get a little slack from radical atheists? None of them are saying you atheists are crazy for not believing in Christianity. WOuldn’t you find that a little insulting, and want to get them to stop?”
OK – nobody likes to be called an idiot. and in sympathy, i try not to call people who have faith idiots unless we get into a discussion on religion and they say something iredeemably stupid and/or nasty – say, that all gays deserve to go to hell.
None of them are saying we’re crazy for not believing in Christianity? Well, we live in a pluralistic society – I come from the UK, not the USA – and people are free to say what they want, while living together harmoniously.
However – they do honestly think we’re going to go to hell. And they think that the evidence is overwhelmingly obvious that they’re right – as the Bible says, Creation leaves us with no excuse; and of course there is the historical evidence of Jesus – how can we deny that?
Finally: If we have atheists saying that Christians are crazy and Christians saying that atheists are crazy, it seems to me that the atheists are on firmer ground. Atheists believe that the sun comes up in the east and that 1 plus 1 will always be 2. Christians believe that there is an invisible man in the sky and that people live on after death in bodies we can’t see.
See?
No, you don’t know anything in this situation. The fallibility of the human perceptual and cognitive apparati is notorious. If nobody else can independently confirm this experience, your only rational provisional conclusion must be that you hallucinated.
Steve LaBonne writes, “you don’t know anything in this situation. The fallibility of the human perceptual and cognitive apparati is notorious. If nobody else can independently confirm this experience, your only rational provisional conclusion must be that you hallucinated.”
I think that is a bit extreme. Everyone has private experiences. I know a bit of greenbelt quite well, and if I see some green herons there, that doesn’t mean I should discount that experience, just because no one else has seen the same. Of course, it’s a bit different if instead of a common bird, I see one that supposedly doesn’t live in this region. Or one that is supposedly extinct.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean I hallucinated. Of course, a god or angel or demon would be even more unusual than an ivory-billed woodpecker.
Still, the problem of dealing with private experiences is a bit more complex than saying if no one else can confirm it, then perforce it must be hallucination. There are all sorts of other cues. Of course, I can’t expect others to know what I know, based on experience that I cannot share with them.
More importantly, to the religious discussion, is the point I made above: very few Christians claim to believe based on tangible and direct revelation by angel or god. They instead inculcate faith. They say as much. And they try to inculcate it in others. And that is irrational, regardless of any private experience someone else might have had.
Sure, to put it in Bayesian terms, your prior probability for seeing even a very rare bird is (hopefully!) much higher than for seeing an angel. So I wouldn’t expect you to hold it even as a provisional hypothesis that you hallucinated the bird. However, if nobody confirms the sighting, you do have to allow for the possibility that you simply misidentified the bird, and you shouldn’t be surprised to have difficulty convincing other birders that you are correct. (Think “ivory-billed woodpecker”.)
The problem is that there are any number of things for which my Bayesian prior is essentially zero. If I encounter such an observation while alone in the woods, should I immediately conclude that I am hallucinating?
That doesn’t strike me as particularly rational. It certainly is a hypothesis to consider, and investigate. (Do I seem otherwise normal? Might I have ingested any substances that would lead to hallucinations? Have I had hallucinations in the past?) But maybe there is something real to the unique thing I am seeing, even though I would have given it zero probability before having seen it. Of course, that wouldn’t justify leaping to conclusions in the other direction, either.
The problem of singular or private experience is not an easy one.
ell, I can only speak to my own priors, but the one for seeing an angel is so close to zero that yes, I would assume I were hallucinating an angel, and would seek medical attention if the phenomenon were sufficiently vivid / repeated. I’d say that’s a much more rational response than getting on my knees at the nearest church, beacause almost regardless of how convincing the experience seems, my posterior probability for a hallucination would still be a whole lot higher than for a genuine apparition. (If someone with a high prior for seeing angels experienced an apparition, I would not expect to be able convince them they were hallucinating, but nor would I believe myself that they were really seeing an angel. From my point of view their prior probability simply lacks any rational basis, absent documentation of previous confirmed angel-sightings.)
I don’t see in what sense the problem of singular experiences is “difficult”. Private insights- not necessarily bizarre ones but, say, my emotional response to a work of art- can be things that enormously enrich my life. But to the extent that they are genuinely singular and private they cannot be contributions to knowledge. Wittgenstein’s well-known “private language” argument makes this point, I think.
First word of that should have been “well”.
Again, point of view. You’re making a choice to disbelieve something. You have your reasons, they have theirs. By saying they are irrational, all you are saying is that you can’t repeat the way they came to their conclusions, just like you can’t repeat the way your buddies came to fall in love with their crazy girlfriends. Or whatever.
And quite frankly you don’t know that they’re wrong. You don’t know that Jesus didn’t come back from the dead. You don’t know that he didn’t perform miracles. You don’t know that there isn’t a heaven and a hell. You believe it to be true, but you don’t know for a fact any more than they do.
So they believe and you don’t. You are choosing to call them irrational, and they are choosing not to call you irrational. You’re call them a bunch of poopyheads, and they’re asking you to be nice.
Wow, they’re sure acting irrational, aren’t they?
You have your reasons, they have theirs. To say this reaponse is weak would be a massive understatement. Apparently you haven’t gotten the memo about the self-refuting nature of relativism…
Is that really the best you can do?
No, they can’t repeat the way they came to their conclusions. My buddies could tell me the way they came to fall in love. They could tell me what they like about their beloved, they could show her to me, we could talk, I wouldn’t necessarily fall in love myself, but I could see the real person they are talking about.
If my buddy had an invisible girlfriend, though, who baked invisible cookies for him, and whispered inaudible requests into his ear…then we’d have a better analogy here.
tydanosaurus writes, “you’re making a choice to disbelieve something.”
No, really, I’m not. This notion that I could somehow choose to believe that something is the case is a strange one. I wouldn’t know how to make myself believe that something is the case. That very kind of belief is strange to me. It is the fact that Christians do choose to believe, and encourage others to so choose, and talk about how to keep choosing that, that proves they are irrational.
