This is probably a minority of Christians who are like this. A significant minority, mind you, not just some extreme fringe, but probably a minority nonetheless.

As to this not being inline with Jesus’ turn-the-other-cheek, man, that’s just for starters. I’m still baffled how these Prosperity Gospel people manage to avoid thinking about that whole thing about the camel and the eye of a needle. The Christian Religious Right in America holds pretty much the exact opposite philosophy as Jesus.

(Please note I am not one of these “Jesus was a great philosopher” atheists. Legitimate doubts about the historicity of Jesus aside, even the Jesus character in the gospels is a clear douchebag a lot of the time. Look no further than the story of the fig tree. Quick summary: Jesus sees a fig tree in the distance and decides he’s hungry. He gets there and there’s no fruit, so he’s all like, “What the fuck, fig tree?!?” And his apostles are like, “Uh, Jesus? Figs are out of season, yo.” So Jesus gets all pissed and he goes, “Ain’t no fucking fig tree gonna mess with THE JESUS,” and he curses the fig tree so that it will die and nothing will ever grow there again. WTF?!?!??)

‘Nuff Said.

Your Thoughts?

Blair Scott, a spokesman for the American Atheists, Inc., was subjected to over 8,000 death threats and other violent rhetoric after appearing on Fox News. Some examples:

Your Thoughts?

In this post, I am going to explain why I don’t think we should model our primary identification on any positive metaphysical position, but rather should stake our ground on epistemology and methodology instead.

Christians identify themselves based on an allegiance to Jesus Christ. First and foremost they communicate “I am a follower of Jesus Christ”. When pressed for explanation of what this means the traditional response is to identify with the sorts of doctrines one finds in the Apostle’s Creed.

For many devout Christians these beliefs are primary and no other beliefs can be accepted which undermine these ones. And while many Christians will try their best to reconcile apparently contradicting scientific, logical, philosophical, historical and common sense truths with their Creed, there are infamous problems that they have doing so. And this leads to the numerous embarrassments Christianity has suffered from Christians who cannot cope with science or its metaphysical implications.

My concern is that, given the nature of the human mind, putting any particular belief as one’s intellectual bedrock and key identifier of one’s position in the conflict of ideas and practices risks this same problem. If people begin identifying themselves as first and foremost “evolvers” or “evolutionists” (rather than just as skeptics or atheists, etc.), then this positive position becomes paramount to them and an attack on it risks being taken as an attack on their very identity, just the way attacks on many religious people’s belief in God is wrongly taken by them as offenses against them themselves as persons.

This is the danger of tagging yourself with a specific idea—especially in the arena of religion. And when you start saying things like that evolution can do a better job of solving every problem God has previously been thought to solve, then you set up your evolutionary metaphysics as a competitor religion. Already atheism, which is, strictly speaking just the negation of theism, is tagged by many lazy dualistic taxonomers as a religion simply because it addresses the question of gods and the question of gods is treated as primarily a religious (and not a philosophical) question in the public mind.

The crude classifiers think “well everyone must have a religion” or “something fulfills religious functions for everyone” or “everyone has a god, even if it’s only their own reason”, etc. and on such grounds just insist on exposing atheists as having a religion after all no matter what we do or say. Do we have prominent figures in our movement? They must be the atheists’ priests! Do we have any firm epistemological, metaphysical, or moral commitments? Those must be the atheists’ dogmas! This is even the case while atheists are typically a group suspicious of, and hostile to, metaphysics and all broad, speculative claims that do not have scientific backing. Were atheists to call themselves “evolvers” and back a robust speculative metaphysics, there is no doubt in my mind that the lazy would immediately tag this as being just like faith-based reasoning no matter how much we protested to the contrary.

And, worse, if we saw ourselves and defined ourselves by our belief in metaphysical evolution first and foremost, we would be more likely to start to treat it as rigid dogma as the religious tend to do. We would be more likely to have implicit faith, the unwillingness to reconsider and explore new evidence against our current metaphysics.

In a way, this is a potential danger even with atheism itself–that identifying with disbelief in gods could become so important that we become hostile to any legitimate evidence for gods. This is a potential hazard of any believing or disbelieving.

So, given all of this, I think the best ground to stand on is epistemology. When asked “what are you?” our answer should be along the lines of “freethinker”. This has an unfortunately presumptuous sounding connotation of course, in that it can sound self-congratulatory, like you’re saying you are freer thinking than others. You had might as well go the whole arrogant nine yards and call yourself “The Correct Ones”.

But that’s not what “Freethinker” really means. It does not mean the presumption of superiority, but it means the acknowledgment of no arbitrary authorities in thought. Freethinkers, in principle, stand for free thought and against the right of anyone to demand assent to propositions by faith alone. The key contrast with the faith-based is that they acknowledge a legitimacy to surrendering one’s belief to priests, prophets, institutions, dogmas, and holy books even when no appeal to common sense or rigorous philosophy or science is given.

Self-professed “Freethinkers” should not be heard as congratulating themselves on thinking better than anyone else, but rather as those committed to the principle that everyone is entitled to, and responsible to demand, sufficient reasons for believing anything they are asked to assent to.

Allegiance to this principle of free thought is what should mark us as distinct from the faith-based as our key, anti-faith, anti-authoritarian principle. And free thought can stand for thought free of all prejudicial encumberances that stand in the way of true knowledge. It is an embrace of the scientific method, of philosophical rigor, of logical rigor, and of all that we have learned in the past several hundred years about how to identify and overcome bad forms of reasoning and replace them with more truth-conducive ones.

This should be our rallying point because today’s best metaphysics might tomorrow be refuted. Even today’s best science could see an earth shattering paradigm shift. People’s identities should not be bound up with any doctrine since that makes it harder for them to change their minds and abandon it when such a cataclysmic change happens. They should think of themselves first and foremost as those who oppose prejudice and willful belief of what is unsupported or undermined by evidence. The more obedience to this principle is the only thing they anchor themselves by, the more likely they are to be properly flexible when understanding progresses.

