Doubting Marcus

Reason Is Not Tyranny

Every so often in a discussion I’m told something equivalent to “stop imposing your reason on me” or “everyone can’t be reasonable you know?” To my ears this sounds a lot like “REASON IS THE DEVIL!” and of course such words can only spouted from the lips of someone soundly defeated.

Still in the most charitable sense this is correct, it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to be convinced of even the most basic facts. The classic example is that there are still people claiming that Earth is flat (no really, The Flat Earth Society is real). Of course this is absurd in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary but if we are being reasonable we should expect a certain small number of holdouts even on questions this simple. There just aren’t any magic arguments which are so powerful that upon hearing them all minds, no matter how they are currently configured, are convinced of their validity.

However it’s one thing to be told that you can’t convince everyone of even obvious truths, it’s quite another to tell people that they shouldn’t try to convince people or that we should abandon reason altogether. This latter claim isn’t a question of fact rather it’s an articulation of value but it’s a value which I don’t believe anyone really holds. The easy quip would be they can’t believe this because they are trying to convince me with reason to give up reason.

Still, more important to daily actions, I flatly don’t believe anyone truly doesn’t care about being reasonable because without valuing living by reason they would, for example, be unable to justify passing on eating mercury and hence slightly reducing the frequency of their alleles in the gene pool. Without valuing being reasonable, at least some of the time, you would have no explanation for why you don’t do… well, anything and everything. The only real question is how reasonable do we want people to be and what’s the appropriate amount of outside interference and encouragement in order to achieve that level.

This too is a question of values but even if you think we ought to mostly leave people alone it’s just plainly silly, and disingenuous, to spit in the face of reason by saying things like “stop imposing your reason on me” to avoid changing your mind.

‘Faith’ Games

Faith is really just a lifestyle but it’s a way of knowing which is equivalent to the basic assumptions needed for coherent thought and superior to those same axioms. Confused? You should be, I’m starting to think that’s the point.

The joke about postmodernists is that if you are attacking them on a specific claim they must have meant something else. More and more in discussions with religious believers I find myself facing a similar convenient shift of meaning whenever I try to pin someone down on what they mean by ‘faith.’

When I point out you can’t understand reality by ignoring it and sticking to your beliefs I’m told I’m getting faith all wrong and that I also have faith because I accept some axioms of thought. If I explain why the two aren’t equal I’m told I’m right after all but because faith is clearly superior to those axioms because it can account for absolutes. If I explain the futility of a finite mind trying to argue for absolutes I’m reprimanded for missing the real point of faith which is about acknowledging we don’t know everything, staying humble and being a good person.

Really ‘faith’ is often whatever a believer needs it to be to avoid acknowledging any misstep from the truth. However point this out at your own peril as it just might lead to questions like “Who said I’m talking about knowing reality anyway?”

Faith is a Rule Changer… Sometimes

As a skeptic I’ve read and taken part in many debates with believers who follow the familiar pattern: A debate on a topic begins and after some time the believer acknowledges that the skeptic has made some strong arguments but instead of acknowledging that maybe they should reconsider their position the believer says “you just have to have faith.”

Now we all know you can’t argue with faith because it is by definition impervious to evidence but you can point out that the acceptance of faith isn’t a good thing epistemologically, it just doesn’t lead to knowledge. However what I find more important is to point out what just occurred. We were both playing the same game by the same rules, attempting to prove our views with logic and evidence, but as soon as it became apparent the skeptic had defeated the logic and evidence of the believer, the believer changed the rules of the contest. Now you can’t stop people from doing this but you can try to make them acknowledge that to withdraw from the use of reason purely when it doesn’t fit them anymore is an admission that the belief they hold isn’t rationally based, or at the very least they are currently out of rational reasons and should permanently stop using those arguments just refuted.

In moral terms abortion, same-sex marriage and the death penalty are all subject to faith claims on all sides of the issue. So if someone is to reasonably decide if any of these are moral we must clearly reject faith as a guide to do so. Still, for example, Obama’s support of same-sex marriage today will undoubtedly be met with claims of immorality based solely on the fact it contradicts a faith position that homosexuality is immoral. As my previous post indicated, I don’t buy for a moment any arguments that homosexuality is immoral but because morality is one of last places in public discourse where it is still acceptable to use religious beliefs as the sole justification for a position. As a result people who oppose same-sex marriage largely don’t even bother to make arguments to support their position.

However in science, where creationism and a small minority of climate change deniers disagree with established science because of their religious beliefs, it’s no longer publicly acceptable, at least not in political or legal discourse, to replace argument with an explicit expression of faith. When people do this they are roundly dismissed as unfairly, and unconstitutionally, attempting to force their religious beliefs onto secular society. Now there aren’t any moral positions supported the way the theories of evolution and climate change are, but I think secular people must be just as vigilant in pointing out the unfair and unconstitutional move from using reasoning and evidence to faith positions with regard to morality as they are about issues of science. It’s our responsibility to remind them either that retreat into faith should be allowed in every field, which would make rational discourse impossible, or it shouldn’t be allowed anywhere.