joshua fost
writing
> if not god, then what?
> fables for a young skeptic
> the thinker's toolbox
> the glass bead game
> fight dogma, not religion
> neural rhythmicity...
teaching
> beauty and the brain
> cyborg millennium
> einstein's universe
about
> resume / cv
In many debates, the sides taken are science vs. religion; this strikes me as slightly misleading, and slightly risky. A better distinction, I contend, is between skepticism and dogma, and I want to make the case that in most discussion, making the distinction is worthwhile.
In the first place, "religion" connotes a vast jungle of social structures, moral systems, epistemological traditions, myths, and histories. Conflating all of that into one unitary structure, as if you are fighting one opposing view, is a mistake. Never mind the fact that all of this richness varies from one religion to the next. Simplifying so many aspects from so many faiths into one bite, i.e. "religion," combines too much and muddies the water. Make sure you know what you're really arguing against.
Secondly, all faith-based religion is dogmatic, inasmuch as belief in revealed truths does not require or allow critical thought. To be fair, this is not to say that theists don't think about their dogmas. They do, but they don't investigate the claims in the same way that a skeptic would. To the faith-based theist, the holy text is True without question -- study and criticism merely add clarity and interpretation. This kind of questioning is commonplace, for example, in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To a skeptic, any proposition -- regardless how venerated - might be false. A skeptic lacks faith altogether. Investigations may be empirical or logical, but can always be used to evaluate and (provisionally) reject or accept a proposition. The whole idea of Truth exists only for the dogmatist, not for the skeptic.
A third reason dogma is a more appropriate opponent is that many dogmatic beliefs have nothing at all to do with religion. Indeed, non-theistic faiths can be more dangerous than Inquisitions, precisely because they do not carry church flags. Genocidal wars, for example, derive their fuel from the passionate certainty that some racial group is inferior, and I daresay that belief is not based on double-blind studies. Para-religious ideas like life after death, or moral objectivism, seem impervious to evidence and deeply affect both worldview and behavior. Even an apparently beneficent dogma, like humanism, does not deserve to go unquestioned. (Is it really a given that human needs are the most important? What are the environmental consequences of that belief?)
It is sometimes argued by those seeking harmony between the two camps that faith and reason -- religion and science, dogma and skepticism -- are simply two different ways of knowing. I disagree. Faith reserves the right to suspend logic, and from there, no progress or understanding is possible. If P and ~P are both true, we know nothing. Our goal, therefore, should be to show not that any particular religion is wrong, but that all dogma-based approaches to life are nonsensical and harmful. Besides, it is probably rhetorically, pedagogically, and socially easier, not to mention less confrontational, to get a dogmatist to see that emotions are not effective in the solution of physics problems than it is to convince a theist that the Bible has nothing useful to say about molecular biology. And yet, the first lesson ultimately leads to the second.
In the end, faith may lead to glorious and beautiful states of emotional satisfaction, but they are unwarranted, and possibly delusional. Reason is the only effective way to learn the actual mechanisms of the world, and as many of us will confirm, the world so discovered has glory, and beauty, and comforts aplenty.
...But I could be wrong.
idea sketchbook
> colorblind
> probabilistic law
> general relativity
> hybrid cars
contact: josh at joshuafost dot com