Philosophy

Misunderstanding Faith vs. Analytic Thinking

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2013 02 16 How Critical Thinkers Lose Faith in GodThis article from Scientific America is from back in May 2012, but I’ve seen it making the rounds today on Facebook, so I thought I’d point out a couple of problems with it very briefly. The article starts by observing that if you encourage people to think analytically, their belief in God falls in subsequent surveys. I don’t question that result, but the article then goes off the rails a bit:

These studies demonstrate yet another way in which our thinking tendencies, many of which may be innate, have contributed to religious faith. It may also help explain why the vast majority of Americans tend to believe in God. Since System 2 thinking requires a lot of effort, the majority of us tend to rely on our System 1 thinking processes when possible. Evidence suggests that the majority of us are more prone to believing than being skeptical. According to a 2005 poll by Gallup, 3 out of every 4 Americans hold at least one belief in the paranormal

Aside from the reference to this characteristic being “innate” (which is spurious, at least given the contents of the article) and the too-easy parallel between supernaturalism and religion, the primary red herring is the implication that System 2 (which virtuously requires “a lot of effort”) is superior. Is it? Is it really a question of just being too lazy to think hard and therefore invariably realize that God doesn’t exist?

Well, try Googling “analytic thinking empathy“. You will find a series of articles describing that analytic thinking suppresses empathy, and that empathy also suppresses analytic thinking. Does this fact complicate the naive assumption that System 2 thinking is automatically superior? To my mind, all this article really demonstrates is that when one starts out with an extreme bias towards sciemtism, one ends up with scientism. Rationality is obviously important, and analytic thinking is valuable. I didn’t get two graduate degrees in analytic disciplines (economics and systems engineering) without realizing that fact. But there’s more to humanity than analytic thinking.

Faith Is Rational

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My guest stint at Times And Seasons went well enough that they decided to let me join as a permablogger, for which I am both grateful and excited. This coming Monday, I’m going to start posting weekly with the first in a series I’m planning about modern secularism and Mormonism. But I’ve got some general comments about the claims of modern secularists that I want to get to right now.

1. Atheism and Christianity: Not Apples to Apples

Any debate between a modern secularist (i.e. New Atheist or New Skeptic) and someone of religious faith starts with a tactical advantage for the atheist because atheism, as a category, has no history, no text, and no dogma. There’s virtually no content and therefore nothing to defend. The representative of religion, by contrast, is expected to answer for the history, text, and dogma not of theism (which, like atheism, is a mere category), but of Christianity (or other religions), which is a particular instance of theism.

2013 02 13 New AtheistsA fair debate would either pair generic atheism with generic theism, or it would pit a specific instance of atheism against a specific instance of theism. It’s not as though there are no organized instantiations that fall under the broad umbrella of atheism, after all. Maoism would be one particularly unpalatable example, since it clearly embraced atheist belief in the non-existence of God and drew the conclusion atheists often draw which is that religion is irrational and dangerous. As a result, Mao bloodily repressed religion during the Cultural Revolution. Am I suggesting that atheism ought to be held responsible for the actions of every instantiation of atheism? Absolutely not, nor am I suggesting that Maoism is typical of atheism any more than radical Islamic terrorists are representative of religion (or even of Islam). I’m just illustrating how much of a tactical advantage it is to only have to defend a generic abstraction.

The reality is that the New Atheists actually do make specific, concrete claims that deserve scrutiny and require defense. In particular, the New Atheism entails myopicy materialism, radical reductionism, and extreme empiricism. Each of these is a contentious philosophical proposition, and none of them can be defended by pointing to scientific, quantitative experimentation. Nope, it’s experimentation itself that actually requires philosophical defense.

It’s not that modern secularists are deliberately avoiding these tough questions, of course. It’s more a matter of the fish not knowing what “wet” is. Scientism is so ascendant in particular regions of Western civilization that folks aren’t even aware that they have a specific paradigm, and much less that it might have feet of clay. 

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Zoot Suit Riot

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I graduated high school in 1999, so I was there for the late-90s swing revival that was to a large degree kicked off by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies (charming title, right?) single “Zoot Suit Riot”. I saw Reel Big Fish live, enjoyed local band Fighting Gravity, and listened to my bargain-bin find Land of the Rising Ska endlessly.

This was all a few years before Wikipedia launched, however, and even more years before we all developed the knee-jerk reaction to look up any unfamiliar word or phrase instantly to learn more about it. By the time I developed that habit, ska, swing revival and Zoot Suit Riot were all far from my mind.

Until just a couple of days ago when a random blog post about cover art for an obscure new novel pointed out that the protagonist was depicted wearing a zoot suit. Wait, what? A zoot suit is a real thing? Yes, it is:

A zoot suit (occasionally spelled zuit suit) is a men’s suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there. Not only is the zoot suit a real thing, but so were the zoot suit riots:

The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of riots in 1943 during World War II that exploded in Los Angeles, California, between white sailors and Marines stationed throughout the city and Latino youths, who were recognizable by the zoot suits they favored. Mexican Americans and military servicemen were the main parties in the riots, and some African American and Filipino/Filipino American youth were involved as well.