Now, yes, I have some choice in matters of the heart. Some, not total. And I choose what moral commitments I will make. That always is a matter of choice. But to choose to believe a positive claim, about what is the case? That is irrational on its face. My choice has no effect on the question.
the idea of conditional probabilities implicit in SL’s “bayesian” approach has for some time seemed to me a promising tack for resolving (or at least delaying) an impasse in these discussions. for example, consider the supposed faith/reason dichotomy. as is frequently observed, we all “believe” things we don’t “know for a fact” (actually almost everything); the question is what weights we assign to the multiplicity of “input events” that go into calculating the conditional truth probabilities for those beliefs. for example, given a collection of input events C (my mom said so, I read it somewhere but don’t remember the source, prof myers said so, I saw it with my own eyes, it just feels right) and the additional event “the bible says so” (B), a biblical literalist presumably will calculate for event E P{E|C,B}=1 (ie, event B is determinative) while a secularist would presumably typically calculate P{E|C,B}=P{E|C} (weight B with zero, ie, ignore input event B).
possible advantages:
– it focuses the discussion on specifics such as how each of us weights various input events as opposed to vague generalites like who is or isn’t superstitious, rational. spiritual, etc.
– it may offer a path around the binary nature of “faith vs reason”. presumably, most religious people consider that they are being reasonable in their beliefs. where such a person and a secularist find common moral beliefs, it can be the basis of a discussion about how different input events and weightings can lead people to the same beliefs.
– it can be the basis for “agreeing to disagree”. people can have honest disagreement on the truth value they put on a specific event (eg, it was reported on Fox News or on PBS). eg, I would love to understand where the input event weightings for people like mr. hatfield differ from mine since my bet is that our conditional event probabilites aren’t dramatically different despite his labeling himself “religious” while I label myself irreligious.
– and at least it offers a basis for understanding specific causes of an impasse and might even suggest to participants some positions they might need to rethink.
of course, it’s no magic bullet for dealing with extremists, they must be ignored or resisted as necessary. also note that the suggestion isn’t to compute explicitly conditional probabilites, just to keep in mind that the process of accepting or rejecting an assertion is an essentially an implicit calculation of them.
Hatfield here. I previously proposed a hypothetical question for Caledonian, to wit:
“…..if a believer held their beliefs provisionally, as his described rationalist might, should we describe their belief as ‘faith’ or as something else?”
I didn’t sense that my question was well-addressed by Caledonian’s reply and said so. Caledonian replied: “The question presumes erroneous assumptions, and anyone with even a basic grasp of English can see that I denied your hypothetical.”
Alarmed, I returned to Caledonian’s previous reply to review my decoding skills. Here is what I found: “Given the available evidence, there is no rational justification for holding the tenets of existing religions even provisionally. There is in fact massive evidence, both empirical and logical, that demonstrates specific religious doctrines to be untrue”.
Well. Perhaps I am guilty of not ‘listening’ carefully, since Caledonian feels that he addressed my question. That makes his next conclusion (that I am either a liar or in an ideological straitjacket) understandable. So I must plead clumsiness and ask Caledonian and other readers for their indulgence.
At the risk of being perceived as obtuse, however, I’d like to explain why I find his response unsatisfying without people assuming I have some sort of theological ax to grind.
Simply put, my hypothetical was addressing the question of whether or not a believer in this or that religion could hold a belief provisionally and, if they did so, would this constitute faith, the topic of this thread?
Caledonian’s response is unsatisfying. It doesn’t seem to me that it addresses the question, which presupposes that a belief could be held provisionally. Instead, it denies that the presupposition is possible because (here’s the leap) “there is no rational justification” for holding such views, even provisionally.
Well, OK, that’s his point of view and not one that I find particularly objectionable. But it doesn’t address the question, because there is no presumption in the question that any particular belief was justified by appeal to reason. At no time did I stipulate that. In fact, I’m inclined to think that quite the opposite is the case. I think within the domain of religion people typically rely upon their intuitions and experience in evaluating claims, rather than reason. I suspect Caledonian would agree with me.
In the same vein, Caledonian continues: “There is in fact massive evidence, both empirical and logical, that demonstrates specific religious doctrines to be untrue”.
Again, I don’t really have too much of a problem with this statement, either, especially if one substitutes the word ‘incredible’ (in the sense of being difficult, if not impossible to credit) for ‘untrue’ (non-falsifiable hypothesi being immune to disproof as a formal matter).
Bottom line, Caledonian: I agree.
However, my assent to this point has nothing to do with the question. Again, I never stipulated that the belief had to have any rational basis.
Tell you what: I’ll rephrase my question to make it user-friendly. If a person gave assent to a certain faith-based delusion, could they do so provisionally? Why or why not? If a person could give provisional assent to a faith-based delusion, would this constitute faith, or not? If the holding of faith-based delusions is not provisional, then how can we speak of someone ‘losing their faith?’
I promise that if anyone replies to that I won’t attempt to make anything more out of it. I regret if I have misrepresented your previous attempt to address the question.
Sincerely….Scott
Substance-free (heh) Scott here.
Steve LeBonne asks me: “What’s your point and what’s your stake in the discussion?”
I’m interested in the nature of belief, both as it applies to religious experience and the protocols of science. I don’t think either of these topics are content-free or lacking in substance, and I’m interested in what educated people strongly grounded in evolutionary biology have to say about these things. That’s why I’m here: it interests me, and I hope that I did a better job of explaining my interest in my most recent post. If anyone has any response to the reformulated question, I’d be interested to hear it.
On the other hand, I’m not interested in debunking atheism per se; as I’ve said, my interest is phenomenological, not apologetic. I’m definitely not interested in constantly fencing with bright, well-spoken people who mistake my interests for some sort of religious crusade; that would be entirely inappropriate in this forum, not to mention vulgar.
I do hold out the hope that readers of this blog, regardless of their beliefs, might be interested in the same things. Can belief in a religious construct be held provisionally, or is there something qualitatively different about affirming a belief in the supernatural? This speaks to PZ’s example of an ‘invisible girl friend’. Comments?
Scott
Holding a belief provisionally does not mean “on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.” Saying I believe in leprechauns, but only provisionally, does not mean much of anything.
Faith is a hole in your brain? Faith stops critical thinking?
What boring juvenile tripe. Faith is neither a “hole in the brain” nor does it stop critical thinking. The proof is ample and obvious in everyday life. The choice to be closed-minded or to have a swiss-cheese brain is hardly one of either having or lacking religious faith.
Faith is a process, not a state. Faith requires introspection and is a healthy challenge to both the individual and the collective human condition. Religion provides observable, validated benefits to both individuals and society. You can get these benefits in any of a variety of ways. Religion is a legitimate method.
I don’t care what, if any, religion any of you people have.
However, if your beliefs are based on “hating others that aren’t like you”, then not only are you a detriment to our culture, but your very identity is unstable and sad.
It’s quite the embarrassment to see so-called rational atheists acting exactly like the people they point the fingers at. You guys need to pull your pants back on a get with the program.
What PZ said. Well-founded beliefs- such as well-established scientific results- should nonetheless be held provisionally (i.e. while the current state of knowledge holds), as there is never precisely zero probability that new information could show them to be at least partially wrong. Unfounded beliefs should simply not be held at all, and claiming you hold them “provisionally” is just weaselling. (Of course, religionists typically hold their beliefs to be certain.)
Faith is blind belief in that which has no reasonable foundation. (Many religious writings make a positive boast of that, so there’s no use trying to deny it.) It may often be pardonable. It is never admirable. If the Michelles of the world have an emotional problem with that- well, tough.
“is there something qualitatively different about affirming a belief in the supernatural”
my answer would be that it depends on why one holds such a belief. the conditional probability approach addressed above assumes that there is at least one “input event” (even if it’s a bit fuzzy like “intuition”) that raises the conditional probability of the belief being true to some relatively high level (which, if less than one, is how I would interpret it as being “provisional”). in that case, my answer would be “yes”.
if that assumption is wrong, I would have to respond by asking in turn what in the absence of any input event would motivate raising the conditional probability at all? “intuition”, “a sense of god”, etc are at least “input events” by my loose definition, but “just because” isn’t. presumably, even faith has to have some tangible cause.
oops – in the first case, altho the answer to the question in my head would be “yes”, the answer to your actual question would be “no”.
“Unfounded beliefs should simply not be held at all”
altho I agree with the sentiment, the reality is that in the mind of the “believer”, they are founded. hence my interest in what those foundations are. with dogmatic automatons, of course, there’s no hope. but with people who – like mr. hatfield – are willing to engage in a dialogue, isn’t it worth at least trying to achieve some mutual understanding?
for example, consider the idea of one’s life being “meaningful” in some cosmic sense. the absence of any such meaning bothers me not in the least, so any non-objective input event the sole benefit of which is to suggest such meaning gets weighted zero in my conditional probability calculations. someone else may simply be psychologically unable to accept that nihilistic view and be “forced” to apply non-zero weights. but if we can each accept that distinction, a civil discussion should be possible.
Really? Wow! So exactly which faith tenets can you prove using critical inquiry. If none than they are irrationaly held. which is fine but your argument is then flat.
If one is choosing what to have faith in or at all perhaps. But how does the belief in any supernatural underpinning become a state? The rest of your sentence is baloney.
Then why get them by invoking supernatural and irrational superstitions? Religion also provides very real validated detriments to individuals and society. So essentially you pick and choose.
So you mean people who would consigh people like PZ to hell for having a different opinion OR how about people who don’t want gays to marry? So exactly is how PZ’s war on irrational beliefs even remotely comparable to the widespread hate caused by the above 2 ‘ideas’?
Unfortunately I had no time to make my continuing comments timely.
David says:
“Agreed, the models I’m talking about aren’t the whole story, but they represent an important layer in the “cognitive stack”. If you ignore them, you’re left wondering about their consequences in higher layers.”
To be frank, I prefer to wait for neuroscience to make valid model before I speculate too much. As I will probably go into in another comment here, I think adhocs are perfectly all right *as long as they connect to facts or verified theory*. I’m not sure if this is the case here.
Yes, we filter sensory data. If we filter concepts is harder to tell due to the lack of an explicit concept knowledge base.
We seem to consolidate concepts though, since we sometimes replace old ones or at least puts less weight on them than new ones. It may at times be drastic replacements. Thus my reference to Kuhn.
“Faith enters by way of the “conclusion” that this stability is a permanent condition!”
You make reference to personal anecdotal experiences. In science such methods are impermissible since they can’t be verified. It is also unnecessary since stability follows from several observations. For myself I’m happy with what science observes.
Observations that implies stability is such ones as universality, causality and isotropy. general symmetries implies conserved quantities by Noether’s theorem.
For example, universal Lorentz invariance and universal energy conservation implies the fine structure constant (that characterises the strength of the electromagnetic interaction) should be constant. And spectrum of quasars show that it has varied by at most something like 1 part per million during the last 10 billion years (astro-ph/0401094, astro-ph/0402177).
Not coincidentally, that also sets a firm limit on the amount of nonnatural causes that the universe may have been subjected to. Every year you may have at most 10^(-16) of your EM interactions to be miracle caused. So a miracle that affects you can be at most about 0.0000003 s long during your lifetime, if you live to be a 100 years. Compare that to our visual frame updates of 0.08 s. You shouldn’t blink or you will miss your personal miracle show.
Scott says:
“Something changed, and the question of how one’s ‘faith’ can evolve to not merely accomodate, but to enthusiastically advocate Darwin is, for me, the most interesting question since it speaks to my personal history.”
I agree with that epiphanies are interesting and sometimes profound. My own attempt of description is above, in the discussion about consolidating conceptual knowledge.
Note: In my toy calculation I was assuming isotropy, which is reasonable for the universe and most religions as well.
Speaking of epiphanies, since my first comments I’ve had one. I realised that some parts of my comments lack or have incorrect framing.
Lack of framing affects my discussion of naturalism. I note that “naturalism seems to basically be an observation that a set of similar methods works well and following this some general observations we do with these methods, rather than a set of assumptions”. This is of course correct, but I realise that if I use frames it is more understandable.
It is natural to state that naturalism and science, seen from the frame of observations or the frame of the area as such, doesn’t assume anything. This is what is important in the discussion above.
But if we try to formalise them as in philosophy (which I believe is hard and most attempts misguided) we can as much naturally state that science and its methods assume the axioms of that formalisation. Which is things like universality and causality. This is important in that narrow frame. While it is still important for philosophy to realise that we are discussing an attempt of formal model, not the area itself.
Incorrect framing affects my discussion of the category mistake to conflate faith and facts when discussing naturalism and science. I have made a big mistake earlier due to making that same basic mistake. “So even if part of an endeavour, be it love life or politics, have evidenciary and trust problems and in practice must be provisionary based on portions of faith, there is also areas where we are much helped with facts and where we can independently observe that it help”. I now realise that what I have called faith in some theories (emotions, morality, politics) is in fact sometimes adhocs, and that this is the correct framing here.
I think adhocs are perfectly all right *as long as they connect to facts or verified theory*. (And that is what distinguish proper adhocs from faith.) It is still scaffolding of course, but it is fact based scaffolding. It is not the sturdiest of walls, but it is sturdier than empty faith.
ctw writes, “the reality is that in the mind of the “believer”, they are founded. hence my interest in what those foundations are.”
Naively perhaps, it seems to me that the way to investigate that is to read what believers write, about why they believe. If you do that much, it pretty quickly becomes clear that PZ is correct: faith is a hole in the brain.
“for example, consider the idea of one’s life being ‘meaningful’ in some cosmic sense.”
The way most believers speak and write, this has nothing to do with Bayesian reasoning. Very few of the arguments believers make involve probability at all, and almost all of those are wrong. Rather, the way most believers talk about meaning and god, they clearly are committing the fallacy from bad consequence. They say life without god would be meaningless, they say that would be horrendous, so they believe in god. If that doesn’t count as a hole in the brain, then nothing should.
Thanks, Michelle, that was interesting…
“Faith is a hole in your brain? Faith stops critical thinking?”
Faith is an ABSENCE of critical thinking. If you thought critically about religion you wouldn’t accept it. Apologetics is the art of pretending there are good reasons to be a Christian (good LOGICAL reasons) but if there, are, they are based on the premise that God does exist and the Bible is true.
Of course, faith doesn’t prevent the person from being logical; but in order to do this they must simply erect logic-tight barriers in their minds; for example, Christians are capable of devastatingly logical analysis of holy books – such as the Koran – but seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the Bible.
“…Faith is a process, not a state. Faith requires introspection and is a healthy challenge to both the individual and the collective human condition. Religion provides observable, validated benefits to both individuals and society. You can get these benefits in any of a variety of ways. Religion is a legitimate method.”
Indeed it is. Religion can be relaxing, soothing, provide community feeling and a sense of purpose. But so what? We’ve always known that believing in Santa Claus makes children feel and behave better too.
“However, if your beliefs are based on “hating others that aren’t like you”, then not only are you a detriment to our culture, but your very identity is unstable and sad.”
That’s quite true. But from what I’ve seen of atheists and agnostics in general, they do NOT seem to be based on “hating others you aren’t like you” – unlike Christians, whose rather contradictory doctrine is based on loving people and sending them to hell. Generally, atheists seem to me to be:
Indifferent to religion.
Responding to threats to general freedom and liberty.
Annoyed at the presumptuous and condescending nature of religion (“I love you, even though you’re a miserable hellbound sinner…and you know, your life will never be TRULY happy until you welcome Jesus into your heart.”
Worried about the cultlike aspects of organised religion.
Annoyed and amused that people still take fairy tales so seriously.
“It’s quite the embarrassment to see so-called rational atheists acting exactly like the people they point the fingers at. You guys need to pull your pants back on a get with the program.”
“Get with the program?” What does that mean, exactly? Does that mean that when Christians say things like “The Bible was written by eyewitnesses,” “Evolution is only a theory” and “You’ll be eating your words when you have to say that to God,” we shouldn’t say that they’re being unreasonable, silly and, with enough repetitions, stupid?
Tydanosaurus:
Just hypothetically speaking, how would you feel if a majority of adults were Santa Claus worshippers who were enthusiastic and vocal in their beliefs and wanted to have them taught in schools as fact? I imagine you’d feel puzzled and annoyed, and if they were sufficiently influential, you might feel concerned. Right?
Hi, Scott,
I must admit I’m not quite sure what you mean by holding a belief provisionally. If somebody provisionally believes in God, does that make them a weak theist or an agnostic?
Thanks to PZ, Steve, ctw and Mr. Larsson for their thoughtful replies. I wish I had time to comment on them all. Interested Atheist asks: “If someone provisionally believes in God, does that make them a weak theist or an agnostic?”
Good question. One of the things that prompted my interests in this matter was reading an interview with E.O. Wilson, a hero of mine. That interview can be found here: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/eow.html
In the interview, Wilson speaks of a provisional deism, which is (for a lack of a better term) similar to how I try to parse my religious sentiments when I’m doing science. I hope this link is helpful.
Scott
“… PZ is correct: faith is a hole in the brain”
phrased in a different – but no more complimentary – way, I agree. all I’m suggesting is enquiry into the nature of that “hole”. it clearly isn’t an absence of intelligence, education, sophistication, etc – plenty of people well endowed with those attributes are religious. why? what is the hole religion fills for them? or even what is the “hole” for those of us who aren’t religious?
and in pursuing those questions, I’m not suggesting that anyone is actually using Bayesian (or any other) statistical concept, only that it might – for those who think that way – be a useful approach for qualitatively modeling the mental processes involved. it seems clear to me that a scientific mind works that way: given proposition E and input events such as R={E is supported by published peer-reviewed research}, N={E is hypothesized by nobel laureate X}, et al, one implicitly computes P{E=T|R,N,…}. similarly, I assume a believer implicitly does something similar with different input events and different weights. one can argue (correctly, IMO) that the process is flawed, but to just dismiss it with epithets isn’t intellectually honest.
