Originally published at the USU SHAFT site.
Ive enjoyed several of the videos produced by The Thinking Atheist. This video, however, should make them reconsider their (already rather smarmy) name.
In the video, several atheists relate their Christian upbringing, which they now not-so-fondly remember as brainwashing. Dawkins has sometimes gone so far as to claim that religious education is a form of child abuse. It can be, but the complaints made by the atheists in the video struck me as petty. There are too many grave injustices in this world for me to care about your being dragged to church every Sunday as a child. (Though Ill admit that my religious upbringing wasnt very strict, and I generally dont regret my experience in Mormonism.)
The main point of the film is that its wrong for religions and religious people to target the youth. But if you believed in a real, literal Hell, youd be obligated to do all you could to ensure that your kids averted it. Just as you wouldnt let your kids drink poison to find out its lethal, you wouldnt expose them to or let them hold poisonous (read atheistic) beliefs that would imperil their salvation. If that requires a degree of so-called brainwashing or indoctrination, then so be it. Were I ever to have kids, I would of course try to teach them to be open-minded, critical thinkers. Id even encourage them to investigate the worlds religious traditions. But thats a luxury I have as someone who doesnt believe in the threat of Hell.
To be sure, I think the degree to which religious parents inculcate religious beliefs in their children is often detrimentalespecially when those beliefs are terror-inducing, like the concept of Hell. But this video misidentifies the problem. The problem isnt the indoctrination so much as its content. It doesnt make sense to ask Christians to stop steeping their children in their respective religious faith or to stop proselytizing. To ask this of a Christian is to ask them to be a hypocrite. Again, if you believe in a real Hell, its imperative that you save people from it. No, the only appropriate response is to challenge the very belief (in this case, Hell) that is motivating the actions.
And another thing: Isnt everything you teach children a form of brainwashing? Kids are evolutionarily primed to be sponges for information. Kids may be born atheists, as the video asserts, but they are not born critical-thinkers. Theyre curious, granted, but theyre nonetheless impressionable. Critical thinking is a skill that requires a fully-developed brain and years of intellectual exercise. Even were you to teach your children skepticism, they would accept those lessons unskeptically.
Whats more, I have a hard time believing that the people interviewed here are not raising their kids to be atheists, just as the religious parents raise their kids to be religious. Why is the latter brainwashing, but the former not? Because Christians host concerts and pizza parties (how nefarious!)? Give me a break. Were not talking about a pedophile luring kids into his van with candy, but sincere religious people concerned about the spiritual well-being of their children.
Im very supportive of the movement for nonbelievers to come out of the proverbial closet, but it seems many new atheists expect religious people to go into one. Id rather everyone have a voice in the public square, the marketplace of ideas. The more debate and discussion, the better. This video, though, trades in the kind of lazy accusations and caricatures of religious people that do little to advance our dialogue.
Very good points. By coincidence, I just wrote a post based on a video you posted about being wrong. The thing is that there’s not really a magic formula to figure out exactly which of your own beliefs are wrong — it’s extremely difficult! So parents are going to teach their own beliefs to their children, and some of those beliefs will be wrong — how could it be otherwise?
That said:
I can’t speak for those other folks, but (from personal experience as a parent with lots of friends who are also non-religious parents) in an atheistic household, the concept of God typically doesn’t come up until the kids ask about it (usually after having been exposed to it by religious friends and family members). And when it does come up, it’s often when the kids are a little older, as opposed to kids who are taught the stories of Jesus from the cradle.
I agree that god(s) don’t come up in atheistic househoulds until later, generally. I only meant that I doubt that these particular parents aren’t teaching their kids to dislike religion. If you’re willing to participate in a video like this, you’re probably evangelical and aggressive about your atheism (which is fine).
Very likely.
And — now that my kids are old enough that they’re asking about it — I don’t beat around the bush about my own opinions (as I’ve recounted on my blog — with more news coming up soon!). But I’m glad that they’re exposed to alternate beliefs from their grandparents. I think they will learn more by the experience of seeing that people think differently than they’d learn if I were to bend over backward to avoid the topic myself.
“Dawkins has sometimes gone so far as to claim that religious education is a form of child abuse. It can be, but the complaints made by the atheists in the video struck me as petty. There are too many grave injustices in this world for me to care about your being dragged to church every Sunday as a child.”
This made me laugh.
It seems these days however, everyone wants to be a tragic figure online – even if it means completely inventing a “tragic childhood” from even the flimsiest material.
I haven’t seen the videos. But
“It seems these days however, everyone wants to be a tragic figure online”
is painting with an awfully broad brush.
Yeah, well… it was obviously hyperbole Karen.
Sigh…
No one appreciates art anymore…
@6 lol
Jon, for once I need to disagree with you. The fact Smithy believes he is protecting his spawn from hell by propagandizing them does not strike me as good grounds for asserting that Smithy is morally justified in propgandizing his spawn.
If it did, Jon, then if I believed I was protecting my kids by teaching them the world was full of vicious elves who were out to eat them I would be justified to teach them that simply because I thought I was protecting them from elves. But does my right to indulge in a delusion outweigh my kids right not to be needlessly misled and terrified of elves? At what point do we cease to indulge delusions? When they result in our denying everyone in our society the benefits of stem cell research? Or at some point before then?
At any rate, I ain’t sure passing a delusion onto a kid should be something we refuse to hold people responsible for.
Hmmm… I may have misunderstood what you’re saying, Jon. I guess the term I’m not clear about is what you mean by proselytizing. To me that word can at times mean more than simply imparting information or indoctrination. It can mean an effort to persuade, and that effort to persuade can even involve deceit, appeals to false reasoning, and exploitative tricks. All of those are commonly used by the proselytizers here in my town. So, my early response was based on my understanding you to be saying that it’s OK for a parent to proselytize their kids. But then I came back and reread you. You seem to mean something different than I do by proselytization. So, I’m not sure I disagree with you anymore.
“Brainwashing” is an emotionally charged term, so I’m not surprised that some people shy away from it. I have in times past myself. Let’s try defining it.
Wikipedia has brainwashing down as:
Let’s break it down.
systematically: Yep, there’s a system in place. From Nursery to Primary to Young Men’s and Women’s. That’s a lot of training and reinforcing.
unethically: This is probably the root of the OP. It’s probably not unethical to raise your children in a counterfactual belief system that you sincerely believe in, though it probably is unethical to start a counterfactual belief system. So we’ll give this one a pass for now.
manipulative: Yes. Any system that claims that a person’s eternal salvation is conditional on participation in the system is engaging in manipulation on a huge scale.
often to the detriment of the person being manipulated: Some people feel that the church has benefitted them, some don’t. I’d say no, but that’s because I like the things I believe to be true. (I’m funny that way.) I spent lots of money and years of my life promoting superstition and unreason.
In sum, I find that my Mormon upbringing matches this definition of brainwashing in all but (maybe) one particular. What else can you call it when someone’s critical reasoning faculties are short-circuited to keep someone in the system?
“a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated”
Pretty vague, subjective and generally unhelpful definition.
That could describe just about anything, from the US Marine Corp, to law school, to Greenpeace, to high school football camp, to MTV, and… well… just about any ideology that is pushed in a persistent and organized fashion in our society.
The only question is whether the ideology is viewed as “harmful.” Which is – more often than not – utterly subjective.
Besides, I doubt anyone here has really thought through the human implications of how, exactly, you plan to hold those parents “accountable” for teaching their kids about stuff you subjectively disagree with.
