thinking by druthers 2
[Second installment in a series on confirmation bias. Back to Part 1.]
An audience member at my Austin talk asked a good and common question. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris apparently made the case that those who do not hold religious beliefs must be willing to challenge the irrational beliefs of their friends and neighbors. (I say “apparently” because I started but didn’t finish EOF. I am the choir, he had me at hello, and I had other fish to fry.)
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“So,” asked Audience Guy, “do you agree that we should more actively challenge the irrational beliefs of friends and neighbors?”
I said no.
I know this will strike a lot of y’all as heresy, and it depends on the relationship in question — but I don’t think we should make a general practice of confronting people we know and challenging their beliefs uninvited. I am opposed to aggressive evangelism of ALL kinds. And not because it isn’t “nice.” The reason is that uninvited personal critiques of belief, especially of irrational ones, are almost never effective. Of the scores of people I know who have given up religious beliefs, approximately zero did so as the result of an uninvited challenge by another person.
There are all sorts of things we can and should do to make it more likely that they challenge themselves, but you can’t force another person to think. You can help another person become curious enough to invite the discussion, in part by being a visibly contented nonbeliever yourself. Once you have an invitation from the other side, a lot is possible. Otherwise, forget it.
“But but but…I have such a great argument!” You crack me up. Sit down and listen. The very idea of argumentation is based on the premise that you’re after the truth. It works brilliantly when a person is convinced of the virtues of the scientific method, convinced that there is nothing so beautiful as reality and nothing so ugly as self-deception.
But traditional religious belief isn’t arrived at by a critical determination to avoid error. It is arrived at by the focused determination to confirm one’s biases. Now, quite suddenly, you are asking a person to switch pole stars — to reorient his or her entire way of thinking from confirmation bias to a love of reality wherever it lies.
You’re funny. No no, in a good way.
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into,” said Jonathan Swift, supposedly. If you have ever tried to argue a religious point with a fervent believer, only to see the goalposts move and terms redefine themselves in midair, you know what he was talking about. But you may not have known why: the other person is working from an entirely incompatible operating system. Stop being surprised that he can’t open your attachments.
A lifetime of cherry-picking evidence on the basis of its confirmation value rather than assessing its value as evidence can lead people into unintentional hilarity. The more they surround themselves with nodding people who are busily confirming the same biases, the more hilarious it gets. The nonreligious are by no means excluded from this disease — more on that in part 3. But traditional religion, founded as it was on the principle of confirmation bias, is an especially fun source of rib-tickling.
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During some down time in my room before my May presentation at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst NY, I indulged in one of my favorite masochistic pastimes: watching EWTN, the Global Catholic Network. A panel discussion was under way, and a priest was going off on the evils of condoms, of homosexuality, of abortion — anything, really, other than unprotected-face-to-face-one-man-on-top-of-one-woman-he-is-married-to-resulting-in-baby-sex. (You know…like the kind priests have.) There was never a risk that the rest of the panel would do anything but nod, so of course his statements got ever-stranger and ever-less-supportable.
Finally he hit bottom. “And why do you think there is a priest shortage?” he asked. “That’s right: abortion! Nothing could be more obvious.”
Nod, nod, nod.
The next topic was end-of-life care. “Too many doctors are woefully ignorant of Catholic bioethics,” said an expert on, presumably, Catholic bioethics. “They will, for example, pull the plug on a patient merely because all brain activity has ceased.”
Nod, nod.
“What they fail to realize is that the suffering of the body in those final hours may be necessary to get that person into Heaven.”
Nod, nod.
“By denying the person that suffering, the doctors, in their ignorance, may be contravening God’s will by denying a chance at redemption.”
Nod, nod.
“And by moving so quickly, they may be denying God the chance to intervene miraculously to bring that person back.”
Nod, nod.
These are very close to verbatim. I was writing as fast as my little paw could push the pen.
An outsider looks at such a fatuously silly misuse of the neocortex with astonishment — and out spill the arguments. Wasn’t the plug contravening God’s will, and the removal of the plug restoring God’s intended situation? Does God, who exists outside of time and space, actually need “time” to perform a miracle? How much, exactly? Yes, yes, yes. Fine.
But those around her are having their own biases confirmed — so nod go the many heads, and she digs deeper and deeper for nonsense.
WE ALL DO THIS, myself included, as noted in the last installment. The key is to make yourself vulnerable to disconfirmation, to be in the room with people who will call you on it when you make a bias error, and to be properly embarrassed when it happens.