BTW, my alternative to “hole in the head” is that for the kind of thoughtful religious people that are of interest to me (to repeat, dogmatic automatons aren’t), the input event {was “indoctrinated” while young to believe E} plays a key role, and my uncomplimentary – though not intentionally malicious – analog is a physical inadequacy: either can inhibit performance in some arenas but have little or no impact at all in others. I see the fundamentalist research scientist as analogous to, say, the golfer who (as I vaguely recall – not an area of interest to me) is masters level at stroke production despite being unable to walk a course, never mind be an olympic runner.
-charles
“Annoyed and amused that people still take fairy tales so seriously.”
well, I was “right on”-ing your list up to this one. but continuing in my “appeasement” vein, I’d say that’s perhaps a little too dismissive. the people in question may sincerely believe that the miracles were chronicled by eyewitnesses and that those chronicles have been transmitted through the centuries unaltered. altho I have always rather doubted that, until recently I could have constructed no substantive argument to justify that doubt (see item #1 on your list).
I think the point can be made in a less antagonistic way by something like “tend to dismiss beliefs based on questionable assumptions”.
– charles
‘Fairy tale’ is right. It doesn’t matter if we know that accurate transmission of the tales took place for thousands of years if there were significant stretches of time in which no such verification is possible.
Additionally, one does not need to be able to show that there are no historical records of the individuals described in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to recognize it as a fabrication intended to convey a message.
Hi Charles,
A bit dismissive? Yes, I’m afraid so. Perhaps I should have said that’s how I feel about people who take religion very seriously. I’m happy to go with that, and leave the rest of the list.
I wonder how Tyndanosaurus would feel about the Clausists?
Scott – thanks for that link, a very interesting article. I think the most important part for this topic was:
“PT: You call yourself a deist. What do you mean by that?
EO: A deist is a person who’s willing to buy the idea that some creative force determined the parameters of the universe when it began.
PT: And a theist is someone who believes that God not only set the universe in motion, but is still actively involved.
EO: But I’ve been doing a kind of Pascalian waffling as a deist. I think being an atheist is to claim knowledge you cannot have. And to say you’re agnostic is to arrogantly dismiss the whole thing by saying that it’s unknowable. But a provisional deist is someone like myself who leaves it open. You see, evolutionary biology leaves very little room for a theistic God. I’d like it to be otherwise.”
I’m not sure what he means by “willing to buy the idea” about a creative force. As I understood it, deists are people who believe in God – solidly believe – but just in a distant, impersonal God. If, by “willing to buy the idea” he means it’s a possibility but he isn’t sure, doesn’t that make him an agnostic, despite what he says about agnostics? Or does it make him a weak atheist, for saying that God is a possibility but he’s not sure?
And I wonder how you apply provisional faith to Christianity?
Sorry, just had a thought.
About calling religion a “fairy tale”. Well, if we’re talking about a contemplation of the infinite, then no, maybe it isn’t a fairy tale.
However, if we’re talking about a contemplation of the infinite – or anything else – that requires you to believe in someone walking on water or cursing fig trees then yes. Blatant mythology.
Scott, a provisional belief is a contradiction in terms. At best it is a hypothesis awaiting justification, or else a counterfactual (“if I were to believe/disbelieve such and such, what would be the consequences?”) In either case, I don’t think it fits any theological definition of “faith”.
I reacted as Interested on Scott’s link – it is an interesting article.
Depending on ones view there are several problems with Wilson’s interview. If I try to stand down from my personal worldview I still see most remaining.
“In his newest book, Consilience (Knopf), Wilson looks up from the ants once again and argues for the unity of all knowledge. He suggests that a small number of natural laws underly far flung disciplines–from the arts and religion to biology, anthropology and psychology–and that it’s time for cross-fertilization.”
He says so here, but later due to his “provisional deist” stance he is rooting for a dualistic transcendental plane. Suffice to say, dualism isn’t the Ockham razor solution to a unified knowledge. It will be compatible with sciences only if there will be objective evidence for such a thing, and no method to establish such evidence exists.
He identifies, probably correctly, a deist. “A deist is a person who’s willing to buy the idea that some creative force determined the parameters of the universe when it began”. (Which again has trouble with Ockham and lacks compatibility with the methods of science.)
But goes on to state his “provisional deist” idea which is something else. It is what could be called a deceitful (and hopeless) waiting for sciences to reinvent dualisms such as souls. Souls have been left as bad and unnecessary explanations for verified ideas such as the theory of the mind. As Interested and anthony I have trouble to place such a fickle and weak idea in a solid context.
Einstein is supposed to have quipped that only two things were infinite- the universe and human stupidity- but that he wasn’t sure about the universe.
I would add one more infinite thing- the human capacity for self-delusion and wishful thinking.
All talk of “provisionally” “buying” “ideas” about the “spiritual” or “transcendent” or “creative” needs to be critically examined with that in mind- especially by those tempted to be “buyers”.
Wilson just shows how difficult it can be to completely overcome one’s early religious indoctrination (some version of evangelical Christianity in his case). I find that I increasingly agree with Dawkins that such indoctrination is a form of child abuse.
The idea that people need religion in order to be blind to the facts, or persist in believing something they want to believe is far from true.
There are a great many reasons for people of all kinds fo do precisely that, and they near universally do, to differing degrees, in one manner or another.
Deism holds that a Creator is responsible for the Cosmos, not merely any particular universe.
And actually, most theisms hold that as well.
It’s worse than that: such a position is incompatible with the way our physical universe is approached in the sciences. Science leaves the question of what rules define our reality open — when new information comes in, it adapts its conceptions. Making the sort of distinctions that dualism requires simply isn’t an option: if it can interact with our world, it’s part of our world.
It’s only possible to meaningfully discuss the supernatural if first we set bounds on what can be natural, and science does NOT do that. The dualism hypothesis requires rejecting the open-ended nature of science.
Of course people don’t need religion to engage in wishful thinking- it just happens to be one of the most popular ways to evade reality, because it promises to smooth over our deepest quarrel with reality- our difficulty in accepting our own mortality.