Plato and Aristotle were wonderful metaphysicians and the Catholic Church was to be commended for learning a great deal from them. But the Church’s dogmatic elevation of ideas from their metaphysics into non-negotiable absolutes has a once vibrant and progressive intellectual tradition lumbering stagnantly and regressively into the 21st Century.

Eric is right that atheists should give much much more rigorous and open-minded accounts of metaphysics than at present. But we should only believe them with as much conviction as their rational strength warrants. And before we bring up our metaphysics, we should be wary of giving the impression that we are saying, “oh I have heard your faith-based gobbledygook which I’m free to ignore and now here’s my faith-based gobbledygook which you are free to ignore too” (which is what too many people hear when metaphysics, especially related to religion, is raised).

So, instead we should stress our epistemic standards, stress their proven viability in practice, and then, when pushed for how we might answer metaphysical answers say (in so many words), “Well, these are the best alternatives there are and here is why they are better than theistic alternatives, and here is me stressing that I am only going to assent to the best alternative to the extent to which it is likely to be true.”

Finally, this prioritizing of free (and rigorously critical and skeptical) thinking is not another kind of faith as might be ironically charged. Placing skepticism as the priority is not some overestimation of the mind’s ability to refute every false doctrine or to know that every metaphysical doctrine is false, or anything like that. Cautious skepticism and slow willingness to assent to propositions until their evidence has been adequately established is not a statement that everything not assented to is false. Rather it is a recognition of the limits of the human mind to know and a painstaking curb on the temptations of the human mind to presume too much too impetuously and to believe by faith.

Skepticism is the antidote to the poison of faith, not itself another faith.

Lastly, why do I identify primarily as an atheist, despite having made the passionate case for “freethinker”. Well, it is factually true I am an atheist and it is in accepted parlance the scandalous word that signifies rejection of submission to all faith-based authorities more boldly and defiantly than any other and draws the line in the sand against theists in particular, in a way “freethinker” does not quite manage.

And given the current state of things, that confrontational stance is where the action is. It’s where the principled stand I want to make against faith is best understood.

But for those fundamentalist Christians who do need a Biblical argument to convince them that it is wrong to use the state as a tool of coercion of consciences, my friend Loyal Hall, a devoted Christian, has made the case against Christian theocracy excellently from within that point of view and its terms.

And I’m told that Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You is a classic worth passing on to the Christian theocrat in your life.

Your Thoughts?

Part of this discussion meant pointing out that many things now associated with religion can be salvaged for good if only they stop being poisoned by faith.  Geoff though wants to know why I don’t make any room for salvaging faith itself also:

I have to admit that I didn’t get through the entire piece. A former Baptist
churchgoer in my youth, I witnessed the pitfalls of faith-based devotion to
antiquated morals first-hand (and I continue to note their prevalence today). The arguments you pose seemed, in part, a reiteration of things I’ve
understood–if not expressly stated–so I found myself longing for some counter argument FOR faith.

I’ve since done away with religion, but I, like you, believe that there are
undeniably positive things about it; faith, in my opinion, being one of them.
To this day, I credit my experience in Christianity for instilling a faithful,
optimistic quality to my life. I glanced through the titles to your series on
‘Disambiguating Faith’ hoping to find a more optimistic view of faith–maybe one that explains how it can be valuable to those without religion, rather than all the ones that seem to demonstrate how damaging it is to religion.

One thing to clarify about my Disambiguating Faith series is that if you read through the titles, you will see that I defend the value of many things people call faith. To repeat, with links to articles distinguishing things confused for faith from faith, a list I gave in the following post: I talk about the proper understanding of the value of “rationally justified confidence, proper trust, proper loyalty, holding probable beliefs which nonetheless have some uncertainty, educated guessing, gut feelings, epiphanies,  brainstorming, hypothesizing, counter-intuitive reasoning, [and] trusting one’s subconsciously formed intuitions“.

I also could add that self-confidence and optimism or a number of other good things that people regularly call faith are great things worth encouraging.

The key issue to me is that none of these things are good when having them involves a will to believe what one perceives to be undersupported or outright undermined by evidence.  This is the distinct thing that faith demarcates that is not covered by the other good words for good things.  I would never suggest anyone should abandon all those other good things.

What I am trying to make clear in post after post is

(1) that when those other good things are mixed up with willfully believing more strongly than the evidence warrants or believing against what the evidence indicates, then those otherwise things are corrupted

(2) just because these other good things are sometimes called faith, we cannot let people equivocate and have us think that therefore willfully believing more strongly than evidence warrants or willfully believing despite refutation are themselves acceptable (either rationally or ethically)

In other words, if the word faith is allowed to ambiguously cover all the good things I listed above (and more) then that hides the morally and rationally crucial distinction.  If the same word is used for the good and for the bad, then people are not adequately instructed about the clearly isolatable vice of faith and so they can confuse instances of the vice faith for just more instances of the virtuous things (wrongly and misleadingly) also referred to as faith.

I want to make clear, the target “faith” is not any of those good things, it is this specific bad thing.  Others want to keep things ambiguous and say, “well if you want optimism, beliefs which are only probable, loyalty, trust, deference to experts, then you have to accept that faith is legitimate and that means accepting that it is good to have beliefs stronger than evidence warrants or beliefs which disregard counter-evidence”.

I want to say “No, I can have all those good things and still reject willful belief that disregards evidence because those good things, properly understood and practiced, are completely separable and distinguishable from that kind of faith-based believing.”  And the most decisive way to send that message that is to clearly as possible specify that faith is a word only for this specific intellectual and moral vice and not a word for the various intellectual and moral virtues which it is misleadingly lumped in with.

All that said, I do think there is at least one exception to my ban on faith (defined as I define it.  You can read about that in this post: “Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons”.

Your Thoughts?

———-

For more on faith, read any post in my “Disambiguating Faith” series.  It is unnecessary to read all its posts to understand any given one.

Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Faith As Tradition

Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Faith As Guessing

Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Can Rationality Overcome Faith?

Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Heart Over Reason

Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

Implicit Faith

Agnostics Or Apistics?