Need more? Enjoy this, remembering all the while that the arguments apply only to bananas — especially at 0:19, 0:41, and 0:51:
“Seriously, Kirk,” he says — which is how you know he’s serious.
Yes, fine, these are fairly extreme examples. But I think the essence of religious thought as confirmation bias is nicely captured, as is the essence of the difference between religion and science. Next time I’ll finish up by showing what it is that makes science work differently. And psst…it isn’t the superior moral or even intellectual fiber of scientists.
[On to Part 3.]
Reaching out to Harry AND Sally (1 of 3)
by Dale McGowan
[An essay in three parts on current atheist outreach. Appears in the current issue of Secular Nation.]
The scene was the ballroom of the Kansas City Airport Marriott at the 2006 convention of the Atheist Alliance. On stage was the smart and articulate Hemant “Friendly Atheist” Mehta.
Hemant was talking about his book I Sold My Soul on Ebay. He was also, unsurprisingly, talking about friendly atheism, suggesting that atheists show a friendlier face to the religious world than we often do.
Intentional ridicule and insult directed at religious folks, he said, are especially counterproductive. Included among his examples was the “Smut for Smut” campaign at the University of Texas San Antonio, in which atheist students offered to trade pornography for Bibles.
“BULLSHIT!” screamed an audience member near me. “THAT’S BULLSHIT! Those people have courage, they’re out there fighting for your rights, and you ought to be honoring their courage!! For you to stand up there and…”
You get the idea. A kind of atheist “Support Our Troops” thing.
It was a seminal moment, a genuine clash between two different heartfelt visions of atheist activism. Both seek to move atheism out of the margins, but only one of them sees force as the way to get there.
Mr. Bullshit isn’t alone in thinking that a two-by-four between the eyes of religious folks is the best tool for advancing freethought. But neither is Hemant alone in thinking otherwise.
Each of the two approaches can be effective, just for very different receivers. I have met a few formerly religious people who said they needed a little cranio-lumber contact to rattle the fillings of their faith. They couldn’t hear Corliss Lamont or John Stuart Mill with an ear trumpet, but a good wedgie from Hitchens got them kicking the tires of their belief system at long last. There are also the silent, anonymous atheists among us who finally found their voice once someone like George Carlin or Pat Condell assured them that yes, it’s okay to call breathtakingly stupid things breathtakingly stupid.
These things can certainly go a bridge too far. David Mills’ response to the Blasphemy Challenge (in which Mills uses a bible to pick up dog feces, smearing the feces on a picture of Jesus while swearing a blue streak in front of his laughing 10-year-old daughter) leaps to mind. But it’s much more often the case that atheists are accused of playing too rough—Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens—when in fact they have merely refused to pull punches in a fight that genuinely matters, and the entrails on the ground are evidence not of excessive force but of the opponent’s refusal to go sensibly to the mat for anything less.
But there’s another audience out there, one that dwarfs the fans of the two-by-four by a good many multiples. This includes believers cautiously open to disconfirmation and closeted nonbelievers cautiously open to coming out. Numbering in the millions, they are predisposed to our message but unwilling to gird for culture war.
Though both approaches have long been available, only the two-by-four has generally been audible. Lamont’s joyful Humanism was there at the same time as Madeleine Murray O’Hair’s “Religion is induced insanity,” but only O’Hair’s efforts made it to the general radar. She achieved great and noble things, Madeleine did, but her approach, even as it emboldened the True Unbelievers among us, also made the cautious, silent majority of the nonreligious slump ever-further down into the “no comment” pew.
There is an audience that is well-served by the no-prisoners approach, and I count myself among them. But I’m thrilled to see that the “friendlier” frequency is gaining bandwidth of late, beginning at last to tap that huge reservoir of potential self-identified freethinkers who are reached more effectively on that wavelength than the other.
All three of the outreach efforts featured in this issue [of Secular Nation] — the Tree of Knowledge (Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia), the turnpike billboards (FreeThoughtAction and now PhillyCOR), and the highway cleanup (Atheists United and dozens of other groups nationwide) are operating on this less abrasive frequency. I believe that in doing so, they are moving us into the second of three phases in our courtship with the population at large.
The Courtship Challenge
Though we need to make ourselves visible to the public, visibility is not enough. A four-car pileup is also visible, but that doesn’t mean you want to be a part of it. We need to engage in something beyond exhibitionism—something closer to courtship.
Courtship is a three-step process: (1) be noticed; (2) be attractive; and (3) deliver the goods. In the all-too-recent past, freethought was stuck in step one, trying desperately to convince the public—and each other, for that matter—that we exist. As recently as 2003, when I began floating the proposal for a book on nonreligious parenting, agents and publishers shrugged it off, saying “there’s no audience for such a book.” Then the Four Horsemen took care of visibility once and for all.
Now for step two.
To make yourself attractive to the beloved, you’ve got to see yourself through that person’s eyes—an effort organized freethought has too seldom made. Too often we spend our time ranting in frustration at the general public’s inability to see how darn good-looking we are instead of finding out what really turns them on.
All three of the featured outreach efforts are giving consideration to attractiveness. Each is positively focused and speaks to one or more of the specific human hungers that church has traditionally satisfied.
The highway cleanup by Atheists United and others sends a message of civic responsibility and a desire to work for the greater good.1 FSGP’s Tree of Knowledge (a holiday tree decorated with freethought bookcovers) makes use of a familiar, attractive holiday symbol with happy and loving associations, underlining what is shared between worldviews rather than what differs. Finally, the billboard by FreeThoughtAction speaks to the desire for the embrace of community while at the same time cleverly addressing the existential fear of human aloneness in the absence of the divine—i.e., “you are not alone” in your disbelief and “you are not alone” despite the absence of God.
All three also invite the public into the third step in the courtship—assessing the substance of organized freethought. The FreeThoughtAction billboard provides a prominent and memorable web address, leading to a brilliantly-designed site with well-organized links for additional exploration of the world of freethought.2 The book covers on the Tree of Knowledge represent invitations to explore freethought. And the Atheists United name on the freeway adoption sign provides an easy-to-remember, Googleable point of contact.
These three efforts share another crucial feature: simple clarity. In five seconds, I get it. And I know I’m not alone in finding wit—especially nuanced wit—to be an intellectual aphrodisiac. The Tree of Knowledge names and celebrates precisely the thing that Yahweh forbade in Genesis 2:17, while the FTA billboard is a gentle (and cheerier) counterpoint to the white-on-black messages signed by God.3
[continue to part 2]
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1Though I winced hard when one spokesman for the group was quoted as saying they made the efforts “so we get to keep the sign.” A nice benefit, but if exposure is all it’s about, that’s more than a tad duplicitous.
2And, through the use of the capitals, turns the potentially unfamiliar concept of “freethought action” into three positive and lively words: FreeThoughtAction. Brilliant!
3Which I must admit to adoring. It’s fairly rare to see religious folks making effective use of humor.
Humanists weigh in on corporal punishment
Shortly after I put together the ONE SAFE GENERATION initiative for the Institute for Humanist Studies, I got a note from Institute director Matt Cherry.
The London-based International Humanist and Ethical Union (or IHEU, the worldwide union of humanist organizations) convenes a World Humanist Congress every three years. One of the tasks of the Congress is to consider resolutions and statements submitted by member organizations. Passed resolutions then serve as a kind of evolving statement of generally accepted humanist positions on issues of the day. If you want to know what the consensus is among humanists on abortion, euthanasia, contraception, reproductive rights, the environment, armed conflict, women’s rights, and a host of other issues, the IHEU resolutions offer the best available summary.
Matt had noticed that the organization had not yet taken a position on corporal punishment and asked that I draft a resolution. Here’s the text:
The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) supports worldwide efforts to abolish the use of corporal punishment for the discipline of children.
Corporal punishment is defined as “the use of physical force with the intention of causing bodily pain or discomfort so as to change the subject’s behaviour or to punish them.”
Corporal punishment teaches children that violence is an acceptable means to make others do something, thereby perpetuating violent behaviour from generation to generation.
A growing body of research strongly indicates that corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary measure and has strong associations with multiple undesirable outcomes, including an increased risk of depression, aggression, antisocial behaviour, and the continued use of violence in subsequent generations.
Nonviolent disciplinary techniques have been shown to be as effective as, or more effective than, corporal punishment. As humanism teaches the preference for nonviolent means whenever possible, IHEU supports efforts to educate parents and teachers regarding these disciplinary alternatives.
In response to growing evidence against corporal punishment, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNESCO, American Academy of Pediatrics (USA), Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (UK), and many other national and international organisations have condemned the practice. Twenty-five countries to date have declared corporal punishment illegal, and bans are under consideration by several others. Most national statutes already prohibit violence against adults, including family members. A corporal punishment ban seeks to extend the same protection to children.
