faith, truth, & evidence

Just read a tweet that reminds me how much I enjoyed presenting the "Will to Believe" essay it fell to me (as session chair) to read last Sunday in Chocorua, NH for the "Footsteps" Symposium. Its author Mark Franklin was unable to attend, so I got to collect by proxy the many expressions of admiration directed his way for his excellent work. The spotlight was all his, but I lucked into basking in it. 


The re-tweet from @DJGrothe asserted, in the dogmatic form imposed by 140 characters (if not in fact by a dogmatic frame of mind, on this issue), 

that faith, belief without evidence, is something to be admired is probably the most dangerous idea in the world today.

Mark's paper, to the contrary, pointed out very persuasively that sometimes,

by deciding not to commit ourselves until sufficient evidence arises, we might actually end up working at cross purposes with our own truth-seeking aspirations... 

Waiting for conclusive evidence that you can scale the heights, defeat the enemy, win the Presidency, or meet the deadline (to pick a few random cases) is liable to be self-defeating. Truth isn't out there waiting to be found, it's waiting to be made. Or not. Truth happens. 


Yes, we can. Well, maybe we can. Who knows? -In advance, nobody does. That's why James wrote that

 a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

It's just not always as simple or black and white as "faith versus evidence." So many of the contentious squabbles surrounding so-called New Atheism  would benefit from a deliberate and reflective reading of "Will to Believe," and an appreciation that many "faith-heads" (Dawkins' term of opprobrium) value truth too.


But few of the more prominent contenders seem to have bothered reading it at all.

Mark's excellent essay, along with audio of the entire Symposium on MP3 CD-ROM (and video of much of it), is available for purchase at www.conferencerecording.com. 


Tell your local librarian.

"Poetic Atheism"

Jennifer Hecht's latest contribution to a new blog called Unreasonable Faith*: 

...I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I don’t think the universe can think. I don’t believe there is some special being that is separate from the universe and knows about us and cares about us and made us. All of that is the imaginative fantasy of one group of animals on planet Earth... 

What comes into being when matter and energy fall into such patterns that they look up and say hi and write symphonies? Art happens. It’s very strange and wonderful.

The truth may be real but it is not “matter of fact.” What in fact we have here is a billion fantastically sexy weird interesting stories all going on at once in a great cacophony of experience. How do we make sense of what it is to be human, to be this thing, this sentient matter?

Well I certainly don’t think the magic of consciousness should be considered evidence for something hidden, something else. The magic of consciousness is magic enough. Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are.

But the truth, the what actually is is very strange and overloaded and wondrous indeed...

==

*owned by former evangelical Christian Daniel Florien, who explains what made him a skeptic:

1. I read widely outside of evangelical Christianity with an open mind. Just reading isn’t good enough — without an open mind, everything confirms your own beliefs. I decided truth was more important than my current beliefs. I was warned this was dangerous. It was indeed.
2. I studied science with an open mind. I came to believe in an old earth, then finally evolution. This was a long process of removing layer after layer of propaganda.
3. I looked for evidence for many of the claims I believed and realized that there was no reputable evidence at all. I could believe Jesus was resurrected, or that Moses parted the Red Sea, but there was no evidence outside oral stories recorded by unknown biased authors many decades (or, as with Moses, many centuries) after the fact.
4. I researched the history and authorship of the Bible from a secular perspective. After I realized the messy history of the Bible, and saw all the contradictions and absurdities, I could not believe in inspiration much less infallibility, and any faith I still had crashed down.
5. I learned to think critically and, with much trepidation, finally applied it to my own religion. After years of struggling, I finally accepted I was in a cult called evangelical Christianity.
6. I asked hard questions and got tired of the final answers being “it’s a mystery,” which really meant, “it doesn’t make any sense to me either, but that’s what the Bible says.”
7. I learned about probability. Things I thought could not happen without divine intervention ended up being within the laws of probability. Coincidence really exists.

Free-thinking 1st ladies

Isn't it great to have a pair of free-thinkers in the White House again? Thinkers period?

As I grew older I questioned a great many of the things that I knew very well my grandmother who had brought me up had taken for granted. And I think I might have been a quite difficult person to live with if it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband once said it didn’t do you any harm to learn those things, so why not let your children learn them? When they grow up they’ll think things out for themselves.

And that gave me a feeling that perhaps that’s what we all must do—think out for ourselves what we could believe and how we could live by it. And so I came to the conclusion that you had to use this life to develop the very best that you could develop.

I don’t know whether I believe in a future life....

A future life elsewhere, post mortem, and as herself, I think Mrs. Roosevelt meant. (I like what Andrew Carnegie said about this too, btw: it's not our place to worry about a future life, but to "pitch this one as high as we can.")

But she did believe in our collective future. That's a form of faith, too. I prefer to call it hope.

Inspired

Speaking of "faithheads"...

(That term, by the way, popularized by Richard Dawkins, is more derogatory and incendiary than I'm generally comfortable with. But sometimes the company one must keep, here in the buckle of the Bible Belt, just makes it bubble up, benign intentions and tolerant impulses notwithstading. Sorry. But I'm leaving it in.)

A religious zealot and publisher in Murfreesboro, Tennessee named Shelton Smith comes in today for what strikes this free-thinker as a fawning and uncritical feature story in the Nashville Tennessean about his "embrace of old-time religion." That's not terribly unusual around these parts, unfortunately.

Smith, an "Independent Baptist," publishes Sword of the Lord. He is committed to halting "spiritual drift" and spreading the Verbal Inspiration of the Bible, the Deity of Christ, His Blood Atonement, Salvation by Faith, New Testament Soul Winning and the Premillennial Return of Christ; Opposing Modernism, Worldliness and Formalism."

Smith contends that only the 1872 King James Bible is inspired. All else is imposture and fraud.

So, inspiration happened once in all of recorded human history? It simply falls to you and me to salute and genuflect and defer and shut up?

Socrates and Emerson (and Twain and Nietzsche) had a lot to say about that benighted suggestion. Why are you and I here at all, if not to enjoy "an original relation to the universe" and so on? But Smith says simply: "There's what I think, and then there is what the Bible says. I'd rather go with what the Bible says."

I'd rather think about it myself, thanks all the same. I'd rather honor the inspiration that offers itself afresh every day, beginning with the sunrise, to me and you and possibly even to Shelton Smith, though I doubt he'd notice.

But what really galls about this story is the gratuitous insult to baseball fans the Tennessean reporter hurls with its first sentences: "Being a Christian is a lot like playing baseball. Get the fundamentals wrong, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket."

"Faithheads" is too kind.

Iowa 2, Nashville 1

But what a perfect night to sit out under a full moon and watch premier but unspoiled athletes plying their craft. "Faith Night" was unobtrusive. (In an alternate universe they have Reason Night at the old ballpark, maybe? But then the home team wouldn't have a prayer. I remember hearing Harry Caray actually say "The good Lord wanted the Cubbies to win!" Guess He got booted out of St. Louis too.)

The concessions were under control this time. The girls didn't complain about the bathrooms.

And the post-game fireworks were actually worth staying for.

Good job, Sounds. We'll be back.

Brainwashing children

Stephen Law (The War for Children's Minds, Routledge 2006) cites Oxford physiology researcher Kathleen Taylor on brainwashing: "One striking fact about brainwashing is its consistency. Whether the context is a prisoner of war camp, a cult’s headquarters or a radical mosque, five core techniques keep cropping up: isolation, control, uncertainty, repetition and emotional manipulation."

Law thinks religious teachers and those who try to instill "faith"-based values in children are distinctively guilty of brainwashing them, of attempting to "inject beliefs into the child's mind directly, without engaging the child's rational, critical faculties." But what about parents and other teachers generally?

Teachers, parents, and authorities of all stripes who deliberately bypass children's "rational, critical faculties" aren't teaching, they're indoctrinating. Emerson reprimanded such people: "You're trying to create another you. One is enough!"