On September 18 I discussed the confession of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that he had experienced some heavy doubts about God’s existence, based on God’s distressing lack of appearance on the planet. Surprisingly, though, Welby had no doubts about Jesus. I found that quite astonishing, for Jesus has meaning to Welby only as the son of God (as well as a third of the Godhead, given that Anglicans accept the Trinity). How can you doubt God and be certain about the divinity of Jesus?
At any rate, Julia Baird (an Australian opinion writer for the New York Times who also has a Ph.D. in history) has taken to her keyboard to defend Welby in a Sept. 25 Times op-ed,, “Doubt as a sign of faith.” Her thesis is, in her words, this: “Doubt is a crucial part of faith.”
But her piece does not start off well:
Certainty is so often overrated.
This is especially the case when it comes to faith, or other imponderables.
Overrated? Wouldn’t you want to be certain that your faith was right? After all, you’re staking a lot of your life, and all of your afterlife, on what you believe. And certainty in other matters, so long as it’s supported by evidence, is what you want. (I think she’s talking about real empirical certainty, not simply one’s assertion that one is right.)
To defend her thesis, Baird first lists some religious people who have had religious doubts, including Welby himself , Mother Teresa (her diary entries on this are now well known), C. L. Lewis, Flannery O’Conner, Benjamin Franklin, and even Jesus himself, who, says Baird, cried out on the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Well, that might not be Jesus’s doubt about God’s existence, but anguish about why God didn’t save him.
Indeed, according to scripture Jesus did say that, but in only two of the four Gospels, Matthew and Mark. Here are his final words in all four gospels:
- Luke 23:34: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.
- Luke 23:43: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
- John 19:26–27: Woman, behold your son.Son Behold your mother.
- Matthew 27:46 & Mark 15:34 My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
- John 19:28: I thirst.
- John 19:29-30: It is finished.
- Luke 23:46: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
If Baird quoted Luke or John, we wouldn’t see that doubt, so she’s cherry-picking. Did Luke and John simply leave out those crucial words of doubt, or did someone make them up? (Baird appears to believe they are real, for she implies, as we’ll see below, that she’s a Baptist.)
But never mind. Her view that doubt is inherent in faith, is largely (but not completely) correct. How can it not be for many? If you’re committed to believing a bunch of superstition lacking evidence, and yet you’re a thinking person who bases the rest of your life on things for which you’d like evidence, then sometimes you must wonder if all this stuff is real. That’s all well and good, but, given the nature of faith, how does one resolve those doubts? This is the question Baird avoids:
Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.
This is truly making a virtue of necessity. For there is no good way for a believer to actually resolve those doubts, for there is no evidence to appeal to. How can Welby call on evidence to convince himself that God really exists? After all, it’s that lack of evidence that raised his doubts in the first place! At least Baird admits that faith is “persisting in the presence of doubt,” that is, pretending that something exists when you’re not sure it does.
No, there are only two ways to quell those doubts. First, just decide to quietly shelve them and convince yourself that you were right all along, or conjure up some “evidence,” like a frozen waterfall or a beautiful evensong, to get you back on track. But that is just confirmation bias. Or, you can do what Baird’s pastor does, and just say that maybe it doesn’t matter if what you believe is true, so long as it produces good things:
My local pastor, Tim Giovanelli, a Baptist whose ocean-swimming prowess has lassoed scores of surfers and swimmers into his church, puts it simply: “For Welby, myself and many others, it is not that we have certainty but have seen the plausibility of faith and positive impact it can make. In a broken world, that can be enough.”
But where does the “plausibility” come from? Doesn’t Giovanelli really mean “logical possibility”? It is the mistaking of the logical possibility (and emotional appeal) of a God for the plausibility of a God (something that Alvin Plantinga does continually, and on purpose), that mistakenly leads the doubters back to faith.
Yes, religious doubt is natural, and inevitable in rational people, but the whole goal of religion is to quash it. Granted, some, like Welby, will admit it (though I suspect that people like Al Mohler, Ken Ham, and William Lane Craig don’t have such doubts), but in the end they always decide that they were right all along—on no evidence—and plow ahead as before, like a ship going around an iceberg. I doubt that Welby’s newfound doubts will affect his sermons or public pronouncements from now on: he will certainly act as if God and Jesus exist when he talks to his flock.