It’s easy to shoot your mouth off online and make big macho talk about “dropping the hammer” on those groups you don’t like. Less easy to really think through the societal problems of resource allocations and ruining homes that you are most certainly implying behind all the angry ranting.
I don’t think I would use brainwashing as the best descriptor for how the Mormon story is taught. Indoctrination, (uncritical acceptance of what is taught) is probably closer to what happens, and on some occasions there may actually be something that approaches religious education, where material is presented as true, but with the advice to examine it (inquiry) without, and this is the critical point, a predetermined answer for your inquiry.
However, to dismiss (#11) “brainwashing” as a “vague, subjecting and unhelpful definition,” is itself pretty vague, subjective and unhelpful.
Well, one good turn deserves another Parker.
That said, I do agree that “indoctrination” is probably a more useful word here. The only question then becomes whether it’s the good kind or the bad kind. Because there’s a lot of “indoctrination” going on in society that we actually agree with – no matter what position you’re arguing from.
“Indoctrination” is what it is. If you think unquestioned, unexamined obedience is good, then you have your subjective answer. By the way, what is the societal indoctrination with which we agree?
Just about any set of values you seriously push on young kids would probably count Parker.
Seth:
If you don’t like the definition I gave, why don’t you find one that you do like? Then we can talk about it.
I don’t find the word to be generally useful to begin with. So it isn’t a problem of what definitions you want to give it. The word is inherently unhelpful from square one. It obscures and distracts more than it clarifies nine times out of ten.
If you teach children critical thinking skills and allow them the space to exercise them, then you’re not indoctrinating them. Parenting doesn’t need to be synonymous with trampling your child’s ability to think for themself.
Jonathan, let’s have a reality check here – no parent really does this.
No parent allows his or her kids to simply muddle things out with no moral input whatsoever.
And if anyone actually did it, it would probably count as criminal neglect.
A parent can be an advocate for their own views, expose them to other viewpoints, make sure that the child knows that good people often disagree, and provide them with the skills necessary to make sense of the issues for themselves. That’s not allowing their children to “muddle things out with no moral input whatsoever” and it’s not indoctrination. False dichotomy.
And it’s not criminal neglect. We’re not talking about letting them decide whether or not to play in traffic.
BTW, this is how I approach religion with my children. There exists at least one parent who does this. Q.E.D. 🙂
Sure, and a lot of Mormon parents teach their kids critical thinking skills too.
So there you are.
@8
Jon, delusions go a lot deeper than simply religious superstition. The universality of western medicine and psychology comes to mind. Besides not all of Religion is about well…fear of elves, as you put it.
Me too. I’ve written extensively about making sure that my kids understand that plenty of people believe differently than Mommy and Daddy — and trying to teach them the tools to think for themselves, even if it means they end up disagreeing with me.
Maybe they do, but can you provide some links? I read a lot of Mormon blogs and atheist blogs, and I’ll tell you this is a frequent preoccupation with atheist parents — How can I teach my kids to think for themselves? How can I get past my own desire for them to just believe like me, and avoid indoctrinating them? How can I teach them to question all authority, including mine? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blog of Mormon parents sincerely swapping tips on how not to indoctrinate their kids.
On the flip side, I’ve seen plenty of Mormon blogs where the parents share advice for raising their kids to be faithful in the church, whereas I don’t think I’ve seen a blog where atheist parents swap advice on how to be sure their kids will grow up to be staunch atheists.
My particular sample may well be biased, but I think this is a point where there’s a very real difference in the values that secular parents typically seek to teach their kids.
Isn’t this just a matter of not using the same lingo?
No, I don’t think so. I think there is a real difference between “I want to teach my kids to have a strong faith in the Lord,” vs. “I want to teach my kids to think for themselves — even if it means they grow up to have different answers than mine to life’s big questions.”
Yeah, except that in my case, learning to have “faith in the Lord” happened to involve a lot of critical thinking skills.
Or is this one of those instances where “critical thinking” is actually being used as a code word for “agreeing with the atheists?”
The Mormon parents I’ve known (*not a scientific survey) discourage critical thinking about their own religion. I’m sure there are some who are not like this, and I applaud those with the courage to allow their children to evaluate Mormonism objectively.
Can we really say that a parent who teaches their child to apply critical thinking even to the parent’s own beliefs is indoctrinating their child? I don’t think that’s just a difference in lingo. That seems like a qualitative difference in parenting strategies.
How do you see having faith as involving ‘critical thinking’?
I see critical thinking as ‘questioning one’s assumptions by the light of evidence’, while faith means ‘sticking to one’s assumptions despite the lack of evidence’.
No, “critical thinking skills” isn’t coded language. I accept the fact that, as I said, good people often disagree and will apply good reasoning to a problem and come to different conclusions. I think a good question for parents to ask themselves is whether they are helping their children to understand other points of view that contradict their own?
For example, when was the last time you made a good faith effort to explain to your children why some people don’t believe in Mormonism? I’ve done the reverse, explaining the reasons as I understand it that people believe in Mormonism, and encouraging them to ask believers for their reasons directly in case I’m not doing them justice.
Daniel, I don’t see faith and critical thinking as mutually exclusive, but I think I have a slightly different definition of faith: faith can be seen as the decision to take action even though the evidence isn’t conclusive. After we’ve applied all of our reasoning skills to a question, the evidence probably isn’t 100% conclusive. Faith allows us to act as though it were.
For example, the evidence that reducing dietary cholesterol will reduce heart disease isn’t 100% conclusive, but I act as though it is (or at least I try to).
A lot times, however, we skip the first steps of gathering the evidence as comprehensively as possible and then evaluating it critically. That takes a lot of work that we may not have the time or energy for, or maybe we just want to believe a certain way. That’s where faith’s greatest sins lie, in my opinion.
Sigh… I can see where this is going.
Critical thinking to you guys just automatically means rejecting religion. So the mere fact that a person is religious is sufficient evidence in your minds that there isn’t any critical thinking going on.
Of course, I find this sort of thinking to be incorrect (and more than a little self-congratulatory). But I’m not sure I want to expend the effort to convince you otherwise.
And incidentally, the last time I seriously explained why other people believe differently was last week – to my 8 year old daughter. It wasn’t comprehensive, but we talked it over.
Sorry Jonathan, I somehow missed your post. So my previous response might be a bit off.
I see faith slightly differently, though your definition is OK.
I see faith as a decision to commit to discovering something about the world. So at the beginning, you may not have all the data, but you commit yourself to exploring for it. All human action is – in a sense – faith-based.
Scientists wouldn’t search for a cure for cancer if they didn’t have faith that the disease ought to be eradicated. And they wouldn’t bother if they didn’t have faith that human effort is actually capable of doing it (think about it a moment – is there really any reason to believe we can eradicate cancer as opposed to not?).
Gandhi wouldn’t have done what he did if he didn’t have faith that human freedom was a better state than otherwise. All politics is – in the end – faith based.
We all act on ideals that we take for granted on faith, and proceed from that premise.
But the thing is – it’s only by fully diving into a paradigm or course of action, that you can really fully understand.
To understand something, you must love it first. And if you do not love it, you can never fully understand it.
This accusation is totally unwarranted. Please read this recent post of mine where I wrote about the importance of being willing to question your own assumptions. You can see that I linked to a number of my earlier posts where I talked about how I’d learned from my own errors or from recognizing assumptions I’d held without realizing I was holding them — on a variety of different subjects.
Admittedly Chanson, I wrote that without reading Jonathan’s final comment. The accusation would have been much softened if I had.
I do think that Daniel thinks this way, based on my past interaction with him. But Jonathan can have the benefit of the doubt. I wasn’t really thinking too much about you when I wrote it.
