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

[apdraper2000.livejournal.com]

Your pitting Keller against orthodoxy seems to me a bit wishful.

What does orthodoxy really mean? We would both agree that no one is simply reading the Bible and doing "what it says." You have to interpret it. You need a community, or in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit at work in the body of Christ. So we are all postmodernists at this point - "the orthodox reading of scripture" is not fixed but is continually being negotiated across time. It is still being negotiated. (In retrospect, Keller may prove to have been an influential negotiator!)

Keller's whole raison d'etre is to be a lucid, articulate advocate for orthodoxy. He has no interest in saying anything that all of his evangelical friends/mentors would disagree with. What he IS interested in is any intersection he can discern between the preoccupations of the contemporary world and the preoccupations of Scripture, so that he can help contemporary Christians feel the import of Scripture for their day to day lives and at the same time do "apologetics," try to find points of connection between the unattached and this alien (to them) tradition.

You are not an alien! In your own way, you are remaining faithful to the tradition by caricaturing it and mocking it - maybe "blasphemer" would be a better designation than "apostate." You're in the complicated position of adhering to a particular view of what Scripture means *like a believer* without actually holding the beliefs that make such a stance coherent. Your strategy is to try to take Christians at their word and give Scripture enormous authority so as to show how they don't respect that authority in practice themselves. I don't buy it. Some of your points are very strong, some are weak, but they all presuppose this notion of mimicry or ventriloquism, - not finding a good analogy - like what matters about being a Christian can be accessed by remote control.

I propose that for Lent this year you should abstain from this RPG and try to forget Jesus ever existed. Seriously, what's longest you've ever gone since being a Christian without once consciously trying to think like a Christian?

[nameandnature]

It seems you're warning me that I might be taking robhu's former path of being what I called an evangelical Christian atheist. That's pretty serious: after all, we all know what happened to him.

You're right to say that some of my criticism of Keller's stuff is objecting to his apparent inconsistency with how I used to read the Bible. That's because Keller is claiming to be a part of the community that I used to be part of, but as far as I can tell, he's doing it wrong. I'm not part of that community any more, so it's possible things have moved on since then. I'd take that as evidence that this community is of human construction, but it does mean I should not call my views of what evangelicals should believe "orthodoxy".

Instead, I'd like to talk about how things have moved on. That is, what has caused this change of mind? I'd claim it's an ad hoc response to modern rejection of the divine right of kings, which lead to a rejection of the right of the divine King (something which at least one evangelical seems to be bothered about). The most important thing for Keller and Lewis is that Christianity spreads. It won't spread easily to anti-authoritarians who no longer believe God has a right to judge them, so instead, there's this alternative where people effectively judge themselves. How does Keller know this alternative is right? How would he know if it were wrong? Is there anything which supports it, other than that he wishes it were true?

I'd argue not, even given a belief that the Bible's authors were correct (which is my objection to his Rich Man and Lazarus and Romans 1 interpretation). But even if we don't get into what "orthodoxy" is, Keller makes a number of other claims (those I've mentioned in the bullet points) which he needs to back up.

Your strategy is to try to take Christians at their word and give Scripture enormous authority so as to show how they don't respect that authority in practice themselves.

Yes indeed. Most Christians believe in belief more than they actually believe. If your beliefs don't lead you to anticipate that God will make any difference in the world, our arguments are concluded, and welcome to atheism.

I don't buy it. Some of your points are very strong, some are weak, but they all presuppose this notion of mimicry or ventriloquism, - not finding a good analogy - like what matters about being a Christian can be accessed by remote control.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you arguing that non-Christians can't know what Christianity is? Should we conclude that when Christians describe it, they don't know what they're talking about?

Seriously, what's longest you've ever gone since being a Christian without once consciously trying to think like a Christian?

I don't try to consciously think like a Christian most days. The exception is probably when I'm arguing with Christians, in which case I try to experience some sort of empathy, I suppose.

[apdraper2000.livejournal.com]

You have a substantive objection to my objection, which I understand as: if Christianity doesn't have a fixed cognitive content, where it makes assertions about the world that can't just be changed at the convenience of an individual or an entire culture, then we can all be done with it. It simply has nothing to do with truth.

My objection to that objection would be weak, in particular ad hominem, and would run along these lines: if you're not done with it, how do you expect anyone else to be done with it?

I don't try to consciously think like a Christian most days. The exception is probably when I'm arguing with Christians, in which case I try to experience some sort of empathy, I suppose.

That I have the impression otherwise is probably an example of the myopia of online exchanges. A lot of your thinking about Xianity makes it online; less of your other activities (such as dancing).