At the end, Baird compares the doubts of believers with those of rationalists, quoting the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell:
If we don’t accept both the commonality and importance of doubt, we don’t allow for the possibility of mistakes or misjudgments. While certainty frequently calcifies into rigidity, intolerance and self-righteousness, doubt can deepen, clarify and explain. This is, of course, a subject far broader than belief in God. [JAC: Really? How can religious doubt itself “clarify and explain” without some way of resolving it?]
The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it best. The whole problem with the world, he wrote, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
But there are two differences between the kind of doubt evinced by Baird and that mentioned by Russell. First, when a scientist or empiricist doubts something, say string theory, they don’t go around proclaiming that it is true. They admit constantly that it is plausible but unsettled. Scientific “truth” only comes with substantial empirical verification. In contrast, the believers who have doubts, like Welby, ultimately go their merry way and forget that they had those doubts, saying that they’ve been resolved by further reflection. But reflection can’t resolve doubt unless you have a way of adjudicating the conflicting positions.
And that brings us to a crucial difference between religion and science. In science doubts are resolved by evidence. If you don’t have evidence that string theory is correct, you don’t tell yourself and others, “upon deeper reflection, I have clarified to myself that it is indeed right.” If you don’t have good evidence, you stop promoting your theory as the truth; instead, you persist in asserting that it’s undecided. But will be a cold day in July (in the northern hemisphere!) when Welby and Baird, who have even less evidence for God than physicists have for string theory, start doubting God’s existence publicly and frequently. Unless the doubts of the faithful are resolved by “deep reflection”—almost always the case—they become nonbelievers.
Baird’s article is a prime example of what I call The Great Sausage Machine of Theology: a mental appartus that converts scientific and empirical necessities—in this case a lack of evidence for one’s beliefs—into theological virtues. And, like sausage-making, the working of the Theological Grinder are best kept hidden. By exposing them, Baird has revealed their intellectual vacuity.
I think Carl Sagan’s “they also laughed at Bozo the clown” comment is relevant here.
Yes, the intelligent and well educated often evince doubt. That does not mean that if you go from being a cocksure fundamentalist to a doubting fundamentalist that you have gotten smarter. You could just be the Bozo of doubters.
In addition to Jerry’s point about two different kinds of doubt, the “cocksuredness” of the stupid is not the same as the evidence-based confidence rationalists place in various theories. “Cocksure” implies an attitude of “I’m right. I just am. No you will not convince me otherwise.” That is not the attitude of rationalists or skeptics.
Whenever someone uses the word cocksure, I can’t help but think of Mick Jagger performing with the Stones in some black & white footage from an early show.
Exactly. This is basically assuming a cause based on correlation. If smart people tend to be the ones that doubt themselves, and ignorant people tend to be the overconfident ones, it doesn’t automatically work in reverse. You can’t prove your smartness by expressing doubts, any more than a genius can regress by becoming more confident. No amount of self-deprecation can substitute for actually learning something.
The believer has a dilemma: how to appear open-minded while fully attending to his many unsupportable beliefs. Doubt is the perfect remedy. Doubts can (and should) help us modify and refine our beliefs, but they have a second use. They can be put on display as artifacts of our alleged open-mindedness. Christians in particular often imagine that the mere existence of doubts in their minds is a sign of their keen rationality, relatability, and openness, when in fact, they never allow their doubts to inform their beliefs – they just collect dust in their minds like old awards in a trophy room.
Nice imagery.
That is a very good « résumé » of the issue.
I doubt whether God exists, therefore God exists?
Extreme pretzel logic.
That kind of thinking deserves the Extreme Pretzel Logic Prize or also referred to as just just The Templeton.
Möbian strip logic, perhaps? It makes for a manifestly one-sided view of the world.
The question is whether your doubt proportionally weakens your belief. A reasonable person, when presented with cause to doubt something, will put less stock in the possibility that that proposition is true. An irrational one will persist in belief — or even “double down.”
Once again, religious faith is revealed to be the domain of confidence artists. How often are victims of pyramid schemes urged to stay the course when the cracks in the edifice start to become apparent? Sure, you’ve got doubts; that’s normal — everybody does. But you’ve got to be strong and see this thing through if you want to not just get your own money back, but the tenfold profits you just know are coming your way!
Or, yet another example confirming the utility of Cognitive Dissonance Theory….
Cheers,
b&
Reminds me of an aesthetic anecdote:
Picasso walks along the beach and finds some drift wood. He hands it to an affluent art collector and says, “This is ‘Driftwood’, it is my masterpiece. How much will you pay for it.”
Maybe Picasso has seriously seen the wood as a perfect emblem of all that he could have ever have symbolized with his craft. One could be exposed to a life of complete mystery trying to resolve what he meant by manufacturing such significance out of literally nothing.
Not surprisingly, I am sure such a piece of wood would have caught a significant price had this happened in real life.
He managed it with a discarded bicycle saddle and a pair of handlebars.
Or Duchamp with a urinal. Or Duchamp with a bicycle wheel. Or Duchamp with a peep hole. Some people have suggested to me he did it with the large glass too, but I’m kind of partial to it.
The same level of imagination is evidenced in a lot of street art, these days: http://www.demilked.com/street-art-plays-with-surroundings/
These are brilliant! I love the Banksy telephone spies as well.
Or Mapplethorpe, about whom some wit said, “Boy, that rectal aperture (to paraphrase) sure can paint!”
Oh, don’t get me started on artists manufacturing significance out of nothing.
Concept is everything baby!!
Nothing else is needed!
And it doesn’t even have to be an objectively (well, as objective as you can get in art) intelligent or interesting concept. I’m convinced a lot of “concepts”, especially in music, are actually post facto rationalizations of whatever the composer or artist managed to put on paper, ultimately with no better thought out guiding principle than “you’ve got to put something on this paper”.
Having spent a lot of time in the art world I can say that the number of amazingly wonderful examples of art I encountered was rivaled only by the number of amazingly obvious, cliche and or superficial examples of art I encountered for which the artist was proudly convinced were uniquely insightful or even profound. But, hey, if no one tries, none of the great stuff would happen.
Incidently, just in case, I was being sarcastic about concept. That school of though makes my teeth ache.
Yeah, I recall we’ve commiserated before about the situation wrt concept/execution.
“But, hey, if no one tries, none of the great stuff would happen.”
True. But it seems to me the thing that makes the greats great is that they had the insight, intellect, and skill to be able to grow out of the “trying” phase and get to a point where they really knew what they were doing. With this in mind it doesn’t make much sense to me to call, say, Beethoven’s 3rd symphony an “experiment”. The frustrating thing is when all the “tries” of lesser talents are lauded by less discriminating consumers.
Like your typical art critic or wealthy art groupie?
Yeah. Anyone who really should know better. People whose pronouncements have an effect on the canon.
Just have a cat walk on a piano and provide inspiration.
I think the problem here is that they are mixing up two different usages of the word doubt (and not Quinton’s two definitions given in #14).
There is intellectual doubt of the “I suspect it might not be true” kind. For that kind of doubt, you are right, the rational thing is to seek evidence and pull back your commitment while you do it.
But we also sometimes fear doing an action we know or have good evidence that we should do because it’s scary, and we call that doubt too. Its the old deer in headlights problem. Or the military issue – you want your troops to advance, not doubt your order. The proper response to that kind of doubt is often to push through or ignore it, and charge on. The theists (at least the ones we’re talking about) seem to be treating doubt in the existence of God like the second type instead of the first type. Its ‘Satan is attacking! I must keep swinging my faith sword and not lower my prayer shield!’ doubt rather than ‘I’m not sure this proposition is true, let me investigate it further’ doubt.
Exactly: religion (and religious thinking) relies on basic category confusion. Treat fact claims (“God exists”) as if they were moral or meaning claims (“live your life wisely and well.)
Although I think religious people are mistaken, I don’t think I’d call most of them unreasonable (just irrational). The type of cognitive dissonance you bring up is something I experienced quite strongly while still a Christian. Of course, there’s the Doubting Thomas story where Jesus himself says it’s better to believe without evidence. And then, there are passages like Matthew 4 and Luke 4, where asking for evidence is associated with Satan. Those are pretty strong reasons to avoid asking for evidence for God. Personally, I took it as a point of pride that I knew so much about science and understood the nearly complete lack of evidence for Christianity, but persisted in my faith, anyway. After all, I’d been told for years and years by people I trusted that that’s what you’re supposed to do. Granted, those are emotional reasons, not rational ones, but when you believe your immortal soul is at stake, those are still pretty strong reasons.
I think what makes it worse is that most of the con artists aren’t in on the con, having been fooled themselves.
In most contexts, those two words are synonymous.
What amazes me about that passage is that the focus is always on believing without evidence, and never on the “Holy fucking shit! Jesus has a gaping chest wound, and Thomas just shoved his hand inside it and fondled Jesus’s intestines! OMG ZOMBIES! Somebody, quick — get the shovel, and aim for the head!”
I’m pretty sure that the ones higher up in the hierarchy are in on it. I can’t imagine the Pope actually believing, and we know for a fact that Mother Theresa didn’t. And it’s often said that seminaries are the most effective atheist-producing factories on the planet.
And those in the trenches? Textbook studies in Cognitive Dissonance Theory.
b&
Your middle paragraph = bingo
She should tell the other people that say there is evidence-a-plenty for gods that they are rong!
Brilliant post, Dr. Coyne!
I read Baird’s op-ed a few days ago and was hoping you’d write about it.
Same here.
“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, oh and by the way, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
//
As a young Catholic Jesus’s cry always confused me – if he’s God, how can he be calling out to himself about himself forsaking himself??
He didn’t become a god until after that piece was written 🙂
In laymens’ terms it’s called masturbation. This is what confuses me about the whole masturbation is a sin thing.
That paradox is easily explained:
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3t20zy
One minor point. I have the impression that one of the critiques to string theory has been the lack of implementation of experimental tests due logistic impossibilities.
Minor point to yours. According to Witten, the most hailed living physicist and a string theory specialist, string theory has made testable predictions, but they are “post-dictions” right now. It predicts the same gravitons that semiclassical gravity does in the low-energy regime. It predicted flux tubes between nucleons a year before quantum chromodynamics did. It predicts the same black hole entropy as semi-classical methods do (which test depends on your definition of “experimental”).
The situation is akin to magnetism in classical EM theory. It looked like its own field even after Maxwell married them. But after relativity came along, it can be recognized as a low velocity relativistic effect of the EM field, by way of defining both from the Lorenz force. (And quantum physics strengthened that in the making of quantum electrodynamics as field description.)
If string theory is correct, we can similarly recognize low energy effects of it post-dictum. But that is still an open question.
Oh, I forgot: we have seen gravitons in the spin down of pulsar binaries.
This is pretty much the philosophical position known as “fideism” classically stated in William James’ 1896 essay “The Will to Believe”.
It is often contrasted with “evidentialism” as put forward in Clifford’s earlier essay “The Ethics of Belief” (to which James was replying). Evidentialism is a very new label for an old position, that you should not believe things out of proportion for the evidence for them.
Perseverance in faith is never good if it leads to increasing cognitive dissonance, lack of empathy for outsiders, sexual repression, and so forth. However, I admire fideism more than fundamentalism which manufactures clearly fraudulent “evidence” for unsupportable beliefs.
I had to check that. It’s pure madness: “Fideism (/ˈfideɪˌɪzəm, ˈfaɪdi-/) is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths (see natural theology).” [Wikipedia]
Science has shown that religious beliefs are very much, arguably fully, dependent on reason, and definitely that science is superior over unwarranted beliefs whether expressed in claims or not.
Understandable as your take is I nevertheless arrive at the opposite end. Fideism is as much about manufacturing fraudulent “evidence” for unsupportable beliefs as fundamentalism is today.
