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 Creed and CredencesSeason 2, Episode 6Complete TranscriptBarry: I pull up to a lakefront house in Concord New Hampshire, and it’s pouring rain. before I have a chance to find an umbrella, a man comes out to greet me with his feisty Jack Russell mix leading the charge. They walk me immediately over to the back of his garage.Dave: The dog's name is DNA so you can tell I like science.Barry: Dave is an amateur scientist, he got a bachelor's in physics and got his master's in biology at Clemson University. He was a successful enough businessman that he can now concentrate almost exclusively on experiments and explorationDW: Well Barry what this is is this is an invention of a guy named Dr. Kiyomori who lived in Tokyo.Barry: on the back of Dave's garage is a large clear dome like contraption about the size of a small yoga ball, instead of it are a series of reflectors with wires running out of the device and into the garageDW: and he named this technology Himawari, the Himawari is a Japanese word for sunflowerBarry: the Himawari device filters out the ultraviolet sunlight as attracts the Sun but then it absorbs the light and transmits it elsewhere through fiber-optic cables and special bulbs. Dave is using it to conduct an experiment inside, he's growing tomato plantsDW: on the left side is a control group that is getting illumination through the window on the right we have another six pots that are getting illumination just through the Himawari, everything else Barry, is identical, the same seeds, the same pot, same measured amount of dirt each are weighed.Barry: at the end of eight weeks Dave is going to compare the size and weight of the tomato plants. Success for Dave is if the plants growing under the Himawari are going to be significantly bigger and healthier and longer lived than the plants that are grown in ordinary sunlight. Dave's testing a theory. DW: filtering out the ultraviolet wavelengths which give us the skin cancer and the sunburns and fade pictures and stuff like this. We believe it's what's allowing this plant growth to be much healthier.Barry: Dave believes that you'll find giant plants and animals in environments with pure sunlight minus all of the UV rays. Dave believes you'll find plants and animals that live very long times in these environments. The theory Dave has is that Earth's ancient environment was just such a place.DW: the bible does say there were giants in those days we do have some indications that people lived a long time literally hundreds of years in the early days the primeval days before the flood. The patriarchal age in the Bible.Barry: and Dave believes that his experiment with the Himawari growing device helps to confirm these ancient earth proclamations in ScriptureDW: biblically if you read Genesis chapter one, Genesis chapter two, the early Earth seems to be different in some ways, there seems to be some hints that there was a water vapor canopy that surrounded the early earthBarry: Genesis 1:7 and God made an expanse and separated the waters which were under the expanse and the waters which were above the expanseDW: there seems to be a different hydrologic cycle no rain in the early EarthBarry: Genesis 2:5 and there were no plants on earth and no seeds to cultivate for God had not sent any rain to the earth, nor any man to work the land. Dave takes these two passages to indicate that the early earth atmosphere, the earth of God's creation contained a thick layer of water vapor, vapor that reflected back all of the ultraviolet light of the Sun, and that one tenant, if true, explains a world of giant long-lived plants animals and humans. And this is size related to longer lived in your mind?DW: In some creatures it is more so, for example there's a number of reptiles that really don't hit puberty, that continue to grow their entire life, and so if they live for a long time they just get really big and so this could actually impact upon why dinosaurs are so big for example.Barry: I forgot to mention Dave is Dino Dave, Dino Dave Wetzel.DW: and I have for many years investigated living dinosaurs, been fascinated by dinosaurs ever since I was young man.Barry: Dave is a dinosaur hunter DW: Barry I've been to Loch Ness, Papua New Guinea, looking for a creature they call the Ropin, and I've been to Cameroon and Congo and there's a creature called Mokele mBembe. Cambodia looking for critical Set a La the amazon of lake nahuel huapi I've been up to Lake Okanagan and British Columbia, because I believe that God created these dinosaurs to show his power and his greatness and they lived alongside man, and we read in Job chapter forty for example about a fantastic creature called Behemoth which just got a long tail and it said it's the biggest thing God made very likely a sauropod dinosaur still around at the time of the patriarch Job, which the oldest book in the Bible, and God says, “Behold now Behemoth look at this creature,” and he's trying to make a point that creature is big and intimidating and arrests your attention, “think how great I am as your Creator.”Barry: From Vassar College you listening to Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I’m Barry Lam. You wouldn't typically