It is a serious question, though. A quick google search on “skepticism vs. atheism” turns up a lot of interesting debate, ranging from people claiming that you can’t really call yourself a skeptic if you’re religious to the other pole where people argue the importance of not conflating the two.
Skepticism is so broadly useful that it’s a shame that it has been narrowed in the popular conception to mean religious skepticism.
Seems to me that there is no reason that Religion can’t compel an individual be objective and use critical thinking. Most of the truly Religious people I know are always looking for clarity about how their actions meet up with their beliefs and vice verse. To me it looks a lot like critical thinking and striving for objectivity.
A lot of that striving is done without empirical evidence, as Seth pointed out, even scientific research is carried out with a certain amount of faith in an unknown but hoped for outcome.
Seth, you are mischaracterising my view. I do not think someone has to come to the same conclusions as I do to be a critical thinker.
If you’re a committed Mormon, you probably believe in statements like
God appeared to Joseph Smith.
The Book of Mormon is a factual account of people living in Ancient America
Jesus died to save the world from sin.
If you choose to believe those things, you are doing so in the absence of evidence. That doesn’t qualify under any definition of critical thinking that a reasonable person would use.
Some people here are stretching the definition of ‘faith’.
My uncle used to say, “You wouldn’t try to get out of bed in the morning unless you had ‘faith’ that the floor were solid.”
But that isn’t faith. I actually have a lot of evidence from past mornings that the floor is solid. Today might be different, but I have a very reasonable expectation that future instances will be similar to past ones. That’s just normal inference.
The scientists who work on cancer do not need to have faith that they’ll be successful. They might hope for a good outcome, they might predict their chances of success, but faith is not required.
Faith is the willingness to suspend reasoning in the service of a belief that lacks evidence. I don’t expect Seth will like that definition, but nothing new for this thread.
Daniel, that’s not a definition of faith that most religious people would accept, and rightfully so. It’s a strawman argument because no one believes anything in the “absence of evidence”. The evidence may be horrible and insufficient by most standards, but it is evidence.
You and I don’t believe that the Book of Mormon provides sufficient evidence to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, but it is evidence of a kind. So saying that Mormons believe without evidence is a mischaracterization of the situation.
The definition of faith as “the willingness to suspend reasoning in the service of a belief that lacks evidence” doesn’t apply to Mormons or any other religious person that I’ve ever met. Of course it’s ridiculous to believe in something without any evidence at all. They don’t see their faith that way. They have the Bible, the belief of their parents, the feelings they label as the Holy Spirit, the existence of the universe, etc. They base their faith on evidence. So only a nonexistent strawman bases their faith on a complete lack of evidence.
Scientists who work on cancer need faith because nothing in science is ever proven 100% true or false. There’s always a probability that the conclusions they’ve drawn from the evidence are wrong. The p-value for an experiment is never exactly zero. That’s at the heart of the Bayesian revolution in the philosophy of science.
The difference between science and religion is that the evidence for most religious beliefs is generally so poor that having faith isn’t really justified, not that religion uses faith and science doesn’t. They both rely on faith.
Jonathan @42 — I was with you right up to that last paragraph: “they both rely on faith”.
Sorry, but saying “I think that theory X is more likely to be accurate than theory Y” does not require “faith”. At all.
Especially since so much of science is not about hoping for one outcome or another. There are a lot of results where the evidence is pointing strongly in one direction (so I’ll believe that conclusion is probably right), but more data is needed. And when more results come in, maybe it will point to a totally different conclusion, which is fine. I’m just curious to know what is the best current approximation to the answer.
Similarly, “Theres always a probability that the conclusions theyve drawn from the evidence are wrong. The p-value for an experiment is never exactly zero.” Sure, but that means that your level of confidence varies, depending on the type of evidence used to reach the result. And you can look at the reasoning and evidence in order to decide what level of confidence is appropriate for a given result. But that is not faith. Hope, faith, and confidence are related, but they’re not the same thing.
I’d say there may be an element of “faith” in your scenario about scientists picking a research direction. Not that they have “faith” in their results being right, but that they may have faith that a given approach or idea will yield fruitful results. Your career is doomed if you follow a dead-end idea, so choosing to devote a month or year or more of your research time to a particular theory or approach requires a certain combination of hope and intuition that might appropriately be labeled “faith”.
Scientists who work on cancer need faith because nothing in science is ever proven 100% true or false.
You’re not describing faith. You’re describing reasoning under uncertainty. They are different things. By defining faith this way, you’ve emptied the word of meaning.
We also seem to have different ways of talking about evidence. If something is ‘bad evidence’, it’s not evidence. If someone thinks that bad evidence is good evidence, then they are mistaken. Of course I recognise that Latter-day Saints think they have evidence. But they are mistaken. As always, if a Latter-day Saint thinks they have good evidence, I and many other people would like hear about it.
I think it would be interesting to do a top-level post where we link to some discussions where believers are discussing amongst themselves the question “What is faith”? (Maybe I’ll try to do that this week, unless one of you would like to write it.) I’m sure Seth can help us out some, but it would be nice to get a range of believer views on the subject. It’s kind of funny to have three atheists debating “what is faith?” amongst themselves. 😉
I agree with Jonathan that it’s not fair to say faith is “belief without evidence”. I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s belief based (at least in part) on explicitly subjective evidence such as spiritual witness or one’s own intuition about what seems or feels right. Daniel will probably object “That’s not evidence!” — but I guess we’ve just shifted the debate to the definition of “evidence”. 😉
That’s how these things go, I’m afraid.
I agree with Jonathan that its not fair to say faith is belief without evidence.
Why not? When you have evidence for something, do you need to have faith in it?
@47 — I explained @45 why not: because it involves accepting a different type of evidence that they feel is valid and trustworthy evidence.
That said, I’m willing to play devil’s advocate on this. I was just thinking of the recent video where some Muslims debated PZ Myers (and filmed it and posted the video). Right at the beginning, PZ Myers argues that the science that Muhammad wrote in the Koran was information that was known at the time, and that Muhammad could easily have had access to. And the Muslim guy immediately starts accusing PZ of believing that on faith! What does that say about that believer’s definition of faith? It looks like he’s saying his definition of faith is “believing whatever you want, regardless of whether you have evidence to back it up.” Seriously, watch the video and tell me what other definition that guy might be using.
Sorry, but saying I think that theory X is more likely to be accurate than theory Y does not require faith. At all.
It requires extremely little faith, but taking a step back from just the statement itself, we can see that making that statement requires the faith necessary to trust your senses, your experimental apparatus, and your ability to reason correctly. Without that faith, a person couldn’t take the leap to express that statement. Maybe scientists don’t think of it as “faith” per se, but that’s what it is.
Youre not describing faith. Youre describing reasoning under uncertainty. They are different things. By defining faith this way, youve emptied the word of meaning.
I’ve essentially defined it the same way as the Lectures on Faith, so it was religiously meaningful to at least the authors. What you’re expressing as emptying the word of all meaning seems to me to really mean that by pointing to the commonality between religion and science, I’m taking away the ability to draw a sharp distinction between the two. You seem to want faith to be what religion does and what science does not.
From what you’ve said, I think you’re trying to say that faith doesn’t involve any reasoning at all, a completely subjective, irrational process. I find that conception of faith problematic. First because human reasoning is never a purely rational exercise. Even at our most rational, unconscious biases affect how we think. No human process of decision making — science notwithstanding — is untainted by irrationality.