The IHEU calls on all Member Organisations and Individual Members to promote opposition to corporal punishment at the national and international level by means of publicity, discussions, and education, with the aim to secure the abolition of the practice.
On June 8, the resolution was passed unanimously by the General Assembly of the 2008 World Humanist Congress in Washington DC.
The next phase of ONE SAFE GENERATION — an orchestrated campaign to focus attention and action in the humanist blogosphere on a series of child protection charities — is scheduled to launch on September 1. Watch for it.
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Related posts:
- Encourage South Africa’s spanking ban
Spare the rod — and spare me the rest
Responses to “spare the rod”
Interview with corporal punishment researcher Elizabeth Gershoff, Ph.D.
Article: Most Parents Condone Spanking — Child Development Research Doesn’t (from Civitas)
Alternatives to corporal punishment
parenting and the safest sex of all
by Dale McGowan
We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.
Lily Tomlin
Joycelyn Elders, the most quotable U.S. Surgeon General of all time, once said, “Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily.”
That kind of quotability can get a political appointee fired. At a UN conference on AIDS in 1994, Elders was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation to prevent young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity. “I think that it is part of human sexuality,” she replied, “and perhaps it should be taught.”
Never mind that the answer was sensible. Never mind that it was true. Once U.S. conservatives pictured their progeny receiving instruction in self-gratification—complete with cucumber-based demos, no doubt—Elders’ dismissal was assured.
Sense and truth have never had much place in our cultural discourse on sex, and few aspects of the topic have been more twitchingly mismanaged than masturbation. Those who recall the baffling mix of intense pleasure and intense shame that accompanies most discoveries of masturbation should want nothing more than to spare our own kids the unnecessary torment. Yet masturbation, the very first form of sex kids will generally encounter, is the topic most often missing from parent-child discussions of sex.
The roots of our dysfunctional attitudes toward masturbation are intertwined with the age-old distrust of bodily pleasures. That distrust probably didn’t originate in religion. Among other things, religion is simply a place to put our most beloved bad ideas for safekeeping. But when it comes to perpetuating and reinforcing dysfunctional attitudes toward the safest sex of all, it’s hard to beat the Abrahamic religions for over-the-top hysteria.
The Catholic catechism calls masturbation “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” One popular 19th century Jewish theologian called it “a graver sin than any other in the Torah.” Mormonism teaches that “masturbation is a sinful habit that robs one of the Spirit,” while Shi’a Islam forbids it completely, quoting sect founder Imam Ali as saying “one who masturbates commits a sin equal to killing me eighty times.” ¡Ay caramba!
But at least one influential religious conservative has voiced support for a more accepting, naturalistic parenting approach to masturbation—and has been excoriated for it by his fellows. The following passage refers to a conversation he had as a boy with his minister father:
We were riding in the car, and my dad said, “Jim, when I was a boy, I worried so much about masturbation. It really became a scary thing for me because I thought God was condemning me for what I couldn’t help. So I’m telling you now that I hope you don’t feel the need to engage in this act when you reach the teen years, but if you do, you shouldn’t be too concerned about it. I don’t believe it has much to do with your relationship with God.” What a compassionate thing my father did for me that night in the car.
Aside from “I hope you don’t feel the need” and the bit about God, this is almost precisely the message I want to get across to my own kids. And it comes from none other than James Dobson.
He still tangles it with silliness, suggesting that boys in the act think not of any girls they know but only of their “eventual wives.” Christian author Herbert J. Miles goes one better, suggesting that boys pray first, thanking God for the gift of sexuality, then think only of him during orgasm (which certainly gives “Oh, God!” a whole new meaning). But let’s give credit to both of them for getting the basic message right and thereby reducing the number of children growing up with unnecessary self-loathing and sexual repression.
In the absence of communication on the issue, children are guaranteed to feel tremendous shame and guilt when the natural developments of early adolescence lead them to self-stimulation. When your child is on the cusp of puberty, casually let him or her know:
- What masturbation is;
- That it’s a normal thing nearly everyone does at some point;
- That it’s a natural indication that the body is becoming ready for sexual activity and reproduction;
- That all of the stories about grave consequences are complete nonsense;
- That though it is not shameful, it should be done only in private.
Removing the guilt and shame from our children’s first encounters with their sexuality requires no detailed description or instruction—just simple permission. And nonreligious parents, free of repressive doctrines, are in an ideal position to give their children that permission, as well as the mental, emotional, and sexual health that comes with it.
