Doubting Marcus

The heavy-lidded satisfaction that marks the graduate of seminary, madrassa, or yeshiva is that of someone who has gained a standard of accuracy beyond ignorant questioning—one which also gratifyingly confirms prior assumptions. Even the most sincere come to faith as seekers; their reasoning, necessarily, is motivated—and their ability to select their material makes any appearance of objectivity an illusion. Their minds play only home games: since faith motivates their reasoning, their reasoning can make no sense to those outside the faith. Though all are intent on the same objective—obedience to divine law—the devout necessarily lack a common standard of accuracy: hot Hassid and cold Litvak have no shared premises; the mystic Sufi will never convince the devout Wahhabi; the Propaganda Fidei cannot judge the tenets of Pentecostalism. The great advance of the Renaissance, even before the rise of science, came when we stopped trying to convince each other through quotation and turned instead to evidence, present and real, as the basis for mutual understanding.

- Michael and Ellen Kaplan - on theology as motivated reasoning from their book Bozo Sapiens