The Evidence-Impervious Agnostic Theists

Faith Which Exploits Infinitesimal Probabilities As Openings For Strong Affirmations

Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith

How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don’t Have Faith, In Practice

Naturalism, Materialism, Empiricism, And Wrong, Weak, And Unsupported Beliefs Are All Not Necessarily Faith Positions

How Faith Poisons Religion

Disambiguating Faith: How Religious Beliefs Become Specifically *Faith* Beliefs

Your Thoughts?

In this way faith is essentially a matter of will and not just belief.  Simply having a belief that is unsupported or undermined by evidence is insufficient to have a faith belief—you have to perceive that your belief is unsupported or undermined by evidence first and then defiantly choose to believe anyway.  This also means that there could be some beliefs that are supported by evidence but a given believer does not know that and, despite thinking that the belief is unsupported by evidence, chooses to believe anyway.  In this case, someone could hold a belief by faith even though it is actually unnecessary to do so since the belief is evidentially supported.  If it is blameworthy to believe without perceiving that there is appropriate evidence for your belief (as I argue it usually is), such a person’s believing would be culpable even though the belief is warranted by evidence she does not know about (or does not properly weigh).

Some interesting things follow from this.  Even though religious people the world over, throughout time, have believed many strange things which seem to modern minds utterly refuted by evidence, they have not necessarily had faith in all these strange things.  Quite often they may have (and may still) perceive themselves to be responding to evidence.  Their standards of evidence and their various metaphysical, epistemological, scientific, etc. assumptions may be totally erroneous.  But this is due to an inadequacy of critical thinking skills and/or a lack of information, and not due to a contemptuous disregard for critical thought and subordination of reason to willfullness, like faith is.

It is rationally justifiable and appropriate for children to accept the word of their elders in a great many matters.  Their default assumption has to be that unless they have reasons to doubt what they are told, that it is likely to be true since they do not themselves have the wherewithal to investigate every piece of information for themselves and they have an immense amount of information to assimilate as fast as they can.  Children are rationally justified in considering their parents and teachers trustworthy guides until they give signs of untrustworthiness in specific areas.  When children accept the metaphysical, ethical, and scientific guidance of their parents they are justified even if what their parents and teachers are saying is false.  This is not faith as the children are not making any willful choice to reject evidence in principle but rather a justified deference to those more expert than they are.

During this period, rather than train children in the rigorous standards of critical thought which have made the modern revolution in knowledge possible, many religious people train their children to reinforce their worst, natural, human cognitive biases where it suits their religion.  Many children are trained to adopt the vice of faith in this way.  But this is a distinct issue from their default trust in their parents’ teachings about how the world works, which is rationally justified for them even if it means some of their beliefs are false.  Sometimes we can be rationally justified in believing what it is impossible for us to know, given our situation, is false.  We don’t actually have knowledge in such a situation, but we are at least blameless for our error.

So, in this context, we can understand how someone can mature into an adult with many false beliefs that, while not knowledge, were nonetheless formed through a rationally justified process of trusting the best authorities available to oneself.  From our parents and teachers we learn a wealth of true things and so we are justified in our trust even though we will inevitably pick up some false ones.

Now in my experience, many religious people hold many of their religious beliefs as though they were matters of knowledge (or high likelihood of knowledge) because (a) they do not have proper training in critical thinking skills to assess them philosophically, logically, or scientifically, or through other appropriate methods and/or (b) they have not been adequately exposed to the arguments for alternative possible beliefs to the ones they trustingly learned from their parents.

So such people may not actually hold many of their religious speculations directly by faith, i.e., by a choice to believe what is unsupported by evidence and even undermined by evidence.  Such people are just implicitly accepting the passed on beliefs of their religion as automatically as they accept all the other beliefs that came from their parents and teachers and tradition, etc.

Before specific, effective intellectual challenges to their beliefs arise, where their faith is really located is in a disposition to retain their religious beliefs (if not many others) even if they are undermined by future evidence.  So, whereas the average religious believer, prior to serious exposure to devastating arguments, believes that God is a likely true entity and also believes that water is comprised of two hydrogen elements and one oxygen element, and believes that both these perceived truths are trustworthy, she is ready to abandon the theory of the composition of water if scientists change their teaching but she has been trained in advance to affirm the God belief even if she should encounter an intellectual challenge.

Many religious believers do implicitly think belief in God is the most rational metaphysical explanation of the universe, especially before they encounter vigorous challenge to that assumption.  They do not really think they are being especially defiant of evidence.  Yet their belief that faith is a virtue disposes them to defy the evidence should a strong argument be made against their belief just the way that I may have a belief in, and general disposition towards, the virtue of courage though usually I have no need for it.  For many religious believers, even though they believe many strange things, they do not actively do so as matters of defiance of evidence until the case against their strange beliefs is made and then they activate their vice of faith, thinking it is a virtue.

And this is what is so insidious about faith.  One begins a debate with a religious believer who, despite the strangeness of what he thinks to outsiders, finds his beliefs entirely sensible given the inculcation in him of a certain intricately interconnected and seemingly coherent view of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, science, history etc. all together from a young age by the same people who taught him innumerable reliable, proven, practical things as well.  One then brings to light for this religious believer all the inconsistencies internal to the believer’s religious system of thought and all the inconsistencies between the religious system and what is known about history and science and morality and metaphysics, etc.  One creates in the religious believer cognitive dissonance and the room for doubt.  One clarifies the rules of logic and the scientific and philosophical methods and attitudes and standards of evidence which have separated the modern era from areas of such slower intellectual progress.  And this sensible person who believes in their religion because it made sense to them has a choice: engage in a process of correcting for all these inconsistencies by abandoning the received religious beliefs as erroneous or cling to those beliefs while admitting they are unfounded or undermined by the evidence.

Some religious believers will still insist they have the most rational account, of course.  I was this kind of religious believer for most of my religious life.  In retrospect, I relatively rarely had faith except for one period where I sort of did—but that’s a story for another time.  But such believers who will make modifications to their beliefs about metaphysics, science, history, ethics, etc. in order to keep their religious beliefs both internally consistent and consistent with their beliefs in non-religion specific matters, to some extent are avoiding deliberately having faith.  Sometimes they become rationalizers who distort their views on a host of issues just to keep their religious beliefs logically consistent with the rest of their thought and avoid cognitive dissonance.