Again, though, my concern is not with empathy: not relating emotionally to Christians, but with (still don't have the right term or analogy) trying to relate cognitively to Christians. In that respect, your link to the "freud v god II" post is spot on. That's EXACTLY the problem I'm talking about.

[nameandnature]

You sound a little like someone else I ran across recently. Halfway though his transition from fundy to humanist atheist, at the liberal Christian stage, Robert Price wrote:

I warn my ex-Evangelical reader that every time he announces his repudiation of his former compatriots, each time he derides what now seem to him absurd views, every time he becomes resentful over having been "taken for a ride," he is placing himself, albeit negatively, back into his Evangelical world. Now all of this is quite understandable, even justifiable, since one must "get it out of one's system." And, as is well known, a pendulum never stops in the middle the first time. But the ex-Evangelical should look forward to its settling down in the middle eventually. That is, his goal is to put the whole thing behind him, not to continue to be involved with it, fighting the same old battle only on the opposite side.

I'm not done with it because I think that a lot of Christians (especially evangelicals) need permission to disbelieve, and I wish I'd had permission earlier, and there's this Golden Rule thing, so...

By "permission", I mean that one of humanity's cognitive biases is that we tend to want to agree with other people near us. A nice thing about the Internet is that we can find other people to be near even if they're not geographically close to us. So it's good to have this stuff on the net.

The other reason I'm not done with it is because it's fun to debate, of course.

if Christianity doesn't have a fixed cognitive content... It simply has nothing to do with truth.

There are a couple of things I say. One is that Keller looks like he's making it up as he goes along. There are responses to that: maybe God is revealing stuff as people are ready to hear it, maybe it's a bit like science where old theories are superseded. To the latter response, I'd say that the difference between progress in science and Keller's stuff is that scientists need to be able to show they have sufficient evidence to discard the old theory (as well as convincing the incumbent experts, of course: we're dealing with real people here). To the former, well, I think proponents of progressive revelation have to be very careful that to avoid it becoming an idea which can explain anything.

The second thing I say is that if you're someone who doesn't anticipate that God will act in the world, you're already functionally an atheist (even if you don't know it yet: this is Rahner's theory of anonymous atheism). This comes out of ideas about belief in belief, belief as attire and so on. The trick for overt atheists is not to convince such people that God won't do anything, because some part of them knows that already (God's lack of power and non-existent nature being clearly seen from what has not been made), but rather to stop them believing it's virtuous to assert that God will do something. Showing that they don't act like people who believe their own assertions might do that, I suppose.

[apdraper2000.livejournal.com]

I'm not done with it because I think that a lot of Christians (especially evangelicals) need permission to disbelieve, and I wish I'd had permission earlier, and there's this Golden Rule thing, so...

Ha ha, that's awesome. Very well said, sir.

And it IS fun to debate.

Those are two very good reasons. I withdraw my objection.

In any case, there's a symbiosis going on here. When I was in high school I thought Camus was pretty cool, and probably aspired to being an existentialist. When I went back to Camus for reinforcements against evangelicalism, I couldn't help but notice that he was hammering out his philosophy in a more or less constant dialogue with Christianity. This had the undesired effect of making the religion look better. Call it the "worthy opponent" syndrome.

So, may you hold on to your coolness, and may we hold on to you.

hit the comment limit: here's part 2

[nameandnature]

trying to relate cognitively to Christians. In that respect, your link to the "freud v god II" post is spot on. That's EXACTLY the problem I'm talking about.

Let me see if I understand the problem. Brown's problem with neo-atheist fundamentalist neo-sceptical secularists like Dawkins is, as far as I can tell, not that they're wrong about whether there's a God, but that they're naive. In the Freud vs God post, Brown says that the sort of cognitive hygiene that seems second nature to the neo-atheist is rare, hard work, and that it's not clear to most people that it's worth the bother. Given this, you cannot take religious people at their word: when they say they believe a thing about how the world is, they're making another sort of statement entirely, even if they themselves claim otherwise. Trying to demolish these supposed beliefs about the world isn't going to make religious people into atheists, because they never really believed them in the first place.

I think you're saying that I have the same problem. Maybe I do, and my time would be better spent trying to get kids educated in logical thinking, or something. Nevertheless, the Christianity I knew appeared to be genuinely making statements about how the world is, and I stopped calling myself a Christian when I realised it was very unlikely those statements were true. I don't think I'm unique, although I may have a very specialised atheist ministry :-)

[apdraper2000.livejournal.com]

Nevertheless, the Christianity I knew appeared to be genuinely making statements about how the world is, and I stopped calling myself a Christian when I realised it was very unlikely those statements were true.

I should always keep in mind, when I get impatient with your more extended discourses, that you pay us a vital compliment by engaging with our ideas, as if we really took them seriously ourselves. "Hygeine" is a good word in this context.