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believe it or not when you are committed to that belief system it is internally consistent and logically coherent … as long as you don’t look too closely and you are surrounded by others who are also in the bubble.
help people overcome their faith and to create a better world—a world that uses intelligence, reason, rationality, thoughtfulness, ingenuity, sincerity, science, and kindness to build the future; not a world built on faith, delusion, pretending, religion, fear, pseudoscience, superstition, or a certainty achieved by keeping people in a stupor that makes them pawns of unseen forces
But the Street Epistemologist doesn’t just tear down fairytales, comforting delusions, and imagined entities. She offers a humanistic vision.
You will transform a broken world long ruled by unquestioned faith into a society built on reason, evidence, and thought-out positions.
ambitious 2018 plans
A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless.
“Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway.
Another way to think about “belief without evidence” is to think of an irrational leap over probabilities.
Not everything that’s a case of pretending to know things you don’t know is a case of faith, but cases of faith are instances of pretending to know something you don’t know.5
A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision.
The problem with agnosticism is that in the last 2,400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one.
we can have a meaningful discussion about “belief without evidence” being an unreliable way to navigate reality. We can also examine the dangers of formulating beliefs and social policies on the basis of insufficient evidence.
Faith is an epistemology.12 It’s a method and a process people use to understand reality. Faith-based conclusions are knowledge claims.
Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world.
If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value. Believing on the basis of insufficient evidence cannot point one toward the truth.
anyone reared by fundamentalist parents deserves credit for the exceptional struggle from indoctrination to enlightenment.
amen
perhaps because I don’t view atheism as an immutable characteristic, like eye color, I don’t consider it an identity.
Part of the confusion on the part of those who don’t use faith to navigate reality is that they understand that faith is an obviously unreliable process of reasoning.
Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth.
Faith replaces wonder with epistemological arrogance disguised as false humility.
help others reclaim their curiosity and their sense of wonder—both of which were robbed by faith.
Socrates and Nietzsche prescribed a different kind of interpretative experience, one in which we’re not just finding and confirming our existing biases, but also attacking them.
Disabusing others of warrantless certainty, and reinstilling their sense of wonder and their desire to know, is a profound contribution to a life worth living.
Street Epistemologists shouldn’t attempt to separate people from their religion, but instead focus on separating them from their faith.
if one gains a proficiency in certain methods of critical reasoning there is an increased likelihood that one will not hold religious beliefs.
individuals have damaged their thinking not only because they’ve habituated themselves to not proportioning their beliefs to the evidence, but also because they actually celebrate the fact that they don’t do so.
In The Big Sort, American sociologist Bill Bishop argues that we cluster in politically like-minded communities
Combine clustering in like-minded communities with filter bubbles, then put that on top of a cognitive architecture that predisposes one to belief (Shermer, 2012) and favors confirmation bias, then
The tools and allies of faith—certainty, prejudice, pretending, confirmation bias, irrationality, and superstition—all come into question through the self-awareness of ignorance.
faith-based beliefs occupy a special category of beliefs that are particularly difficult to revise.
A pathogenic belief is a belief that directly or indirectly leads to emotional, psychological, or physical pathology; in other words, holding a pathogenic belief is self-sabotaging and leads one away from human well-being.
Some observers suggest that the legitimacy of science itself is under attack by supporters of the paranormal”
we need to teach people how to think like scientists (see Shermer’s Skepticism 101 program: http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/08/30/skepticism101/) and not just have them memorize science facts
I have talked to many who have left religious belief behind, and it turns out that a willingness to think critically and independently has almost always played a pivotal role.”
It’s more likely you’ll earn success if you view what you’re doing as an intervention and consider a person of faith as someone who needs your help—as opposed to passing judgment.
Of what sort am I? One of those who would be glad to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and glad to refute anyone else who might speak untruly; but just as glad, mind you, to be refuted as to refute, since I regard the former as the greater benefit.” —Socrates in Gorgias
The moment we’re unshakably convinced we possess immutable truth, we become our own doxastic enemy.
Honest inquirers with sincere questions and an open mind rarely contribute to the misery of the world.
You need to become comfortable with not knowing and not pretending to know, even though others may ridicule you or attempt to make you feel inadequate for not pretending to know something they themselves are only pretending to know.
it is of little use to bring in facts when attempting to disabuse those in the precontemplative stage of their faith-based beliefs. If people believed on the basis of evidence then they wouldn’t find themselves in their current cognitive quagmire.
Bringing facts into the discussion is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem: the problem is with epistemologies people use, not with conclusions people hold.
To demolish a building, start with the base. Take out the support beam and the entire structure will fall. Faith is the base. Faith holds up the entire structure of belief. Collapse faith and the entire edifice falls.
Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem. Warrantless, dogged confidence is the problem. Epistemological arrogance masquerading as humility is the problem. Faith is the problem.
Belief in God is one consequence of a failed epistemology, with social and cultural mechanisms that both prop up this metaphysical belief and stifle epistemological challenges.
By targeting belief in God, you also run the risk of modeling the wrong behavior—the behavior of being doxastically closed—of having a closed belief system and an inability to revise your beliefs.
(This may also avoid one of the most common retorts among uneducated, unsophisticated believers, “You can’t prove it not to be true.”)
The belief that faith is a virtue and that one should have faith are primary impediments to disabusing people of their faith.
The perceived association between faith and morality must be terminated.
few people directly answer the question about how they know they’re not delusional. (In the case of faith-based beliefs, I’m not sure there is an answer because they’re actually suffering from a delusion.)
The difference between misconstruing reality and being delusional is the willingness to revise a belief.
I’ve found that fundamentalists, on the other hand, have given considerable thought to their faith and to their beliefs, and this change model sometimes does not directly apply to them; rather, they’re often suffering from an as yet unclassified cognitive disorder.