And other times these religious believers wind up with religious beliefs that are more modified and compatible with the rest of what they know to be true.  Oftentimes they are still unaware of further serious problems that would cause further need to adapt.  But while ignorant of those further challenges, they still are not resorting to faith.

And of course, some of these religious believers who modify some beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance will feel like faithfulness to their religion requires biting the bullet on some issues and adopting an explicitly faith-based, willful defiance of evidence on those select issues rather than all of them.

And some believers are so intractable that they give little or no ground whatsoever and just embrace the “nuclear” (faith) option fullthroatedly.   Sometimes, such people even become outright misologists who fear and distrust reason itself.

This account, I think, explains in part why many religious believers start out thinking their beliefs completely sensible, even obviously true, and yet within the space of even a relatively short debate will wind up switching gears drastically and saying things like “but that’s why you need faith!”  They often shift from thinking what they have to say should be totally comprehensible and persuasive to conceding that of course there are no good reasons for their positions but of course that’s not a reason to abandon them.

That, I think, is because they initially overestimate the justification for their beliefs and faith is the fail safe built in by religion to protect the strangeness of their beliefs when it is finally exposed to them.  It kicks in as a “get out of cognitive dissonance free” card.

This allows religious people to convince themselves they are perfectly reasonable people who have no problem with evidence and whose religious beliefs are of course sensible (and at least likely true if not provable), even though in sudden emergencies they will become explicit enemies of evidence and reason on a dime.

And this should offer a little more insight into how faith is the poison that paralyzes religions and religious people from abandoning false beliefs and improving their practices, and, thus, why it is what is really wrong with religion and what stands in the way of truer religion (i.e. religions which are based on and reinforce truth, rather than passionately preserve and perpetuate the ossified errors of our superstitious, scientifically ignorant, and morally barbaric ancestors).

Your Thoughts?

———

For more on faith, read any post in my “Disambiguating Faith” series.  It is unnecessary to read all its posts to understand any given one.

Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Faith As Tradition

Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Faith As Guessing

Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Can Rationality Overcome Faith?

Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Heart Over Reason

Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

Implicit Faith

Agnostics Or Apistics?

The Evidence-Impervious Agnostic Theists

Faith Which Exploits Infinitesimal Probabilities As Openings For Strong Affirmations

Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith

How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don’t Have Faith, In Practice

Naturalism, Materialism, Empiricism, And Wrong, Weak, And Unsupported Beliefs Are All Not Necessarily Faith Positions

How Faith Poisons Religion

How Religious Beliefs Become Specifically *Faith* Beliefs

What About The Good Things People Call “Faith”? (Or “Why I Take Such A Strong Semantic Stand Against The Word Faith”)

Metaphysics is an important part of philosophy and for many people it is only through their religious instruction and religious categories that they ever broach some of the most profound and enduring questions and proposed answers philosophers have ever worked out.  And often religions use the power of myth, another potentially wonderful thing, as a remarkably effective tool for conveying values and metaphysical ideas straight to people’s hearts—even those who would not be able to understand abstract metaphysics or value theory.

I could go on emphasizing the positive aspects of life that countless people experience through their engagement with religion and often (wrongly) think they need faith-based religion (or religion at all) in order to have.  The things I have mentioned can be had without any reference to religion, and especially without reference to faith-based kinds, but the fact is that for a good many people it is the vehicle for getting these things that they have found most accessible or productive for them.

The problem with religious traditions is not that people get nothing good from them.  They would not exist at all were that true.  It is not that people cannot get stimulating myth, metaphysics, ritual, tradition, spiritual experience, ethical guidance etc. from religion.  The problem with problematic religions is the way that it limits people’s imaginations and practices out of faith. The last thing I want is for people to have less myth, less metaphysics, less ritual, less tradition, less spiritual experience, or less ethical guidance, etc.  I want people to have all these good things but better than most religions, as presently constituted, can provide as long as they inculcate in religious people the vice of faith as a central virtue.

What is faith and what is not faith?  And why is it the key impediment to maximizing the goods people seek in religion?

Faith, of the distinctively problematic religious kind which I think we should be criticizing, is deliberately committing to propositions, authorities, traditions, and groups beyond what is rationally warranted.

Faith is deliberately believing a proposition more strongly than evidence warrants (either when you think that the proposition is not strongly supported by evidence or is even undermined by the best evidence).  Faith is the willful treatment of one’s most cherished notions as though they were impervious to evidence.  Faith is hostility to genuine, open-ended doubting.  Faith is an improper way of using the will and emotions in reasoning which allows them to subvert reason rather than properly aid it.   And faith involves willfully putting your subjective desires ahead of objectivity and perversely calling this the real route to truth.

Because of these things, faith is unethical, not virtuous.  It is a kind of rationalization, not a form of rationality. In fact it is worse than simple rationalization, it is a deliberate commitment to rationalize.   Still worse, this form of rationalization is inculcated in children in such a way as to train them from a young age to deliberately embrace and reinforce precisely the cognitive biases that one must learn to overcome in order to be an effective critical thinker.  In this way, training in faith itself (regardless of the actual content inculcated) is an active miseducation, which undermines the work of genuine education.

Faith often also entails loyalty to a group or trust in an authoritative source beyond what is merited.   Faith is a way that an individual signals a willingness to subordinate him or herself completely to a group by forfeiting even her ability to think for herself.

Faith in the distinctively religious sense should not be allowed to be confused with rationally justified confidence, proper trust, proper loyalty, holding probable beliefs which nonetheless have some uncertainty, educated guessing, gut feelings, epiphanies,  brainstorming, hypothesizing, counter-intuitive reasoning, trusting one’s subconsciously formed intuitions, nor having beliefs that are simply based on wrong or weak arguments.  We shouldn’t let people equivocate that because many of these things are useful and are also sloppily called faith in our language, that therefore faith in the relevant religious sense which I have been explicating is a good thing.

Having given a quick summation of what faith is, let me turn to address directly how faith ruins religion.

