A Manual for Creating Atheists (6 page)

1. An exception is the so-called Satanic verses from the Koran. In his early suras, Muhammad made compromises with popular, preexisting goddess worship; later he revoked these verses—calling them Satanic verses—and created a new principle permitting newer revelations to supersede earlier revelations. Thus there is another way to figure out which claims about the world we should accept and which are likely false, though not through reason or evidence. The new principle is based upon the latest revelation. Later suras in the Koran supersede earlier suras. Unfortunately, many of the more militant suras are found later in the Koran.
   
2. I’ve never understood such claims of the faithful—in this example, Muslims who state that other Muslims do not have the correct interpretation of the Koran. Once one buys into a system of belief without evidence, it’s unclear on what basis one could make the claim that there’s a correct or incorrect interpretation of the Koran.
   
3. There are many ways we can rationally determine what’s in our own interest and what sort of communities we should construct. For example, in
   The Theory of Justice
   , American philosopher John Rawls offers us thought experiments to reason our way to an ideal political and economic system (Rawls, 2005). He details ways to create mutually agreed upon principles of justice.
   
4. One doesn’t have to look to the most extreme examples to find other instances of people misconstruing what’s good for them. Fad diets are a more pedestrian and close-to-home example. A few years ago I met someone at a local gym who ate pounds of watermelon everyday in the hope that this would help him lose weight and regain his health. He didn’t lose weight and he didn’t regain his health. He didn’t manage to do either because eating pounds of watermelon every day is almost certainly not an activity that will lead one to health or to sensible weight loss.
   

CHAPTER 3

DOXASTIC CLOSURE, BELIEF, AND EPISTEMOLOGY

“The call to an examined life is about changing the way people think.”

—Steven Brutus,
Religion, Culture, History
(2012)

“Change minds and hearts will follow.”

—Peter Boghossian

You’re almost ready to begin your work as a Street Epistemologist. However, before you start talking people out of their faith, you’ll need a primer on the following: (1) the reasoning away of unreasonable beliefs; (2) the forces that contribute to closed belief systems; (3) the factors that cause people to lend their beliefs to the preposterous; and (4) the likely reaction to treatment by individuals (they’ll be upset!). You’ll also need a crash course in epistemology.

“ALL MEN BY NATURE DESIRE TO KNOW”

In Book 1 of
Metaphysics
, Aristotle writes, “All men by nature desire to know.” Aristotle, while reflecting on the thoughts of Plato and Socrates, argues that for an examined life to emerge we need questions
and
a hunger to pursue those questions. Absent any desire to know one is either certain or indifferent.

Socrates said that a man doesn’t want what he doesn’t think he lacks. That is, if you believe you have the truth then why would you seek another truth? For example, if your unshakable starting condition is that the Ten Commandments are the final word on morality, or that the Koran is the perfect book that contains all the answers you’ll ever need, or that all human beings descended from Manu, you stop looking. Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth.

In ancient Greece, Chaerephon went to the Oracle at Delphi and asked who was the wisest man in Greece. The Oracle said that no one is wiser than Socrates. Socrates thought perhaps the Oracle—The Pythia—was saying that all men are ignorant. On the surface this was what she was saying, but she was also saying that understanding that we’re ignorant, and having a desire to know, are virtues.

Aristotle is correct: all people by nature are driven to know. Humans have an inborn thirst for knowledge. When we speak to others we’re interested to know what they think and why they think the way they do. When we see a physical process at work in the world we’re curious about it—we want to know why the cream makes the design in the coffee it does, and why the leaf falls in the wind in a particular way. We have an inborn curiosity about people, natural phenomena, and our lives. Children in particular desire to know.

Faith taints or at worst removes our curiosity about the world, what we should value, and what type of life we should lead. Faith replaces wonder with epistemological arrogance disguised as false humility. Faith immutably alters the starting conditions for inquiry by uprooting a hunger to know and sowing a warrantless confidence.

If it’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, then the realization of our own ignorance begins our intellectual and emotional work. Once we understand that we don’t possess knowledge, we have a basis to go forward in a life of examination, wonder, and critical reflection.

Among the goals of the Street Epistemologist are to instill a selfconsciousness of ignorance, a determination to challenge foundational beliefs, a relentless hunger for truth, and a desire to know. Wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know are a solid basis for a life worth living.

The Street Epistemologist seeks to help others reclaim their curiosity and their sense of wonder—both of which were robbed by faith. A human being can live a life without questioning, but as British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) wrote, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The sense of moving your intellectual life forward and feeding the hunger to know are a vital part of the human experience.
¹

Academicians frequently talk about confirmation bias and a hermeneutic circle—when interpreting something, our assumptions dictate what we feel, hear, see, and experience. For example, many years ago when I lived in New Mexico, I was in a doctor’s waiting room with three strangers and an oddly oversized painting on the wall. The painting depicted a scene in which settlers, who had just disembarked from a large a ship on the coastline, were peacefully greeted by Native Americans. The young woman to my left started a discussion about what a wonderful painting it was, mentioning that she was studying art in school. An older man to her left said that he found it to be offensive, and talked about his Native American heritage. The other man talked about how the ship in the painting was not historically accurate, and went on to speak about what the ships actually looked like. Each person brought her or his life experience to the interpretation of the painting.

