Recent Religious Discussion

Recently I was asked by a friend of mine to respond to a religious argument she was involved in,  because she needed a pretentious (I think she means pedantic, shit, nope, pretentious) response to a pretentious response and this is the result.

The initial argument:

My definitions are again very simple, I suppose. I define science to be systematic knowledge gained via observation and experimentation. Faith is a belief held without proof. If we lend credence to faith, why then would you ever treat the sick? Why not just pray for them? 

Taking a walk down the road of accepting unproven things seems to me to be a very slippery slope indeed, for if we are willing to accept one unproven view what is then to stop us from accepting many other more harmful ones? I give you, for example, the countless wars fought over conflicting unproven beliefs. 

I concede your point, science does change over time, but the difference lies in that science builds upon a knowledge base while intuitive answers often substitute one unverifiable claim for another. You said that, “they talk about faith being the belief in things unseen, but are true.” Who are “they” and what makes them true? How, then, with this loose sense of rigor would we even begin to ascertain the supposed truth in non-empirical, untestable “truths”? 

I would liken the process of science to building a house. You start at the bottom, not with the roof. Intuitive answers appear to me an attempt at hanging a roof in mid-air and hoping the rest of the house appears to support it. 

I agree with you in that we do not know everything, however if we accept the world-view that intuitive or faith-based answers are equally acceptable to empirical how can we ever expect to build a solid foundation of understanding? 

And to answer your question as to how people fear change, do you remember the vaccination debate? One piece of bad science was presented to the world. A group of people latched on to it and believed it. As a result, despite having been proven to be solidly incorrect, there are people unwilling to change their minds. People are denying probably the most beneficial piece of modern medicine because they fear change. Or perhaps an even better example would be those families who deny modern medicine in favor of prayer. They let their children die rather than accept a world view that is different from their beliefs. They fear changing their views due to what, fear of the wrath of god?

That, in my humble opinion, is not a win for intuitive/faith based answers. How easily we could avoid many of the atrocities that plague the world (holy wars, starvation, wide spread sickness) if only we would set aside these unverifiable intuitions and simply just change with the times, work on expanding the testable and verifiable knowledge that we have. 

What I was asked to respond to (spelling is as was in original):

Taking the points paragraph by paragraph, allow me to offer a two-second rebuttle. A soundbite, if you will. And we all know that soundbites really demonstrate nothign except the abiltiy to cleverly construct phrases. But here goes.


I agree that science is a systematic knowledge gained via observation and experimentation. Faith is a belief held without proof. I agree to both points. I do not doubt science as a whole, in the slightest. Indeed, I would not be in the field I am in, with the analytical mindset and training that I have, if I doubted those empirical things we know to be true. Yet I suspect that you yourself believe in things without proof, merely because you suspect them to be true, even there is no proof yet. Science does it all the time. That is how advances are made. We suspect something to be true, even without proof, and we work to find that proof. We create hypothesis, test them, and evaluate the tests. And, we even build other hypotheses upon those yet-unproven-but-believed-to-be-correct theories, in order to continue to advance. 


How then, is faith, a belief held without proof, any different?


As an aside, if I had a sick child, not only would I seek appropriate medical care, but I would pray for the child. I would do all in my power to have that child become well. That's not quite the point you were making with your question, but in my mind, it is the point that is the most relevant. I would do all within my power to help my child.


Lets address the point that science builds upon a knowledge base while intuitive answers often substitute one unverifiable claim for another. Be careful not to exaggerate the point. Often is not always. Indeed, by your statement, you suggest that sometimes it is ok to substitute one unverifiable claim for another. I again submit that it happens all the time in science and in life (they are much the same thing). 


The statement that faith is the belief in things unseen, but are true. You truly wish to know who the "they" is? It is a religious statement; the "they" is a multitude of people who subscribe to that theory, and "what makes them true"? It is a statement. The belief that holds it to be true is the same belief that holds religion in general to be true. Asking what makes that statement true is straining at the gnat. Let us rather examine religion in general, as opposed to one of its articles of faith. Unless I misunderstood the nature of your questions here.

Thank you for elaborating upon change. Allow me merely to suggest that the two examples you have cited are not people reacting out of fear of change. Fear of other things, perhaps- infecting their child with measles, mumps, and rhubella, or fear of offering less-than-the-best help (in their view) possible to a sick child. (Did the child get sick with measles, mumps or rhubella?) I do not see it as fear of the wrath of their god. Indeed, for the second example, I see it as adamently doing what they feel is best for their child. Me? As stated above, I'd be doing both. I'd fly out a witchdoctor from the backwoods of Africa if I thought it would help.

However, the last paragraph tugs at me the most. I find it rife with strawmen and red herrings.
You are equating faith with being responsible for many of the atrocities that plague the world, including holy wars, starvation, wide spread sickness. That's a heavy charge to lay at the feet of faith. Please show me how faith and/or religion is responsible for all of this. Even holy wars, in an example I cited a few days ago, are not generated by religion, but by men in power who use religion as an excuse. Very rarely do you see the fatmas strapping suicide bombs to themselves.

Secondly, you charge that these unverifiable intuitions are 1) inconsistent with the current times, and 2) somehow blocking the ability of knowledge to grow and expand. I'm not sure I can believe either of those statements.

My very long winded response (hey, she asked, so I assume this is what was expected):

A lengthy rebuttal to your two-second rebuttal.

I submit not only that you'd better understand the gray area that separates science from pseudoscience but that you'd also actually be better at your job if you did doubt “those empirical things we know to be true” if and when you have reason to do so. Science without skepticism isn't, and there are two possible outcomes of this practice:

1. The empirical truth becomes further bolstered when you falsify your doubting hypothesis.
2. The empirical truth becomes empirically questionable when you support your doubting hypothesis, and possibly even itself falsified.

Both of these outcomes are the foundation of every scientific advance that has been made throughout human history, and skepticism is absolutely essential to the process.

Faith is different because faith, by definition, is the exclusion of the skeptical process. It's not necessarily (though it usually is) consequential just because the faith is placed in something unverified, but that's not at all the only measure of ideas in which faith is placed. In almost every religion, placing unquestionable faith in ideas is expressed as a virtue, and doubt as a vice. Faith can be placed in all kinds of unfalsifiable, and therefore untestable, claims that lead to all sorts of atrocity worldwide, and it's not limited to religion. Faith in dialectical materialism and cults of personality led to tens of millions of deaths in the USSR and China, faith in National Socialism to millions more in Europe, Africa, and Asia, faith in a religious caste system to unlivable conditions for millions of people in India, etc. The claim that the leaders of people intentionally use religion, without subscribing to it, to subjugate and oppress them is naive at best, and is equivalent to the claim that neither ayatollahs nor popes really believe the ideas they profess. Those leaders have faith that their leadership is righteous and is bolstered by the exclusive religions they follow, and further faith that those ends justify their means. The Judeo-Christian tradition explicitly lays out ways by which a leader is supposed to subjugate and manipulate people within the narratives of all three major contributory religions, and most of these methods are endorsed in those books by God, prophet, and messiah alike. Christian reformation is a comparatively new phenomenon, and even in that case it was the gradual inclusion of secular values that led to modern liberal Christianity.

I promise you, the person who straps on the bomb has faith that what he's doing is the righteous will of God, and it's that faith that leads him to choose to do it. They make the choice to do that. They are not under threat of death nor are they conscripted against their will. They volunteer for recruitment, and many come from relatively privileged homes. They have faith that it is the right thing to do and that God will reward them if they do it, and it is written, sometimes obliquely and sometimes explicitly, right there in the religious works they believe are true.

All of that could be solved just with the practice of skepticism by those people. One tiny iota of doubt would be enough for someone to think “Heeeeey, wait a minute. This is my LIFE we're talking about here! Is it really worth sacrificing for something I can't even be sure is the truth?” And they could answer that question honestly if they weren't absolutely sure doubt is a bad thing.

That is why it's faith, not religion, that is the problem. Without faith all modern religions would simply be mythology and theology; curious pastimes and intriguing narratives.

As for doing all within your power to help your child, surely you're not suggesting that parents shouldn't temper that with common sense and medical science. Time wasted in a crisis is time that could be spent preventing a tragedy. Given the choice between prayer and study, I choose study every time. You can get second opinions, further testing, access to research, earn more money to pay for it, comfort the kid, or anything that can be demonstrably shown to improve your kid's chances better than the absolutely nothing you do with hands clasped and thoughts focused on prayer. Sure you could pray while you're doing all of those things, but seeing as how prayer has been shown to do nothing except comfort the pray-er (and indeed some studies have even suggested it can be damaging to the ill if they know the prayer is occurring), it's a desperate leap to conclude that it does anything more than just make you feel better. That said, I can only conclude that “all within your power” is still limited by what you're frantically willing to believe might be effective, true, and harmless, which brings us full circle to the point of this.