Irrational, unmerited faithfulness to tradition with disregard to changing evidence is a primary reason that religions stagnate.  Since treating faith as a virtue means being willing to disregard evidence, outdated and refuted beliefs do not get jettisoned when new evidence comes along.  Rather faith doubles down on them (because that’s what faith does by its very nature).

Metaphysical speculations which were once vital, current, and adventuresome become ossified into brittle dogmas and new speculations which deviate from those held by faith and elevated as such to matters of personal and group identity, are dismissed, demonized, and denounced without a fair hearing.

Even new scientific ideas with powerful demonstrations and potential are treated with suspicion and contempt when they challenge dogmatically held, evidence-resistant faith beliefs.  And even the scientific ideas that are accepted are not allowed to have their full metaphysical implications realized when they threaten a belief protected by the willfulness of faith and its hostility to change and to open-minded consideration of new evidence.

Values too are frozen when treated as matters of faith.  People are actively trained and encouraged to put a disproportionate trust in the immutability of their current values and to consider value judgments closed to new evidence.  Essentially it is faith, above all else, that valorizes prejudice in both ideas and values.  And thereby it guarantees that bad ideas and bad values are very slowly, if ever, improved upon.

It is irrational beliefs, justified only by faith, which ruin genuine spiritual experiences by giving people false, misleading, and unnecessarily dogmatically limited and outdated interpretations of their meaning and value.

Faith ruins myths by taking them literally and/or dogmatically.  Since evidence is treated as irrelevant, some religious people believe in myths as literally true despite their sheer preposterousness and obvious falsehood to any competent modern critical thinker.  And when faith is placed in myths, even those who acknowledge they are not literally true wind up falsely overestimating their metaphorical truth value.

Blind faith in a myth simply because it comes from one’s own tradition means no longer critically analyzing what is true and false in it and unjustifiably elevating it over other equally good or better myths.  And for those who believe in religious myths as literally true, often other valuable myths are shunned.  Sometimes they are even suspected of evil. The problem with religion is not that it is imaginative and mythic, but that it limits the imagination by arbitrarily and excessively committing itself to some symbols, images, and characters,etc. while treating competing ones with hostility.

Faith also undermines the great value of tradition.  Tradition is an unbelievably vital and indispensable force.  The accumulated wisdom of thought and practice that is bequeathed to us through culture is what separates us from our pre-civilized ancestors.  Born outside of such wealth of ideas and institutions, into the wild with just our biology and our own devices to guide us, we would discover so staggeringly little of what we presently know about the world and about how to master it and to enjoy it.

But faith in tradition—the willingness to trust tradition beyond its ability to freshly justify what it recommends to us—threatens to turn tradition into a force for stagnation or, worse, outright regression.  Faith-based religions close their mind to the future and insist on such disproportionate belief in received tradition for its own sake as a virtue and as the precondition of virtuous and truthful living.  Rather than seeing tradition as a repository of testable hypotheses and warnings, faith in tradition (and specifically faith in religious tradition) treats tradition as what is not and never can be—a set of unquestionable and unalterable truths which should be trusted even against the emergence of new evidence that undermines the ideas and practices it recommends.

Similarly faith ruins the good community that religion might otherwise offer because it teaches each member to defer absolutely to certain authorities (be they texts or members of a hierarchy, etc.) who themselves cannot prove their credentials in any evidence-based way.  Such disproportionate deference to authorities is anti-egalitarian and an impediment to rational and moral progress.  It arrests or retards intellectual, moral, and political progress.  Those who impose such a rule are authoritarian in mind and practice.  Faith, as the opposite of skepticism, ruins people’s relationships to their religious communities by making them slaves to books and priests, incapable of radical reform and harmfully stifled in their possibilities for creative self-expression.

In these ways and more, faith ruins trust.  It ruins loyalty.  It ruins reason.  It ruins tradition.  It ruins philosophy.  It ruins values.  It ruins spirituality.  It ruins community participation.  In every case the distinctively faith-based gesture is to treat these things in ways that are excessively loyal to what has been even when it is irrational for the present and the future.  In every case the distinctively faith-based gesture is to limit the horizons of discovery out of an unjustified and unrevisable allegiance to a way of thinking or acting that cannot stand up to reason and might very well be improved upon if only free, rigorous, and critical thought were chosen instead.

Much about religion could be redeemed.  Much in religion could be seamlessly updated and improved in rationalistic ways, were it not for faith—the true poison currently killing religion and numerous other things of value along with it.  All the actual constructive change which does occur in religion happens in spite of faith, not because of it.  Most of the good benefits that religious people do get from religion is in spite of its inculcation of faith, not because of it.

Your Thoughts?

__________________

For my views on how to constructively approach religion and spirituality beyond faith, see my posts True Religion?,  Towards Atheistic Religions (Or Away From Them, Depending On How You, On Defending True Spirituality And Taking The Word Back From Spiritually Bankrupt Fundamentalism, I Am Interviewed About My Personal (Atheistic) Religiosity/Spirituality, and Is It A Waste Of Time For Atheists To Care About Spirituality?

For more on faith, read any post in my “Disambiguating Faith” series.  It is unnecessary to read all its posts to understand any given one.

Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Faith As Tradition

Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Faith As Guessing

Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Can Rationality Overcome Faith?

Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Heart Over Reason

Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

Implicit Faith

Agnostics Or Apistics?

The Evidence-Impervious Agnostic Theists

Faith Which Exploits Infinitesimal Probabilities As Openings For Strong Affirmations

Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith

How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don’t Have Faith, In Practice

Naturalism, Materialism, Empiricism, And Wrong, Weak, And Unsupported Beliefs Are All Not Necessarily Faith Positions

How Faith Poisons Religion

This is what most Christians think, following the book of Hebrews, was what happened with the ancient Jews. God gave them a sacrificial system and various archetypes so that when Jesus came they would have a framework of metaphors and symbols with which to properly understand the meaning of Christ’s life and work.  Lewis essentially extends this concept to the non-Hebraic world and thinks that God was not simply allowing all other cultures to get things totally wrong and not know him at all.  Rather he thinks God was giving different mythic and symbolic arrow signs to the same eventual historical fact of Christ’s salvific work.

