The primary rule of rational belief is:
Accept all, but *only*, those ideas for which you
have rationally adequate *cognitive* validation.
However, most people include as a major premise in their epistemology
the following rule:
If something *appears* true,
then it *is* true.
Thus, a person who accepts this rule may believe that the Earth is flat,
that TV magicians do real magic, that psychic surgery is real, that
astrology is a sound science, that professional wrestling is real
competition, that, when an actor appears to sing a song in a movie, it is
always really the actor's voice coming out of the speakers, that God
exists, that God *doesn't* exist, and so on. Basically, believing
something because it is "apparently" true in this sense is believing
something on *faith*, because one has not bothered to perform the
cognitive activities necessary to validate that the idea is true or at least
close enough to true to accept with strict qualifications.
Does this approach work? Does faith in fact generally lead to true
beliefs? Is this kind of apparent truth a reliable indication of *actual*
truth? If it works, why do so many people who use this method get into
conflicts over crucial ideas? If the method is reliable, then it should
yield essentially the same results no matter who uses it. And, why is it
that so *many* ideas that once "appeared" true to nearly everyone no
longer appear true to so many people, even with respect to issues where
it is obvious that the truth can't have changed over the years? Should
we accept that the Earth has, in *fact* gone from flat to nearly
spherical? Apparently.
No, this method does not work. It's based on one's feelings, on
unchecked "intuitions," on "just knowing," on desires, etc., not
primarily on cognitive contact with reality. Even when a particular idea
that one holds on faith *does* turn out to be true, it's basically
accidental. In many cases, there is not much more chance of such a
belief being true than there would be if the person simply accepted
ideas on the basis of a coin flip. Indeed, in certain categories of ideas,
the probability, in general, of such a belief being true is *less* than it
would be if the person accepted ideas on the basis of a coin flip. This is
especially true with respect to certain issues concerning probability, and
with many ideas that many people accept largely because they are
*attractive* and the person *wants* them to be true.
Sadly, many people rely on faith most strongly in dealing with
questions whose answers are most important. Thus, a person may make
elaborate calculations and deeply ponder the facts in deciding which
computer to buy, but base many of his basic and critically important
philosophical ideas on faith, on whether they *feel* right, on whether
they are "apparently" true, etc. Others pretty much rest *most* of their
beliefs, regardless of significance, on faith, more or less
indiscriminately. Of course, accepting ideas on faith is indiscriminate to
begin with.
Oddly, and logically bizarrely, many of these same people will tell you
that their beliefs are *objectively* true, because *they* feel that they
are true. Thus, many religious folk will attempt to persuade you that
their particular God-of-the-Month God must *actually* exist because
of how deeply they *feel* that they are in contact with Him. Despite
the dismal historical empirical failure of faith to be reliable, and despite
the lack of any specifiable reason for that particular person to believe
that *his* faith is any better than the faith of those who disagree
profoundly with him on the *same* type of basis (they deeply *feel*
that their belief is true), such a person will continue to believe. It often
does not even matter that the idea has been *proved* false, either by
blatant empirical means, or by clear logic (there are still people who
claim to have "squared the circle" using straight-edge and compass,
there are still people who believe the Earth is flat, etc.).
Why does this happen (and so often)? Because faith has no corrective
mechanism aside from the death of the people involved. If a rational
person makes a mistake and thinks that pi is 3, you can show him that
this is not true. But, if a person believes on faith that pi is 3, he does
not need to bother listening to your proof that pi is *not* 3, because he
already "knows" that it is 3. Or, if he does "listen," he may simply not
let himself understand the significance of what you are saying. Or, he
may have so deeply corrupted his thinking skills with past "acts of
faith" that he either cannot follow your demonstration, or believes,
against his own observations, and his own logic, that there is some flaw
in the demonstration that he just doesn't see. If you apply faith more
diligently, more extensively, to the issue of whether pi is equal to 3, it
won't make any difference, or, if it does make a difference, it may
simply result in the person believing even *more* solidly that pi is 3,
or that the Earth is flat, etc.
In less severe cases, rational criticism or proof of the truth of an
alternative may actually work, but you can't rely on this. The
willingness to abandon reason to the extent of accepting ideas on faith
to begin with is a bad sign. A rational person doesn't do that, so a
person who *does* do that may well not be open to reason.