I have often argued that deism is a gap that is as much closed today as theism is, that it is squatting as firmly within the Religious Asylum. And I think this is an example of how that plays out.
I probably arrived at the opposite take than you because I am more familiar with fideists who do NOT believe in the classical Catholic creeds, but who have a more generic bare-bones religiosity (such as William James or Wittgenstein.)
However, when a more conventional traditional believer like Alvin Plantinga appeals to fideistic justifications of belief, then the results are indeed dire. You get a more fundamental deeper falsification of truth and the meaning of truth.
I think pseudoscience is actually more honest and respectful than faith. At least its advocates start out trying to stand on common ground with nonbelievers by using reason and evidence to make their case.
Things get ugly when they finally revert to fideism — the smug assumption that certain pieces of information can only be known by an open and receptive heart. I’d much rather be mistaken than rotten.
When the “doubt as a religious virtue” thing comes up, I always dust off this Sam Harris quote:
“Mother Teresa’s doubts have only enhanced her stature in the eyes of the Church, being interpreted as a further confirmation of God’s grace. Ask yourself, when even the doubts of experts are taken to confirm a doctrine, what could possibly disconfirm it?”
Welby needs to recognize that doubt is only the beginning. Like most people I meet who are skeptics, they doubt too. They are skeptical about a great number of things. But being only skeptical when one has the ability to not only doubt but falsify claims is what differentiates Welby from scientists, for example. He appears to be unwilling or insecure to entertain hard work needed to uncover truths about our world. This same circumstance invades the thoughts of most skeptics too: they make a lot of mostly justified noise, but stop short of investigating solutions.
There are two kinds of doubt.
The first kind is the type that religious people talk about. It’s just the opposite side of faith. Both faith and doubt are on the same “emotion coin”. Just like happiness and sadness, there’s an eternal battle between the two. Somedays you’re happy, other days you’re sad. The tide of life puts you on either shore over the course of your life.
I’m pretty sure there is some sort of catechism or something that says that blind faith (fideism) is undesirable, so “doubt” is a necessary part of faith and its only function is to validate faith.
The second type of doubt is intellectual. In this instance, it’s no different than curiosity, as all curiosity seeks to annihilate itself. Furthermore, this sort of doubt shouldn’t invite the negative connotation that the emotional doubt engenders, since it is just a request for more knowledge.
The first type of doubt is an emotion, and since it’s an emotion it can only be dispelled by some other emotion: faith, reassurance, love, etc. The second kind of doubt can only be extinguished by learning more about something.
You can tell when theist are most definitely using the emotional type of doubt if you attempt to substitute where they write/say “doubt” with the word “curiosity” and its derivatives. I’m not sure anyone would say that they’re curious about their faith sometimes.
People enter into crises of faith when the two types of doubt temporarily merge. When the emotional doubt gives way to the intellectual doubt. Since god doesn’t exist, it’s impossible to get more knowledge about a nonexistent entity, so at this point the theist will either suppress the intellectual doubt and use the emotional doubt as a foil to their faith, or give up on their faith.
God is supposed to represent the absolute, inviolate, non-transcendable, buck stops here, truth about existance. Doubt invalidates the whole premise. If God(s) existed in truth, there would be no doubt.
Good one; its an Ontological Disproof of God. A God demonstrated is more perfect than a God undemonstrated, so if we can doubt the existence of God, He must not be the most perfect being possible.
The Calamity disproof, disproof by the misery of unwarranted belief. Someone should pass that by Slick Craig.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,'” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.~D. Adams
Douglas if you can read this, please settle this argument once and for all.
“Doubt as a sign of faith.”
And the absence of doubt is a sign of faith, too. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Indeed.
I love Jerry’s description of religious rationalization: making theological virtues of necessities.
There’s a Latin phrase “omne ignotum pro magnifico est”, which is sometimes loosely interpreted as a reference to the god of the gaps argument. I would propose that one could also simply say “everything points to god”. Theists will argue that any and every old thing, including contradictory things, points to god.
(The point being that you can leave out the “ignotum/unknown” part.)
If it doesn’t make sense, is contradictory, that just makes it better because profundity.