How do you differentiate what's empirically true from what's not?

When you talk about the suggestion that sometimes it's ok to substitute one unverifiable claim for another, you claim that it happens all the time in science and implicitly that that leads to the conclusion that one unverifiable claim can be arbitrarily substituted for another.

First off, when “intuitive answers” was used in that context, what was meant was that it was not ok for one unverifiable claim to be arbitrarily substituted for another based on intuition, but that claims can replace one when based on a foundation of knowledge and experimentation. The following house-building analogy should make that pretty clear.

Second, “unverifiable” is not really an empirically valid position, and is really quite meaningless when assessing the truth of a scientific claim. With little semantic manipulation, pretty much any claim, and certainly almost every scientific claim could be called “unverifiable” (In fact this is a favored tactic of Christian apologists as well as new age gurus the world over, and is a veiled example of the argument from ignorance). The prediction that gravity works to the tune of general relativity everywhere throughout the known universe is “unverifiable” and yet almost universally accepted to be true. The reason isn't because of verifiability, it's because of falsifiability. That distinction is important, because an unverifiable claim can still hold weight if not verified, but a falsifiable claim is dead in the water if falsified. All testable scientific claims are falsifiable, because by nature of falsifiability, withstanding vigorous tests provides growing evidence of their truth. When you use the phrase “unproven-yet-believed-to-be-true” what you should really be saying is “unfalsified-and-congruent-with-observation-and-working-scientific-models.”

Third, questioning the validity of a truth statement as vague as “they talk about faith being the belief in things unseen, but are true” is a valid point to make. Asking “Who are 'they?'” and “What makes them true?” is the right way to assess that statement, and is most definitely not “straining at the gnat,” as it were. Those questions are the very nature of scientific thought, and are indispensable in scientific formulation. The reason is that in a scientific model, a small inconsistency can bring down the entire framework of the theory. This is why theoretical scientists strive for falsifiability. No amount of observational evidence could ever verify with absolute certainty any scientific model, but a single experiment with contradictory results has the potential to rip it from the foundations it was built upon. Your defense of this red herring (“Straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel” is a great, almost textbook example of biblical red herring, by the way) seems to be argumentum ad populum. Many people believe it's true, so it must be true in some respect.

Fourth, no scientist suspects something to be true without evidence (“proof” is a loaded word, as it implies that something can be empirically “proven”). Or rather, no scientist would ever call that science. Though few proponents of religious claims accept them evidence-free either. The difference between the two is not whether one accepts hypotheses without evidence, it's in what qualifies as evidence for and how to attach that evidence to the hypothesis currently under the microscope. Most scientists consider their background of complete immersion in scientific literature qualifies that “suspicion” of truth as a sort of evidence in itself, though certainly not enough for publication. Following that “suspicion” comes an odyssey of hard work and formulation, research, meta-analysis, peer-review, testing, publication, more peer-review, more testing, revised publication, more peer-review, more testing, and so on. If any “suspicion” fails at any point in that ongoing process, it's either immediately discarded or amended to begin the process anew. And, perhaps most importantly, the longer that process goes without falsification, the more weight a scientific theory has. There's a reason Newton and Darwin are still considered relevant in the sciences whereas Aquinas and Descartes are not.

A digression and fear of change

Regarding the vaccination debate, you're right. Actually it's fear of autism that currently drives the anti-vaccination wagon as a result of the fraudulent (can't stress the “fraudulent” part enough, as in “intentionally misleading to make money on litigation driven testing”) report published in the British medical journal “The Lancet” (which they retracted in 2010 with sincere apology) and written primarily by Andrew Wakefield. In response to this, you claim you'd be “doing both” as it is “adamantly doing what they feel is best for the child.” Although how you can possibly both get your child vaccinated and not is either a statement from sheer ignorance or an attempt at showing undue respect for both sides of the argument. In this case, you'd be forced to make a choice, and the autism fear-based one is the wrong one, as it has unnecessarily exposed thousands of kids to (and in some areas even led to the reemergence of) various illnesses previously almost completely eradicated by childhood vaccination. The point is that those parents who let fear alone drive their decision to do “what they feel is best for their child” did not actually do what was best for their child, leading to a situation that certainly isn't “best” for thousands of other children. This was done because of fear-based ignorance and nothing more, regardless of what the parents were afraid of exactly.