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This column also appears in the June 4 issue of Humanist Network News.
A nice page of info on masturbation from Cool Nurse — Teen Health, Teen Advice.
“hey, mr. cunningham”
You never know someone until you step inside their skin and walk around a little. –Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird
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A few years ago I was teaching a seminar on the use (and misuse) of the arts in the Third Reich when a student asked a great question — one of the best I ever heard as a professor:
“What would you say is the basic difference between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’?”
What an unusually great question. I stared at the carpet for a week or so as I worked out an answer. Then, amazingly, an answer that I still consider the right one came bubbling to the surface.
I think the central distinction between liberal and conservative is the attitude toward difference. Conservatism embodies our evolved tendency to value what is familiar, shared, and traditional while distrusting the unfamiliar or foreign. Liberalism tends instead to distrust sameness and to see greater value in diversity and change. It seems to (liberal) me that this distinction is at the root of things.
Correct me since I’m wrong.
We watched To Kill a Mockingbird a few days ago. I wasn’t sure if the kids would take to it — B&W, some wooden acting, etc. — but once again they surprised me. As of this morning, Laney and Erin have watched it three times.
I remembered the story as an indictment of racism, but the racial narrative is just one thread in the larger message of the film (and book) — that we fear what is different or unknown, and that that fear drives us to kill mockingbirds (i.e. to hate and harm the innocent).
Tom Robinson is a black man falsely accused of beating and raping a white woman. Mrs. Dubose, the cranky elderly neighbor, is assumed by the children to have a pistol under her shawl. The unseen Boo Radley is assumed to be a homicidal maniac who “eats raw squirrels,” while his father is assumed to be “the meanest man who ever drew breath.” Even a dog walking down the street erratically is assumed rabid and has the Bush Doctrine unleashed on him.
If my definition of the difference between conservatism and liberalism holds water, To Kill a Mockingbird seems to be an extended tribute to the liberal impulse and indictment of the conservative. But again, I’m a damn liberal, so I might very well be engaging in confirmation bias. I’d be interested to see if a conservative sees it differently.
There’s one scene that seemed relevant to the nonreligious — who are, after all, among the hated-different-unfamiliar in our society. A classic lynch mob has gathered at the jail to kill Tom Robinson, only to find his lawyer, Atticus Finch, sitting in the doorway, reading a book.
The mob already has Atticus neatly labeled and dismissed as a “nigger-lover” and a “tricky lawyer” (and now a book reader! Pinko elitist to the core, this one). Having replaced his humanity with a caricature, they will find it a simple matter to do whatever it takes to get past him.
But then Atticus’ children Jem and Scout show up. He orders them to leave. They refuse, and Atticus does not beat them to death (permissive parenting!). Then Scout recognizes a face in the crowd: Mr. Cunningham, a farmer for whom Atticus has done work and whose son Scout knows. “Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” she says:
I said Hey, Mr. Cunningham. Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one early morning, remember? We had a talk. I went and got my daddy to come out and thank you. I go to school with your boy. I go to school with Walter. He’s a nice boy. Tell him ‘hey’ for me, won’t you?
She says his name. She says her name. She reminds him of their connection and offers a kind greeting. Cunningham’s body language says it all. He squirms. He looks at the ground. He tries to hide behind the brim of his hat. He can’t keep the caricature from dissolving in the face of Scout’s humanizing connection.
I spend a lot of time telling nonreligious parents that one of the best things we can do for our children is to be out — to have our views known by those around us. It’s far less important to engage and challenge other beliefs than to simply put a known and loved (or hell, even mildly liked) face on the abstract bugaboo of religious doubt.
It works for every kind of reviled “other.” It’s easy to go to war against distant foreigners as long as “they” are “over there,” safely unknown and simplistically drawn. It’s easy to convince yourself that gays are a perverse threat to all that’s holy as long as you don’t know anyone who’s gay. And there’s no difficulty in convincing yourself that atheists are immoral hedonists if you continue to assume that those around you are all believers.
That’s why it’s important for those who differ from the majority — blue people in red states, red people in blue states, gays, atheists, the works — to be out of the closet, to be a smiling, normal, ethical contradiction to all the fearful assumptions. So I try to convince nonreligious folks to seize those “Hey, Mr. Cunningham” moments and put a human face on disbelief. And it’s equally important for us to avoid drawing a caricature of all religious belief — to recognize the normal, sane, ethical believers all around us. That’s the way the caricature crumbles — one person at a time.
