A Manual for Creating Atheists (4 page)

2.
Pretending to know things you don’t know
.

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
For example, someone who knows nothing about baking a cake can pretend to know how to bake a cake, and this is not an instance of faith. But if someone claims to know something on the basis of faith, they are pretending to know something they don’t know. For example, using faith would be like someone giving advice about baking cookies who has never been in a kitchen.

As a Street Epistemologist, whenever you hear the word “faith,” just translate this in your head as, “pretending to know things you don’t know.” While swapping these words may make the sentence clunky, “pretending to know things you don’t know” will make the meaning of the sentence clearer.

To start thinking in these terms, the following table contains commonly heard expressions using the word “faith” in column one, and the same expressions substituted with the words “pretending to know things you don’t know” in column two.

Disambiguation: Faith Is Not Hope

Faith and hope are not synonyms. Sentences with these words also do not share the same linguistic structure and are semantically different—for example, one can say, “I hope it’s so,” and not, “I faith it’s so.”

The term “faith,” as the faithful use it in religious contexts, needs to be disambiguated from words such as “promise,” “confidence,” “trust,” and, especially, “hope.”
^6
7
“Promise,” “confidence,” “trust,” and “hope” are not knowledge claims. One can hope for anything or place one’s trust in anyone or anything. This is not the same as claiming to know something. To hope for something admits there’s a possibility that what you want may not be realized. For example, if you hope your stock will rise tomorrow, you are not claiming to know your stock will rise; you want your stock to rise, but you recognize there’s a possibility it may not. Desire is not certainty but the wish for an outcome.

Hope is not the same as faith. Hoping is not the same as knowing. If you hope something happened you’re not claiming it did happen. When the faithful say, “Jesus walked on water,” they are not saying they
hope
Jesus walked on water, but rather are claiming Jesus actually did walk on water.

Thought Challenge!

In my May 6, 2012, public lecture for the Humanists of Greater Portland, I further underscored the difference between faith and hope by issuing the following thought challenge:

Give me a sentence where one must use the word “faith,” and cannot replace that with “hope,” yet at the same time isn’t an example of pretending to know something one doesn’t know
.

To date, nobody has answered the thought challenge. I don’t think it can be answered because faith and hope are not synonyms
.

Atheist

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer God than you do.”

—
Stephen F. Roberts

Of all the terms used in this book, none is more problematic, more contentious, more divisive, or more confusing than the term “atheist.”

This confusion is understandable given that the word “theist” is contained in the word “atheist.” It is thus natural to assume a type of parallelism between the two words. Many of the faithful imagine that just as a theist firmly believes in God, an a-theist firmly disbelieves in God. This definitional and conceptual confusion needs to be clarified.

“Atheist,”
as I use the term
, means, “There’s insufficient evidence to warrant belief in a divine, supernatural creator of the universe. However, if I were shown sufficient evidence to warrant belief in such an entity, then I would believe.”
^8
9
I recommend we start to conceptualize “atheist” in this way so we can move the conversation forward.

The atheist does
not
claim, “No matter how solid the evidence for a supernatural creator, I refuse to believe.”
¹⁰
In
The God Delusion
, for example, Horseman Dawkins provides a 1–7 scale, with 1 being absolute belief and 7 being absolute disbelief in a divine entity (Dawkins, 2006a, pp. 50–51). Dawkins, whom many consider to be among the most hawkish of atheists, only places himself at a 6. In other words, even Dawkins does not definitively claim there is no God. He simply thinks the existence of God is highly unlikely. 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.

Agnostic

Agnostics profess to not know whether or not there’s an undetectable, metaphysical entity that created the universe. Agnostics think there’s not enough evidence to warrant belief in God, but because it’s logically possible they remain unsure of God’s existence. Again, an agnostic is willing to revise her belief if provided sufficient evidence.

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. Aquinas’s five proofs, fail. Pascal’s Wager, fail. Anselm’s ontological argument, fail. The fine-tuning argument, fail. The Kal
m cosmological argument, fail. All refuted. All failures.
¹¹

I dislike the terms “agnostic” and “agnosticism.” I advise Street Epistemologists to not use these terms. This is why: I don’t believe Santa Claus is a real person who flies around in a sleigh led by reindeer delivering presents. I am a Santa Claus atheist. Even though there’s nothing logically impossible about this phenomenon, I’m not a Santa Claus agnostic. (That is, a large man in a red suit delivering presents at the speed of light is not a logical contradiction.) “Agnostic” and “agnosticism” are unnecessary terms. Street Epistemologists should avoid them.

EPISTEMOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS

Now that the terms “faith,” “atheist,” and “agnostic” have been clarified, 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 Claims Are Knowledge Claims

The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek “episteme,” which means “knowledge,” and “logos,” which means “reason and logic” and “argument and inquiry” and therefore, by extension, “the study of.” Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that focuses on how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is, and what processes of knowing the world are reliable.

Conclusions one comes to as the result of an epistemological process are knowledge claims. A knowledge claim is an assertion of truth. Examples of knowledge claims include: “The moon is 52,401 miles from the Earth,” “My fist has a greater diameter than a soda can,” and “The Azande supreme God, Onyame, created the world and all lesser gods.”

Faith is an epistemology.
¹²
It’s a method and a process people use to understand reality. Faith-based conclusions are knowledge claims. For example, “I have faith Jesus Christ will heal my sickness because it says so in Luke” is a knowledge claim. The utterer of this statement is asserting Jesus will heal her.

Those who make faith claims are professing to know something about the external world. For example, when someone says, “Jesus walked on water” (Matthew 14:22–33), that person is claiming
to know
there was an historical figure named Jesus and that he, unaided by technology, literally walked across the surface of the water. “Jesus walked on water” is a knowledge claim—an objective statement of fact.

Much of the confusion about faith-based claims comes from mistaking objective claims with subjective claims. Knowledge claims purport to be objective because they assert a truth about the world. Subjective claims are not knowledge claims and do not assert a truth about the world; rather, they are statements about one’s own unique, situated, subjective, personal experiences or preferences.

Think of subjective claims as matters of taste or opinion. For example, “Mustard on my hot dog tastes good,” “John Travolta is the greatest actor who’s ever lived,” and “The final season of
Battlestar Galactica
wasn’t as good as the first two seasons.” These are subjective statements because they relate to matters of taste. They are not statements of fact about the world. They do not apply to everyone. Contrast these statements with, “The Dalai Lama reincarnates.” This statement is a knowledge claim. It’s an assertion of truth about the world that is independent of one’s taste or liking; it’s a faith claim masquerading as a knowledge claim, a statement of fact.

Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world.

Faith Is an Unreliable Epistemology

“Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning.”

—
Gary Gutting, “The Stone,”
New York Times
, September 14, 2011

Faith is a failed epistemology. Showing why faith fails has been done before. And it’s been done well (Bering, 2011; Harris, 2004; Loftus, 2010; Loftus, 2013; McCormick, 2012; Schick & Vaughn, 2008; Shermer, 1997; Shermer, 2011; Smith, 1979; Stenger & Barker, 2012; Torres, 2012; Wade, 2009). There’s no need to recapitulate this vast body of scholarship. Instead, I’ll briefly explain what I find to be one of the principal arguments against faith.

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. For example, the following are unassailable facts everyone, faithful or not, would agree upon: