I remember seeing Bill Maher's Religulous several years back, and found it mildly amusing and irritating at the same time. Clearly, Maher had an agenda to mock God-fearing people of faith by finding some poor representation. Maher says in the following clip he is coming from a place of I don't know, but this is all bunk because he clearly feels he's too smart to know anything beyond his godless beliefs (which also revolves around his own smug narcissism that doesn't rise much above the people he interviews here).
Bob revisited a great blog post on Secular Faith and Religious Knowledge; a theme I like to go back to from time to time. I've blogged about faith and belief in the past, but haven't quite nailed the topic as well as I wanted to. I know I've come across too many intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals (like Maher) that can't seem to question their own beliefs. For example, most people don't know much about climate change (or at least not enough where they could articulate the science to any great extent), but they have put their trust in science to the point where the science is settled. So settled, that some can make claims that the world is going to end in 12 years. I'm not discounting that climate change may be a real thing, but from what source and to what ends? We know correlation and causation don't always line up in the way we'd like; so while we can accept some anthropogenic greenhouse gases may be a culprit, in the complexity of a global system we'll never be certain enough to know to what extent and therefore what cost-effective measures will truly mitigate the issue. But if your belief has closed you up to other considerations, you've just found another religion (and not necessarily a better one). Bob says, “belief is generally a static thing. It takes the unknown and superimposes the known upon it, thus foreclosing the unknown. Once one believes something, the issue becomes settled, even if in reality it isn't.” So while we can be inclined to follow certain theories (some which may support other motivations we may have), “Nothing is truly settled until we have arrived at first principles, axiomatic truths, or empirico-sensory bedrock. Anything short of this is just arbitrary.” It ultimately comes down to whom do we trust, because “Belief cannot establish its own legitimacy, but derives its legitimacy from someone who either knows, thinks he knows, or pretends to know.” We're all following someone's lead, but we'd be better off to watch out for the street dung along the way. So while belief is generally static, faith can be more generative; allowing more more depth and coherence. Faith “is actually a subtle and sophisticated way to gain knowledge that transcends the senses, not a means to provide false but comforting answers and to vanquish curiosity.” We can stay with the question, and come from a place of not-knowing and knowing simultaneously. Instead of superimposing our cognitive ideas on reality, we inquire with our “psychospiritual probe...to explore transcendent reality” as it reveals itself to us. When John Henry Newman said “Faith is a reasoning of a religious mind,” he was not discounting reason but emphasizing a Reason that comes from a deeper whole. He understood an truly integral person does not just use the modern version of reason to make judgments, but uses an accumulation of his/her sentiments, observations, experience, tradition, imagination, intuitions, and instincts to inform them. As such, faith is not anti-reason, but rather emphasizes the source of knowledge which lies beyond the competence of reason alone. We need to inquire from within and without to get centered around anything. Otherwise we'll just arbitrarily go along with some belief we have just been indoctrinated into, or some idea that we have projected our subconscious drives onto. Better to have faith in the things that matter, and believe in the rest of it.
Career opportunities for evolutionary biologists are pretty good these days, but there must be a nagging feeling that comes on to them every so often – assuming they are intellectually honest. I am not sure what in natural selection gave us a brain (and mind) far more sophisticated and superfluous than what was needed for survival, but it really screwed up. I mean, just think of the overhead required that catapulted us to have Shakespeare plays written, compose Bach music, or send us off to the moon. We didn’t need it. We also don’t need to be chasing after Truth, or having mystical experiences for that matter. It just gets us into all sorts of trouble, when we should be hunting boar (and not writing code) to get the girl! It also seems there are these transitional spaces where natural selection doesn’t offer a great explanation. The Cambrian explosion is still a mystery where all these species appear fully developed with no alteration since that period. The move from primates to Homo Sapiens seems like quite a leap too, when although we were quite strong for a significant period of time, at some point the evolutionary process decided to make us weaker and give us the capacity for language and the awareness to know when we're acting like arseholes. The evolutionary biologists eventually find that organisms can be reduced in complexity only so far. At some point, they bump up against an irreducible complexity. Then they need to explain how it is that complex interacting and interdependent parts of organisms can evolve together without a God to the somewhat brilliant and mostly stupid people we are today. Still, our potential to be real persons is quite excessive from that materialistic perspective. So will science fill in the gaps with evidence, or will I fall prey to the God in the Gaps proposition? Neither. I think scientists fall prey to these gaps with just as much religious vigor in their Darwin in the Gaps argument. They even cleverly point to Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory as a suitable explanation; however, never explaining the mechanism that made that even happen. And while I’m not going to say God lent a hand with these leaps, I’m also not willing to concede that there may be cosmic nudges happening here and there. Are these miracles? Or is it that existence, life, and mind are all miracles in themselves? I will at least open myself to Intelligent Design as being one plausible explanation. In the interview below, Stephen C. Meyer convincingly raises some concerns with the neo-Darwinist position; such as, how are we to account for all the discontinuities in evolution; how so-called undirected processes produced the complexity and information needed for life to emerge; and how did we get so lucky with the anthropic fine-tuning required for organic material to appear from inorganic material? Intelligent Design posits that personal agency (theist or non-theist) is fundamental to the cosmos. It's probably the only input to an open system that can account for the information needed for the origin of existence. But then again, the neo-Darwinist will lock him or herself into an impoverished closed system of scientism, where although the human mind can seemingly grasp things that are true, there can be no intelligibility at the root of it that is source of Truth. Garbage in, garbage out. Consider a look at Meyer's line of reasoning here: