This is Amusing . . .

. . . but it seems like a strange article to appear on the website of a Catholic newspaper. It amuses me. I am amused.

Just Link-Surfing

Some time ago I read somewhere an explanation about how one can choose beliefs that struck me as extremely silly. The author claimed that since "believe" is a verb, and since verbs are actions, and since we have to choose to act, that it just stands to reason that we can choose to believe things. I've been writing about that argument as I remember it, but since I can't find it I don't feel comfortable sharing my argument yet. It could be that I misremember, or that I've invented a memory. I don't know. I thought it was in Paul E. Little's Know Why You Believe, but a quick flip-through hasn't even revealed a sensible section of the book for that to appear in.

So I was tooling around the internet trying to find some references to that argument when I came across another at a site called 1 in Faith: A Christian Bible Study. The sentence I liked about this argument was this:

In English the verb for faith is "to believe," as faith does not have its own verb.

The author's right of course. If I have a belief about something, I believe it, but if I have faith in something I don't faithe it. This contributes to the confusion in our discourse about belief. There's more to their argument that I don't appreciate as much--such as trying to completely separate faith in something from the belief that the something exists--but this is a useful nugget.

Now I just need to find that original bit I was looking for.

Another Interesting Article

Karen Armstrong has an article at WaPo discussing the differences between faith and belief. She seems to suffer from a healthy dose of the genetic fallacy, and also seems to put a bit too much stock into vocabulary dictating reality, but it's a pretty interesting read.

Even more interesting is Paula Kirby's skeptical response.

The Marxists are Coming! The Marxists are Coming!

Seems that conservatives are content to toss buzzwords around when they're not upping their dosage of crazy. Sometimes, the two get blended. Not only are "Socialism" and "Communism" applied to the Democratic side of the Health Care Reform debate, I've been informed that

[t]he pile we are in did not start because of capitalism it began with FDR - even before that as the Marxist movement began to purposefully and openly (at least in Provda[sic]) target our schools and our media as early as 1900.

Where the hell do they come up with this shit?

A Hail of Bullet-Points

Even though I'm committed to trying to keep up my blogging pace of the last few days, I have a lot of grading to do today, so I'll just list some bullet points for now.

• One way to get people to believe crazy things is to lie. Steve Benen has posted about how Republican senator Mike Pence is so successful in spreading his lies about the Health Care bill. (via Matthew Yglesias)
• The Texas Board of Education is trying to promote the teaching of "the biblical motivations of America's settlers and founders" in public schools--and they have so much clout in the textbook industry, it could affect the whole country.
• Dale Neumann, lethally stupid Wisconsin father, has been convicted of reckless homicide in the diabetes death of his daughter Madeline, and faces up to twenty-five years in jail.
• According to John Tantillo of Fox News, President Obama's tendency to explain is a bad thing. Right. Give me the good old days, when we had the Decider . . .
• "Hell is a morally repugnant doctrine. People wonder why God would send people to eternal punishment." Nevertheless, 59% of Americans believe in it, according to one poll.
• Jefferson County, Alabama is going bankrupt. Why? Because the Republicans in power there lowered taxes and put public services in the hands of private enterprise. Thank you, capitalism.

I really need to get my brain under control. I'm still going in too many directions. Maybe once I get all of this out of my system, and once I've finished my grading, I'll be able to focus.

Climate Change Deniers: Still Deluded

It doesn't take much for a belief to spread--all it requires is that someone convincing present it and someone willing to accept it be exposed to it. When these two things meet in a situation where the stakes are high, even profitable, it can be difficult to fight against misinformation.

Regardless of the evidence presented, the "birthers" still insist Barack Obama was born outside of the United States, and is ineligible to serve as president. Likewise, regardless of the fact that there is no serious scientific debate about global climate change and humankind's contributions to it, the denialists continue to gain support through their mass media megaphones.

Anthony Watts is a California radio meteorologist whose appearances on Glenn Beck's show have bolstered the climate change deniers, but here's a video that does a good job of neutralizing Watts's claims:

(via Pharyngula)

A New (To Me) Concept: Bounded Rationality

I was reading the most recent issue of Adbusters while on break at Book Store the other night and I came across an article on economics that mentioned "bounded rationality." I'd never heard of it before, even though it's been around for a few decades. According to the Mighty Wikipedia,

bounded rationality is a concept based on the fact that rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions.

This looks to me like "reality." Why it's interesting to me is that we don't like to acknowledge that our beliefs have flaws. All of them. When we're correct, it's mostly by accident. We never have all of the information, we aren't all omniscient geniuses, and we don't have enough time--even when we use what time we have well. This is a useful idea to me.

The problems I see with our discourse about belief (and this is what drives me to keep bringing it up) is that it's rarely discourse. It's not people coming together to consider what might be true. It's usually people aiming to convince everyone else that we're right and everyone else is wrong.

Well, that doesn't work for me. It doesn't work in a democracy, or a culture like ours, or in any meaningful dialogue. I'm here mostly to correct my own ignorance, my own prejudices, and my own hostilities.

We're all just satisficers. The only way we'll make better decisions and have truer beliefs is by acknowledging that and using reason properly, in the spirits of fairness and charity.

The Limits of Faith

People living closer to the action have probably already heard about this case, in which a Wisconsin family failed to get their daughter medical care--opting instead to pray--and watched her die of untreated diabetes. Let's let the family explain:

Leilani Neumann said during videotaped testimony that the family believes the Bible says healing comes from God and that she never expected her daughter to die. The Neumanns said the girl had not been to a doctor since she was 3.

A criminal complaint said Dale Neumann told police he believed God would heal his daughter right up until she stopped breathing. He also "professed to believe God was going to bring Madeline back to life."

This case is a good example of why Richard Dawkins and Cristopher Hitchens (and to a lesser extent Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) write against religious faith in such polarizing terms. Dawkins even calls religious indoctrination child abuse in his book The God Delusion. I don't know about indoctrination, but this kind of nonsense certainly can't be explained away with vague pronouncements of freedom of religion.

To give some idea of how avoidable this death was, here's the testimony of medical experts:

Madeline's gradually declining health would have gotten acute three or four days before she died as her body began shutting down. But despite being unresponsive and in a coma, the girl could have been saved very late into the day of her death with the proper treatment.

Even people who don't wield the First Amendment in a case like this can have variations of this disorder. "It's what I believe," they say. "My belief's as valid as yours." I've even heard people talking about their own "subjective truth," as if that made any sense. But not all beliefs are valid, and there are times when the evidence has to overrule conviction. That's why actual thinkers get so frustrated with Holocaust deniers and Young Earth Creationists and people who believe God will cure diabetes or raise children from the dead because somebody wrote something 1900 years ago about a guy who lived forty years before that who is alleged to have done those things.

Faith in Science

An interesting issue brought forth by Michael Gerson at the Washington Post the other day (not to say that it's a terribly interesting editorial) about religious scientists. He identifies two competing schools of thought regarding scientists (whose jobs require that they work with empirical data exclusively) who believe in supernatural beings.

On the side that is uneasy about this relationship:

For some scientists, this combination of scientific excellence and religious faith is contradictory -- like being a geneticist and believing in unicorns or astrology. "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs," says Peter Atkins of Oxford University. "But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because [religion and science] are such alien categories of knowledge." Behind this assertion lies the assumption that the scientific category of knowledge has superseded the religious one.

The problem I have with Atkins's position is that I don't understand what he means by being "a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word." To be a scientist is to be employed as one who does science, isn't it? Can't you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and work in a lab? Maybe Atkins is making some kind of essentialist claim--I don't know. Also, I think his use of the word "knowledge" is problematic here. Certainly science and religion are competing systems of truth claims, but "knowledge" implies truth, not just truth claims. It seems he's asserting two categories of truth, and I don't see that.

