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“nones”—those
Hellenistic philosophers were trying to encourage stoic self-sufficiency, a sense of self-responsibility, and a tough-minded humanism.
You administer a dialectical treatment with the goal of helping them become less certain and less confident in their faith commitment (or perhaps even cured of faith entirely).
It will help you to step back and exhibit more objectivity in your interventions.
A positive, accepting attitude will translate into an increased likelihood of treatment effectiveness.
if your subject even senses a hint of anger it could complicate their treatment, significantly slow their progress, and even calcify or feed the faith virus.
Interventions are not about winning or losing, they’re about helping people see through a delusion and reclaim a sense of wonder.
Your discussions with the faithful are a genuine opportunity for you to help people reason more reliably and feel less comfortable pretending to know things they don’t know.
As long as you keep in mind the possibility someone may know something you don’t, and as long as you’re open to changing your mind based upon evidence and reason, you’ll eliminate much of the potential for creating adversarial relationships, and avoid becoming that against which you struggle.
You need to become comfortable with not knowing and not pretending to know,
Remember: the core of the intervention is not changing beliefs, but changing the way people form beliefs—hence the term “epistemologist.”
Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem. Warrantless, dogged confidence is the problem.
You should be modeling doxastic openness—a willingness to revise your beliefs.
focus on undermining one’s confidence in how one claims to know what one knows (epistemology) as opposed to what one believes exists (metaphysics/God).
direct the discussion to how one knows that these alleged entities exist.
Target each epistemological claim separately. For example, “I feel God in my heart,” or “Literally billions of people believe in God.” Do not move on to another claim until the subject concedes that the particular claim in question is not sufficient to warrant belief in God.
The perceived association between faith and morality must be terminated.
By redefining faith as “pretending to know things you don’t know.”
By explicitly stating that having faith doesn’t make one moral, and lacking faith doesn’t make one immoral. I usually provide examples of well-known atheists most people would consider moral:
I then ask subjects if they can think of any examples of the faithful who are immoral.
First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?”
How do you know you’re not delusional?”
read Motivational Interviewing
Have patience. The fruits of the intervention may come weeks, months, or even years later.
When people begin to genuinely question their faith, or when their pathogenic hypothesis is frustrated, they may be unhappy with their interlocutor.
Street Epistemologists should prepare for anger, tears, and hostility.
Model the behavior you want to emulate. Don’t become frustrated. Helping people to stop pretending to know things they don’t know takes time, usually occurs over multiple treatments, and involves months and months of practice before you become a full-fledged Street Epistemologist.
The Transtheoretical Model of change states that behavioral change occurs in a series of stages.
When appropriate, relate to your subject by bringing in shared personal experiences.
“How to Think about Weird Things”
“The Defeasibility Test”
“Often as a consequence of sustained Socratic dialogue, one realizes that one did not know something that one thought one knew.”
Socratic method can create moments of doxastic openness—moments when individuals become aware that their reasoning is in error. In these instances people become less certain, less sure, less confident, and correspondingly more open to alternative hypotheses and explanations.
The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly
what conditions could be in place that would make the hypothesis untrue?
The elenchus is a simple yet effective way to undermine a hypothesis by eliciting contradictions and inconsistencies in one’s reasoning, and thus engendering aporia.
I’ve found subjects are usually more receptive to continuing treatment when questions are framed as just that—questions—and when you show your interest in a conversation by asking follow-up questions.
If you construct your statement with the passive voice, the subject may be more likely to be open to alternative causes.
I specifically avoided the word “you.”
“I don’t know” is a deceptively powerful statement. It also leads the subject to think, correctly, that you don’t have all of the answers and that not having all the answers is okay.
