I wrote this over 5 years ago for my personal blog. I'm cross-posting it here as i feel it is pertinent to the high level issue of communication among people with radically different premises.
Page 1: A few starting premises... nothing too drastic
I hope we can agree on a few basic premises.
I know people who would argue with the first two items. There are entire philosophical schools of thought which disagree with taking these as givens. I acknowledge that such objections are somewhat valid and deserve attention in a rigorous, academic treatment of this matter, but i am not going to take the space to refute them in this essay. I believe that most of my readers agree with those first two assumptions and do not require me to defend them to follow along with this discussion. I have things to say on these topics to those who do not agree, but will only post them if there is a specific inquiry on this topic.
Bias disclosure: Generally, i think that people who argue that we can't even be sure we exist need some counseling :). At minimum, they've probably watched "The Matrix" way too many times. I'll have the discussions with them when absolutely necessary, but usually find the folks who seriously hold these positions to be hung up on (obsessed with?) the least probable of all possibilities. YMMV.
Items 3 & 4 appear self-evident to me as well, and i don't think there is much controversy about them. Only a person who gets fooled on a regular basis thinks the expression "seeing is believing" should be applied in every situation. Stage magicians love to have an audience composed entirely of such folks, though they are less useful when serving on a jury.
Though i can generally trust what my senses reveal to me, i must remember... for example... that the person who is far away isn't really smaller than the one who is close to me, the sun is not moving across the sky while i remain motionless, and the train whistle is not itself changing in pitch as the train approaches me.
My senses provide input, but to be most useful in understanding my environment objectively i must submit that raw input to analysis, experimentation, and verification, not just accept it at face value. Many things can be verified this way, allowing one to construct a good, working, verifiable model of the physical world. That model will be workable within the limits of the actions which can also serve to verify it, but not necessarily 100% correct.
As we 'expand our senses' via technology we sometimes encounter new explanations for parts of the old model that had never been shown to be wrong. We also discover new things which must be explained by experiment or inference.
Prehistoric people's were able to verify the assertion that people weren't really smaller when far away, they just appeared to be so. They had significantly less options for disproving the assertion that the earth sat still while the sun, moon, sky and stars moved as a unit overhead. They drew a conclusion that matched the information available to them and which, although incorrect, didn't cause them any specific problems. It worked just fine for what they required of it. Their successors weren't so lucky in the matter of believing that using leeches to remove 'bad vapors' from the body was a good idea, or that the brain existed only to cool our blood, but those assertions couldn't be verified or refuted until technology helped us understand physiology better.
The train whistle is another matter entirely. I doubt that the Doppler shift had been noticed in ancient times, because they generally didn't have the ability to move at the speeds necessary to notice the effect with our raw senses. There's a case where improved technology allowed us to experience new places where we were required to look beyond what our senses told us.
There is seldom much controversy about matters at this level. If i can measure something with an oscilloscope, or thermometer, or blood pressure guage, i am fairly secure that i am getting reliable information. My bathroom scale is another matter, but that's also another matter in itself :-). Few people argue over the correct length of an inch, though they may debate the use of inches vs meters.
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Page 2: Culture is a blessing... and a curse
If a matter is not subject to physical demonstration things become trickier. People are quick to do the first part of item 5 "Our reasoning allows us to infer information about things we cannot sense or manipulate directly", but consistant follow through on the second half, "we should remember that the conclusions we have drawn are inferences, not proven facts", is not as common.
Most people appear to think about a subject once (if ever!), and their reasoning on the matter is almost always subject to their own biases and cultural norms. They aren't generally interested in questioning their previous conclusions, and many are even hostile to the idea of such questioning. These folks hand their postulates off to their children, usually with a firm warning that they are to be accepted without question and then passed right along to the next generation.
I think this factor is part of why people tend to follow whatever religion their parents happened to follow, but we'll get to that subject in more detail in a subsequent essay. I note, however that even where that rule isn't applied exactly it still often applies in its larger sense - though that may not be obvious at first glance.
Most of my siblings adhere to some form of Christianity, just as my parents did, and they all pretty much practice it at exactly the same level of wishy-washy commitment that my parents followed. Some of them are stil nominal Catholics, while others of them are nominal protestants of one flavor or another. They may think there's a world of difference between their beliefs, but on the scale of what is believed in the world the differences between their positions are insignificant.
I did not embrace the religion practiced by my parents at any level, and have instead gone a very different way. I don't know what it was about me that made me unique among the 9 kids in my family, but i am definitely different from my siblings in this area. In turn my own son is on yet a different spiritual path from me. But in a certain sense he is following my spiritual example, because one of my fundamental beliefs is that people should decide these matters for themselves. Did he learn this principle from my example, or did he inherit a tendency to be less of a sheep than most of his fellows? Nature or nurture? Who can say?
But the issue of this essay is larger than the specific one of belief in God. It's the larger question of believing in anything that really comes down to what one chooses to believe when no unambiguous proof is available to settle the matter. In these cases, more often than not the conclusion people draw is the same one that the other people who share their cultural biases tend to draw, although it will probably be a different one than that drawn by someone from a different culture (each member of whom will in turn tend to draw the same conclusion as the other members of it).
Since fundamental truth is not a function of cultural preference, the fact that all members of a culture tend to share a belief doesn't tell one anything at all about whether that belief is true or false, it simply illustrates the principle described above, and nothing more.
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Page 3: Momo is allowed to make up words. The rest of us need to use the dictionary.
I despise having conversations with people who assert that they get to make up their own personal meanings for words which are already defined within the language to mean something specifically different than how they choose to use them. It's lame, and it cripples any attempts to have a meaningful conversation on any subject for which these words are important. While i note that language changes, if someone tells me that they prefer the red sweater, i don't expect that i have to remember that when they use the word 'red', they really mean the color blue.
Some words are more crisply defined than others, of course, and even my reference book for this matter expresses an overlap between the three words i'm about to define. But without a crisp, mutually exclusive definition for these terms some of you will hear very different things in my subsequent sentences than others, so i'd like to firm this up.
These definitions are an honest attempt to distill the intent of the dictionary's primary use of the terms and - MORE IMPORTANTLY - to distinguish them from each other explicitly, not an attempt to completely redefine them. If you use these words differently than these definitions that's understandable, as their meanings DO overlap in common usage, but i ask that you check this out with a dictionary before complaining that *i'm* using them incorrectly here.
In decreasing order of certainty we have:
So, for example, i know that that many citizens of the US are without health insurance, and I believe that this is a natural consequence of the corruption of our government, but i recognize that other explanations are also reasonable. It would require faith for me to think that the Republican sponsored plans to dismantle Social Security are anything other than a plan to help the financial industry siphon off money from the average citizen. I don't have that particular bit of faith.
I prefer to operate from things i know. When i must use something that i simply believe to make a decision, i try to stay conscious of the unknowns in the equation and remain open to new evidence which could change my belief and thus the associated decisions. In general i avoid 'faith' purposely, but there is one area where i will practice even that at times.
There are some nasty people in the world. Once i identify someone as a low-life, i do all i can to minimize my interaction with them from that point on. I feel no obligation to excuse their behaviors or allow them to manipulate me to their advantage. Generally, once a low-life, always a low-life.
But i also know that ... while not the highest probability at any specific moment... people can change, but only rarely and usually only after a sigificant event forces them to re-examine their beliefs. If a person who has consistently been a jerk in the past wants access to my company, i generally am not ready to ignore the evidence and give them a 5th chance. But it's not to say that i'll never do so.
There's very litte reason for anyone to ever improve themself if no one will ever accept that they have changed. If we never allow anyone a chance to rise above their past and forever hold them accountable for past behaviors, there's no reason for them to improve. I reserve the right to decide for myself to whom i will extend faith of this type, but i do ignore the evidence of past behavior at times and go with compassion instead to forgive someone for the past and allow them a chance to start fresh if i see something in their behavior that allows for the possibility fo reform. I can't possibly know that they will do better. Experience implies that i should not believe that this time will be different. But i am free to make a choice to have faith in them.
Page 4: Faith is not an indication - either direction - of the truth of a matter.
I have no issue with people telling me that they believe in something because of faith. They have the same right to apply that principle in their lives that i reserve for myself, and to choose the areas in which they will apply it. Such comments aren't open to any form of scrutiny, since the only test for acceptance of any matter through faith is the choice of the one who holds it. Faith, by its very nature, is not subject to rational analysis because believing something through faith is the polar opposite of rational thought.
One of my axioms is: "You cannot reason a person out of a position which was not originally reached through reason". Positions held through faith are not attained via reasoning, so in general such positions are equally immune to rational critique. That used to frustrate me until i recognized it consciously. These days i withdraw from a discussion with someone once it is clear that they can't, or won't, distinguish between their faith/opinion/belief and true knowledge.
But it does frustrate me to hear someone say that they 'know' something that cannot be demonstrated beyond question, or to tell me that they believe in something, and expect for me to believe it as well, but can't present even a trivial case to support the matter. Both of these are matters of faith, not knowledge, and i consider it intellectually dishonest to assert otherwise. I also recognize that any meaningful converstaion between us ends at that point. Opinion is not fact. Faith is not knowledge. Red is not blue.
No matter how much they state it, nobody can know anything about God. We can quibble over whether it is reasonable to believe various things about God, but anyone who insists that they know anything about God is either delusional or unable to manage the proper use of the term 'know'.
Similarly, we do not know whether there is or isn't a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, whether the dinosaurs were knocked off by an asteroid impact, or the age of the earth. We have sufficient information on these matters to believe one theory or another with varying degrees of certainty, and each of them have positions that are currently dominant in serious scientific circles. But these are matters that are not yet proven to the point where anyone can say that they know the truth of them for absolute certainty to the point where the term 'know' is appropriate.
I know that i love my wife. I know that i am a human male. I know that i live in the US. I can demonstrate these matters with concrete, verifiable facts to the satisfaction of any reasonable person who desires me to do so and who shares my definition of the associated terms.
I believe that there is a black hole at the center of the universe, that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and that the earth is about 4.5B years old. I believe these things because they have credible evidence to support them (not all of which i personally understand), and because that evidence jives with many other things that all work together into a coherent whole which, though it cannot be verified in toto, does match up with observable facts where it can be verified.
Mostly, i do without faith. When the evidence fails to support a position, even one which may be near and dear to my heart, in most cases i allow the evidence to override my preference in the matter and attempt to formulate a new belief that doesn't contradict the evidence.
The Bible says that "Faith without works is dead". I agree. I'd also like to point out that faith without a willingness to examine itself is an indication that the holder of that faith prefers comfort to truth. That's their business, and i don't deny them the right to choose comfort over truth, but it is the exact opposite of how i choose to face reality.
Thanks for reading.