Second, for virtually all religious believers, faith is the irrational last step at the end of a chain of reasoning. Religious believers don’t pick their beliefs by flipping a coin. If asked, they will express reasons that they have faith. “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” (1 Pet. 3:15) We may disagree with their reasoning, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
Of course, the reasons religious believers express may not be the real reasons, but that’s fair to say of anyone who believes anything. For example, if asked why I believe in the Big Bang, I might say that it’s because there is scientific evidence that supports that theory, but the real reason I believe it is that I’ve heard scientists who have worked in the field say that there is evidence and I trust them to have interpreted the data correctly.
Regarding evidence, all evidence is bad evidence if your threshold is high enough. Evidence is evidence and it can reasonably justify certain confidence levels, but it will never justify 100% confidence. Lacking the ability to have complete confidence in our reasoning, there isn’t a nonarbitrary dividing line that we we can draw to class evidence into the two groups, good and bad. Maybe you think 95% confidence is good enough. Maybe I think 51% is good enough. Both are arbitrary.
The dividing line being arbitrary, I can set my threshold arbitrarily high and state that the evidence that you base your beliefs on is bad evidence and therefore — according to what you’ve said — not really evidence at all.
I disagree. I think you are emptying the word of meaning by saying that faith is no more than the ordinary daily assumptions we make in order to function.
Anyway, I just spent some time searching for definitions of faith on the Internet, and — if I have faith that google can direct me to useful information (I’ll grant that as faith) — I’d say the definitions by believers are so all-over-the-map that perhaps the word doesn’t have a useful definition.
Daniel #40
You’ve exactly proven my point.
You do equate religious views with an absence of critical thinking. Which fits the pattern of contempt for religious belief that I’ve gotten from you time and time again, on various forums.
It’s a little late for you to be complaining now that you don’t like how unfair that makes you look.
There is a great deal of critical thinking that goes on in formulating a person’s religious beliefs – even concerning things you can’t measure in a lab. The problem is that you have incorrectly narrowed the TYPE of evidence to which critical thinking can apply. Which is a common atheist foible. Only certain types of evidence count. Everything else is just elves and unicorns.
Never mind that a lot of perfectly legitimate and important aspects of the human experience get unceremoniously shoved under the rug when you do this.
Now, it is correct enough that testing a scientific theory is theoretically possible in the absence of any sort of emotional motivation whatsoever.
But no scientist does this. No human being does this. Emotional motivation is at the heart of ALL human action. And emotionally-driven goals are at the heart of all of it as well. And all science is conducted in the name of overarching ideals that you must simply accept on faith.
Concern for human welfare, is a faith-based ideal. Belief in the inevitable triumph of human progress is a faith-based ideal. Democracy is a faith-based ideal. Belief that your pharmaceutical company is benefiting humanity and going to provide you with a stable job is a faith-based notion. Heck, the entire stock market is essentially faith-based – you can even see the fluctuation in the DOW numbers measuring the temperature of the collective faith of investors.
All human action is motivated by faith. We, at a certain point, just have to accept that we are uncertain about some big things that impact our lives. Yet we have to set that aside and dive in anyway. And it is through participation in the system that you believe in that you get evidence of its truthfulness.
We learn by doing – and that’s true of religious paradigms as well.
Steh @52 — Yes, everyone is biased in ways they don’t recognize. Everyone uses some component of emotion when reasoning. It’s not humanly possible to be purely objective.
However, you can respond to that information by
1. sincerely trying to recognize your bias, to compensate for it, and to use every tool you can to get accurate information despite your bias, or
2. telling yourself that all conclusions are really just [equally biased] opinions, hence you don’t need to even try to reach accurate conclusions; believing whatever you please is the just same.
There’s a real difference between these two responses to studies about how bias works.
Which leads me to a funny thought experiment:
Suppose I say to you: “I really am completely objective. I never use any emotion in any of my reasoning. I did when I was younger, but since then, I’ve trained myself to have no emotional bias at all.”
Can you prove me wrong? What kind of evidence would you use?
Right.
But who said that bias is bad?
Do you honestly wake up each morning and try to examine whether your belief in “human freedom” being a good goal is well-founded or not?
At a certain point, you just have to pick the hill you’re going to die on.
That is an interesting experiment.
I don’t think you can prove the person wrong. Mainly because it’s hard to prove that emotions exist at all.
Sure, I could hook you up to a machine measuring your physical biological reactions – reactions that we ASSOCIATE with emotion. But does that prove it? Not so sure.
And of course, if we accept the parameters of Internet discussion, it is utterly impossible for me to prove you wrong Chanson. I can’t see you for one thing.
But our own human experience of interacting with people (which is also faith-based) tells us that everyone has emotions. So your claim would seem unlikely to most of us based on mere experience.
Bias isn’t necessarily bad, but it often hinders people from reaching accurate conclusions.
I didn’t claim it’s important to continuously re-hash subjects you’ve already considered at length — especially in the absence of new arguments and/or new evidence.
I think that — when you encounter new arguments or evidence — you should try to ask yourself: “Do I have an emotional attachment to some conclusion that would make me want to dispute/dismiss this argument?” And then try to be aware of that bias and compensate for it as much as possible (which is, admittedly, very difficult). I think it’s also important to examine the invisible assumptions that you don’t realize that you are holding, which is even trickier. But not totally impossible. 😉
I don’t disagree.
However, I would point out that the reasons that most Americans believe in stuff like “freedom” are very similar to the reasons people believe in their own religion as well. I don’t think most Americans have deeply examined why human freedom is a good thing as opposed to the alternatives – other than repeated superficial gut-checks.
We believe mommy, daddy, and our third grade school teacher when they tell us that freedom is good. And we live in a system designed to perpetuate the bias in favor of it. And we watched episodes of GI-Joe and He-Man that told us so.
But I don’t think most people really critically examine societal assumptions like this.
I agree that I’m removing the special religious meaning of faith because I don’t see that there is a real difference between religious faith and the kinds of assumptions that we make to remain functional. (Of course I disagree that I’m emptying it of all meaning.) So I don’t buy the criticisms of religion that are rooted in its use of faith. We all use it to some degree, so people in glass houses are wise to avoid throwing stones.
I believe that the distinction that we can draw between religion and science is in the kinds of evidence and reasoning involved. I find many of the evidences and reasons given by religious believers for their beliefs lacking in one way or another. I will argue against their reasoning or their use of the kinds of evidence they appeal to because I don’t think the evidence justifies the leap of faith, but I don’t waste my time complaining about faith itself.
Seth @58 — Yes, very true.
Jonathan @59 — my main objection to your earlier comment was that you’re saying that I have to accept that XYZ is faith; i.e. that I have to accept your definition of faith.
I agree that the definition you’ve stated is a possible definition of faith, but I don’t think it’s the canonical definition of faith. Indeed, I suspect that the word doesn’t have a canonical, universally agreed-upon definition. “What is faith?” is a complex semantic and philosophical question.
Here you’re assuming that saying someone believes “on faith” is an insult, and that calling something “faith” is a way of “throwing stones” to denigrate someone’s profession of belief. I reject that analysis. I think that’s an insult to people who consider faith a positive thing.
I agree with this statement. That’s what I said @45.
I say bias is bad. It gives wrong answers.
I also know I’m capable of it. So what I try to do is become more aware of how it works and what kinds there are, and try to be as free of it as I can be.
This differs from your approach, which is to take refuge in it. Everybody does it, or something like that. Relativism.
This is not really fitting for someone who’s trying to learn more and overcome their cognitive weaknesses, though it fits very well with someone who’s staked out a position and wants to defend it, whether it’s right or not.