Socrates and Nietzsche prescribed a different kind of interpretative experience, one in which we’re not just finding and confirming our existing biases, but also attacking them. Whenever we have a chance to peek at our prejudices and see our own biases and underexamined assumptions, we have an opportunity to attack those assumptions and to rid ourselves from the presumption of knowledge. Examining and thoughtfully criticizing our biases, our interpretations, and what we think we know, is an opportunity for wonder to reemerge.

As a Street Epistemologist, one of your primary goals is to help people reclaim the desire to know—a sense of wonder. You’ll help people destroy foundational beliefs, flimsy assumptions, faulty epistemologies, and ultimately faith. As Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein says in
Philosophical Investigations
(§118): “What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.” When you destroy a house of cards you have a view of reality that’s no longer obstructed by illusions.

Helping rid people of illusion is a core part of the Street Epistemologist’s project and an ancient and honorable goal. Disabusing others of warrantless certainty, and reinstilling their sense of wonder and their desire to know, is a profound contribution to a life worth living.

REASONING AWAY THE UNREASONABLE

“Faith and reason are often—and justly—treated as irreconcilable opposites, despite Pope John Paul II’s famous argument (in the aptly entitled
Fides et Ratio
) that the two are alternative ways of arriving at the same truths. After all, faith is by definition the belief in something regardless or even in spite of evidence, while as David Hume famously put it: ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.’

It would seem to follow that someone’s faith couldn’t possibly be moved by reason. Thankfully, it turns out that this is empirically not the case. There is both ample anecdotal and occasional systematic evidence of people shedding their faith through—in part—a process of reasoning. For instance, in their book,
Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith & Others Abandon Religion
, Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger examine how the typical time course unfolds in both directions (i.e., acquiring or losing one’s faith) and find striking asymmetries. Non religious people who convert often do so as a result of a sudden, highly emotional event, either a personal one (e.g., the death of a loved person) or a societal one (e.g., the 9/11 attacks). However, the most likely path to un-faith is slower, taking years to unfold, and going through a lot of readings, conversations, and reflection.

When I was living in the Bible Belt I knew several people who illustrated this latter path. Often the initial spark was provided by reading a secular author who wrote in a non-threatening manner (the typical example was Carl Sagan), or by being exposed to small but nonetheless disconcerting cracks in one’s own religious teachings (e.g., being told by your preacher that your friends will go to hell because of such a trivial thing as singing in church).

There is clearly a need for more systematic psychological and sociological studies of the relation between faith and reason, but the evidence so far is clear: people can and do change their mind in response to reasonable argument. The problem is, it takes a long time, repeated exposure to similar ideas by different sources, and possibly also a particular personality that includes a propensity to reflect on things.”

—Italian-American biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci

One of the premises of this book is that people can be reasoned out of unreasonable beliefs. Not all scholars agree. In “Why Is Religion Natural?” French anthropologist Pascal Boyer argues against the idea that people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly (Boyer, 2004).
²
Ending his article with the famous quotation from Irish writer Jonathan Swift, “You do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into,” Boyer argues that it is unlikely that religious beliefs can be argued away.

I disagree. Here’s the evidence and several counterarguments:

1. Individuals
   have
   been argued away from religion. Many people who have recovered from religion have self-reported that they’ve been reasoned out of their religious belief. Former preachers have even gone on to become evangelical atheists: Hector Avalos, Dan Barker, Kenneth W. Daniels, Jerry DeWitt, Joe Holman, John W. Loftus, Teresa MacBain, Nate Phelps, Robert Price, Sam Singleton, etc. These individuals now successfully use lessons from their past, alongside reason and argument, to help others leave religion.
   
2. If the focus is on religion, as opposed to faith, Boyer may be partially correct in stating that
   religion
   can’t be “reasoned away.” Trying to reason away religion would be like trying to reason away one’s social support, friends, hobbies, comforting songs, rituals, etc. This is why Street Epistemologists shouldn’t attempt to separate people from their religion, but instead focus on separating them from their faith. Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network.
   
3. Subsequent to much of Boyer’s work, an interesting 2012 study,
   Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief
   , showed, as the title states, that analytic thinking does in fact lead to religious disbelief (Gervais & Norenzyan, 2012). While mechanisms of religious disbelief and various factors that contribute to disbelief are not entirely understood at this time, the authors demonstrated that improvements in analytic processing translate into an increased likelihood of religious
   dis
   belief. In other words, if one gains a proficiency in certain methods of critical reasoning there is an increased likelihood that one will not hold religious beliefs.
   
4. Finally, many apologists (especially American theologian William Lane Craig) have had considerable success reasoning people into holding unreasonable beliefs (Craig, n.d.). This is a despairing statement about the effectiveness of the faithful’s tactics. There are entire bodies of apologist literature detailing how to reason and persuade unbelievers into faith.
   

Boyer’s criticisms notwithstanding, the problem of faith is
at least
partially a problem of reasoning. People can be reasoned out of unreasonable beliefs.
³
In fact, people frequently change their religious beliefs independent of reason, moving with abandon from one faith tradition to another.

BELIEVING THE PREPOSTEROUS

“I believe because it is absurd.”

—Tertullian (197–220)

“I mean that we do not infer that our faith is true based on any sort of evidence or proof, but that in the context of the Spirit of God’s speaking to our hearts, we see immediately and unmistakably that our faith is true. God’s spirit makes it evident to us that our faith is true.”

—William Lane Craig,
Hard Questions, Real Answers
(2003, p. 35)