Not just because I said so
We often talk about moral development as if it’s a mysterious process by which a child, born either tabula rasa or seething with apple-infused evil, somehow becomes good. Or not.
In our rush to replace amorphous mystery with rock-solid fable, any discussion of morality will eventually run straight to the most obvious off-the-rails moment in modern history: Nazi Germany. And even though the technique is so overused that it has its own fallacy and even a Law to describe our tendency to overuse it, I think it would be even dafter to not look to Nazi Germany for moral lessons.
But why stop with the guy on top? And why do we waste time debating whether Hitler was a Christian or an atheist, as if both worldviews were not already rife enough with examples on both extremes?1 Nazi Germany consisted of millions of people, some of whom participated in the horrors, others of whom heroically opposed it. Why not look deeper than Hitler for our moral lessons?
Fortunately someone has. Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.
Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.
Ethicist Jonathan Glover applied the same questions cross-culturally, looking at the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda in addition to Germany, and came to similar conclusions. Dictating a set of authority-based rules turns out to be the worst thing we can do for ethical development — yet we are continuously urged to do exactly this because it feels ever-so-decisive and bold.
The alternative is not a home in which kids are free to ignore rules. All that’s required to get kids actively engaged in their own moral development is a willingness to explain the reasons behind the rules. My kids know they have the right to hear our reasoning, and yes, it’s sometimes a pain. But it’s a path that leads more reliably to ethical adults who will question both commands and commandments rather than boldly do whatever Zod says.
In short, instead of doing what feels right, I humbly suggest we try the approach that appears to, uh…work.
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1Not that it isn’t a fascinating sidebar to the topic. If you’re interested, start with this excellent and thorough Wikipedia piece on the complex subject of Hitler’s beliefs. Good news: both atheists and Christians can reasonably disown him, and neither should throw him into the other’s camp.
the certainty myth
There is a criticism of atheism that never ceases to flummox and irritate me. Atheists are fools, goes the line, because you can’t be 100% certain God doesn’t exist.
Here are a few definitions of atheist that most people would agree with:
– Someone who denies the existence of God (WordNet)
– One who believes that there is no God (Webster’s New 20th Century)
– Somebody who does not believe in God or deities (Encarta Dictionary)
Nowhere is reference made to “Someone who claims to know there is no God.” There’s nothing about certainty. The atheist says, “You believe God exists, eh? Hm. Not me.” It’s quite simple. Elegantly so.
I’ve never met an atheist who was quite dense enough to claim certain knowledge of the nonexistence of God. Aside from the difficulty in proving a negative (i.e. I would also be unable to say for certain that there’s no teapot orbiting Jupiter), certainty itself is a bogus concept. The best we can do is increase or decrease our confidence in a proposition.
I don’t think God exists, and theists think he does. Why, in that equation, are atheists tagged as arrogant asserters of certainty, while theists get a pass? I don’t get it.
I saw this most recently, and depressingly, when a Google alert of mine popped an old blog entry by Dilbert creator Scott Adams into my inbox. It includes this passage:
This brings me to atheists. In order to be certain that God doesn’t exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity –- the ability to be 100% certain. A human can’t be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren’t that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.
Chuckle. I guess.
Adams is an agnostic himself, and I assume and hope he’s just riffing for laughs. Surely he knows that his beliefs are identical to almost any given atheist. Surely. Well, I’m not so sure. Many people hold this incredibly daft assumption, and few apply it to theists, as if belief is the default and atheism an assertion.
And I know where the problem started.
The problem, ironically, was started by my hero, Thomas Huxley. Prior to his coining of the word “agnostic,” it was probably understood that atheists were people who simply said, “I don’t believe in God.” Huxley wasn’t somewhere in the muddy, shrugging middle, 51-49 for-or-against belief. He had a very strong conviction that God did not exist. But it wasn’t certain, and he wanted to underline this, so he created the word “agnostic” (Latin for “not knowing”) to name what should damn well be true of the entire human race. None of us knows…but surely it’s OK to say what you think the deal is.
Thanks to our monkey tendencies, though, the upshot of Huxley’s clarifying coinage was greater confusion. Agnosticism was instantly assumed to mean “don’t know, don’t care,” and the myth of atheism as an assertion of absolute certainty was reinforced by contrast to the new term. Neither is accurate (as Russell will show shortly). They are really two different ways of saying the same thing: I think God is pretend. Agnosticism simply leans on the word “think,” and atheism leans on “pretend.”
Bertrand Russell himself was conflicted on this point, and referred to himself as an atheist or an agnostic depending on the audience:
I never know whether I should say “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist”. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.
Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.
from “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?” in A Plea for Tolerance in the Face of New Dogmas (1947)
Unfortunately, in the essay “What is an Agnostic?”, Russell gives this unhelpful backhand, even though it is written for an entirely popular audience:
An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not.
*Sigh.*
I, like every atheist I know, am an atheist and an agnostic and a humanist and a freethinker. Each has a different emphasis; all are compatible. Questions?
ode to a mother-in-law
< Sadly, the very first thing that comes up
in a Google Image Search for "mother in law"
There’s a laugh line in my seminar that isn’t meant to be a laugh line. It’s entirely serious, but they always chuckle.
In the section on extended family issues, I recommend letting your kids go to church once in a while with trusted relatives — and they chuckle at the word “trusted,” just a bit. It’s a knowing chuckle, of course. There are both trustworthy and untrustworthy religious folks, and many of us have both in our extended families. The untrustworthy are the sneaky proselytizers, the ones who tell our kids in whispers that Jesus loves them, that “I’m praying for your mama and daddy,” or even drop little hints of hellfire — not as a threat, of course, but as the thing they’re working so hard to save mama and daddy from.
The trustworthy are those who preface their input to my children with “I believe” statements instead of presenting everything as…well, gospel, and respect our decision to let the kids work it out for themselves in the long run.
It is my very good fortune to have a mother-in-law in Category #2.
The daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, graduate of a Baptist college, and devout churchgoer, she nonetheless has been absolutely fabulous about respecting our choices with the kids. I am quite certain she’d rather her grandchildren were being raised in the church, but she’s never pushed the point. When our kids do attend, perhaps 3-4 times a year, it’s always with her.
Her stock has begun rising even further with me lately. A few weeks ago I heard (secondhand) that a member of her church asked if it bothered her that neither of her sons-in-law is a Christian.
“Pfft,” she said. “You listen here. Those two boys treat my girls like queens. I can’t ask for more than that.”
She’s also been known to suggest that I’m more Christian than many Christians she knows. Considering the source, that’s a compliment I’m very pleased to take.
As I talk to nonreligious parents around the country, I encourage them not to assume too much about their religious relatives. Even those who are very serious about their own faith are often more willing to bend than we sometimes think. It’s not always the case, of course. Some will do their level best to put you in hell well before you’re dead, and once you’ve seen that in action, it’s more than an assumption. But I’m convinced that we jump to that conclusion too often. And I’m glad to hold up my own mother-in-law as an example.
Happy Mother’s Day, Babs!
the interfaith alliance
I don’t usually wax too political in this space, but there’s an activist organization I’m getting all hot and sweaty for lately. It’s The Interfaith Alliance (TIA), a coalition of 185,000 members from over 75 different religious and nonreligious perspectives founded in 1994 “to challenge the radical religious right” by protecting religious pluralism and the separation of church and state. They’ve had it with the use of religion as a tool of political manipulation and division. They think it’s bad for the church AND the state.
I have a collective crush on these people.
The president of TIA is Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy, Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, Louisiana and host of the program State of Belief on Air America Radio.
Gaddy is a Baptist who remembers that church-state separation was woven into the founding of his denomination and remembers why. He is awesome. He is a force of nature. (And I’m not only saying that because he declared himself “so impressed” with my “important work” when he interviewed me on December 22. Goodness, I’ve forgotten about that completely.)
It was TIA that pointed out last week, in a way both brilliant and hard to refute, that “if a potential employer asked you questions about your religious beliefs in a job interview, it wouldn’t only be offensive, it would be illegal.” Yet one interviewer after another in the presidential campaign asks questions about personal religious convictions. And what is a campaign if not an extended job interview?
Asking how a candidate thinks religion and government should intersect — well, that’s a terrific question, and one that’s rarely asked. Instead, we get a litany of questions that violate the Constitutional guarantee that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” (Article VI, section 3), in spirit if nothing else.
This week had TIA drawing attention to an effort by Focus on the Family to put the “National Day of Prayer” (seven days away) squarely in the hands of evangelicals:
The National Day of Prayer Task Force requires volunteer coordinators to sign a pledge stating: “I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those with differing beliefs are welcome to attend.” The coordinators must also sign a statement of faith that includes the following language: “I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God.” This clearly aligns a government-sponsored event with a particular Christian denomination, in violation of the basic provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
And so it always goes. When religion and politics mix, “religion” will inevitably become a single narrow expression of religion. In the case of the U.S., that’s evangelical Protestantism.