Not necessarily.
Sometimes picking a side and vigorously defending it is the only way to take that side seriously enough to comprehend it.
As you like.
I need to remember that people may have different purposes than I do, and that’s fine.
To clarify, I don’t think my definition is canonical. It just serves to point out that everyone makes irrational leaps of reasoning. It’s unavoidable if you want to avoid being paralyzed. I think we would be hard pressed to come up with a nontrivial definition of faith that applies to religion but doesn’t apply to some degree to science, atheism, etc.
So I don’t think that saying someone uses faith is an insult, and those who use faith as an insult are only insulting themselves.
You just called faith “irrational leaps of reasoning” in this very comment — which is exactly what I’m taking issue with. I think a lot of people of faith would consider that in insult and wouldn’t accept that as characterizing “faith” (though some might be OK with it).
Maybe everyone does occasionally make irrational leaps of reasoning, and maybe I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the faith community, but I would guess that the people who have a problem with “faith = zero evidence” might also have a problem with “faith = irrational-style reasoning.”
I doubt someone who says “I have had a spiritual witness that has built my faith, hence have a testimony of the church,” would be agree if you respond “Oh, I totally understand — I have lots of things I believe for irrational reasons too!”
I should have explained that, in the way I’m using it, “irrational” isn’t necessarily an insult. I realize that it has a strong pejorative connotation. The way I am using it here, I mean to convey the idea that rational thought can only get us so far, that it can never justify certainty, so in order to act as though something were true, we have to make a gamble that can’t be justified by an appeal to reason. This kind of gamble, the leap of faith, is irrational, and we are forced to do it all the time.
Maybe a better word would be “transrational”?
In any case, many religious believers will openly acknowledge that their faith is irrational in the sense that I’m using the word. They’ll say that you can’t attain faith by using your intellect, for example. I think it was Uchtdorf who gave a general conference talk where he stated as much and may have used the word irrational although that’s probably just my hazy memory.
So while religious believers will give reasons why they believe, they will also acknowledge that religious belief isn’t entirely a rational thing. While the word “irrational” tends to be pejorative, if we can set that aside, I don’t think what I’ve said about faith would be that controversial to most religious believers. Perhaps some would object, but it’s mostly other kinds of believers that tend to deny that their belief isn’t perfectly rational.
Well, I guess I certainly like “transrational” better than “irrational.”
The problem is that the definitions here are so woolly. “Rational”, “logical”, “evidence”… what do those words even mean? What can be included in their scope?
Half the debate consists of one side trying to limit the definitions and the other side trying to expand them.
I’ll grant that some believers are OK with saying that faith is not necessarily rational. However, my argument is that many will say that “faith” means there’s some other positive reason to believe — regardless of whether it’s “rational” or not. That’s why I don’t think it’s a compliment to people of faith to say “everybody uses faith because everyone’s irrational sometimes.”
I’m not trying to compliment or insult anyone, so I don’t particularly care either way. 🙂
Stepping away from the semantic questions, where specifically do you see the distinction between belief based in science and belief based in religion?
Peoples rationality is actually not geared for truth, but is geared for winning arguments. So, in the end, both rationality and irrationality are employed when it comes to maintaining faith.
Historically, it used to be very rational to have faith in God, because “evidence” of God was all around you. Atheists were the ones who were considered “irrational.” The tables started turning, I’d say, around the early 19th century. The point here is less about the actual existence or nonexistence of God, and more about how “rationality” is more related to the number of people believing something than about what and how something comes to be believed.
I think this question is too complex for a quick comment. I’m just talking about the definition of the word “faith”. I understand that there are many common (conflicting) definitions. But the one I use is the following:
Alan, that’s an excellent point, though I think we can point to a set of thinking strategies that involve ratiocination that tend to point us toward a more accurate view of the world. They may not work perfectly, but on average can lead to better results. For the sake of this discussion, I’m calling these thinking strategies “rational”.
chanson, that definition still proves my point because everyone relies on subjective evidence. All evidence is ultimately subjective sensory data and mental objects. We all use our intuition to fill in the gaps of our reasoning. Science is just better at mitigating the problems of subjectivity by preferring repeatability, statistical significance, peer review, empirical verification of our intuitions, etc.
In other words, science is just biased toward making us do more reasoning and more verification of our beliefs whereas religion is often satisfied with less.
Except for the “intentional” part. I claim that there is a difference between intentionally embracing subjective evidence vs. making a sincere effort to compensate for it as much as humanly possible.
Yeah, I think we’re saying the same thing. Science prefers to rely on faith as little as humanly possible whereas religion embraces faith as a virtue that should be magnified (at least when faith is placed in the right religion).
Close, but not exactly. You’re saying that every use of subjective reasoning (including unintentional) is faith, therefore every conclusion is (to some degree) based on faith. I think that that renders the word practically useless. I claim that only intentional use of subjective reasoning deserves the label “faith”, therefore not every conclusion merits the word “faith”.
However — like I said — there are lots of possible definitions of “faith”. If people of faith can’t agree on what it means, why should we? 😉
Anyone who thinks science can ever replace religion is waaaay overestimating the actual role of science.
You might as well claim that one day science will make music appreciation obsolete.
And faith isn’t really something that runs in opposition to science. Nor is it something that exists as an alternative to science.
Faith is merely belief that motivates devoted action. Those beliefs can be true or untrue (as you like). But the mere fact that it is “faith” does not mean it conflicts with science. In fact, faith of some brand motivates just about all the science we do, when you boil it down to the basics.
🙂
Maybe I’m not understanding. Are you using “intentional” to mean the same thing as “knowing”? If you are, then an unintentional/unknowing use of faith is only ignorance of what’s going on. Otherwise, I’m not sure how we disagree.
My definition of faith is useless if you want to draw a sharp distinction between religious beliefs and other beliefs (because I think such a distinction is mostly artificial). It’s useful if you want to recognize that it is possible to apply critical thinking skills to the question of religious belief and still come to religious conclusions because critical thinking is not absolutely incompatible with religious belief.
Yet another definition of faith. So, would you say you disagree with my definition @72? (Just curious — I’m willing to agree to disagree on it…)
BTW, at the moment, I don’t feel like I’m up to moving on to the questions: “What is science? Is it inherently in conflict with religion? Is that the same as being in conflict with music appreciation?”
Yes Chanson, I do reject the definition of faith in #72. It trivializes and inappropriately limits the word to “gut checks.”
That’s not how I live faith, that’s not how Mormon theology views faith (unless you are talking about people who have a rather superficial view of the theology), that’s not how anyone who has read and understood Alma 32 views faith.
This is emphatically NOT about gut-checks.
What if I were to remove the part about intuition? (I actually only added the term “gut checks” because you’d mentioned it earlier in this thread.) What if I limited it to evidence based on spiritual witness. Then would it suit you?
I think that limitation doesn’t really work – because often faith does operate on evidence that is not spiritual – but rather more material (two more vague words) in nature. The dividing lines just aren’t that clear.
OK, well then I’ll just go with “deliberate use of (some types of?) subjective evidence” as my working definition.
I think one day science will understand exactly how music appreciation works. That’s unlikely to make people appreciate music one whit the less.
I think it’s also possible that one day science will understand exactly what makes people religious. That, on the other hand, might well make many people less religious.
Well Kuri…
Those are some interesting faith-claims you have there. We’ll see just how far this confidence in lab results is born out, I guess.
Have you read Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by neurologist Oliver Sacks? I’ve only read the first few chapters, but it’s quite interesting so far.