But, if faith is so unreliable, why do so many people believe things on
faith? Because they *first* believe on faith that faith is reliable. Faith is
also supremely *egotistical*, because the person believes (on *faith*!)
that *his* faith is reliable, even if he believes that nearly everyone
else's is completely wrong. Of course, that's exactly what *they*
believe, as well. In these cases, each person believes that there is
something *special* about *his* acceptance of ideas on faith. If person
A believes in a proposition P on faith, and person B believes a severely
conflicting proposition Q on faith, and if you ask them both why they
think *their* particular use of faith is reliable while the other's is not,
they will each often give you some variant of the *same* answer,
usually something like, "I just *know* I'm right," or "God says so," or
"I know I'm right because my faith is pure," etc. When they confront
each other, neither of them can say *anything* of significance in favor
of his belief that the other one does not also say, with equal fervor. And
both may definitely be honest in feeling certain of the truth of their
belief.
Some forms of faith dress themselves up and go around disguised (at
least superficially) as reason. The various formal and informal fallacies
in reasoning are cases of pseudo-reasoning that have just enough of the
"look" of reason that many people who too casually examine ideas and
arguments may see them as reason, even though they may have no
cognitive value whatever and may actually *hinder* cognition. Many
people accept such fatally flawed arguments as justification for beliefs.
They do this sometimes honestly, sometimes because they actually
believe on faith but feel that such arguments *do* justify their belief,
and sometimes because they simply need something to give *other*
people as justification, when they either know they believe on the basis
of something else, or when they don't even *actually* believe the idea
in question (but are, perhaps arguing for it on the basis of *other* ideas
that they *do* believe, as when people argue for the existence of God
because they believe that a belief in God somehow promotes morality --
which it doesn't, but that's a different issue).
You might think that science would be free of such abandonments of
reason, but, in practice, it is not (though it does better than philosophy).
However, science and scientists are *relatively* more rational than
most people, at least about *science*, on average. And, people
understand that science is *supposed* to be rational. Because of these
factors, people who want scientists or others to accept ideas that are
unscientific (or even anti-scientific) *as* science must go to *some*
lengths to dress up their ideas in the guise of reason and scientific
respectability.
Thus, a person who wants you to accept the idea that silent praying
over sick people in a hospital will help them get well may cite some
badly flawed "study" as "evidence" (or even that it is *proof*) that this
is the case. Why does he do this? Because he knows that many people
won't accept the idea (or the suggested theism *behind* the idea)
without something that at least *might* be a rational basis for belief. If
prayer is supposed to make people prayed about/over healthier, you
can't just *say*, "Praying over people in hospitals makes them
healthier." No-sireee-Bob, you've gotta provide what the person is
willing to take as a scientific basis for it. This can be done by citing
"scientific" studies. It doesn't matter that the study is badly flawed.
Indeed, it may not matter if such a study was ever even actually
conducted at all. But *saying* that there is a scientific basis for the
claim, and giving some salient detail (whether real or not) such as the
name of the hospital or the number of people in both the prayed-over
group and the control group could well be enough to convince many
people.
Thus, many people *believe* people like Dembski, Behe, Thaxton,
Johnson, and so on, merely because they have that nice "patina" of
rational discussion and scientific or other credentials, etc. It is not even
necessary for many people to actually read and examine the claims and
arguments of such people, if the conclusion is something they have a
desire or tendency to believe anyway.
What *apparently* holds them up is faith in the deeper ideas they hold,
faith that tells them that they either cannot make any significant errors,
or that they are unimportant because what they are arguing for is true
*anyway*, and all that's important is to get other people to accept it,
and if logic must be trampled to *death* to do this, that's okay.
Well, it's *not* okay. Not only are ideas held on faith *frequently*
completely false, even when they are nominally true, their lack of
cognitive basis often means that they are grossly misunderstood as well,
so that, in practice they may be no better than if they were simply
outright false.
Further, faith kills. It kills thought, it kills good judgment, it tends to
make it's victims *stupid*. It destroys whole societies, it promotes war
(because nations living on faith have no *rational* means of resolving
disputes), it promotes mental illness (and, in fact *is* a kind of
intellectual illness), it leads to horrendous public policy, it leads to
genocide (as in Nazi Germany, for example), it leads to despotism,
tyranny, dictatorship, totalitarianism, mass starvation (as of the twelve
million or so peasant farmers in the early Soviet Union, and as in
Ethiopia and elsewhere more recently), it leads people to refuse medical
treatment that clearly has a chance of saving their lives or the lives of
their children, and, in general, promotes death, destruction, and
suffering.
