As for me, I don't "want to believe" things. What I want is for the model in my head to match reality. To have reasons other than apparent truth for believing anything is to invite self-deception. It's hard enough to winnow out the nonsense our culture has saddled us with, without actually rooting for some of it.
If you want to go to the extreme of arguing that using evidence as a justification for believing (or not believing) in something is an act of faith, then I don't think we can have a reasonable argument about anything.
And yes, the idea of using evidence as justification is itself an act of faith. This is not that extreme a position - take a look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for evidence (ironic, isn't it?) of that. At some point, you have to take some basic principles as given. Otherwise, you end up with circular reasoning.
The decision to slice the world into atheist vs. religious is itself a rather arbitrary one, just like how it's weird (when you think about it) that skin color has become the source of 500 years of hate, while nobody blinks twice (ha, ha) about someone's eye color. Why not slice the world into open-minded vs. close-minded people? There are open-minded theists (Wall is one of them) and close-minded atheists, just like there are close-minded theists and open-minded atheists.
I can only believe that those positions hold such a cherished part of his personally identity, that he is unable, or unwilling to do it.
For one thing, even the best philosophers and epistemologists have been unable to do so for millennia, all swell foops aside.
I remember, my first week of college, I had lunch with my advisor for the normal "how are things going?" chat. I said that I really liked my physics course, but I thought the psychology/neuroscience seminar was frustratingly vague. I liked that there was always a right answer in physics, but in psychology there're all these competing theories, and some experiments will point one way while others point the opposite. It was all a contradictory mess of evidence, and you seemingly couldn't draw any conclusions from it.
He replied that once you get to the higher levels of physics, it was like that too. (He'd done his Ph.D at Harvard as part of the team that won the 2001 Nobel Prize for discovering Bose-Einstein condensates.) There are not clear right and wrong facts, there's only data, and sometimes the data will point one way and sometimes it will point the other. And in order to make sense of that data, you need to be able to hold all the possible ideas, both right and wrong, in your head at once, so that you can sort them out.
I basically ignored him and then floundered through college. But once I got out and into the working world, I found that pretty much all the leaders I admired had this ability to hold multiple contradictory ideas in mind at once and yet still make a decision. And the authority figures I didn't respect lacked this ability, as did most of the people who never managed to rise into leadership positions. It was a pretty discomforting realization, since I wanted to move into a leadership position and yet my whole life up till then, I'd been seeking certainty in my intellectual life.
When you reach a contradiction, there're a couple of possible responses. You can go narrower, discarding the evidence that doesn't fit your hypothesis. This is the Ayn Rand approach - "Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. One of them is sure to be false." Or you can go deeper, unpacking each idea into its constituent parts and keeping those parts that you can reconcile between the two. This is the Hegelian synthesis.
It's not that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but if you want to have a big impact on the world, your thinking has to encompass the world, including all the parts that don't fit with your preconceptions. If you limit yourself to faith, then the only people who can relate to your ideas are those that themselves believe on faith, while if you limit yourself to evidence, then the only people who can relate to your ideas are those who themselves believe in evidence. You've excluded half the world from being able to hold a dialogue with you.
That's why I mentioned Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions above. Kuhn's contribution was to document how prevailing scientific thought shifts over time. And he found that during periods of "normal science", scientists operate under the Randian paradigm - they sweep evidence under the rug that doesn't agree with the prevailing hypotheses. But once in a while, someone will come along that actually looks at the experimental results that have been recorded as anomalies, and instead of discarding them, turns them over in his head until they can be made to make sense with the existing body of evidence. Like Einstein and relativity. And then you have a paradigm shift, and the body of knowledge advances to include both the old laws and the new evidence that has been discovered.
> Holding onto faith in creationism and other religion-based myths is holding many people back from understanding what real evidence we have about the world.
When did I say that all religion was good or that faith never caused any harm? The thesis I was arguing against was that someone who has faith or mentions god is suddenly less capable of rationality.
> If you want to go to the extreme of arguing that using evidence as a justification for believing (or not believing) in something is an act of faith
No this is not what I said. To paraphrase myself: There are ideas and concepts that go beyond physical reality, for which there is neither evidence for or against. People choose to believe one way or another for personal reasons, neither one is more rational. It makes a lot of self-proclaimed rationalist atheists wriggle and squirm, but if you truly believe that you can only believe things based on evidence, then you can not believe God does or doesn't exist, because God is a concept which is greater than our physical powers of observation.
Even if your try to invoke Occam's Razor, it all comes down to definitions, which of course is tough to pin down when it comes to something like God. You can define God literally as a bearded man in a throne and then it seems unlikely. You can define God as just one thing, anything, which is above our cognitive capacity, and then it seems likely.
And maybe you think I'm just playing games here, but I'm not. People are important. People's inspiration is important. Being able to say "I think there is a purpose to the universe" is an important thought to some people. Those people might even do great things that you admire (like, say, invent Perl). To come around and just flip the loony bit on because someone mentions the G word is not quite so cooly rational as said individual would like to believe.
I'm not here arguing for religion, I'm arguing for the fair judgement of an individual's true quality.
But I think Larry is not talking about this sort of metaphysical question. He believes, for example, that Jesus lived on earth and is the son of God. And notice how he tortures himself to simultaneously hold both a belief in evolution, and devine omnipotence. Its rather interesting to see.
and why give weight to the ramblings of the religious but not to all schizophrenics?
shouldn't we give both views equal respect without calling to reason?
edit: referring to the "difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences/delusions/hallucinations" symptoms when i said schizophrenics
Exactly! And vice versa!
Who said anything about "giving weight" to "ramblings"? You are fixated on everything being about truth and facts and who's right, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Maybe you don't want anything bigger than observable facts and theories based thereupon in your life, but I hope when your parents say they love you you don't tell yourself that it's simply endorphins firing in their brains.
would you rather i countered an argument with untruths and lies?
what i'm trying to say is, if you are willing to give credibility to any assertion which is without proof, then you have to give an equal amount to credibility to _all_ assertions without proof
i.e, all religions equally, fairies, leprechauns, elfs, russel's teapot, a furry-god, Elvis still alive, alien-invasions and abductions, etc..
and problems arise then, if you give credibility to _all_ religions, there will be contradictions
- they have different creation stories and timelines
- multiple 'unique' prophets
- multiple 'chosen' tribe/people
etc..
If the answer is yes, that's fine, but remember that you are taking that assertion on faith. There is simply no evidence one way or the other about what lies outside the bounds of human knowledge.