think that a belief in living dinosaurs is a tenet of the Christian faith, but well when you look at Scripture and take names and descriptions literally why wouldn't you believe that?DW: Creatures like the Leviathan creatures like the fire flying serpent some kind of eight reptilian snake-like flying creature that’s talked about prophet Isaiah. I believe it's a pterosaur.Barry: if you think Dave is a nut you're not thinking hard enough. There's this tenant from epistemology with a theory of knowledge and rationality, it says that the rational person has to have coherent and consistent beliefs. Their beliefs have to hang together. Whatever you want to say about Dave at least he's trying to be consistent. It's undeniable that the Bible contains passages about large reptilian creatures in the early days of the earth and it's undeniable that we found such creatures in the fossil record. If you could find a living dinosaur, capture it, and bring it back to show everyone, you've got an exhibit to the truth of creation science.DW: my point is if we can't believe the evolutionists on something like dinosaurs. How can we believe them on some of the real stretches like life coming from non-life or a big bang creating an ordered universe or an ape-like creature just by random mutations developing consciousness?Barry: Dave isn't the nut. If anything Christians who don't believe these things have some explaining to do. At least a water vapor canopy can explain giants, dinosaurs, long lives, and a source of water for the great flood of Noah's Ark. It also can explain why we don't live that long anymore because with the water vapor canopy gone we're getting hit with all these UV rays. By the way I also learned from Dave that the great flood is responsible for the mass extinctions, as well as why Pangaea split up into many continents. Dave's beliefs hang together. What do other Christians have to say about plate tectonics, or the fossil record, or UV light? On today's show we're going through two stories of people who are trying to make their religious beliefs fit with the empirical facts, because of the central tenets that our beliefs should all fit together. Throughout we're gonna look at one philosopher's theory that this is all wrong. But what he actually says is that we've understood religious beliefs are wrong. They're not actually beliefs at all. It's a view that both atheists and fundamentalists are sure to despise, but could it be true?NVL: I'm Neil van Leeuwen, I'm an associate professor of philosophy and affiliated with the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University.Barry: Neil van Leeuwen has a theory, a theory he's been pushing for the past few years. It's a theory about religious beliefs, actually he doesn't even want us to use those two words together, religious and belief. Neil believes that most people who are religious don't actually believe the tenets of their religion and it's not because he thinks they're hypocrites or lying out of bad faith. He thinks it's because of what it means to believe something.NVL: this thing I'm calling factual belief we all have thousands of them in their really mundane. So you bury, for example, believe that the currency in France is the Euro. You believe that New York City is in New York State so it's kind of the bedrock and we don't even usually call them beliefs, we just say how things are or how we take them to be. I think in the lay population when people talk about what they believe they normally refer to what I call religious credences. Many people believe that Jesus rose from the dead, many people believe that God exists my basic claim is that the way religious credences are processed in the mind is different from the way factual beliefs are processed.Barry: One of the features that differentiates religious credence ha's and factual beliefs for Neal van Luwan is that factual beliefs are simply and straightforwardly responsive to evidence. There's evidence in favor of them, there's evidence against them, people treat the evidence for and against in straightforward ways.NVL: Say you factually believe that there almonds in the cupboard, say your partner tells you there are no almonds in the cupboard, then poof your factual belief that goes away. It's something that is so simple that we tend to forget about it, but we're updating our factual beliefs all the time. This kind of constant updating is a feature that I call evidential vulnerability and factual beliefs have it and importantly the other cognitive attitudes tend not to have it.Barry: by other attitudes Neil means something like imagination or make-believe. If you and a group of friends are imagining or make believing that a horrible vegan meal tastes like steak and eggs then every bite where you get evidence to the contrary doesn't really count against that imagination. Or take desire if you desire to eat steak and eggs and all that's on the menu is a tofu burger you don't thereby have a reason not to want steak and eggs anymore. On the other hand if you're blindfolded and asked to guess what you're eating and you think you're eating steak and eggs, then as soon as the food hits your tongue it tastes like tofu you have reason to stop believing that it's