With respect to Steve’s last comment, I think there’s more to ‘wishful thinking’ that that. It’s not just that people want to evade or smooth over their deepest quarrels with reality. They want to manage and control that reality as much as they can. Belief systems that promise a short, swift and comprehensive description of reality exist not so much because they are true, but because they offer the believer the delusion that they are in control.
Caledonian says something that I strongly agree with, which is that meaningful discussion of the supernatural requires a boundary for naturalism, and the latter doesn’t appear possible to realize due to the way science is practiced.
My take on that is that the fuzziness of the boundary lies on the supernatural side and, as with the limit in calculus, scientists can approach the boundary as closely as they like as long as they rely exclusively on naturalistic explanations in their explicit treatment of phenomena.
Anthony holds that a ‘provisional belief is a contradiction in terms.’ Well. I was once a creationist of sorts. I can assure you I didn’t hold that belief casually. As time went on, and I learned more, I came to reject the creationist views that I had been exposed to in my youth. I now believe very strongly in common descent, the production of new species through natural selection and the general sufficiency and applicability of Darwin’s thought. I don’t take those views casually either. Granted that the latter doesn’t explicitly invoke deity, it still has religious implications and, as I said, in a very real sense I’m convinced my core beliefs in this area have changed. I didn’t abandon one hypothesis for another!
If beliefs can’t be held provisionally, how is it that they can change or (ahem) evolve over time, as I’m pretty sure they did in my case? For that matter, if belief is not in some sense provisional, how could someone ever ‘lose their faith’?
Perhaps Mr. Larsson could chime in at this point. Is this a ‘category mistake’, and if so, why?
There is not the slightest reason apart from wishful thinking to believe that naturalism has any “boundary” at all. If we can somehow detect and study a phenomenon, it’s natural. If it evades all attempts at intersubjectively available detection, it’s a fantasy.
There is no wiggle room between those poles.
Steve’s statement above puzzles me. First he says there is no ‘boundary’, then he proposes a polar distinction between detectable natural phenomena and that which can not be detected intersubjectively.
Sounds like a boundary to me. But wait! Steve says the latter is a fantasy if it can’t be detected intersubjectively. So, perhaps, there is no boundary because the only things that are real are that which science can investigate, while those that can’t be studied this way aren’t real.
Hmm. Ever stare at a Necker cube and watch its’ orientation ‘flip’ in your mind’s eye? As Dennett would say, there’s enough heterophenomenological evidence to confidently assert that such cubes do ‘flip’ in our perception. Not a fantasy, one presumes.
On the other hand, knowing when the cubes are going to ‘flip’ seems to be a different sort of proposition, not to mention how the ‘flip’ is encoded, or what the qualitative experience of ‘flipping’ is like. We don’t even seem to understand how to go about studying phenomena like this. But it seems imprudent to me to simply regard things like ‘flipping’ or other qualia as mere fantasies, just because they do not readily yield to intersubjective detection.
SH
Wishful thinking also leads to willful misunderstanding. No, I propose no “boundary”, I simply deny that “undetectable phenomenon” is a meaningful phrase in the English language.
Just who imagines that perception is not amenable to scientific study? If you think so you’re missing out on a hell of a large research literature… (by the way examples like Necker cubes actually work against you since they point up the unreliability of the individual person’s sensory apparatus, thus reinforcing doubt on the value of testimony of singular experiences.) In fact, there’s been quite a lot of work on the way the brain decides what’s foreground and what’s background in a figure, which is the mechanism in play in illusions like the Necker cube. And pointing to mental phenomena in general (I flatly deny that these are impossible to study objectively- they’re merely difficult) is irrelevant unless you really want to commit to substance dualism, which has been a hopeless position for quite a long time.
Your position in general, in fact, is hopeless, and I strongly suspect that none of it derives from from anything more epistemologically respectable than the lingering effects of your childhood religious indoctrination. You’ve managed to jettison so much of that already, why not go whole hog and get it over with? You’ll be a clearer thinker for it.
Scott, the only way I can unpack the meaning of a provisional belief is: “I believe p if and only if p is true. But I don’t know if p is true. Therefore I don’t know if I believe p.” This is a possible state of mind, but to call it faith equates faith to ignorance.
I suspect in your case, provisional belief means more like: I have no justification for believing p, but, for emotional or aesthetic reasons, I do not want to negate p.
And, contrary to your implication, it is certainly possible to abandon one hypothesis for another as one learns more.
Not naturalism, nature. There simply is no a priori justification for us to set any boundaries on nature — it IS what we mean by ‘existence’.
It isn’t that the supernatural cannot be discussed, it’s that everything supernatural is necessarily unreal.
Scott apparently NOT paying attention! I beg Caledonian’s pardon if I have conflated my reading of a belief system (naturalism) with nature itself.
I was responding to his comment, where he wrote: “It’s only possible to meaningfully discuss the supernatural if first we set bounds on what can be natural, and science does NOT do that.”
I’m confused. Science may not set bounds on the natural, as Caledonian suggests, but the way science is practiced (methodological naturalism) surely delimits the sort of explanations that may be proposed. The subjective, the supernatural, the non-falsifiable need not apply. That sounds like a boundary to me, and (with respect to Caledonian) a boundary a priori.
And I’m quite happy with that boundary. As Lewontin wrote:
“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated, etc…”
I don’t find anything in this statement the least objectionable. It’s the only way you can do science. Otherwise leprechauns gain equal standing with gravity, and such. But it is an a priori commitment, not a demonstrable fact, that ‘everything supernatural is necessarily unreal’.
Similarly, Steve denies that “undetectable phenomenon” is a meaningful phrase in the English language. Well, I wasn’t responding to that, but to Steve’s previous caveat “intersubjectively available detection.”
I chose the Necker cube precisely because it was detectable ‘intersubjectively’…what Dennett calls ‘heterophenomenology’, whereas other experiences invoking internal mental states are harder to pin down.