Faith kills *people* as well as rational thought, often by the tens of
millions (as in Nazi Germany, Communist China, the Soviet Union,
etc.). It kills because people who accept critical ideas on faith often
accept them as absolute, and unquestionable, so that there is little or no
room for discussion with those whose land they wish to take, or whose
race or ethnic or religious background they find unacceptable. Since
they won't listen to reason, they rarely *see* reason, and thus they may
refuse to back down, regardless of the facts. Or, if they refrain from
killing, they may still live in more or less constant needless strife
because of their needless irrational reactions to the peaceful activities of
other people (most people fall, to one degree or another, into this
category politically).
And, faith *profoundly* undercuts morality. Rational morality is the
result of a *rational* understanding of human nature and human needs,
and the development of guides to action based on that understanding,
but faith is an attack on reason at it's very root. To accept a belief on
faith, you must reject reason and rationality, because the primary rule of
rational belief excludes faith and all such willingness to subvert
cognition and facts for whims and wishes. Faith is a *fundamental*
violation of rules of rational thought and belief, so any claim to
"accepting" reason *and* faith is a claim to accept reason and the
violation of reason at the same time.
"Well," you may ask, "how is that relevant to the issue of Intelligent
Design vs. pure naturalistic evolution?"
It's not, directly, except that the issue would not even arise if people
were not able to fool themselves and others with faith and bad
reasoning so that they accept the religious and or philosophical beliefs
without which no one except the truly mentally ill would otherwise
accept and which provide the basis for ID theory. Bertvan tells us that
design is apparent, though she does not say *why*, in objective factual
terms, it is apparent to her, or why it mightn't be something else other
than design that she's *misinterpreting* as design, etc. No, that's now
how faith works. For her, *facts* are not important; *appearances* are
what are important to her, because, with appearances (which,
conveniently, can be whatever she wishes them to be), she can maintain
her faith in design, in a perfect vicious circle of appearance supporting
belief which then supports the appearance, with neither needing to have
much of anything to do with facts of reality outside the circle.
We see similar mechanisms at work in the case of Behe (with his
egregiously illogical and anti-scientific dismissal of alternate pathways
to IC structures), with Dembski (with his elaborate attempt to frame a
theory of explanation filtering that will "just happen" to equate facts in
nature with design by agency (as distinguished from "design" by natural
forces), and Johnson pretending, against even elementary rules of
reason, that naturalistic explanations and non-naturalistic (i.e.
supernatural, theistic) explanations have the same initial
epistemological footing (which would only be true if we had the same
general kind and quality of evidence for the existence and nature of a
supernatural realm as we do for the existence and nature of the natural
world we live in on a daily basis).
These three men are like Bertvan in their apparent faith (or is it
dishonesty?), but they choose to dress it up so it can go out in public
and fool many people into thinking that it's not faith but reason.
Perhaps they are *so* unable to pay attention to their own reasoning
that they *can't* question whether it's sound or not. I don't know. I
*do* know that the errors they commit -- and stick by -- are so
elementary that they are fodder for first-year logic and philosophy
students. There is nothing subtle about these errors.
When all this kind of detritus is cleared away, ID theory is exposed as
little more than a bald assertion systematically propped up by non-facts
and bad reasoning (because, given its nature and the currently available
data, little good reasoning is available for it). Remember the old
argument for the existence of God to the effect that, while each of the
arguments for His existence might be individually invalid, if you
gathered them all together, they made a pretty good case? Is this kind
of argument any good? No: just as zero times a million is still zero; a
dozen or two of bad arguments doesn't prove the conclusion. Reason
doesn't work that way; there is no support from *essentially* unsound
arguments for their conclusion, no matter how many of them you gather
together. ID theory "support" appears to be a slight variation on this
idea, in that it gathers together a whole slew of really bad arguments
(while ignoring or denying their obvious flaws) and then pretends to
have proved design (or shown it to be the best theory).
But, since probably *none* of the arguments have any real probative
value at all for the desired conclusion, the whole pyramid of
argumentation amounts to a stupendous intellectual special effect that is
really poorly done but which is nevertheless enough to impress many of
the yokels. The "yokels" they seem to seek to appeal to are the same
the people who think David Copperfield does *real* magic rather than
stage illusions.
Why? Because, in Bertvan's phraseology, it's *apparent* (to them) that
Behe, Johnson, et al, are right. Reason need not apply.
-- Chris Cogan
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