steak and eggs, that's what beliefs are like they respond to evidence because they're based on evidence. Which one is a religious credence more like, a factual belief or an imagination?NVL: you can hang on to a religious credence despite the fact that the evidence goes contrary to it, and this is something that some people call faith, I'm not saying whether it's a good or a bad thing but it is something that differentiates that kind of attitude, the referential religious credence from the ordinary factual belief and shows they're not really the same kind of thing.DW: I hang on every word of God's Word and if for example God's Word talks about dragons well there were large reptiles that existed on planet earth and interacted with humans.Barry: Dave has a vision of opening an outdoor museum and theme park, Genesis Park where he exhibits artifacts and theories, it would be his own version of our creationist museum. The biggest one of these is in Kentucky where the prominent creationist Ken Ham built a full-scale ark that has supposed to house two of every animal species including the sauropod dinosaurs. Dave has been traveling the world collecting artifacts that he takes to be evidence that humans in various remote corners of the world have interacted with living dinosaurs.DW: can you see what's on this stone here Barry? What does that jump out to you?Barry: That looks almost like a StegosaurusDW: okay so this is a stone and this stone is one of any number of these that are excavated from the tombs in the southern part of Peru-Barry: Dave's got a hundred of these things antique items from places like China and Mali, but he isn't in a position to open a real Genesis park until he captures his prized possession: a living dinosaur he could use as his main exhibit.LJT: So I grew up incredibly fundamentalist I grew up in the home school evangelical fundamentalist movement purity culture and in love with George W Bush we thought he was jesus. If the Bible isn't literal. everything's a lie, that is what they teach you very early growing up. Liberal Christianity isn't really Christianity, Catholics aren't really Christians, the Presbyterians aren't really Christians, only the fundamentalists are Christians and I believed that. Hi I'm Laura Jean Truman and I write over at about Christianity and mysticism and monasticism and surviving fundamentalism.Barry: Laura Jean Truman is my guide through fundamentalism as someone who reasoned her way out of it. Laura also went to seminary, Candler School of theology at Emory University. Laura's well versed in theology and how they teach preachers to guide people through their religious tenets. LJT: Candler takes a pretty hard line on fundamentalism, the creation story is myth, this is mythology this is a way that an ancient people learned to tell their story about their encounter with God, and it's firmly in a genre that we see other peoples telling those stories in the ancient Near East, so we read along with Genesis, we'd read a lot of other ancient near-eastern texts about creation to kind of see this Bible didn't come out of a void, we have other literature from that period that we can compare it to. So for instance we look at judges and look at these stories of ancient people just like conquering like, “and then we conquered there and then we conquered there we just wiped out this whole nation.” We have no archaeological record of these conquests, but let's pull up some other conquest stories that were being written at that same time by neighboring countries, and we see a lot of other conquest stories at that time that were also total bullshit. And so we talked about ancient Near Eastern propaganda stories and ancient near-eastern conquest stories and how this is actually a genre. No one destroyed anybody, so it's not that the Bible is specifically lying, but that we're talking about propaganda from thousands of years ago that everybody did.DW: and hey I get it I agree the Bible is not a history textbook is not a science textbook but if the Bible is God's Word then when it speaks to history it's true, and when it speaks to scientific matters or matters that impinge upon science it's true, and if you're gonna say it's just not true it's just you know got to be taken with a big grain of salt, at what point does it become true? If you want to believe that Jesus Christ lived a perfect life died on the cross was buried and was raised again on the third day. I mean the core basic fundamentals of Christianity, well you want to believe that John is literal history, and the book of Matthew and Mark are two Gospels. Well where are you you know gonna say, “okay that's history, but Genesis isn't”? You see the inconsistency there?Barry: was there a particular moment or experience that you can point to that you made the transition, was it a sudden one like I think I'm an atheist or something?LJT: yeah it was it was a literally overnight I had just been to a lecture and it was a religious lecture it was a female pastor who was gay and liberal and she was talking about how evolution was true and I remember listening to her and thinking, “I just need to buy this that evolution is true we need to stop pretending we can not do this anymore.” And then later that week I was reading Dawkins and I don't even remember which passage it was-Barry: Dawkins is the famous evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard DawkinsLJT: -and I just thought, “There's just no God is there?” and it was like all of a sudden, all of a sudden, “oh there's there's no God!” and it was the strangest thing because all of a sudden there was the sense of “there's nothing with me right now, like I am doing this all on my own.” Genesis wasn't literally true and the Gospels were all a mash-up of different ideologies, and I'm not gonna lie it felt really freeing, it was really nice I was like, “I can do whatever I want with my life.”Barry: Have you noticed that there's actually something that you and atheists have in common is that you believe that the Bible is God's literal word or it isn't and that's different from a lot of people in the middle both Christians and non-christians?DW: I have some refreshing debates with atheists, in that we can both agree what's at stake here. The atheists will say, “evolution really doesn't have room for God.” They're just up front about it and they don't try to play cute about it.LJT: so it's pretty easy it's pretty easy for me I was like “well there's just no God” which and also like I was a fundamentalist, I mean Dawkins is a fundamentalist, I already had the framework for “oh here's a very black-and-white simple way to have a belief system” and Dawkins was like “here's a new one.” and I was like “excellent I’m in for that.”Barry: I know what you want. You want to hear me or someone like Laura Jean debate with Dave about creation science you want to hear what he has to say about radiometric dating, Earth's rock layers, the expansion of the universe and it's calculated age, and on and on. I did do that for a long time. It doesn't sound any different from any other debate you'll find on creationism from the past hundred years. Dave isn’t ignorant of the scientific evidence just has responses to all of it, you can look it up at .DW: Barry that's what science is all about and there have been lots of revolutions in science. The big names that we study about are the revolutionaries. We have the Copernican revolution we have the Einstein revolution where it works a little differently when we start getting to the particle levels, so revolutions are the stuff that has made science exciting and great and I just think we might be in store for a revolution with regard to the dinosaurs. Barry: My love of learning never ended, and as a college professor I'm lucky enough that I've never left learning. This is actually the same for you as well the Great Courses Plus is a streaming service that gives you unlimited access to learn from award-winning professors about virtually any topic: philosophy, history, science, art. Watch or listen to any course of your choice on any device any time through the website or the Great Courses Plus app. If you're a fan of this show I recommend listening to the Philosopher’s Toolkit: how to be the most rational person in any room. The course isn't just the talking head there are sketches reenactments in charts that really bring alive the art of thinking well start enjoying the great courses plus the day with my special offer one month free to get this limited offer sign up now at hiphiBarry: It isn't news to anyone that a lot of religious beliefs are impervious to evidence Neil van Leeuwen uses this observation to argue that people actually don't believe the tenants of their religion. Factual beliefs are responsive to evidence, these people have a totally different attitude toward religious tenants. On its own the argument isn't persuasive, there are certain beliefs that people have which they'll believe no matter the evidence and these have nothing to do with religion. Some parents for instance believe their children are saints no matter the evidence. Why think these things aren't beliefs at all rather than just beliefs that are not rational? And anyway sometimes people do end up changing their mind about religion based on the empirical evidence. Doesn't this show that they've believed something all along? Neil van Leeuwen has more to say, there's another important difference he sees in people's religious credencesNVL: imaginative or fictional imaginings can turn off and on for purposes of guiding behavior and what I think is striking is that religious credences to a great extent work in the same way.Barry: Consider the belief, or to use Neil's language -- the religious credence, that God is omnipotent, God could do anything. Do religious people believe this or don't they? Let's just take it for granted that they're either Jewish Christian or Muslim or any other religion that postulates an omnipotent God.NVL: So many people have observed that people don't pray for limbs to grow back. Typically they'll pray for their friends cancer to be cured, they'll pray for financial success in the future they'll pray for things that don't obviously contradict ordinary factual beliefs. If you factually believed that God is omnipotent then why not pray for your limb to grow back?Barry: This example is just it's so great because you know you could start seeing it everywhere like people will pray that the