So now the faithy have co-opted doubt as a virtue in an attempt to seem more credible. It’s as if they finally woke up from the bronze age and realized that seeing faith as a virtue was no longer in style in the modern world. I’m glad the whole stoning people for working on Sundays was recognized as bad a bit earlier.
The last part is true. But in the first part we see Baird ponder her “imponderables”.
Sophisticated Theology™ – pondering the imponderable, believing the unbelievable, rationalizing the irrational – going gaga for many millenniums.
The problem is that Baird doesn’t confine herself to analyzing the emotional content of Believer’s Doubt.
Theologians can’t, like Maru, help themselves.
“Goddidit.” Stop thinking.
“It’s a miracle.” Stop thinking.
“God works in mysterious ways.” Stop thinking.
“Trust Allah.” Stop thinking.
“God willing.” Stop thinking.
“Creation is easier to grasp.” Stop thinking.
“Doubt is part of faith.” Don’t think about it.
“Doubt is proof of faith.” Don’t think about it.
“I can’t imagine how…” I’ll stop thinking now.
“The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” Let someone else do your thinking for you.
don’t forget “let go and let god.”
“Works in mysterious ways” is the best euphemism for failure ever devised.
Its the old “I have doubt because I am open-minded, not like that nasty Richard Dawkins who is certain about everything” ploy.
And let’s brush the whole question of evidence under a very big carpet.
Jerry Coyne wrote: “No, there are only two ways to quell those doubts. First, just decide to quietly shelve them and convince yourself that you were right all along…”
Which is more or less the opposite of when we were children and feared the monster in our closet or under our bed.
No amount of reason would convince many otherwise. Eventually, for the sake of our sanity we fake it and pretend there is no monster in the closet, and no monster under the bed.
Eventually most of us got older and understood there never were monsters.
It’s a shame most parents don’t do the same for their children in relation to God. Tell them it doesn’t exist, and there’s no reason to cower under the blankets in fear of God, hell, demons or Satan.
As for theological doubt in Islam:
Some excerpts from the Quran (translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford UP, 2005):
6:114. “Those to whom We gave the Scripture know that this [Qu’ran] is revealed by your Lord [Prophet] with the truth, so do not be one of those who doubt.”
10:94-95. “So if you [Prophet] are in doubt about what We have revealed to you, ask those who have been reading the scriptures before you. The Truth has come to you from your Lord, so be in no doubt and do not deny God’s signs—then you would become one of the losers.”
32:2. “This scripture, free from all doubt, has been sent down from the Lord of the Worlds.”
49:15. “The true believers are the ones who have faith in God and his Messenger and leave all doubt behind[.]”
Sounds metaphorical, doesn’t it?
I sure am glad medical scientists did not faithfully persist after doubts about the efficacy of bloodletting began to creep in.
Certainty is overrated my ass.
“Certainty is what most people prefer to truth, and it cannot be kept from them.” — John Barnes
Doubts are just fine, and so common that having them warrants no pat on the back. What you do about doubts is what may, or may not, set you apart.
This “doubt is an important part of faith” con is what Sastra calls an immunizing strategy. Any good carny takes the most clearly evident weaknesses of their con and, instead of trying to hide them, reframes them as a strength. That way the marks do the lion share of the work of selling the con themselves.
Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief.
This bit pretty much gives the game away. One of the reasons doubts are being taken here as part of faith is for the same reason tests of character are applied to people’s loyalties, optimism, and courage: to show that they actually have them, and thus to see if they have what it takes to stick to their (positive) paths despite whatever the world throws at them. Doubt is basically a trial to overcome, making you stronger in the process, and so in a bizarre way valuable.
This would be admirable if faith actually was a virtue, and not a sign of misguided thought and idiotic stubbornness.
When you realize they’re making a virtue out of what conspiracy theory nutjobs do – which is believe something against all the odds – then it cuts through the romantic and moralistic mist of their tones. It’s particularly insulting because it turns an innocent skeptic into someone with a character flaw, and overall turns neutral intellectual inquiry and its conclusions into a field and yardstick for measuring one’s virtue. This is not something that should be allowed to slip by unnoticed.
