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

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

Most of the "hard questions about atheism" seem to be just "god of the gaps" stuff. My problem with that is that the underlying assumption behind "I don't know the answer to challenge X about the nature of existence", or "I don't have a plausible explanation for Bible verses Y" being one of "Therefore Christianity is true", because Christianity, for all its infighting, still requires quite specific beliefs in a particular anthropomorphic higher power, which seems to require a very specific and colossal suspension of disbelief.

What if we grant that there is some kind of magical entity that created the universe? It doesn't even being to follow that this entity gives the first hint of a flying fuck, if you'll excuse my French, about humans. A suggestion that we might be like ants to such a being would be overstating the case - people notice ants. If we grant "there is a god" as a premise, I don't see that as raising the odds of there being anything in Christianity much beyond the assumption of no god. To get to Christianity from there requires a whole lot of working, which strangely never gets to be shown. It still ultimately just makes Bibles bits of paper, and it's hubris to assume that the universe and its hypothetical creator has any capacity to care about what we think.

ETA: The short version of that might be summed up as, "No I don't want to hear about Jehova. Get the hell off my porch!"

[cathedral-life.livejournal.com]

Would it be possible for you to doubt about why there's something (some matter, life etc.), rather than nothing?

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in your programming language religious beliefs, can you talk a bit about those?

[(Anonymous)]

> David Mackay's book made me think we should build more nuclear power stations.

My recollection from hearing him talk is that nuclear isn't renewable either, and is only a stopgap. Giant solar farms in the sahara are the long-term answer :-).

> I don't fly much... but I do drive to work

The you should follow DMK's example and quantify which of these is pumping out more CO2. Then you'd know which one to feel guilty about. This doesn't have much to do with doubt though, sorry.

> I'm interested in your programming language religious beliefs, can you talk a bit about those?

Oh yes: do perl users burn in hell?

-William

[brokenhut.livejournal.com]

All those questions were rather disappointing. Like one of the commenters said, the only one missing from the usual suspects was "what use is half an eye"?

But they all seem to basically miss the point of skepticism as a general approach to living. What would doubting doubt even mean? And the thing about the brains --- well, we assume at the outset that our brains fool us --- hence double-blinded clinical trials and so on. None of this is new or interesting. Next they'll be asking about god being the cause of the placebo effect...

[flats.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there's more doubting you could do about the merits of rationality? 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. What are the limits of wise use of strict logical rationality? It's rarely a terribly appropriate tool with which to handle love, for example - in fact, love seems to me to be something that is substantially driven by faith: despite divorce rates or the likelihood of relationships ending, you're still going to make a go of it anyway. So perhaps faith is not something to be dismissed entirely; where might it be a good?

And if rationality isn't terribly useful for our emotional lives (which is to say we shouldn't abandon it entirely, but that a rational solution to a problem of feeling is little solace at all), can we be sure it's that good for questions of life's meaning? "Man is an animal in search of meaning", yet strict existentialism (the rational solution) doesn't satisfy many people... I'd doubt whether atheism is fully convincing on these issues yet.

Finally, there's an arrogant-Dawkins-atheist tendency to dismiss anyone who does have any sort of religious belief as stupid. However, something that looks like what we'd call religion or spirituality is one of the very few features that is universal across human history and cultures. Atheists need a sympathetic explanation for this (Marx's 'opium of the people' is only permissible if one signs up to the rest of Marxism too, I'd argue! ;), and might perhaps doubt why their minority is so sure they know better than these billions. There's room for doubt regarding how far one condemns religion - how far and why is it wrong? And what about spiritualities, zen practice and taking religious doctrine/practices as metaphor, not statements of earthly fact but only emotional truth - the thoughtful atheist might want to doubt how & why his own position is exactly better than this.

What drives a focus on rationality and scientifically-justified atheist position is often a firm belief in truth and reality. Is there room for doubt as to the value of factual truth in all circumstances; is it always wrong to believe untrue things; is it possible to both believe and not believe something at once? In essence it's a position driven by the human brain's inherent cognitive flaws and limited reality-perceiving abilities - I sketch it very briefly. But if we're just not that good at truth & reality, can we doubt that these things are supreme values/virtues?

I suppose my atheism is not as rigorously thought out as yours (as I was never a believer needing convincing to leave a Christian/other path), and an anthropology degree makes me sympathetic to the complexities and subtleties of things-that-could-be-called-religion.** I'm interested in metaphor theory (an anthro-linguistic thing) and the potentials for fictions and flat-out-untruths for nonetheless revealing things of emotional importance and value. Consequently, I do sometimes feel that some of the atheisms I hear about risk throwing out a small core baby of intrinsic human experience with the bathwater of religious bigotry and factual untruths!


** Anthropology of religion is a troubled field, because, try as it might, no-one's ever managed to formulate a complete and convincing definition of just what religion is in a world of so much diversity. (Is Zen Buddhism religion or philosophy? Can Western approaches to science sometimes take on aspects of religious-style thinking? So many questions!) Defining religion comes to look a lot like psychiatrists defining schizophrenia - no list of symptoms applies to all patients, but "you know it when you see it" is a fairly sound heuristic. Hence my 'things-that-look-like-religion' formulations here.

great post

[apdraper2000.livejournal.com]

I have two links for you, one apropos of our earlier exchange about Keller on Hell:

http://www.redeemer.com/news_and_events/articles/the_importance_of_hell.html

the other apropos of what you're writing about now- you can see my entry there, FWIW

http://poserorprophet.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/3-doubts-a-meme/#comments

If I had time to spare for online writing right now, I'd be all over this, just want to say I appreciate it in the abstract. As for me, I've been reading Comte-Sponville (sp?) and have finally found an advocate for atheism who I find persuasive.

Atheist women

[pingback-bot.livejournal.com]

User pw201 referenced to your post from Atheist women (http://pw201.livejournal.com/106320.html) saying: [...] Since graduating, she's been blogging as Peaceful Atheist (I've mentioned her before in my posting on doubt (http://pw201.livejournal.com/104697.html)). There's an article over there specifically on women in atheism. No Longer Quiveringis the blog of two women who were ... [...]