With both Dennett and Damasio I reject the idea of mental dualism; but I also agree with Chalmers that the ‘hard problem’ of conscious experience, the quality of conscious experience, can not be “explained on the cheap.” I agree that some sort of heterophenomenology along the lines of what Dennett proposed in “Consciousness Explained” is a viable scientific research programme, but it doesn’t address the ‘hard problem’ and as far as I know there is no programme employing methodological naturalism that does.
So, my purpose in invoking this example is not to affirm some hoary dualism, or even to defend supernaturalism, as one might have supposed; rather, it was to suggest that there are some things which are real but which are difficult, if not impossible for scientists to study. If so, then not all of nature may be amenable to the protocols of methodological naturalism!
Steve also wrote, rather bravely: “I flatly deny that these (mental phenomena in general) are impossible to study objectively.”
I’m all in favor of you being right, Steve. I would be interested in learning what evidence can be adduced for the idea that the specific case of the ‘hard problem’ can be studied objectively or, failing that, what line of reasoning could be presented that could show why the ‘hard problem’ is not a problem at all?
Finally—Anthony, referring to my former creationist views, writes: “it is certainly possible to abandon one hypothesis for another as one learns more.” Agreed. But I don’t think I viewed my earlier beliefs as a hypothesis to be tested! I took them on faith, that hole in the brain. I believed. My beliefs changed. The substance of past or present belief is not as interesting to me as the question of how we affirm, modify or reject our beliefs in the face of new data. I’m sorry if my experience doesn’t lend itself to neat unpacking, but if (as Steve writes) I was able to ‘jettison’ the religious indoctrination of my childhood, and I really, really took those beliefs on faith, then what happened to make this possible?
This has been a long-winded reply, but each of you inspired me, and I felt a thorough response was in order. Hope it was worth the wait. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Scott
Scott: I’ve read miscellaneous articles about Chalmer’s “hard problem” over the last few years, and to me it seems that what’s “hard” about it is that it isn’t clear what it would mean to solve it. Chalmers believes that introspection gives some additional information about ourselves that Dennett’s heterophenomenology does not, namely “I am conscious” or “I have experiences”. In contrast, the most that Dennett’s research program can do is to come up with a theory of systems that say things like “I am conscious” or “I experiences”.
But it is hard for me to see what could be the difference between the two. If you have some hypothetical being who behaves as if it were conscious, down to making statements like “I am conscious” and participating in philosophical discussions, then I can’t see any basis for saying this being is not conscous. Nor is it clear what it would mean for it not to be conscious.
Perhaps Mr. Larsson could chime in at this point. Is this a ‘category mistake’, and if so, why?”
I don’t see how categories applies to your question. Regarding provisional beliefs, I’ll go with anthony’s answer.
“I’m confused. Science may not set bounds on the natural, as Caledonian suggests, but the way science is practiced (methodological naturalism) surely delimits the sort of explanations that may be proposed. The subjective, the supernatural, the non-falsifiable need not apply. That sounds like a boundary to me, and (with respect to Caledonian) a boundary a priori.”
This is a category mistake. :-) There is no boundary a priori what we know of. Science works in the other direction, from observations to theory. The methods of science has proven themselves by being used successfully. Observations are used to find phenomena. Consequently theories must be validated by observations. We call these phenomena “natural” as a nametag.
We don’t know if we can find and make theories on everything natural, but there is no a priori reason to believe not. Gödels first incompleteness theorem says that more powerful formal theories extends indefinitely. They are therefore at least as powerful as natural phenomena. But since formal theories are able to describe nature as close as we want to, nature must also be “indefinitely extensible”. There is no end to the possible knowledge of nature nor to science.
The subjective: This is descriptions of individual or collective experiences or ideas, so I would call them natural. But here is problems, as you note. The methods we know work needs repeatable observations, so subjectivity isn’t immediate describable. There are people making progress on stuff like describing emotional reactions causes and effects, even individually, so I would call this a problem, not a firm boundary. Perhaps we will never be able to share experiences fully, but that is different from having an explanation for them.
The non-falsifiable: Theories accept some nonfalsifiable parts if enough is falsifiable. But there is no reason to believe that lack of falsifiability will be a problem for our theories to describe observations.
The supernatural: There is no original definition for this. But over the years our knowledge of how natural system works has been extended. Causality means that we know that observations have causes. So one possible definition of supernatural would be an observation that we can’t find a natural cause to. It would stand out against the background of “causal flow”. Of course, saying “I don’t know” is acceptable. But suppose it is a genuine observation. With a suitable boundary we would see a corresponding break of energy conservation, another general property we have learned nature abides. This is what I played around with in my toy calculation earlier.
That sounds reasonable, even falsifiable, but there is a definition problem. Such an observation should rightly be called natural according to the usage of that nametag, and our descriptions of nature would change. So again there is no a priori boundary. Of course, these observations are highly unlikely based on what we now know about nature. :-)
Actually, the redefinition of supernatural would be stupid, since we would like to bring out the different quality. (Not being caused by anything in our universe.) Let us say that this is an option, then. This is all hypothetical anyway, I just wanted to put over that there is no a priori boundary.
it seems to me that the natural/supernatural dichotomy is elusive because it’s a moving target. if one defines the latter to be “that which transcends the laws of nature as currently understood“, then the extent of the supernatural recedes as understanding of nature expands. with this interpretation, science excludes the possibility of “supernatural” explanations simply because those are just variants of “god of the gaps” thinking. the gap used to be the motion of the sun, now it’s consciousness. at any time, there presumably will always be “hard problems”, but before giving up, we need for them to have remained “hard” for long periods of dedicated, sophisticated attack. so far, most have ultimately succumbed. [I see mr larrson has just posted a similar, tho more eloquent, version of this, so suffice it to say I concur.]
this is why I argue in favor of “provisional” knowledge or belief. all I think we can say is that a hypothesis is supported by evidence that makes the probability of it’s being “true” (ie, warranting our acting as if it were true) higher than some hypothesis-specific threshold. this view is consistent with mr hatfield’s experience of his “beliefs” evolving as new evidence became available. having been through that process before, he may well view (correctly, IMO) his current beliefs as provisional since almost surely additional evidence will become available in the future.