The music part isn’t faith-based; I saw it on Nova tonight! 😀 But seriously, though, there’s a lot of progress being made on that. But I don’t see how understanding music appreciation would make people appreciate music less.
My sense is that less progress is being made on religion. But if we obtain a good understanding of religion, and if it proves to be “all in our heads,” then it seems quite possible that that could be a serious blow to religion.
I don’t know if you can access this from Switzerland, but a Nova episode with Sacks exploring music and the brain will be up and streaming here quite soon.
Well, you asserted that one day our own efforts at science will completely comprehend and understand music appreciation.
Whatever that Nova special told you, I’m sure the message was NOT that “we now scientifically know everything about music appreciation.” Nor am I convinced we ever will on our own steam. That’s why I called it a “faith-claim” on your part.
But that misses my point anyway. I never said that lab experiments would never enrich or complement things like art and religion. What I said is that they will never render them obsolete.
Yet atheists always seem to be assuming that the march and advances of the lab will always come at the expense of the realm of the chapel or temple. I categorically reject that way of looking at things.
Back to the original subject of Brainwashing. The question that keeps coming up for me is the difference between socialization and brainwashing. Is it Brain washing to insist repeatedly that your five year old keep his feet off the table. The child will see that it is important to his parents, and depending on how upset his parents get when he does will have corresponding levels of emotion connected to the thought of putting his feet on the table.
Further, when he is on his own, and he does it on his own table he may even feel guilty. Why? Because his parents and possibly other adults reinforced the importance of keeping feet off the table. This is exactly the way cultural norms are handed down. Religious belief is really not different.
On lab experiments and religion.
In a test of altruism and belief in God vs. no belief. Amounts of money given as a measure of altruistic inclination, believers gave more than atheists when the believers were reminded of their belief. When they were not reminded they gave the same amount of money as the atheists. I could not find the specific study on line but here is another by the same researcher on belief in God.
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~azim/Azim_Shariff/Home/Entries/2011/4/16_Mean_Gods_Make_Good_People%28Shariff_%26_Norenzayan%2C_2011%29.html
So, to recap: Seth feels that believing something you want to believe — without having any valid justification — is “faith”. Just not “gut-checks”. Because gut-checks would trivialize faith. 😉
Seth,
You may be right. Religious beliefs seem to be very “sticky” in the face of contrary evidence. Learning what the Book of Abraham facsimiles really say, for example, has had very little effect on Mormonism.
Apparently, believing that something will probably happen in the future — no matter what the justification — counts as “faith” too.
Kuri, that’s because what the facsimiles really say is not a problem for Mormon faith.
And a lot of folks at FAIR see ex-Mormon refusals to accept their arguments as being every bit as blind and emotion-driven as the ex-Mormons claim that the Mormon defenses are. So who’s right?
Probably for another discussion.
Chanson, you haven’t caught me in a contradiction here – because I never trivialized Kuri’s beliefs down to “gut-checks.” Kuri has actual reasons for being confident in the march of science.
But it isn’t inevitable. So I call it a faith claim. It’s a paradigm he feels he has lots of powerful and valid reasons to buy into, and he has given his allegiance to that ideal. But it isn’t as provably inevitable as 2+2=4.
Few things in life are, actually.
Seth — I’m not saying you contradicted yourself. I’m saying I don’t understand your definition and your criteria for deciding whether a belief should be called “faith” or not. If someone says “I believe X for the following YZW reasons…” I’d be at a loss to guess whether you would call that person’s belief faith or not. Whereas, I think I understand Jonathan’s and Daniel’s definitions well enough to (fairly confidently) apply them.
wayne, in those situations, after I tell them to take their feet off the table, I try to tell my children why. Sometimes I have solid justifications, but sometimes it just comes down to explaining the value of conforming to social norms. In any case, I try to avoid using guilt and parental displeasure as motivations. FWIW.
Exactly. The debunking of the facsimiles hasn’t kept Mormons from believing in the Book of Abraham. So you might well be right. Learning what religious/spiritual experiences/feelings really are might not be a problem for religion.
I don’t believe in some sort of “inevitable march of science,” BTW. I often extrapolate current trends into the future, but I’m well aware of the possibility of failure from reasons small and/or grand.
Same here. For example, see how I explained about naughty words.
98.
Parental strategies vary from parent to parent, for various situation, and age of the child.
Most of us(parents) save our strongest emotions, approval and disapproval, for the most important situations. To a kid what is probably more important to them is how the parent feels about them after a given action not whether the parent gives a rational argument. If being able to rationally justify an action is presented as important kids, will get that eventually.
Kids will believe in God if it is important to the parents and community they are in. The nature of their belief will mirror the parents belief. If the belief is presented as black and white, with little room for doubt, the belief is more fragile when an individual is exposed to different points of view. Now if the parents and community present the belief in God as nuanced and flexible with room for doubt, probably belief is much stronger.
Of course. In my case, the strongest and most immediate emotional reaction they’ll get from me is from being careless on or near a road or train platform. That’s the place of ferocious zero tolerance from me and their daddy. Of course, even there, there’s clear reasoning behind it, which I explain to them directly: you could be crushed by a moving vehicle and that would be the end of you.
Kuri, the facsimiles don’t present a problem for faith precisely because they DO NOT “debunk” anything.
I’ve read the whole debate. I find the criticisms of the Book of Abraham to be, on the balance, unable to contradict the faith claims at stake.
The translation of the facsimiles into Egyptian doesn’t matter one jot, because they probably weren’t meant to be read in an Egyptian context in the first place. This is not a “faith vs. science” argument.
It’s a “I think your science is wrong – and mine is right” kind of argument.
Seth, you’re just proving your own point. Joseph Smith said the facsimiles said one thing; scholars have since learned to read Egyptian and proved that they say something else. Believers say that doesn’t matter. So that’s some pretty good evidence that science probably won’t hurt religion very much no matter what it finds out. You were right and I was wrong; I don’t know why you’re still arguing with me after I already conceded the point.
We’re still arguing because you’ve conceded the wrong point. One I was not making.
I’m saying the author of the BoA was a Canaanite, not an Egyptian. So saying what the images would mean in an Egyptian context is irrelevant.
The key to understanding the facsimiles is to ask what they would have meant to the Canaanite redactor who basically cut and pasted the popular Egyptian imagery into the Abraham story.
When you look at it from that light – Joseph Smith nails it.
Those who were asking what the images meant to the Egyptians were asking the wrong question. As a result, all critiques that proceed from that basis are pretty-much irrelevant.
So to repeat, this is not a case of “faith vs. science” where faith triumphs anyway – in spite of the science.
This is an instance where the science backs up my position and does NOT back up yours.
That’s what I’ve been arguing. Does that clarify the situation for you?
And I’m not intending to do a blow-by-blow of the Book of Abraham. But I do want my own argument to be understood here. I feel the science is on my side in this instance. I hold my beliefs in harmony with that science – not in spite of it.
I know. Religious people will do whatever they need to do — including the invention of vaguely plausible-sounding nonsense — in order to continue believing. I get it already.
Right kuri.
And online ex-Mormons do whatever they need to do to justify their own exit story.
So right back at ya.
I actually kind of agree with you, Seth, because I think that human beings are probably no more capable of genuine rationality than they are of genuine free will (which is to say, probably not at all.) But if people are going to pursue the ideal or pretense of rationality, they should do it right. And when people cast off the simpler explanation “this is an Egyptian artifact” for the more much more complex explanation “this is a ‘Canaanite redaction’ of an Egyptian artifact” for no particular reason except that it supports a pre-existing belief, they’re obviously doing it wrong.