This is how Lewis both can redeem the value of the pagan mythologies which he loved deeply and also how he, being so well-versed in mythology, could bring himself to believe in the literal truth of a story that bore all the markings of having been derived from what he knew were earlier mythic stories.  Lewis convinced himself that the myths became fact in the case of Jesus.  Jesus was not special for being non-mythical, but for being the historical instantiation of the myth as no longer a symbolic story but a true one as well.

What struck me most and always stuck with me is how strongly Lewis felt that without this explanation he simply could not be a Christian.  This rather convenient and extraordinarily unlikely story he told himself was pivotal for his believing that Christianity could be true.  And, ironically, it is an idea that many of the believers who lean on Lewis as an intellectual crutch to prop up their faiths would probably find uncompelling and unbiblical.

What struck me about this was that for many believers the central idea that keeps them believing is one that other believers would find wholly inadequate or, even, heretical.  Also any given believer I encounter is readily willing to agree with me that any one portion of their generally accepted faith or another is false.  Sometimes I talk to Christians who tell me outright there is no devil.  Plenty of course immediately concede the whole Old Testament is filled with mythic stories not to be taken literally.  Others insist that of course heaven’s not a “place” but it’s just some kind of “state of being close to God”.  Others will flatly admit that of course we can’t make God do anything with our prayers.  And others will say of course God is not the kind of being that has thoughts like we do or is personal in any recognizable sense to the ways we are.  Or, of course Jesus didn’t literally raise from the dead.  And so on and so forth.

My point is that you could probably get from any given Christian a refutation of some part of Christianity that is not important to them while they hold fast that some other part is what really makes the difference and keeps them Christian.  You could even theoretically have two given Christians on opposite ends.  One saying that if she had to believe the entire Old Testament was literal to be a Christian, she just couldn’t believe, and another saying that if the entire Old Testament is not literally true then the whole thing might as well be false and so she must believe even the ludicrous seeming parts or believe nothing at all.

If one given Christian conceived of God as another one does, he would not believe at all (and vice versa).  This is maddening as an atheist because Christians always get offended when you characterize them as believing x, that the vast majority of Christians believe but which of course the enlightened person you’re talking to understands is false and not “real Christianity.”

What strikes me as interesting is that if you add up the arguments different Christians themselves make you could pretty much refute almost the entirety of Christianity.  Any given Christian already accepts an argument that would be the death knell to the center of another Christian’s faith if that other one believed it.

I have noticed another related irony to this one.  Atheists do the inverse thing with respect to religion.

Even though we refer to religion with one simple word, it is really comprised of a constellation of things (and any given religion may only have some number of these features and miss others altogether—making “religion” more of a “family resemblance” term than the demarcation of a specific one thing).  Religions are each composed of some unique combination of some of the following things: myth, ritual, hierarchy, metaphysics, ethics, superstition, supernaturalism, belief in unseen agencies, priests, prophets, asceticism, festivals, meditation, tradition, supplication, spiritual experiences, mysticism, dogmatism, identity-markers, faith, etc., etc.

Many atheists do not just disbelieve in God but also criticize religion—not just particular religions’ particular actions or institutions but religion itself as somehow wrong and harmful even beyond its false beliefs.

What I find curious is that different atheists will put their finger on different aspects of religion as its damaging parts and concede that there is some redeemable value in other things religion does.  So for one atheist, the real problem is historical associations with patriarchy, while for another it is its talk of “spirituality”, and for another it is its reliance on rituals as a tool of brainwashing, and for another it is the hubris with which the religious claim metaphysical knowledge.

Of course, many atheists will criticize numerous aspects of religion and not just one.  But what is interesting to me is that they will also concede that while parts x and y of religion are fatally flawed morally and should be abandoned, another part, z, is a fine thing, worth salvaging and transplanting into some irreligious framework.

Ironically, some atheists might want to salvage ritual and others might want to salvage spirituality and others might want to retain robust metaphysical speculation.  And still yet others think that not only the religious but everyone must have some kind of “faith”.  And just as you could probably compile each individual Christian’s rejection of a part of Christianity into a refutation of the total system, you could probably piece together all atheist’s proposals for salvaging different parts of religion into a complete defense of all the aspects of religion.  And would that be a defense of religion itself?

For my part, I want to say that most of the component pieces of religion, the activities which comprise it, really can be salvaged and put on a better footing.  We can have spirituality and ritual and speculative metaphysics and mysticism and myths and festivals and identity-forming traditional bonds, etc.

But the one feature of religion which is unsalvagable to me is faith.  Faith is the evil in religion as far as I am concerned.  Faith is the root of the evil of dogma, the evil of religious authoritarianism, and the evil of religions’ hostility to knowledge and to change.  And I think opposition faith is what truly separates the atheist from the religious to the atheist’s credit—even as there is much left in religion that atheists do not well enough salvage yet, to our discredit.

In my follow up post to this one, “Disambiguating Faith: How Faith Poisons Religion”, I put a finer point on what faith is and is not and why it is the real problem with religion which every atheist should oppose with little qualification and avoid replicating in their atheistic conceptions and practices in the world.

Your Thoughts?

Popular atheism in America celebrates versions of naturalism, materialism, empiricism, and so on, that are often based on weak arguments or even on no arguments at all. Popular atheism in America is already faith – and I’m sympathetic to the Christians who refer to it as such. Unfortunately, popular atheism is often just as scientifically illiterate and closed-minded as the worst Christianity. I love it when an atheist tells me that our universe is all that exists. I like to ask: How do you know? What’s your argument? And I have yet to meet a single atheist who can answer those questions.

Popular atheism is not a faith position.  What Eric is encountering are inarticulate, under-informed, or conceptually confused atheists (or maybe in some cases only atheists who happen to disagree with him).  But none of that amounts to adopting a faith, either implicitly or explicitly.  The salient connotations of the word faith, as it relates to manners of believing among modern Western religious people and as it is denounced by contemporary popular atheism, must be clearly distinguished from other instances of believing with no argument, or based on weak arguments, wrong arguments, or appeals to authority, etc.  Someone can be wrong or argue badly or defer to authorities without having an analogue of the kind of religious faith which is at issue in debates about the justification of religious beliefs and practices.