hurricane will pass but they're not going to pray for God to plug the hole in the roof right?NVL: Justin Barrett did some studies that show precisely that people will pray for God to intervene psychologically and also even biologically usually when something is biologically possible like getting over sickness. Almost never will they pray for a mechanical physical intervention. You have to ask with it without being cynical or sarcastic: well why does that prayer not occur to them?Barry: so do people believe God is omnipotent or do they not? Now some people might just say that these people are inconsistent, they do and they don't they have contradictory beliefs. Others might have a good story they say things like God likes curing some people's cancer but he doesn't like making anyone's limbs grow back. Neil's hypothesis is that religious claims aren't typically in people's minds the same way as factual beliefs.NVL: your religious credence is if you're Christian guide behavior especially on Sunday, but a lot of research shows and common sense shows they don't guide behavior that much the rest of the week, and that's why there's this common phrase once a week Christian. Some fairly recent research on pornography use in the Bible Belt suggests that although Bible Belt pornography use is much lower than the rest of the country on Sunday, it's a bit higher during the rest of the week. So this religious credence that God is watching and that God knows what you're doing it seems to operate on Sunday, but not during the rest of the week. Now, if it were a factual belief you would expect it to lower pornography use across the board.Barry: Van Leeuwen claims that the make-believe imagination-like quality of religious credence explains why religious people don't pray for limbs to grow back or for God to fill up your gas tank. Factual beliefs guide behavior all of the time, you don't pray for things you know as a matter of fact just won't happen. This is true of imagination and make-believe. When you imagine that a cactus is your mother you're not going to give it a hug, and this explains why vegetarians are able to take communion. They don't factually believe they're eating flesh and drinking blood. The same is not true in Reverse, or at least in most cases. We don't imagine that the cactus is our mother and somehow come to factually believe that it's so.NVL: so factual beliefs are constantly used in tracking reality, other attitudes including religious credence. They tend to guide behavior only in special settings and special times or in the case of religious credence when your identity is in question.Barry: So what was missing about atheism? How did you get out of it?LJT: I mean my first thought was oh my god I'm gonna get wasted this is gonna be crazy turns out atheist or religious like that's not really my scene and that was kind of disappointing actually because I think I was also talk about fundamentalism that you know atheists are all wild and do drugs and having sex orgies, and I was kind of disappointed that I didn't like doing those things. It's like what's the point of atheism if you're still you and still boring?Barry: Could you tell me what mysticism is?LJTL yeah the Mystics were people who sought religious experience and union with the divine in a way that was particularly experiential pursuit of union with God intimacy with God, most mystics I would say talk about it as a sexual experience, the Catholic mystics would specifically say Union the idea of oneness, being one with God.NVL: when you have a religious credence oftentimes you improvise further downstream religious credences that suit the situation and it's a kind of creative process it's not a rational inference process. So for example, Hindu practitioners regularly invent local deities that are in the official pantheon of the Hindu religion. Well I would say the proliferation of so many different varieties of Christianity is partly due to the fact that people do elaborate inventively on the same Bible and go different directions with it and there's some good examples of this in the Vineyard Christian Fellowship that anthropologist Tonya Lerman talks about. People play make-believe as if God is present, people pretend to have breakfast with God sometimes even pouring God a cup of coffee. And this is all part of a process that's designed to make God feel more real in their life. It really is in this case a game of make-believe, this kind of make-believe invention happens a lot more often than we like to acknowledge with with religious credences. So the official religion gives you kind of a template, but then you engage in a lot of imaginative elaboration on what God is say in your life or in my life.Barry: Factual beliefs on the other hand are not freely invented. We make rational inferences from are factual beliefs but once we start freely inventing other things about them, we enter into the world of fiction rather than belief and we recognize this. We don't start factually believing the fiction. The fact that people so easily start having religious credences in things their community invents is another sign to Van Leeuwen that people aren't believing their religious tenets as facts. Have you thought about how