Considering when the scroll was written, and the interaction of cultures, I don’t think the hypothesis is all that unlikely. Especially considering that writings about Abraham would have been a Canaanite, and not an Egyptian concern at that time.
I think it’s fascinating to watch a true believer in action. Anything anyone says to them just confirms their beliefs more. What we consider to be bloody-minded clinging to fables is to them the resilience of faith. Do they not realise that they’re using the same self-deceptive mechanisms as alt-med believers, young-earth creationists, or 9/11 truthers? Apparently not.
This thread started with a discussion of parental ‘brainwashing’ (or indoctrination), but for me, it’s highlighted the other side of the issue — the end goal of parental indoctrination is to convince the child to take over the job that the parent started, and to become their own indoctrinator. For a great many people, it’s tragically effective.
Try not to dislocate your shoulder while you’re patting yourself on the back Daniel.
Oh, I’m just as capable of being mistaken as anyone else. But I hope I never again engage in elaborate apologetics for some mythology. Our discussions always make me want to be on guard against that very human tendency.
Let me ask: Is there anything that could conceivably convince you that you’re mistaken about your religious beliefs? What would it take, hypothetically?
If Joseph Smith had never handled them, what reason would there be to think that those particular facsimiles are more likely to be Canaanite than to be Egyptian? What reason would there be to think that those particular facsimiles were about Abraham and not typical funerary texts? If the answer is “none,” then your belief is clearly rooted in faith in Joseph Smith, not in sciencey reasoning. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. My objection isn’t to faith but to trying to call faith science.)
That’s a circular argument. They’re only about Abraham if they’re Canaanite documents.
Daniel, that’s a pretty broad category, and vaguely defined.
There are specific beliefs that I have come to disbelieve or question already. But I get the sense that you are asking for more a “package deal” rejection here.
Since I’m not much of a fundamentalist, disbelief in part of the package does not automatically lead to rejection of the whole. Maybe that’s how it worked for you, but not for me.
Kuri, I haven’t been claiming that you independently get to these claims with archeology/history/liguistics alone.
Okay, keeping it on topic — what could you discover that would make you decide that the Book of Abraham was just made up? Hypothetically.
Daniel, it would be a two phase thing.
1. You’d have to prove that what was on the scroll had no reference to the content Joseph Smith was asserting.
Egyptology work on the few tiny fragments of the scroll we have left does not currently do this. Nor is it likely it ever will.
But if the scroll unexpectedly turned up and could be verified as the actual scroll, that might do it.
But that’s not enough.
2. You’d have to prove that Joseph Smith was not inspired after establishing this. Just proving his writings had no reference to the scroll does not automatically get us to “he made it all up.”
So you’d have to prove he wasn’t being inspired in any way when he wrote it. Ways to do this might be to compare the content of the Book of Abraham with other records we have of Abraham and see if there’s a commonality that indicates authenticity.
If you can demonstrate no commonality, then I would likely be willing to relegate the story to the realm of “inspiring fable.” But even then you haven’t established a lack of divine inspiration.
I guess at that point the only thing left would be a gut check over whether you actually still find the thing inspiring. Which would likely be personally compelling – but wouldn’t really prove anything. But maybe at that point you can’t be bothered to care much anymore – maybe you’ve got other things on your mind that seem more pressing.
Seth — There are Egyptian Hieroglyphs written all over facsimiles 2 and 3. Joseph Smith put little numbers by specific groupings of hieroglyphs to indicate which translation text corresponds to which hieroglyphic text.
Today, scholars can read ancient Egyptian as easily as Latin or Greek. A person who is fluent in ancient Egyptian can read the texts on the facsimiles and tell you what they say — and Joseph Smith’s translations are wrong.
Seth, in effect, you’re saying that you’d never change your mind. You’ve set your bar so high that no evidence will probably ever meet that standard. That would be a rational stance if the factual evidence supporting Joseph Smith’s claim to have translated an ancient record were as strong as the evidence supporting General Relativity or the Pythagorean Theorem.
But that’s not the case. I think you would have to agree that judging by facts alone, the simplest explanation is that Joseph Smith did not translate an ancient record to produce the Book of Abraham. It takes something outside the factual evidence to motivate that belief. That puts it in the same evidential boat as astrology, homeopathy, and alien abductions.
Jonathan, that’s the “simplest” explanation if, and only if, you have already made up your mind that God, prophets, and miracles don’t exist.
If you don’t have such prejudices however, it is not the “simplest” explanation, and claims that it is smack of mere question-begging.
Chanson, re-read my argument.
The Egyptian interpretation of the facsimiles is irrelevant. Asking for a strict Egyptological read on them was the wrong approach from the get-go.
It’s like this whole argument is stuck in the 1970s, and hasn’t even bothered to engage the more modern Mormon scholarship at all.
Seth — I’m not talking about interpretations of pictures. Open up your PoGP and look at facsimiles 2 & 3. They are covered with writing. They are written in a language that people can read. It’s not a question of a handful of isolated characters or of using the heiroglyphic writing system to write some other language.
Jonathan, thats the simplest explanation if, and only if, you have already made up your mind that God, prophets, and miracles dont exist.
I wouldn’t mind believing in those things (as I used to), but they entail some pretty extraordinary claims, and they’ll require some extraordinary evidence.
If you dont have such prejudices however, it is not the simplest explanation, and claims that it is smack of mere question-begging.
Is it prejudicial to assume that unicorns and Bigfoot don’t exist until evidence for them has been presented?
You seem to have misunderstood, on a very basic level, the kind of evidence that is necessary to establish a claim.
Chanson, the Semitic adaptation theory suggests that the hypocephalus was simply a cut-and-paste job re-using a popular Egyptian pictogram for a completely different purpose in the Abraham document. In which case, the Egyptian text would be beside the point.
And I’m not even touching arguments that this particular facsimile may have come from a portion of the scroll that didn’t even deal with the story of Abraham – which gets into debates about scroll length/thickness that I don’t even want to bother with in this particular discussion.
Daniel, the tooth-fairy/bigfoot/unicorn/spaghetti monster argument misses the point.
None of those concepts are meant to be taken seriously in the first place. So comparing them to God is pretty-much an apples and oranges comparison.
If only Joseph Smith had realized that those Egyptian texts were beside the point. Then he might not have bothered to publish (erroneous) translations of them.
Jonathan, thats the simplest explanation if, and only if, you have already made up your mind that God, prophets, and miracles dont exist.
If you dont have such prejudices however, it is not the simplest explanation, and claims that it is smack of mere question-begging.
That ignores the fact that the billions of people in the world who believe in those things would agree with me. It takes more than factual evidence and beliefs in God, miracles, and prophets to cause people to believe in Joseph Smith’s claimed translation. Even if a person believes in those things, the simplest explanation remains that Joseph Smith made up the translation.
What you’re doing, Seth, is called ‘special pleading‘.
You’re saying that concepts like Bigfoot and unicorns are not to be taken seriously, but God is, when in fact the evidence is the same for all those entities.
Let alone the fact that some people do take Bigfoot seriously. And the Loch Ness monster, and phantom cats, and UFOs. Your deity is only one of a number of entities that people believe exist, and construct elaborate apologetics to defend. How are your attempts different from theirs?
Belief in God tends to be quite a bit more potent than any of those concept Daniel.
Which is proof enough that you are talking about something completely different.
Then your claim that science supports your argument doesn’t hold up.
Seth, are you familiar with Occam’s razor at all?
