A Manual for Creating Atheists (25 page)

More recently, in reaction to the film,
The Innocence of Muslims
, there were violent protests in Libya, Egypt, Indonesia, and even Australia. In the West, these acts were interpreted through the lens of tolerance. Academic leftists saw the problem as coming from our society—that is, that our society, the United States in particular, needs to be more sensitive, more tolerant, and more understanding of the values, and the faiths, of other cultures (Davis, 2012; Falk, 2012; Williams, 2012). But the societies in which protest killings occurred are perhaps the least tolerant societies on Earth.

The people in these societies did not rampage because we are not tolerant enough, or because they are asking for more tolerance. Mass hysteria occurred when people went on a rampage because their sacred text was desecrated by those who do not value it as a path to knowledge or truth.
⁹
Yet many leftists interpreted this behavior as a call for more tolerance on our part—and many even publicly advocated censorship (Malik, 2012).

There’s something else that’s disturbing about rampaging in the streets. Many leftists hold the idea that someone who does not live in one of these societies would only become upset at this behavior because they don’t understand these cultures and their epistemic systems. If people just understood other cultures then they wouldn’t be upset. Here, the idea is that there’s something intrinsic to one’s understanding that prevents one from seeing the matter clearly—as opposed to seeing something actually wrong with rampaging in the streets and killing people because religious sensitivities have been offended—and by extension something actually wrong with faith-based epistemic systems.
¹⁰

My own view is that people are not disturbed because they don’t understand why people rampage in the street, but
because they do understand
why people rampage in the street.

Leftists, Feminists, and Resuscitating Classical Liberalism

Today’s leftists cannot detect moral and epistemic imbalance because the invasive values piggybacking classical and social liberalism have robbed them of the opportunity and capability of making moral and epistemic judgments. 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.

Most educators in American institutions today are academic leftists of the kind I’ve described—and even academicians who have not bought into this ideology wholesale have trouble sorting out the difference between respecting the value of the individual and making a critical judgment of an epistemology (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Jaschik, 2012; Kurtz, 2005; Rothman, Lichter, & Nevitte, 2005; Tobin & Weinberg, 2006). An unfortunate consequence of this is that many professors teach students to withhold judgments, especially moral judgments.
¹¹
Withholding epistemological critique is wrong and needs to end. What educators should be teaching students is how to make better, more discerning judgments: how to discern reliable ways of reasoning from unreliable ways of reasoning.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the failure of contemporary academic feminism. Feminism is currently married to, or rather cohabitating with, academic leftism. Consequently, feminism has absorbed the same exogenous values that liberalism absorbed. Thus, there has been a tragic, catastrophic, and almost wholesale failure of contemporary academic feminism to speak out against the unbridled, ruthless misogyny of the Taliban, the horrific and wide-scale domestic violence suffered by women in Papua New Guinea, the sexual and physical violence common among Aboriginal women and girls in Australia, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

If one were to abstract feminism from values like tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism as applied to the realm of ideas, etc., what would the results be? Would American feminists be more likely or less likely to criticize the treatment of women in other cultures? The answer is obvious. Feminism’s silence can be understood because it’s been tainted by a litany of invasive values such as multiculturalism and relativism.

Faith

Contemporary academic leftism is also faith’s unwitting ally. Contemporary academic leftists have bullied criticisms of faith off the table.
¹²

Multiculturalism and associated ideologies grant “diverse” epistemologies—especially faith processes—immunity from criticism. Multiculturalism buttresses faith-based processes from criticism by conflating race with culture, and by making attacks on faith and reasoning processes ethically synonymous with attacks on race, gender, and other immutable characteristics. Rational critiques thus become immoral actions.
¹³

Belying classical and social liberalism, contemporary academic leftism transforms the speech act of criticizing faith and faith claims into a moral problem—even a moral failure. Criticizing faith becomes unethical, immoral, hurtful, unnecessary, and unkind. By extension, individuals who offer these criticisms are themselves seen to be immoral, intolerant, divisive, cruel, and even hateful. This is an illegitimate and wrongheaded move.
¹⁴

Faith is not an immutable characteristic; people leave and switch faith traditions. It is not like gender or ethnicity. There’s even a word, “apostasy,” for people who have left a particular faith tradition.
¹⁵
In some parts of the world the punishment for this is death (United States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 2011a).
¹⁶

Shows of deference to the practice of murdering people who leave a faith tradition is a grotesquely misplaced use of the value of “tolerance” that Enlightenment thinkers trumpeted during the time of John Locke and Thomas Hill Green. This isn’t tolerance, but rather ideological blindness and moral cowardice.

Hope

Contemporary academic leftism has created a cascading social, moral, and epistemological catastrophe. It has undermined reason and rationality and created conditions for faith, religion, superstition, pseudoscience, and faulty epistemologies of all stripes to flourish. It is directly responsible for an entire generation of students disengaging their capacity for critical rationality—
and consequently believing they’re better people as a result
.

I hope contemporary leftism will revert back to liberalism and be decoupled from relativism, subjectivity, multiculturalism, and the muddled thinking that emerges from extending dignity from people to ideas. Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and others have eloquently articulated the limits of new liberalism and the urgency to resuscitate classical and social liberalism so that it can again become a vibrant and effective change agent.