Bad example aside, fear of change is a real thing, and all of us are affected by it both personally and culturally. Whether it's being taken out of our comfort zone intellectually, or a conservative American response to the decline of so-called traditional values, fear of change can lead to some of the most heavy-handed attempts at preserving a “traditional way of life” in history. The role of faith in this is evident in the language of the current political divide, specifically the “Religious Right” and the “Secular Left.” Because the fulcrum of the divide between “conservative” and “liberal” can generally be referred to as how resistant a group of people is to changes within their culture, reactionary fear of change will almost always line up on the conservative side of the spectrum. Faith, in this case maintaining faith in beliefs under threat from advances in science and culture, remains an integral part in political decisions these days. It is a huge part of the debates over abortion, climate change, stem cell research, human cloning, gay marriage, DADT, end of life rights, capital punishment, sex worker rights, public education curriculum, criminal justice, nonprofit organizations being able to endorse political candidates or be excused from anti-discrimination laws, and the general argument over where the “wall of separation between church and state” really lies. There is no doubt that letting fear of change control you without it being tempered by an open inquiry regarding the nature of that change is just as dangerous as jumping into any change blindly, and faith hinders that process by allowing its adherents to eschew honest analysis for previously held beliefs.

On the role of faith in holy wars, starvation, and widespread sickness.

You make this claim, and it's a very common one: “Even holy wars, in an example I cited a few days ago, are not generated by religion, but by men in power who use religion as an excuse. Very rarely do you see the fatmas strapping suicide bombs to themselves.”

Lets put aside for a moment that I can't find a definition for the word “fatma” aside from it being a fairly common Arabic feminine name derivative of “Fatima” and assume from context you're either using it in place of “Imam” to refer to Muslim religious leaders or using it in place of “fatwa” to refer to religious opinions and/or edicts. First off, you can note that it's fatuous in the extreme to refer to a “holy war” as “not generated by religion.” This should be pretty obvious seeing as it's not called a civil war, or a revolutionary war, or even a world war, but a Holy War. Second, as stated earlier, the idea that religious leaders don't believe with every bit as much vehemence in the religion they are professing as the people who are following them is naive. The works they quote offer very many incitements to violence in the name of their God (and in the case of the Qur'an, at least 109 verses that call for war with nonbelievers for the glory of Islam). Imams don't strap the bombs on because they already have a job to do in the name of Allah. Fatwas don't strap the bombs on because they are merely abstractions claimed in the name of Allah. Suicide bombers strap the bombs on because they believe that is their job to do that in the name of Allah. Just because faith is the cause of the first two does not make it not the cause of the third.

As far as sickness and starvation, faith has a role to play there too in a grander scope than local politics and infrastructure or warring bands of criminal organizations. Here in the first world, religious faith hinders potential medical advances by limiting research in areas that show great promise, most notably stem cell research. Also here it leads to individuals choosing faith-based alternatives to real medical treatments and suffering disastrous results. In the third world, religious faith does all sorts of damage to infrastructure by limiting access to contraceptives, medicines, and measures of general population control which could potentially stem the problem long enough for researchers to advance food and medicine to catch up. The Catholic anti-condom stance alone is directly linked to incalculable numbers of new HIV cases in Africa. Also in the third world, belief in witchcraft, demons, and other hokum taken on faith leads to a hindrance in inquiry of real medical causes for certain conditions (especially psychological ones) which could potentially be at least somewhat treatable with what they have on hand as well as unnecessarily places the blame for the phenomena on some poor kid with epilepsy or the post-menopausal woman down the street.

Removing faith itself from those cultures and replacing it with genuine scientific inquiry and curiosity would be a near impossible task, but it is absolutely not going to happen if we can't even achieve that here. Faith is not a virtue, it is a disease, and it allows the mind to accept ideas that range from genocidal to irrelevant.

As far as faith actively blocking our ability to grow and expand our knowledge, some of its proponents are certainly in the business of doing just that. Anti-evolution, not allowing a serious inclusion of the benefits of scientific thought into the school of ethics, and a resurgence of fundamentalist intrusion in politics are the means by which we see it happening today. I don't think it's a huge worry at the moment, but it very well could be. It only takes one of those people you think are not representative of the faithful to faithfully detonate a nuclear bomb, and you'll get to watch this change happen right before your eyes, for better or for worse. I will concede that faith is certainly consistent with our times, just not consistent with the positive things our times have to offer humanity.