Gerson goes on to explain the views of another scientist, Francis Collins, who is also an evangelical Christian, who insists "that there are two categories of knowledge, two ways of knowing. And though they are different, they are not 'alien' to one another, or contradictory." Eventually he stakes the position that

[f]or Collins, modern science and Christianity are not competing answers to the same question; they are ways of thinking about two very different sets of questions, both of which should be taken seriously.

I don't know that Christianity has ever given good reason why its truth-claims should be taken seriously. I guess I'll have to read Collins's book myself.

Aside from all of that, I have to accept Gerson's final premise: "that anti-supernaturalism is not a litmus test at the highest levels of science." Now if we could just get the religionists to apply that principle to religious tests for public office.

The Evolution of Belief

I've mentioned before that one of my current writing projects is a humor book about belief. I want to write this book because I get frustrated by people's tendencies to talk past each other when belief comes up in conversation. It's not always religious belief that causes problems--sometimes it's the more mundane stuff, and sometimes it's brought up as knowledge rather than belief. It's problematic and it's irritating.

I just finished reading Michael Shermer's book Why People Believe Weird Things, and while it was interesting, I finished the book thinking something was left undone. First of all, the book assumes that everyone uses the word "belief" in the same way--and that's not the case. Then it goes on to construct reasoned arguments about how people misuse reason in order to believe in notions like alien abduction, creationism, and even Holocaust denial. This is all valuable work, and I think Shermer's book is an important one, but the problems in communicating about belief in 21st-century America begin with the fact that not everyone means the same thing when they say they "believe" something, and very few people understand (or even recognize) the significance of a sound argument.

In yesterday's On Faith page at the Washington Post, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield addresses some of this confusion about "belief" in either creationism or evolution:

For now, I would settle for finding language that helps us end a needless 200-year-old cultural struggle, which helps nobody but the most strident ideologues. Rather than fighting against each other to determine which side is Right, we should find ways to learn from each other, precisely because we do not address these issues in the exact same ways. And to those ideologues whose vision of either science or religion is so narrow as to assume that no such learning is possible, we should say a pox on both your houses!

We can start with the phrase "believe in evolution," commonly used by so many including those reporting about the recent survey in England. Using the same word to describe faith in God and support for a scientific theory strikes me as foolish and
pernicious. It's bad for both science and faith, creating a false dichotomy between the two positions - one which serves nobody but a small group of culture warriors dedicated to making our public culture as stupid and ugly as possible.

How can one use identical language to describe the decision to follow a particular spiritual path which is necessarily beyond scientific testing, and the decision to rely on a theory which is the product of such ongoing testing? We may use the same word, but are they really the same kind of belief?

I don't think there's any serious doubt that they're not the same kind of belief, and Hirschfield is right to draw attention to this. In fact, the focus of my project is to do exactly that with the entire range of belief concepts--to highlight the nonsense embedded in our belief vocabularies. Including Hirshfield's use of the word "decision" regarding scientific beliefs.

Philosophers have done a good job of exploring knowledge, and those explorations have made it, to a certain extent, to the general public. Significantly less work about belief is as widely known. One of my struggles while writing this book is that I want it to acknowledge the serious philosophical work, but I don't want it to be serious philosophy itself. Also, I always start my work on this project by drawing an outline, and outlining is not humorous, so my zeal for the project wanes while I'm working on it.

Plus, I have several other stories and screenplays and essays to work on, and I'm busy, and I'm good at convincing myself that I'm busier than I really am, and I can be self-pitying and lazy. I guess I know what I need to work on.