I don’t think so. More widespread, sure, but not more potent. You should try talking with some (self-described) UFO abductees some time. Religious believers have nothing on them in terms of life-changing strength of belief.
Exactly, Kuri.
Seth — You’re just describing how people feel about the belief, which has nothing to do with how true it is. People can have ‘potent’ feelings about things that are wrong. This is special pleading again.
Anyway, if belief in a god is more ‘potent’ than other beliefs, then that just means that believers should be able to give more ‘potent’ evidence.
Yes, I’m familiar with Occam’s Razor.
It’s an online favorite of people who have already begged the question in their underlying arguments, and are now looking for something impressive-sounding to top it off.
Also, look up the difference between the word “establish” and the word “support.”
Daniel, you’re shifting the goal posts to “truth” now. I wasn’t talking about that. I was saying that God and the tooth fairy are two entirely different things. I don’t have to even touch the topic of “truth” to establish that.
Incidentally, I’ve noticed that no one else on this blog fights harder than you do in the defense of commonly-used cheap atheist insults.
Just found that interesting.
The next thing you know kuri and Daniel will try to convince us that the rapture will not occur on Oct 21, in spite of Harold Camping’s deep potent faith that it will.
Now, now. I’m not insulting anyone, or moving any goal posts. I’m trying to discuss factual issues here, because I think what’s true matters. I thought that was a given — if not, just let me know.
What I’m saying is that people can muster a lot of complicated arguments to defend a counterfactual narrative. People do it all the time. I think you’re doing it with Mormonism, and the tactics you use are very similar to other alternative-reality folks: take your conclusion as a starting-point, defend the belief system against allegations of implausibility, use semantics and uncertainty to create wiggle-room, and (in a pinch) claim that no one knows what the truth is (or that truth is incidental) and say that you’re being maligned.
What scientifically- or skeptically-minded people do is different: they educate themselves about how our minds can fool us, they stay wary of minority or fringe views, they require evidence for extraordinary claims, and most importantly, they change their minds when the evidence requires. Even though I’m not great at this, I take it as an ideal.
Again, I’m not trying to insult you. I’m pointing out your errors — which anyone can make — so your reasoning will be stronger and it’ll be easier for people to agree with you.
The reason I bring up Occam’s razor is because it provides us with an easy guide to what “simpler” explanations are. A “simpler” explanation in essence just means one with fewer components, with fewer “moving parts,” if you will.
The conventional explanation of the facsimiles requires only that Egyptians wrote Egyptian documents in Egyptian. Your explanation adds to Egyptians writing Egyptian documents in Egyptian an entire system in which Canaanites “redacted” Egyptian documents by copying them while completely ignoring the meaning of the words in them and giving them entirely new meanings. It also adds specific Canaanite(s) who worked on specific document(s). Since you can’t arrive at these conclusions based on “archeology/history/linguistics alone,” it also necessarily adds “God, prophets, and miracles.”
The only way your explanation works, in other words, is by taking perfectly commonplace and straightforward phenomena and adding a boatload of additional factors to them. Without even arguing about their dubiousness, your explanation is far more complicated.
So for you to make a claim like
Is just plain weird. If we’re trying to decide what’s “simpler,” it doesn’t matter if gods, etc., exist; their addition to the story obviously complicates something that can easily be explained without them.
“The conventional explanation of the facsimiles requires only that Egyptians wrote Egyptian documents in Egyptian.”
Woah there. Hold the phone.
That’s not a “conventional” explanation at all. It’s an explanation born of complete ignorance of Egyptian archeology.
The Egyptian language and culture was used all over the freaking place when they were a powerful culture and civilization. People borrowed from it, mixed and matched with it, cut-and-pasted it, and used it all the time – whether they were Egyptian or not.
Any Egyptian archeologist knows this Kuri.
You’re frankly just making things up at this point.
Yeah, and that might be a reasonable explanation if it weren’t for the fact that the (well-known) text Abraham copied is significantly more recent than Abraham’s time (on the order of millenia).
(But it still wouldn’t explain why Joseph Smith claimed to translate specific passages written in Egyptian language in hieroglyphic script.)
Oh for fuck’s sake. So change it to “people in the Egyptian cultural sphere wrote documents in Egyptian.” Same difference. Simple explanations are simpler than complicated explanations. Complicated explanations are more complicated than simple explanations. &_&
Chanson, I’m re-reading my own sources to formulate a response to your remarks about actual hieroglyph translation. I don’t want to misrepresent what proponents of the theory are actually saying.
As for your remarks about the dating of the scroll… yes, I was aware of the date – much later than Abraham’s time.
However STILL in a time when Egypt was a big deal – militarily, economically, and culturally. So I don’t think it changes much. In fact, it makes the Canaanite redactor idea more plausible, not less.
Kuri, one thing I did want to throw out –
I’m just not sure I really buy into the whole notion of Occam’s Razor in general. Certainly not in the expansive way you seem to be applying it – to all human truth.
This just doesn’t jive with my experience. Simple explanations are NOT always better, are not always more useful, are not always more likely to be true. I’ve had that demonstrated to me throughout my undergrad and graduate studies.
Occam’s Razor is a cute saying and seems to have explanatory force in some situations. But I would never go so far as to call it a universal law or maxim.
And at any rate, it’s hopelessly overused and abused in debates where atheists hang out. It’s almost always accompanied by problematic question-begging in the underlying arguments as well.
It’s gotten bad enough that someone using it in an online debate has almost become code for “please tune out whatever I’m saying – I’m just being cute.”
Seth, to be honest, I’m kind of surprised that you’re arguing this point. I thought all the savvy Internet Mormons had moved on to “the papyrus inspired Joseph Smith to receive the BoA text as a revelation.”
Out of curiosity, do you also believe that the Masons continuously passed down a (corrupted) version of the endowment ceremony from the time of Solomon?
Seth,
I don’t regard Occam’s razor as anything more than a useful rule of thumb. Making it into a “law” of some sort would basically mean that complicated things never happen. That’s obviously a stupid idea.
But in this case I was only applying it as a way of defining “simple”: explanations with fewer “entities” — components, parts, requirements, or whatever one wants to call them — are “simpler” than explanations with more entities.
Chanson, that’s an approach I’ve heard of. I leave it as an option, but I see no need to resort to it at present.
There are plenty of intelligent Mormons out there who haven’t moved on to that argument.
Honestly, I get the sneaky suspicion that to some people on the Internet “savvy Mormon” essentially boils down to “whatever John Dehlin thinks.” I’m not accusing you of it, but it’s an annoying theme I’m getting overall.
I thought the two main apologetic arguments were “there were a lot more scrolls, which have been lost” and “Joseph Smith was only inspired by the papyri, he didn’t translate them in the usual sense.” Have those been generally superseded, or is “Canaanite redactor” just your personal preference as an explanation?
It’s possible, but I recall people were already using that explanation more than twenty years ago, as I recounted in 2006 — long before I’d ever heard of John Dehlin.
Wow. I’m flattered that my post sparked such an intelligent discussion.
Chanson, let me know if I’m getting too biting.
Kuri, the “Semitic adaptation theory” was something I first read from Kevin Barney who published a paper on it. Link is on my other computer, so I’ll post it later.
I think another argument that I’ve heard is that Joseph Smith actually did get at least aspects of the Egyptian meaning right. I think Nibley took this approach, and I’ve heard it mentioned more recently. I don’t know enough about the topic though to advocate for it here – one way or the other. I’ve also had faithful LDS scholars whom I respect state reservations about some of Nibley’s work. Not to say the wholsale dismissive tone you hear about NIbley on the DAMU is appropriate either.