So this is all intrinsically interesting. (To me, anyway.) It’s cool to learn new history and I’ve definitely recognized zoot suits from movies and stuff without realizing they had a name. Now I know! But what I really learn from experiences like this is how little I know. I’ve written a lot about epistemic humility (especially at Times And Seasons, also the podcast I did), and one of the reasons I got so fascinated with the idea was experiences like this. In just a few minutes with an internet connection, entire vistas of history, fashion, or human experience that you had no idea existed are suddenly revealed.

Now you know something that you didn’t, and that’s cool, but doesn’t it make you wonder about how much you still don’t know? It makes me wonder about that. I feel like my brain is a thimble and the amount of information available on Earth is an ocean.

Photographer Fights Ableism with Exhibit: “Impaired Perceptions”

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Photograph Brian Steel was born with fiber-type disproportion (a form of muscular dystrophy). The condition leaves him extremely weak, unable to lift or carry objects weighing more than 5 pounds, and with breathing difficulties. Despite this, Brian lives an independent life, and he grew tired of how others would judge him without getting to know what he wasn’t–and was–capable of doing for himself.

Brian Steel

In a CNN article that has 8 images and an interview, Brian explained his motivation to photograph himself and others with disabilities:

Some of the people I photographed and interviewed for this project appeared to be perfectly able-bodied but actually have impairments that limited them physically. They are misperceived in a manner that is almost opposite to my experience. They talked about how judged they often felt because people could not understand why they weren’t doing certain things that required more physical effort.

On the other hand, I met people who had experiences where people felt compelled to help them because they were in a wheelchair, but those individuals are fully capable and have accomplished more than a lot of their able-bodied peers.

My point is not to say that one group is better than the other but rather that you simply can’t know what someone is capable of without getting to know them.

I think this is a good message, but whenever I read articles like this I think of another one. At a time when 90% or more of unborn human beings with a diagnosis f Down syndrome are aborted, I’m afraid our society is in denial of the fact that we, individually and as communities, need these people in our lives. While some with disabilities may depend on us for physical and medical support, we rely on them to remind us of what it means to be human. It’s not about what we have–whether it’s health, comfort, friends or family–but it’s about out struggle to attain those things for ourselves and others.

Learning to Start Cheating

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Let me tell you a story about how I didn’t learn to draw.

If I’d taught myself to draw by copying other pics, this is one I would have copied.

One day when I was about 13 years old I went over to a friend’s house and he showed me a poster-sized illustration that he was working on. I was impressed by the smooth, bold lines and the sheer size of the work. It was still in-progress, but I knew that it was going to be great when it was done. I was intimidated until I saw a magazine page lying on his desk. I realized that he was copying the image, and in an instant the mystery evaporated. Even I could do a decent drawing if I had a source image. Therefore it couldn’t be magical. Therefore it wasn’t really art. It was just cheating.

When he showed the finished product off to some mutual friends a few days later, I refused to say a word to detract from the accolades, but I felt like a clean bike racer competing with Lance Armstrong. I wanted to draw too, but I wasn’t willing to stoop to the level of copying what others had done. So I quit drawing.

And here is the story of how I stopped writing poetry.

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To Save Even One Child…

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There’s an old signature that I remember seeing from the days when I spent too much time debating on Slashdot that went something like:

I found the root password to the Constitution: “Think of the children”.

I’ve always felt ambiguous about that sentiment because I’m not comfortable with the increasingly diminishing gap between libertarianism and libertinism. The idea that laws can be amoral (e.g. based on some purely rational system of utilitarian morality based solely on the concept of harm) is misleading and dangerous.

While it’s true that you can’t “legislate morality”, you also can’t legislate without morality. The belief that we should have laws at all is a moral statement. Even if you try to assume that it’s a purely objective statement about how to maximize happiness (or economic output, or standards of living, or whatever) that is, itself, a moral position. Furthermore, “harm”-based legislation offers us a flimsy shadow of the real concerns with which a society must be concerned in establishing its rules. 

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How the World Really Works

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Institutional stupidity is the bane of modern human existence. As a customer, a citizen, a soldier, or an employee we all deal with organizations that behave in such a mindbogglingly idiotic fashion that it’s a wonder they survive. And yet they do. Why is that? Why is it that people in groups seem to be so much dumber than individuals? What happens to the wisdom of the crowd when you give them all cubicles?

Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons: one of the extremely rare known positive consequences of institutional stupidity.

As it turns out, there’s an answer. It’s not that people are dumb. It’s that they are doing work that they don’t really care about. 

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Podcast with A Thoughtful Faith

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Micah Nickolaisen enjoyed the series of posts that I wrote for Times and Seasons about epistemic humility, so he asked if I’d like to do a podcast for A Thoughtful Faith. After I got over the surprise that someone wanted to do a podcast with me, I said sure and the week before last we had a nice conversation.

If you liked the Times and Seasons articles, or if you missed out on them but are curious about epistemic humility, then please give this podcast a listen.

The Pursuit of Happiness Occludes Happiness

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Viktor Frankl

There’s a great article from The Atlantic which ties into the recent piece I wrote about euthanasia and hedonism. And it quotes Viktor Frankl extensively, so there was no way I was not going to link to it. It turns out that the perspective of pleasure / pain (happiness) on one axis and meaning on another now has some research to back it up:

In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables — like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children — over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a “giver.”

“Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,” the authors write.

I had a really hard time picking just one quotation because the article is so full of good observations, so definitely check it out to read more.