much a religious person particularly somebody who's sophisticated enough to be writing Christian apologetics or whatever, would see our view as incredibly condescending to the activity that they claim to be engaged in? Likening what they're doing to a game of make-believe which they will just deny that that's exactly what they're doing. Right like they don't do you're gonna find it offensive in some way right?NVL: I think we're gonna get different reactions from from different religious people and I think you're you're certainly right that that some might react that way and I think some religious people especially in the West are committed to the myth that their religious beliefs are just like any factual belief that you might have, but I think that's outrage response itself has a certain make-believe character. I would say okay maybe yours aren't but what about the once a week Christian? If they factually believe that God is always watching them why don't they act like it's six days a week and you look me in the eyes and tell me that it's not like a game of make-believe, you're outraged doesn't impress me.Barry: the theory that van Luwan is pushing has some rather drastic consequences he believes that even the very act of defending religious tenants is one big act of make-believe. The act of going through the fossil record and looking for evidence of a great flood, the act of going through the history of philosophy and looking for arguments for the existence of God these are merely games of pretense not the actual seeking of evidence. He calls it:NVL: the evidence game.Barry: finding evidence in the evidence game is like finding more props in a game of make-believe, it makes the game richer and more fun. It's like pretending all pebbles are pieces of gold and then finding more pebbles and feeling wealthy. No amount of factual evidence can tell you that you're not wealthy because that's not part of the game. Can you tell me about how any religious doctrine remains when you start looking at things mythologically, so then now we move to the New Testament and we have a virgin birth and an incarnation of God as a human who walked around, right, but then something has to remain right for you to remain faithful or call yourself a Christian.LJT: this is the eternal question that I ask myself probably every two weeks, so yes something something has to remain.NVL: this isn't meant to be a way of refuting religious apologetics, even if it is psychologically speaking a game of make-believe that doesn't show that the arguments are wrong. They could hit on the truth by doing that.LJT: there is there is a difference between the you know ancient myths stories and the New Testament in genre for sure. There are some things that we know are factual about the New Testament the Gospel story, you know we know that there was somebody named Jesus and that he was killed by Roman occupying forces. We know that people claimed after he was killed that he rose from the dead, so we have those kinds of sources. I think the story of Jesus and the way that it was sorted through shortly after his death and claimed resurrection makes a lot of sense to me and feels cohesive in the entirety of the story of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.NVL: another thing that I'd want to add to that is the academic practice of treating evidence as relevant to religious credences is a pretty rare thing if you look at religious behaviors at large. IOt's fair to say that most people don't form their religious attitudes on the basis of having evidence for them, rather they'll say things like, “I wanted that as part of my life,” or, “this was a good community for me.”LJT: when I see Paul or James or John trying to make sense of the death and resurrection of their Messiah, it feels complete, it feels like it all fits in to the same story, it doesn't feel like a left turn and so I buy it, I buy it, maybe one day I won't buy it.Barry: when a philosopher or cognitive scientist postulates that there's a whole other category in the mind and say that religious claims go in there, you should take them at face value that they're not trying to refute religious claims themselves. They're presenting a model of how they think the mind works, a model that's supposed to explain human thinking and behavior. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long abandoned the idea that you could figure out the inner workings of the human mind just by asking people what they think. Too much of the mind is opaque to the very person doing the thinking, this leaves us with a problem of how we do figure out a mind’s inner secrets. There is something I was taught very early on in school as a philosophy major, and it's something I impart very early on in my own classes. Don't treat people as stupid. It's called “the principle of charity.” The principle says that whenever we're trying to figure out what someone is thinking and you have a choice between attributing to them something smart or something stupid, go with the smart one. I actually think Neil Van Leeuwen's view is operating on a principle of charity. He's looking at a body of tenants, he's looking at a range of human behaviors, and he's saying to himself, “you could