FAITH-BASED CLAIMS IN THE CLASSROOM

“When one pretends to know things one doesn’t know in science, one gets laughed at.”

—Matt Thornton, community activist

All thirty students in your introductory philosophy class studied diligently for their midterm.
¹⁷
After all the exams are submitted, you inform your students that you’ll grade their tests using a Ouija board—that is, you’ll place your fingers on the planchette and spirits will divine their ideal grade.

What reaction would this evoke? Anger? Perplexity? Bemusement?

There will, of course, be two groups of students who think that this is a fantastic idea: those expecting a poor grade will hope that a roll of the dice might yield a passing grade, and the small few who actually believe the Ouija board as a reliable mechanism for producing fair grades. Everyone else will be astounded and will likely say so.

This situation is similar to one in which professors find themselves when critiquing students’ reasoning, except that the current academic climate prevents us from saying so. This climate has made educators petrified to call into question a specific unreliable reasoning process—not just any unreliable process. Faith-based beliefs occupy a unique, coveted role protected by a cultural, social, and intellectual sheath of impenetrability.

In the soft sciences (sociology, philosophy, anthropology, etc.), if a student states that she believes a proposition because it comports with her faith tradition, that statement—and the process that gave rise to it—is treated as if it’s a legitimate knowledge claim based upon unassailable logic. It is taken for granted that faith-based claims are invulnerable to criticism and immune from further questioning.

This intellectual rigor mortis is not allowed to occur across all disciplines. 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
.

To render what using faith would look like as a justification in the hard sciences, let’s look at a hypothetical, in-class discussion between a biology professor and her student:

Professor
: [X] happens when the influenza virus infects a cell.

Student
: Well, that’s not my theory.

Professor
: What is your theory?

Student
: [Y] happens.

Professor
: Why do you think that?

Student
: I have faith that my theory is correct.

This one word, “faith,” is the end to rational discourse.

In the soft sciences, educators pretend that rational dialogue has not been interrupted. Invoking faith as a justification for one’s conclusions is treated as protected and even privileged speech. The default position is to grant the believer moral respect and social legitimacy.

This needs to end. Correcting students’ reasoning processes, and granting faith-based responses no countenance, needs to be the academic, cultural, and pedagogical norm across
all
academic disciplines.

Faith is a process of attempting to know the world that will
decrease
the likelihood of coming to true conclusions, or in philosophical parlance, using faith will not yield warranted belief. One way we know this is that different faith traditions make competing claims and these claims cannot all be correct—yet they can all be false.

Unfortunately, both in and out of the academy, faith is not merely viewed as a specious epistemology. Faith is cemented to an implicit, underlying moral edifice that grants it moral currency, and cultural and social legitimacy. What’s particularly interesting is that the elevated moral stature of faith is not just operating in the minds of the faithful; in education it’s become institutionalized in such a way that others, even those who don’t use faith as an epistemology, are forced to buy into the sanctity of faith-based reasoning.

It is considered impolite, uncouth, offensive, coercive, abusive, and even antidemocratic for a professor to correct students’ faith-based claims. Yet it is expected that a professor will point out and even reprimand students if they voice antiegalitarian or race-based claims. (This indicates that there’s nothing in the professor-student power/authority relationship that makes calling students out on certain claims inherently coercive or abusive; rather, there are social, cultural, and even political factors at play as to which claims should be subject to scrutiny. This is an obvious double standard.)

Educators in the soft sciences should adopt a pedagogical stance identical to the stance that’s essential in the hard sciences: Give faithbased justifications no countenance. Do not take faith claims seriously. Let the utterer know that faith is not an acceptable basis from which to draw a conclusion that can be relied upon. Invite students to present evidence, arguments, and reasons for their conclusions, but absent these tell students that their claims will not be taken seriously: Back to the Kid’s Table.

Just as we know using a Ouija board is not a reliable process for assigning fair grades, educators should stand with the fact that faith-based claims are not an acceptable basis for drawing a reliable conclusion.

BEYOND RELATIVISM

Introduction

Cognitive, epistemological, and moral relativism are toxins that students trained in the humanities regularly consume in large doses. They’re taught to withhold judgments on different epistemologies, cultural practices, and moral systems. Consequently, their ability to make critical evaluations has been severely damaged.

Before faith can be exposed as a faulty epistemology, it’s vital to disabuse people of the relativist notion that any epistemology is either just as good as any other—a bizarre and contradictory “egalitarian relativism”—or that epistemologies are impossible to judge.

The purpose of this section is to teach readers how to disabuse others of epistemological relativism. First, I’ll briefly describe the teaching experiences that pushed me to develop an antirelativism pedagogical template. Second, I’ll explain the template educators and Street Epistemologists can use to help individuals overcome epistemological relativism (see appendix C).

“Well That’s Just True for You”

When I started teaching critical thinking more than two decades ago, my attempts to undermine relativism were met with a common student refrain: “Well that’s just true for you.” Any argument I presented was either met with this this mantra, or with a similar utterance, “You perceive through your own cultural lens,” or “You can’t escape your Western, hegemonic, imperialistic, white male, situated perspective.” At first I was stymied by these responses. No matter what examples I presented, or what my reasoning was, I always met the same one-line “objections.”