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PB: Okay, great. Thanks. Now I’m curious, you said before that you think God speaks to people. Not just
interrupt, but I’m really curious about something.
I’ve always found Dinesh D’Souza to be an example of someone who’s insincere;
Shermer has noted that the smarter someone is the better they are at rationalizing. I think he’s correct.
Doxastic closure can come about when people lack the system capacity to reinsert evidence into their System 1 thinking—that is, their System 1 thinking is invulnerable to System 2 thinking.
When I read the work of religious apologists, for example, I find myself incredulous and in a state of perpetual marvel that intelligent, thoughtful people could seriously entertain such hokum.
As a pragmatist, James is saying that his concern isn’t whether a belief is true according to some abstract standard of truth; rather, his concern is whether it is going to serve one’s purposes in living a fulfilling human life.
Choosing to believe a particular proposition is referred to in the philosophical literature as “doxastic volunteerism.”
(“What would it take for you to abandon your faith?” is the first question I ask people interested in debating me.)
if one thinks one has the truth, one stops looking.
It’s vital to reiterate that if the hypothesis stands this does not mean one has found eternal truth. This simply means the hypothesis is accepted as provisionally true.
In discussions of faith in particular, it’s crucial the Socratic clinician differentiate between people and propositions
additional hypotheses that I’d then continue to target for refutation. One effect of this constant targeting and undermining is to create a chowder of epistemic uncertainty—with individual propositions floating untethered from their cognitive foundation.
I’ve always thought that what’s important is to be a person who values reason and rationality, and not to be an atheist. Atheism is a conclusion one comes to after a sincere, honest evaluation of the evidence.
When you embrace reason and make the decision to be rational, reasonable, thoughtful, and honest when examining your life, you will quickly come to the conclusion that you don’t have all of the answers.
Inquiry and wonder must replace dogmatism and certainty.
What can we offer people like my mother in their most trying moments? I’ve thought about this question for quite some time, and the answer is as disconcerting as it is disparaging. Perhaps nothing.
The thrust of our message must be that there are things we don’t know and it’s okay to not know— even in death. Not claiming to know something you don’t know isn’t a character flaw, it is a virtue.
Our objective should be to create people who have learned key lessons from Socrates, Nietzsche, and the Four Horsemen—people who understand the dangers inherent in faulty reasoning processes, certainty, and religiosity.
because you can’t prove that there’s not a God, then God must exist. Of all of the defenses of faith, it is most difficult to comprehend how someone could actually offer this as a legitimate defense for faith or for belief in God.
I ask, “What evidence could I give you that would prove God doesn’t exist? Can you please give me a specific example of exactly what that evidence would look like?” Because it’s not possible to have a justified belief in God due to the fact that there’s insufficient evidence to warrant this belief, very few people have been able to cogently answer the question.5 I then use the discussion as a springboard to suggest that they don’t believe in God on the basis of the evidence.
Anyone who says, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” doesn’t understand what the word “atheist” means, or is simply insincere.
Since the world is the way it is regardless of our beliefs or of the epistemology we use to know the world, “my faith is true for me” is a nonsensical statement.
this is a feeble attempt to undermine reason by stating that there are some mysteries even our best and brightest can’t grasp—thus giving the faithful license to pretend to know things they don’t know.
Science is a method of advancing our understanding. It is a process we can use to bring us closer to the truth and to weed out false claims. Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works.
I never allow the conversation to devolve into the merits of faith until my interlocutor has explicitly admitted that faith is an unreliable path to the truth.
If life has no meaning for someone unless they pretend to know something they don’t know, then I would strongly and sincerely urge extensive therapy and counseling.
One would thus rely less on the content of one’s beliefs and more on the process one uses to arrive at one’s beliefs.
“There is no need to modify the word ‘faith’ with the word ‘blind.’ All faith is blind. All faith is belief on the basis of insufficient evidence. That’s what makes it faith.
When we refuse to admit that our preferences don’t determine reality, we create an environment where reality cannot be improved.”
For Locke, liberalism means limited government, the rule of law, due process, liberty, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, separation of church and state, and separation of government powers into branches that oversee each other’s authority.
Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882).
Epistemic relativism is either coupled with the idea that any process one uses to form beliefs is either just as good as any other process—a kind of epistemic egalitarianism—or with the idea that processes cannot be judged because one process is always judged by another process. In the latter case, there would thus be no basis for a reliable epistemological comparison.
Labeling someone who criticizes ideas, in whatever domain, as driven by fear, or by some other pathological condition—in effect as mentally unbalanced—is a complete betrayal of the core ideas of classical and social liberalism,
Tolerance only works when there’s reciprocity. That is, tolerance doesn’t handle intolerance very well.
What is going on in higher education today is the paradigmatic example of well-educated leftists withholding judgment, teaching others to do the same, and even somehow feeling sanctimonious as a result—as opposed to, just making well-reasoned matter-of-fact judgments.
Faith-based beliefs occupy a unique, coveted role protected by a cultural, social, and intellectual sheath of impenetrability.
Again, in the soft sciences, questioning a student’s belief-forming mechanism is taboo, but in the hard sciences (mathematics, chemistry, biology, etc.) challenging claims and questioning reasoning processes are intrinsic to what it means to teach students to reason effectively.
Cognitive, epistemological, and moral relativism are toxins that students trained in the humanities regularly consume in large doses.
In order to reason well, one needs to be able to rule out competing or irrelevant alternatives. But one cannot do this if one believes that there’s no way to make an objective judgment about those alternatives.
students will come to the conclusion that processes that rely on reason and evidence are good, while all other processes are bad.
Interpreted through the primacy of subjectivity there can be no doxastic errors (errors of belief ). This is because it is impossible to adjudicate a proposition’s truth or falsity in the absence of an objective world.
tolerance does not, cannot, and should not mean having to submit to rules of belief systems to which one does not ascribe.
tolerance
academic leftists take great pride in condemning Western institutions, Western financial systems, and Western corporations. One might see a leftist academic withhold judgment regarding a clitoridectomy in Northern Africa, but loudly decry a gender imbalance in the headcount of speakers at an academic conference.
People infected with faith don’t think of it as a malady, but as a gift, even a blessing.
Whether or not one should stand up for what one believes depends exclusively on what it is one believes and why one believes it. Having a firm belief is not a virtue.
If we lose respect for the truth, we’ll no longer seek it.
“People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.” —Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004)
Treat faith as a public health crisis.
Ultimately, the tax-exempt status of religious organizations must be removed, particularly those exemptions that are not granted to other nonprofits.