(as to “fairy-tales”, I think it suffices to say that the conditional probability of their being true given the evidence – or lack thereof – is vanishingly small without adding insult to injury by what is essentially name-calling; ie, we can observe prof myers’s distinction between respect for a belief and respect for the believer.)
my suspicion is that those who are adamant about knowing what is “true” or “real” are setting some of their belief thresholds too low. as a test, consider 2+2=4: although I’m not on firm ground here (a more mathematically up-to-date friend assures me that “category theory” confirms my intuition, but I don’t know anything about that topic), my current “belief” is that this is not an “obvious” truth, and that if you believe it is, your thresholds may need some tweaking. of course, it may be that mine do, but in either case it argues for the provisionality of beliefs.
I thank ctw and torbjorn larrson for their insightful comments. It’s interesting that the same reasoning some believers employ to accomodate scientific findings (a ‘god of the gaps’) could also be used to reliably remove any hint of non-natural causation by definition. No wonder many creationists bitterly assail those who offer ‘god of the gaps’ arguments!
I was also intrigued by ctw’s discussion of a ‘belief threshold’. I appreciated the fact that ctw’s response took seriously my experiential claim that my ‘beliefs’ changed, rather than to deny on first principles that I could hold religious beliefs provisionally. Still, to be fair to those who have criticized me, I have to admit that a lot of ‘true believers’ who carry their theological axes around with them don’t seem to hold anything provisionally (hence some of the hostility I’ve encountered). This leads me to wonder again whether there is something qualitatively different about the latter.
Anyway, I found your comments helpful and persuasive. Thanks again…..Scott
Ctw, if you are considering “provisional belief” to be equivalent to “working hypothesis”, or a decision to act on the assumption that a belief is true until further clarification, I think that’s a good definition of a state of mind we are all familiar with. However, the original question, way back, was whether this fits a theological definition of faith, and my opinion on that, FWIW, is still no. Though I remind myself that such an approach is repeatedly recommended by Pascal in his Pensees, as a way to acquire religious faith. I would call it the “fake it till you make it” ploy. It works for some people.
anthony –
I think we are essentially in accord, it’s just that I haven’t directly addressed the kind of belief you are calling “theological … faith”. recall that in my conditional probability model of belief, each person weights his/her input events in order to determine (again, implicitly) their conditional probability that a hypothesis is “true”. my assumption (not being a person of faith or knowing intimately anyone who is, I can’t be sure) is that faith is based on some input event(s) (parent says so, bible says so, pastor says so) and that the person of faith assesses such inputs as determinative, ie, their “provisional” belief has conditional probability of being true equal to one. at this point one can say they are fools who believe in “fairy tales”, or that they are employing the same process we are but are choosing and weighting their input events incorrectly. the latter seems to me to be a more promising approach if the objective is to dialogue rather than just to insult.
-charles
Ctw, I can’t argue with you on the probabilistic interpretation. It strikes me, for practical purposes, as a psychological approach and it could very well be correct. The way you applied it in your first post was especially neat. I didn’t mean to insult anyone, but I am afraid I did. I was attempting to answer Scott’s original question, but on a topic so sensitive as an individual’s faith I should have known enough to be more careful of my diction. People understandably don’t like their faith questions to be subjected to logic-chopping. This is my first time posting here and I haven’t quite figured out the etiquette. ;-( Anthony
It has been a long and sunny weekend. In case someone of Scott, ctw, or anthony comes back here I would like to take the opportunity to say that I appreciate the contributions very much. I agree with ctw except on anthony’s analysis of faith that seems insightful to me. Scott’s observation on the different uses of non-natural causation was interesting.
Yow, I didn’t realize this thread was still going on, but I shall try to catch up. Apparently, Torbjörn Larsson,
Torbjörn Larsson: Your points are well made, notably that facts can be distinguished empirically from items of faith. But that’s a very “high-level” view in terms of cognition. Most scientists would have trouble staying in their professions if they didn’t have a basic sense of the consistency of the universe, well below the knowledge that they could (in principle) verify any given fact. That general “sense of consistency” is what I’m describing as a faith. Yes, it might be learned from personal experience — but the way human development works, it’s rather more likely to be imprinted in childhood from adult role models. (Note that at this stage, it is not necessarily linked to the practice of science!) And either way, it’s likely to be backed by individual temperament, which amounts to congenital variations in the person’s psychology.
T.L. again: “The most general description is probably the simple labeling that nature is what is observable by the methods of science.”
Most general? My version doesn’t depend on specifying “the methods of science”! ;-)
“To be frank, I prefer to wait for neuroscience to make valid model before I speculate too much.”
Actually, between cognitive science and modern psychology, we’ve got a fair amount of framework in place for a model of the mind. It’s not “complete”, of course, but already it’s useful for those who can straddle the two disciplines. Neuroscience as such is mostly operating below the level of “mind”, and this irrelevant.
in case there are any tenacious hangers-on:
it appears to me that anthony’s concept of faith – seconded by several other commenters – is summarized in the quip (from will rogers, as I recall) that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. my contention is that this, tho admittedly humorous, is inaccurate.
I have worked in a science/technology/reason-intensive environment with people who to all appearances do think their religious “fairy tales” are true. altho my natural inclination is to conclude (ala dawkins) that they are either stupid, ignorant, or insane, I “know” (ie, believe with high probability, based on the evidence) that they are none of these. hence, fancying myself to be a rational thinker, I have to conclude that the evidence suggests that this inclination is wrong. since in other arenas they appear to use roughly the same analytical process I do (the conditional probability model outlined earlier), my guess is that they do also vis-a-vis their religious beliefs. so, altho IMO the inputs they use are misweighted and/or their belief thresholds are too low, I don’t dismiss the process itself as flawed. which seems sensible to me since I can more easily accept that people use different parameters in a common process than that they use entirely different processes.
disclaimer: I’m totally ignorant of cognitive studies. the conditional probability model is just a home-brew job that I find helpful in thinking about such things. the appropriate confidence weight to be placed on it for any formal purposes is essentially zero.
-charles