On Spraining My Brain

A little while ago I wrote a post about belief that involved a discussion at Crooked Timber. Shortly after that, Dana at Edge of the American West indulged my curiosity with a followup post that was much more thoughtful and productive than my quick request for input. While I was merely looking for other people's ideas about a possible difference between mundane belief and religious belief, Dana provides an overview of ideas, draws some important distinctions, and comes to the conclusion that the CT comment

doesn’t look to me like a debate about different kinds of belief, but a debate about what should count as evidence, and whether personal religious experience gets to count.

The discussion that follows the post covers a pretty broad spectrum, from lay ideas to fairly-well developed specialist views. Some of it, I'm not afraid to admit, is over my head, but it's all interesting to consider.

This consideration of evidence in relation to belief--and, by extension, to knowledge--is at the heart of an article published by Juan Comesaña and Holly Kantin in response to another paper by Timothy Williamson in which Williamson posits that Evidence equals Knowledge. Williamson expresses this in the biconditional relationship (E<-->K). Comesaña and Kantin disagree with this based on the conditional relationship that if something is known then that something is evidence. They find fault with Williamson in this derivation of the original equation:

The proposition that p justifies S in believing that q only if S knows that p.

The evidence they use is twofold: Gettier cases and something called "the closure of justification." Gettier problems have bothered me for years, and I'm happy to think of them more. I need to familiarize myself with the closure of justification, though, because that seems closer to my interests. It has to do with justifying beliefs based on the justification of other beliefs. Man, this is fun stuff.

On a mildly related note, I came across on an article at the Buddhism Channel called "Flesh Made Soul" that boasts the tagline "Can a new theory in neuroscience explain spiritual experience to a non-believer?" I've scanned the article, but I want to go through it a little more carefully, and follow up on some of the source material. The core of the article is this:

A stunning new description of how the human body and brain communicate to produce emotional states -- including our feelings, cravings, and moods -- has all the elements needed to explain how the human brain might give rise to spiritual experiences, without the necessary involvement of a supernatural presence, according to Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California in San Diego who is also a Zen practitioner.

All I need is more time. Then I'll know everything. Or I'll believe I know everything. Or I'll have some evidence to support the belief that I know everything. Or I'll have justification for the evidence that I believe that I know everything.

I think I just sprained something.

Damn, People Are Smart #2

I keep returning to my "belief" project--it's something that's occupied at least a little part of my mind for a decade--and I've even gone so far as to request an information packet from OU's philosophy department so I could work on the material more formally (and, let's face it, more competently). The more I wander about the internet, engaging with aspects of my idea, the more I find that really smart people have been touching on elements of it already, and touching on them in a way that could prove really helpful to me.

At EotAW last week there was a discussion of truth and lies in politics, prompted by McCain's pathetic attack ads and the Obama campaign's more dignified response. In the comments, a guy named Matt Weiner, who's an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University, linked to a post he'd written a few years ago about the practical and ethical implications of lying. It's great stuff, and I'm encouraged by his final paragraph:

The idea of a social epistemic responsibility is a pretty big one that could use some more working out, but I remain somewhat optimistic that we can establish a sense in which someone who tells falsehoods shouldn't be believed.

I'm not terribly interested in the last part--I don't care too much for the notion of "should"--but social epistemic responsibility (as it relates to one's obligations regarding formation, investigation, and expression of beliefs) is a great starting point for me.

Huh?

As I muck around with ideas of belief, I keep coming across strange notions, such as this one in the comments of a thread at Crooked Timber:

Patrick 08.06.08 at 2:21 pm
Slocum- There’s a difference between literally believing something and religiously believing it. Lots of people religiously believe in the Left Behind style of apocalyptic prophecy. It doesn’t have an effect on their day to day lives, and they plan for the future just like everyone else, but it has meaning for them in their… lets call it their symbolic life. In places where they’re interacting with symbols, that’s their allegiance. And that’s why its kind of scary, because for most people politics are a symbolic matter.

Is there really "a difference between literally believing something and religiously believing it?" If anyone can help me figure this out, I'd be most grateful, because it reads like nonsense to me.