On doubt

[nameandnature]

I'm talking about doubt in a few places at the moment. The feeds of my comments don't cover stuff outside LJ (I was using CoComment, but decided that was too risky), so here's where the action is:

Over at Hermant the Friendly Atheist's place, top Christian evangelist Lee Strobel turns the tables on us, and invites other Christian authors to ask atheists hard questions about atheism. You can see my responses over there. Greta Christina has some good thoughts on the questions.

The most interesting questions were Plantinga's stuff on whether having brains which evolved means we can't trust them, and Mike Licona's question: what would make you doubt your atheism?

Lily the Peaceful Atheist (by the way, what's with all these atheists being nice and fluffy? I want to be a fundamentalist atheist rationalist neo-humanistic secular militant like my hero, Richard Dawkins) talks about doubting atheism in a two part posting (part 1, part 2). She's not impressed with Strobel and friends, but rather, talks about the "emotional doubts" of the ex-Christian: the fear of death, and the feelings evoked by Christian music. I understand those sorts of feelings, having had them myself. Still, I'm enough of a scientist (and enough of an evangelical) to want facts rather than emotion.

I said that I ought to be able to doubt atheism, and also other long held beliefs. The problem with saying "I want to doubt" is that it's a noble statement, but if that's all it is, it's useless. As gjm11 says, half the problem is knowing what to doubt. With that in mind, I thought I'd ask you lot:

What should I doubt?
This doesn't have to be religion/atheism, of course, although you're welcome to suggest that if you like (<evil grin>).

Here's a list of stuff I think about religion, philosophy, science and politics, so you can tell me where you think I could be wrong. Anonymous comments are allowed edited: but please sign yourself with some kind of nickname so I can tell you apart from other anonymous commenters.

Religion/philosophy: The sort of god that I used to believe in almost certainly doesn't exist. Jesus probably existed, but God's not saying much these days, so who cares? Non-evangelical sorts of god are too vague to bother with. Philosophically, I am a tentative materialist, and an interventionist moral relativist.

Science: global warming is real and caused by humans, but I don't know what I personally should do about it. I don't fly much because it's dull and the security theatre is frustrating ("Time to spare, go by air" © my Dad), but I do drive to work. David Mackay's book made me think we should build more nuclear power stations. Homeopathy works by the placebo effect. The MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism. Ben Goldacre is god.

Politically, I'm left wing in that I'm in favour of a social safety net, the NHS, and so on. That said, New Labour have become high-handed and irrational wrt ID cards and other civil liberties issues, and on that basis I won't shed too many tears when they lose the next election. Capitalism seems to be the least bad way of organising stuff. The Communists and whatnot I see in blogland seem to relish the moment when they'll take power and hang the oppressors: like Christians talking about hell, the fact that this will never happen doesn't make it any more morally acceptable. I am not a cultural relativist in the usual sense of that phrase.

I think the US-influenced identity politics that seems so popular here on LiveJournal is often bulshytt, and more interested in piety than achieving its stated goals (see also). As a white, male etc. etc., getting into discussions about it is like stepping on the third rail: unless I'm talking to someone I already know to be rational, it's not worth the trouble. That said, I think certain classes of people have systematic advantages over others, but sometimes the concept of privilege is misused in the same way that the opposition misuses evolutionary psychology. Men and women are different at the biological level and this influences brains, but popular reporting of this stuff never talks about standard deviations and whatnot.

So, fire away :-)

Comments

[brokenhut.livejournal.com]

I'm a good 95% signed up to the statements you make above, but I think I may have less agreement than you with the Dawkins fanboys (and they are largely male) who argue that reason is god supreme, and belief/other forms of knowing are ridiculous or stupid.

I'm always fascinated by the "other ways of knowing" arguments because they're never substantiated. The only "other way of knowing" I know about besides observation is divine revelation, and no-one is ever daft enough to actually bring that up. So what else were you thinking of?

[flats.livejournal.com]

You misquote me: I didn't talk of other forms of knowing besides observation, I said other forms beside reason. I'll be kind and assume this was accidental, not a deliberate attempt to discredit my argument.

Observation doesn't have to lead to step-by-step logical reasoning; it can also provide a database of experience subconsciously guiding judgements by intuition. Reason, intuition, divine revelation - to these I'd add knowledge defined by tradition, social norms and trust in authority/others (including 'read it in a book and didn't work it out from first principles yourself'); emotional 'reasoning' (in which you're thinking things through more than intuition, but it ain't formally logical and might struggle to convince another); drug/trance-related altered states of consciousness; something like 'muscle memory' for some phyical tasks where there's no conscious concentration at all, not even the feeling of intuition; probably more if I thought for longer.

All these are other ways of knowing about the world that are neither formal logic nor divine revelation, and I'd argue that you use several of them every single day. (Unless you have actually sat down and reasoned out every single thought you hold from first principles... Which seems too enormous a task to be likely.)

[brokenhut.livejournal.com]

Comedy genius!

"Reason" as a way of knowing. Oh I split my sides, I do.

So, go on then, gimme an example.

[flats.livejournal.com]

Sweetie, I'm willing to accept that my position mightn't be 100% formal-philosophy watertight - analytical philosophy's not my field, anthro is. However, it's quite clear you're less interested in having a constructive conversation and explaining what you don't agree with, and more interested in aggressive point-scoring. I call troll, and I don't play pissing games.

G'night.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't play pissing games.

"...Dawkins fanboys..." "...an arrogant-Dawkins-atheist tendency..."

No pissing games there, you big hypocrite.

[nameandnature]

Good grief. Calm down, people. flats is not arguing in bad faith, and hasn't earned this amount of aggression in reply (FWIW, I'd agree there are atheists who are arrogant, and most of them probably like Dawkins, although I'd question an assertion that Dawkins is himself arrogant).

Anon, LJ's comment support for people who aren't users is crap - please sign your comments with some kind of nickname in the body of the comment, or sign in with OpenID.

C'est moi

[barefootbum.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

The above anonymous comments are mine. Sorry. I'm not used to LJ.

It just irritates me when someone starts off hurling insults and then complains that other people are starting a pissing contest.

If flats thinks there are other ways of knowing (not just thinking) than a logical appraisal of the perceptual evidence, she's free to make a positive case.

[cathedral-life.livejournal.com]

Flats, (as a Christian theist), I'm quite interested to see where you're going with this. When you talk about "other forms of knowing" "beside reason", I'm wondering whether you could expand. For example, could it be said that your example on "tradition" might be a form of distilled community reasoning? Would you posit such a knowledge as being something separate from reason, or a different form of reason? Would you call the kind of discussion that we're having here an epistemological one? Is epistemology something that anthropologists are trained to think about (that sounds rude, but I just mean to ask whether epistemology is in an anthropologists's general syllabus)?

It's great to hear from an anthropologist on the subject. I'm not an analytical philosopher either, but I don't find that analytical philosophers hold a key to an entire sets of questions that might be wondered or asked about.

[brokenhut.livejournal.com]

F: There are other ways of knowing.
B: O rly? Plz don't say divine revelation...
F: Reason, intuition, muscle memory (!), heavy drugs (!!)
B: Gimme an example of something you know from these then.
F: You troll!

For someone who is interested in "constructive conversation" that's pretty impressive. You basically confirmed the suspicion I started with, that all claims for the existence of "other ways of knowing" remain unsubstantiated.

[scribb1e.livejournal.com]

Not trolling at all (and I don't think brokenhut was either), but genuinely think this is an important point.

I don't think you can learn anything about the physical universe using pure formal logic.

Being 'rational' to me means basing beliefs on evidence (including observation). Things you read in books, intuition and muscle memory are all kinds of evidence which may be more or less reliable.

Logic, mathematics and statistics can only be useful in helping to interpret that evidence well.

[simont]

The thing about most of these 'other ways of knowing' is that they're short cuts to the same body of knowledge that reason could have given you. Most literally so in the appeal to authoritative prior sources, since in that one you're grabbing the results of someone else's use of reason (or whatever). But also many of the others: for instance, I agree that we make subconsciously guided intuitive judgments all the time, but they're all ultimately answerable to reason and subject to cross-checks by reason – and occasionally, my reason determines that some class of my intuitive judgments is persistently made the wrong way, and I have to try to adjust my intuition to fix the problem.

So these are interestingly different if you're a psychologist (because they happen by such different mechanisms) or if you're interested in the problem of getting close to the right answers under time and resource pressure (intuitive judgments, in particular, are often used when there just isn't the time to sit down and reason formally). But when the topic of discussion is whether or not there's a god and related questions, which is something we have our whole lives to sit down and think carefully about, the only interestingly different 'other ways of knowing' are those (if any) which access a region of reality that is inaccessible to reason, not those which take short cuts to places that reason would have got you to eventually.