“For Welby, myself and many others, it is not that we have certainty but have seen the plausibility of faith and positive impact it can make. In a broken world, that can be enough.”
Not good enough, Pastor. Not when you refuse to objectively assess the consequences of your faith and certainly not when what you believe is exactly what’s doing most of the breaking.
Doubt is a crucial part of faith.
Then what about people who are CERTAIN that their faith is true? There are people who are convinced that God talks to them–do we conclude that they DON’T have faith?
And what about all those people in the Bible who witnessed miracles? Seeing Jesus walk on water or heal cripples should have removed any lingering doubts in the minds of the apostles; does that mean that they didn’t have faith?
I’m so confused.
This seems to be a common idea in Australia. A sociologist called Hugh McKay wrote a Christmas article for the Sydney Morning Herald 3 years ago called Where there’s faith, so too doubt.
It’s a very thorough compendium of all the most annoying accommodatheist fallacies, arguing only fundamentalists have certainties (religious fundies, and people like Richard Dawkins), while nice people have beliefs that they also doubt (the religious faithful, open minded scientists).
The funniest passage is this list, equating various types of belief:
“If it’s not religious belief, it might be astrology, “the free market”, feng shui, superstition, science, a particular psychological orientation – Buddhist, Freudian, Jungian – or a moral code….”
If you read that list quickly, you might have missed “science” nestled in there.
The guy has an MA.
Sorry for OT comment but this phrase:
“My God, why have you forsaken me?”
is quite perplexing from the mythicist standpoint. And it is something that someone with a “messiah” complex would say when reality hits him in the face and realizes an army of angels aren’t gonna help him.
actually never mind, he was quoting a psalm and thereby “fulfilling” prophecy
Yup, as reasonshark pointed out, this is the hub of the argument. This is where the category confusion reveals itself. Believing a fact claim is being equated with following one’s highest ideals, committing to virtue, being a good person. Nursing a weak hypothesis is like taking care of a sick child. Gosh, it’s so hard — but the struggle shows the depth of love and makes it stronger.
What rot. What a horrible, inept, inapt comparison.
The huge problem here (okay, one of the huge problems) is that doubts that God exists are coming comes from their conscience. It’s not a weakness — it’s a sign of honesty, integrity, humility. They’ve flipped it and got it exactly backwards. But somehow they seem to expect atheists will think they’re so humble to admit doubts — they are more sympathetic, more reasonable, more human. Gee, they have doubts just like us.
Yes and no: the killer part involves how they try to classify their doubts. The struggle over which they so eloquently elaborate is to not end up like us. After all, where does this faith-as-virtue and the-struggle-makes-it-nobler (“courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the mastery of fear”) method of framing the issue automatically put the atheist?
It puts us in the toilet, that’s where it puts us. It places us as weak, cowardly, selfish, and ignoble even before they start talking about damnation. Hell, even if they never talk about damnation and smile and assure us that everyone will one day be enlightened and bask in divine bliss and love, we are damned for our characters. We atheists didn’t draw a rational conclusion as objectively as we could: we gave in to our baser impulses. Sometimes they are tempted that way too. Aw. My heart bleeds for them.
The more they use warm and fuzzy examples of what battling religious doubt is like, the more obvious it becomes that discrimination and dislike of atheism and atheists is not based on how we behave in public or how we talk to believers. It’s a core belief. Every analogy places us in the Bad Guy role. We’re the ones on the flip side, those who would give up on our commitment, our child, our values. Instead of bringing believers and nonbelievers together (“we all have doubts!”) they INSULT us. They insult themselves.
And they’re so choked with religious privilege they apparently don’t see it.
“Every analogy places us in the Bad Guy role. We’re the ones on the flip side, those who would give up on our commitment, our child, our values. Instead of bringing believers and nonbelievers together (“we all have doubts!”) they INSULT us.”
Religion has to do this. It “knows” it has to or die. When a theist spots a chink in religion’s facade and doubts do enter the theist’s mind, religion knows it won’t be able to play fair (ie, appeal to legitimate arguments and evidence) and win. It’s only choice is to try to convince the theist to take a hands-off, display case approach to her doubts, for all the reasons you mentioned. Religion tries to convince the theist she can be proud of overcoming (read: ignoring) her doubts.