Anyway, I could go on all day about the great work of The Interfaith Alliance, but I’ll let you chase links on your own if you wish.
The questions about religion that TIA thinks candidates should answer
The campaign for a more inclusive Nat’l Day of Prayer (if we must have one at all, *sigh*), led by a Jewish group of First Amendment defenders called…wait for it…Jews on First! Oh, how I love it!
integrity
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It’s confirmed: the statistic over which I was so amazed — that 39.6 percent of prominent scientists lost a parent when they were kids — is twaddle. Thanks to blogreader Ryan (who sent the full text of the article I had quoted), I am spared the fate of including a bogus stat in a sidebar in my forthcoming book.
I want to write further about my error (which was silly and avoidable, not a minor slip), but I want to quote a letter from TH Huxley in doing so. Whenever I turn to that letter, though, I am so deeply moved that I have to quote half the letter, just in case someone hasn’t read this remarkable thing. Sometime next week I’ll write about the stat error.
Huxley and his wife had experienced the most unimaginable loss — the death of their four-year-old son Noel. First, a diary entry from the day after Noel’s death, followed by Huxley’s letter a few days later:
September 20, 1860
Diary of Thomas Huxley
And the same child, our Noel, our first-born, after being for nearly four years our delight and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This day week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday his restless head, with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all day upon his pillow. On Saturday night the fifteenth, I carried him here into my study, and laid his cold still body here where I write. Here too on Sunday night came his mother and I to that holy leave-taking.
My boy is gone, but in a higher and better sense than was in my mind when I wrote four years ago what stands above – I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say heartily and without bitterness–Amen, so let it be.
The Queen’s Canon Rev. Charles Kingsley wrote a letter of condolence to Huxley, gently suggesting that he reconsider his agnosticism and accept the consolations of faith in his time of loss. Huxley’s equally gentle response to Kingsley is the most moving testament to intellectual integrity I have ever read. An excerpt:
September 23, 1860
My dear Kingsley –I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife’s account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits–and Mrs. Kingsley will, I hope, believe that we are no less sensible of her kind thought of us. To myself your letter was especially valuable, as it touched upon what I thought even more than upon what I said in my letter to you.
My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them–and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is—Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie….
I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.
Pray understand that I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness. But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say and to feel, “I believe such and such to be true.”
All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.
Measured by this standard, what becomes of the doctrine of immortality?
You rest in your strong conviction of your personal existence, and in the instinct of the persistence of that existence which is so strong in you as in most men.
To me this is as nothing. That my personality is the surest thing I know–may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties.
I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena of my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatise a word, and it alters nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than I was before.
Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind–that my own highest aspirations even–lead me towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.
Science has taught to me the opposite lesson. She warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile.
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, “If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all that was best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge.
_________________________________ Sit down before fact as a little child,
be prepared to give up every preconceived notion,
follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads,
or you shall learn nothing.
I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind
since I have resolved at all risks to do this._________________________________
If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy’s grave my sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is because these agencies have worked upon me, and not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct for ever from the All from whence it came and whither it goes.
And thus, my dear Kingsley, you will understand what my position is. I may be quite wrong, and in that case I know I shall have to pay the penalty for being wrong. But I can only say with Luther, “Gott helfe mir, Ich kann nichts anders.” [“God help me, I cannot do otherwise.”]
I know right well that 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names. As our laws stand, if the lowest thief steals my coat, my evidence (my opinions being known) would not be received against him.
But I cannot help it. One thing people shall not call me with justice and that is—a liar. As you say of yourself, I too feel that I lack courage; but if ever the occasion arises when I am bound to speak, I will not shame my boy.
I have spoken more openly and distinctly to you than I ever have to any human being except my wife.
If you can show me that I err in premises or conclusion, I am ready to give up these as I would any other theories. But at any rate you will do me the justice to believe that I have not reached my conclusions without the care befitting the momentous nature of the problems involved.
I don’t profess to understand the logic of yourself, Maurice, and the rest of your school, but I have always said I would swear by your truthfulness and sincerity, and that good must come of your efforts. The more plain this was to me, however, the more obvious the necessity to let you see where the men of science are driving, and it has often been in my mind to write to you before.
If I have spoken too plainly anywhere, or too abruptly, pardon me, and do the like to me.
My wife thanks you very much for your volume of sermons. Ever yours very faithfully,TH Huxley
[The complete text is available here.]