think that all of these tenets count as beliefs, but that would make people contradictory, irrational, completely insensitive to evidence, hypocrites, and weak willed.” But people aren't stupid, so if we're going to be charitable, it's better to think that the tenants aren't beliefs, but more like imagination and make-believe. This way their religious credences don't have to hang together with their ordinary beliefs, they don't have to follow their tenets all of the time and they're not irrational or hypocrites or weak-willed. In a way, Neil's the good guy here. NVL: The people who have been most hardcore critical about criticizing me have been serious atheists. People like that are committed to the idea that religious credence is really just are crazy factual beliefs, they think I'm letting religious people off the hook. If you have a religious credence say that a virgin gave birth if that's more like an imaginative attitude it's maybe not so crazy because it is compartmentalized, whereas if you have a factual belief that a virgin gave birth then you're a crazy person.Barry: as surprising as it sounds Neil van Leeuwen’s view has the consequence that we should be more tolerant of religious views than we would be if we treated them as ordinary factual beliefs.NVL: sure there are a lot of surveys where you get people who are in Muslim countries saying that apostates should be put to death, but importantly you actually only find that that happens very rarely. There's a huge gap between professed belief and actual action. A large part of that gap can be explained by my view, and it should lead us to think, “well actually most religious people are more sensible than hardcore atheists would portray them to be.”Barry: principles of charity though can come into conflict there's another principle of charity you can employ and it'll give you the opposite answer from Neil's it says that when you attribute states of mind to people, don't make them massively mistaken about their own states of mind. When people allow a certain belief and it seems to them just like every other belief they have, then treat them as though they're not stupid. If they say they believe it, if they think they believe it, we have to be charitable and attribute to them the belief. Neil Van Leeuwen's principle of charity maximizes a person's rationality, this principle of charity maximizes their self-knowledge, and may also maximize their autonomy and responsibility for their own states of mind.LJT: I think there's just so much fear in fundamentalism. Once we lose this black and white simple way of seeing Scripture, we lose everything there's there's nothing left. I think that that ultimately will always lead to a total collapse in belief. I think because fundamentalism is not cohesive, it is not cohesive scientifically it's not cohesive by the rules of its own game, there will come a point of biblical interpretation where you either have to block off half your mind and say, “I'm just not gonna think about this particular idea.” That creates so much internal distress like that is so distressing to do that, living with that kind of hypocrisy in your soul leads to psychological trauma, these people are not going to make it out of their lives in a healthy way I think and that's that.Barry: well you're closer to the community so you have a more insight about it, my fear is that they're just fine.LJT: Oh they are not fine, they are not fine.Barry: can you convince me that that's true?LJT: people who are that easily angered people who are that quick to cut people out of their lives, the the fear there, the like almost panic that causes people to be so incredibly black and white and so incredibly aggressive towards people who are different from them those are not responses of a happy and healthy mind.Barry: in light of all I've learned from Laura Jean Truman and Dino Dave Woetzel and philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen, I think that Neil's view just can't be true of everyone who has religious beliefs. A thoroughly consistent fundamentalist might just be the kind of person who is allowing their religious beliefs to take over their factual beliefs. There aren't two boxes in their mind, just one. But many religious people maybe even most aren't like this, it depends on the person and Neil recognizes that. There's a twist to his view. Factual beliefs and religious credences are just two different boxes in the mind, what goes in each box depends on the individual, not the content of the claims. Someone can believe a religious tenet factually, but similarly someone can believe a matter of fact religiously. We might call these ideological credences, they're every bit as pretentious and every bit as irrational and unresponsive to reason as religious credences, that's because they're in the same box they just don't involve supernatural entities. If Neil is right, we can't just assume that everyone is believing everything in the same way. If we're arguing with people using reason or evidence, trying to show how they're incoherent and have to change their mind, well we might just be wasting our time if their beliefs are in the wrong box. ................
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