I don’t think it’s (all) a conscious effort at obfuscation. Part of it, in fact possibly most of it, could simply be something like a halo effect applied to beliefs.
I’ll give a religiously neutral example first. Somebody who believes that the world is plagued with war is a “pessimist”, and therefore might be assumed to fulfil the stereotype of a pessimist, i.e. grouchy, cynical, frown-faced, brutally honest, etc. Somebody who believes otherwise is an “optimist”, and therefore fulfils another stereotype, e.g. pleasant, welcoming, possibly wise in some way.
In a bizarre turn, it might be assumed as a matter of course that an optimist will predict good futures, or even is somehow obliged to do so, sometimes in spite of the strength of the opposite case, simply because they are “optimists”. There’s a parallel here in the case of climate change, where a businessman might even explicitly say that, because he is for business, he must oppose the case for AGW. In Shermer’s words, “Why not just look at the facts?”
Note that throughout all this, there needn’t be any reference to facts and figures to justify one’s positions. Merely having a position saddles you with a baggage of assumptions. To put it simply, “optimism” sounds nice, so the halo effect ensures our global impression of an “optimist” is nice, regardless of what a stricter, more critical examination would reveal.
I think it’s similar for believers in religion too. An all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God sounds just so nice, so encouraging, so maternally reassuring, that surely anyone who believes it must themselves be kind, nice, even faintly wise people with potential, at least in some way. On the opposite foot, anyone who rejects the idea that God exists sounds like the sort of person who seems opposed to such niceness, and so is probably not nice themselves. They even fulfil the grouchy pessimist stereotype by insisting they’re rational and honest: fancy that!
This doesn’t even have to be a consciously articulated belief (which is just as well, as it’s stupid as Hell logic): the halo effect works unconsciously.
Throw in the fact that religions are supposed to inspire our most uplifting and “higher” emotions, and you probably get the halo effect with a vengeance. Add “profane”, “materialistic” (in both senses – they won’t object to mixing them up), and “worldly” (in the sense of missing out on “heavenly” things) to the list of sins for the atheist stereotype.
You might be right, though, and some combination of self-serving malice and intuitive stupidity are probably at work here to keep the US mainstream’s prejudice against atheism alive and well.
I don’t think it’s necessarily conscious, either. That’s why I used synecdoche and wrote about the institution of religion itself “knowing” it has to resort, ultimately, to ad hom.
Very well put — and I think consistent with my point. In my opinion it’s usually not a conscious or deliberate insult. They don’t think they’re being self-serving; they’re trying to be selfless. They’re even trying to reach out to us. When theists reassure me that they too have doubts which they struggle against they seem to think I’ll find this uniting and reassuring. They don’t realize that we think they’re struggling against their better nature. How could we when religion represents all the good things as a package deal?
The “halo effect” may be another word for (or a perhaps a variation of) what I meant by religious privilege. One chooses the world view which reflects their preferred identity. People who believe optimistic things are people with hope. It’s good to have hope — and sad because atheists have none. This is the common ground.
I recently had a discussion with a “former atheist.” When I asked what changed her mind, her elaborate response basically boiled down to “I wanted to be happier and nicer.”
“My local pastor, Tim Giovanelli, a Baptist whose ocean-swimming prowess has lassoed scores of surfers and swimmers into his church . . . .”
Would Giovanelli’s message be less compelling and legitimate in surfers’ and swimmers’ eyes were he not the least bit interested, or possess prowess, in ocean-swimming? If so, then they’re not all that interested in or motivated by the merits of his theology.
(though I suspect that people like Al Mohler, Ken Ham, and William Lane Craig don’t have such doubts)
I’m not so sure about this. I wonder if, like Mother Theresa, it’s not their doubts which propel them into such vociferous religiosity. Just as gay men seem to make the loudest gay-bashers, I suspect that many of the most active proselytisers don’t believe quite as thoroughly as they’d have us think, and they are trying to convince themselves as much as us.