In this and my next posts, I will lay out some of the relevant features of religious faith which are crucially missing from popular atheist forms of belief  and whose absence makes accusing most atheists of faith a matter of false, unfair, and misleading equivalence.  The first point is simple:  Atheists explicitly reject faith as a source of justification for beliefs.

Now, just because a group denies they do something does not of itself mean they are not guilty of that very thing.  Atheists might still have some kind of implicit faith.  But in the case of robust modern Western religious faith, one of its distinguishing features is that it involves a willingness to explicitly, deliberately, and as a matter of virtue believe things which are under-supported by evidence or counter-indicated by evidence.

Often faith even goes an eggregious step further and involves a commitment to ignore or rationalize away all future counter-evidence.  The chosen nature of religious faith is an essential ingredient distinguishing it from other kinds of unstable beliefs and is one of the most important parts of the atheist critique of it.

Insofar as the contemporary atheist insists that faith is a vice and not a virtue, something to be rooted out of oneself rather than cultivated in oneself, she is already doing something different than the religious faith adherent.  If she is nonetheless guilty of shoddily apportioning her beliefs to evidence you can at least call her on that and by her own avowed principles she will be forced to either come up with better evidence, soften her commitment to her belief, abandon her position outright, or be charged with an intellectual/moral hypocrisy.  By contrast, if you point out that the religious person is not apportioning his belief to evidence properly but rather granting himself whatever beliefs he likes purely on faith his principles allow him to take this as a compliment!

In short faith of the modern religious kind denounced by atheists cannot be had by accident. It involves acts of volition which enable religious people to treat it as a matter of special commendation and justifies atheists in treating it as a morally culpable thing religious people have control to stop doing.  And I don’t know of any representative atheist types who would put volitional faith in the virtue category rather than the vice one.

To elide this fundamental difference in epistemic principles and equivocate by imputing to “faith” to both people is deeply unfair to the atheist.

But even if the atheist’s rejection of explicit faith is significant, might the average contemporary atheist have enough “implicit faith” to nonetheless be guilty of the charge of faith?   I think not.  But I will save my arguments against generally treating wrong, weak, and missing arguments as faith positions for other posts. I will also defend atheists against the charge of holding naturalism, materialism, and empiricism by faith.

Your Thoughts?

__________________

For more on faith, read any or all posts in my “Disambiguating Faith” series.  It is unnecessary to read all its posts to understand any given one.

Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Faith As Tradition

Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Faith As Guessing

Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Can Rationality Overcome Faith?

Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Heart Over Reason

Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

Implicit Faith

Agnostics Or Apistics?

The Evidence-Impervious Agnostic Theists

Faith Which Exploits Infinitesimal Probabilities As Openings For Strong Affirmations

Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith

How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don’t Have Faith, In Practice

Naturalism, Materialism, Empiricism, And Wrong, Weak, And Unsupported Beliefs Are All Not Necessarily Faith Positions

How Faith Poisons Religion

First, I want to stress, contra-Eric, that “atheism” is the best and most accurate general term we have for non-theists.

Eric complains that “atheism” characterizes him negatively in terms of what he does not believe (as though that were more important than the many positive things he does believe). He also worries that the term atheism has too much baggage which leads people to make misleading assumptions about his metaphysics (e.g. that he is a materialist when he is not).

What this ignores is that a concerted and potentially successful effort is underway to make clear that the only thing atheism itself strictly means is that one lacks belief in any personal gods and that it need not mean anything else.

This most stripped down, strictly negative, “dictionary” meaning for atheism is the one we should emphasize for several reasons.

First of all, it is accurate. Regardless of whether previous atheists all got lumped in with materialism or nihilism or existentialism or communism or any other questionable “-ism”, the term is the clearest, broadest, most natural, and most familiar candidate available for contrasting our shared position with theism. While the word is taboo in many places, it is a more natural catch-all than other words with more content that would divide people too much for a true classification scheme. I am perfectly fine with the proliferation of atheist metaphysics and atheist ethical groups and political groups, etc. But on the most general level of categorization, an atheist is an atheist if she simply lacks belief in, or worship of, personal gods.

This bareness and simplicity of “Dictionary Atheism” unifies us as a competing bloc against the large contingent of theists, while also being empty enough to not constrain different atheists from having different particular views about epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, politics, etc. (just as theists do). If agnostic atheists, gnostic atheists, and deists can all find common cause as opponents of theism–i.e., as atheists–then there is a unified front against theism that comes in handy on a central issue, even if particular kinds of atheists diverge from each other in any number of particulars from there.

Eric also complains about going to atheist meetings where

everybody was mainly there just to be hostile towards religion (by which they pretty much all seemed to mean the conservative Christianity of the American religious right). I don’t see how hostility is ever helpful. I dislike hostility from atheists as much as I dislike it from religious fundamentalists. I have no interest in participating in a group whose primary purpose is the hatred of some other group. I’d prefer to build positive bridges and to expand the rational community of hope.

While I agree that it is dangerous for atheists only to be associated with the negative and to only organize as an opposition group and never as people who do anything positive, there is nonetheless still room for a level of organization on which we are an opposition group. The hegemony of irrationalistic, faith-based thinking and institutions is real. And it requires not only positive alternatives but some degree of hostile (but always non-violent) opposition to faith’s damaging ethical and political consequences.

Atheists have been treated with an enormous amount of hostility over the ages. A good part of atheists’ reputations as generally angry and hostile is actually due to religious projection of these traits into us as part of their vilification of us. Where atheists are angry and focused on their anger, often it is either a phase of getting out pent up and repressed frustrations based on cultural, familial, and ecclesiastical abuse over their personal dissent from religion. They deserve this outlet, even if they should then be steered into constructive channels from there.

Other times atheist anger is a proper and calibrated response to injustices, including the unfairness of manifestly unqualified religious leaders and institutions being held up as authorities to the detriment of morality and knowledge.

Do angry atheists sometimes go over the top? Yes, regularly activist atheists are as unnecessarily intemperate in their rhetoric as activist liberals or activist conservatives or activist environmentalists or activist feminists or Tea Party activists or members of any other activist groups. But does that mean they should never organize specifically around their opposition to unwarranted religious power over hearts, minds, and governments? No way. We can encourage activist atheists to temper their rhetoric without counter-productively conflating the whole endeavor of being an opposition movement with being a hate group. Conflict is part of life. We should be as respectful as possible but that does not mean treating conflict as an inherent evil to be avoided at all costs.

An atheist opposition movement is very necessary. Atheists (and other God-ignoring scientists and academics) have for a couple of centuries now been doing the positive, constructive science, metaphysics, ethics, cosmology, etc. that Eric wants us to focus on. And yet all the positive advances in god-indifferent ideas have not by themselves been able to supplant numerous theistic and superstitious ideas or institutions in the cultural mainstream.

Countless natural and social scientists and philosophers have advanced our knowledge in ways which de facto undermine theism and religious beliefs and institutions and should naturally have made them irrelevant and obsolete. And yet, those institutions chug on (and often even grow) because all the positive alternatives in the world make no difference to the mainstream culture as long as they only exist in the parallel universe of academia and science labs.

And even if we were able to mainstream knowledge about alternatives to theism and theistic religion, this will not by itself win over people who feel no compunction to abandon their existing beliefs. So what if there would be an evolutionary metaphysics on the market that some philosopher says for some arcane reason is better than theism? If someone has deep personal, cultural, familial ties to her theism that go unchallenged, she feels as though she has no reason to ever seriously consider this new alternative. A negative attack on theism is important for people to understand why they need to leave what is comfortable to them to begin with.

And while I agree with Eric that atheists should engage in philosophical speculation and develop robust alternative accounts about metaphysics and ethics, there are dangers in defining ourselves as primarily “evolutionists” and “evolvers” as he suggests.

First and foremost, in the popular mind there are few rules if any constraining speculative thinking. People think that when it comes to speculation, we are free to believe whatever we want as our “faith-based choice”. Atheists who center themselves not on a call for more epistemological rigor but rather on a speculative metaphysics would be to the average person “Just another speculative, faith-based belief system, only as valid as any other, including theism”. Even worse, we would be cast as “just another religion” which can be waved away as easily as one waves away a foreign culture’s beliefs as “maybe good for that culture but not at all a challenge to my own religion”.

We would be “just another faith” since we are no longer just speculating metaphysically but defining and identifying ourselves by a metaphysical hypothesis that is insufficiently grounded in evidence to justify the strength of our commitments.

I think an atheist metaphysician may feel well enough justified in believing in cosmological evolution to qualifiedly believe in it and hypothesize about it. But to make it a defining feature of one’s identity and a foundational belief that influences one’s entire way of thinking in a controlling way risks being formally identical enough to other, irrationalistic faiths for the other faiths to see an opening and say, “See ‘Evoluitonism’ is just another faith—no more justified than ours—and therefore there is no need to abandon the faith you already are attached to for something that is only another faith.”

And not only this, but the preexisting faiths already cozy up nicely to people’s anthropomorphizing, superstitious brains in a more naturally intuitive way than evolutionary thinking does. In the competition among leaps of faith, faith in a purposeful person in the sky offering love and eternal life would likely trounce a vague, indifferent, counter-intuitive, unguided process like cosmic evolution which still leaves the question open “where did the first thing come from since it could not have evolved out of any prior thing?” I think if it was faith in personal gods vs. faith in all-encompassing metaphysical evolution, a populace which already will not even accept the scientifically sure evolution by natural selection (but constantly demands either creationism or personalistic theistic evolution) will certainly choose the personal gods over the impersonal evolution principle. It’s a losing proposition.

And not only would evolutionary metaphysics persuade hardly anyone in the cultural mainstream, there would be a much worse consequence: advocating it and centralizing our identities based on it would lose us the moral high ground. We would no longer credibly be able to define ourselves as those who stand for rational scrupulousness and against faith. I am for speculation but not for the elevation of speculative beliefs to a greater role and influence than their degree of sureness warrants. This is what separates me first and foremost from the faith-based thinker and I want to keep it that way.

And, finally, the worst consequence of defining ourselves as “evolutionists” is that it would play right into the fundamentalists’ hands. They desperately want to drag down the theory of evolution to the status of “mere, faith-based speculation” and a “prejudicing worldview”.

By trumpeting speculative metaphysical evolutionary theories as foundational to our thinking and identifying as “evolvers”, we would be actively helping them in their efforts to confuse all evolutionary thinking with “just another unscientific, faith-based worldview”. We would be undermining the crucial effort to establish in the public mind the truth that evolution by natural selection is a scientific theory that should be rationally compelling to all people regardless of faith commitments and that should be capable of undermining many religious beliefs which its objective truth objectively falsifies.

Publicly equivocating in our use of the concept of evolution and extending it liberally and ideologically to solve every other cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical problem—and doing all of this as part of building an inevitably partisan community identity—would add all sorts of counter-productive baggage to the theory of evolution that it does not need and which fundamentalists have been working hard to saddle it with for decades.

Evolution’s primary association should only be with scientific neutrality, not with any one community, not with wishful speculation, and not with overreaching, all encompassing accounts of everything in existence.

The worst consequence to fear from Eric’s suggestion is that fundamentalists are able to disingenuously claim that evolution by natural selection is not the outcome of the best, most objective science, but is only supported by a metaphysical prejudice towards an evolutionary cosmos. If evolution becomes a matter of faith, a dogma we are caught looking to sneak under every nook and cranny of existence, then we give ammunition to the lie that even biological evolution is only believed in because of that preexisting dogmatic faith that evolution is everything.

And once evolution is tied up with faith, then it loses any standing to challenge people’s existing faiths. And, again, when given the choice between their own, preexisting arbitrary faith attachments on the one hand and an alternative set of arbitrary faith attachments on the other, the vast majority feel justified in sticking with their own arbitrary beliefs and ignoring the alternatives.

Your Thoughts?