Normally this site brings me back to my early grad student years, but today it has regressed all the way to the first-year of college and late night dorm discussions. Thanks. Almost as good as watching Freaks and Geeks reruns.
Why PhDs continue to believe in God?
(74 posts) (1 voice)-
Posted 11 months ago #
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"The recent Kalam argument is by far the most potent version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, for example. Obviously it does not prove God's existence, but I can see why one might be rationally swayed to become a believer."
Have to disagree with you there: the Kalam argument, like all that came before it, has holes big enough to drive a truck through.
But that's beside the point: the real problem is that Craig's efforts to revive these arguments is simply a bad way to do philosophy. Forget about Hans's (excellent) work in philsci, and stop reading William Craig's stuff (notice how he never seriously replies, in the journals, to actual philosophers who take him seriously enough to point out the glaring problems with his arguments? His preferred mode of argument is to have his faithful handlers stage mock debates for busloads of retiree churchgoers). Just go back and read Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Agree or disagree with them on other stuff, fine, but on this methodological point they nail it: philosophy cannot and should not do what people like Craig try to do with it. Hans is also a bit murky on this in some of his more popular survey stuff (e.g. his SEP entry on theology and cosmology), but Craig just goes up the river with the whole "systematic rationalization of unquestioned and unquestionable prior beliefs" approach. He admits as much in his silly debate tours: nothing anyone says to him would ever make him change his mind about the essential truth of the bible.
Posted 11 months ago # -
I should have been clear that I do not endorse Craig in particular, but rather the structure of the argument as a whole. I said that Kalam is not successful, but it still a good enough argument, despite the wholes, to make belief in the existence of god have some rational basis.
This is not to say that it is rational to believe in god--rather, it is not irrational to believe in god. At least (as I said), it is no (or not much) less rational to believe in god than in a host of other things we believe in. If we really want to be epistemically modest enough to call it irrational, then we should all be agnostics and general skeptics.
On the other hand, if one wishes to be an atheist rather than an agnostic, then one already has low epistemic standards and should accept that theism is (somewhat) epistemically justified.
Posted 11 months ago # -
There is a huge difference between being rational about the existence of a God and having a reason to believe in a God. There are reasons for everything while there is no rationality behind the act of believing in a God.
And the Kalam argument.....give me a break! Those thinkers did not have a clue of quantum physics and the rationale behind the Big Bang. There is no "cause and effect" before the Big Bang, so just to say that something should have caused the big bang is a very old and misinformed argument about the origins of the universe. Please stop been lazy and read any physics book.
However the arguments above make easier to answer why highly educated individuals, with presumably higher than average IQ, continue to believe in a God. And it is because of the same reasons why a person like anon above thinks that a first-mover argument sounds "rational" or as pathetic as the pitiful "nostalgic" who do not even dare to bring any argument to the table because it is obvious he/she doesn't have one: The unfortunate projections of their own ignorance.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Come on. People believe in soulmates. That's not rational. People believe in the afterlife. That's not rational. People believe in karma. That's not rational.
It's part of who we are as human beings. I don't believe in god, but it doesn't even register when an academic is religious. It's just a belief. I have my own irrational beliefs, so who am I to judge b/c someone has THAT particular belief as opposed to THIS one.
Peace.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Worth noting too that very smart people can still believe very mistaken, or at least very contentious, things in spite of the evidence. Paul Erdos, prolific genius though he was, refused to believe the bayesian interpretation of the Monty Hall problem, evidence be damned. Or so the story goes.
Posted 11 months ago # -
What does it mean to be rational, anyway? One way to look at it is that the conclusion follows from the premises, but then we know the premises don't have to be correct (in our case here, falsifiable) for this to be true. In the hard instrumental sense, being rational simply means it serves your short term (usually economic) benefit. I guess in this case it might be rational to believe in God. Most people do and doing the same likely would lead to some economic benefit. Or, maybe it is instrumentally rational due to Pascal's wager, but again the premise here doesn't need to be correct, you are only hedging in the case that it is. Or maybe we roll with Habermas here and go for some communicative rationality, and in fact believing in God helps me understand the "other" not as an object for my manipulation, but a "subject" to be understood. This position seems highly contingent on the particular religious doctrine as some doctrines clearly embrace an instrumental perspective regarding the "other." So where does that leave us? Well, I think we can safely say that it can be rational to believe in God, but such a position can be rooted in things that have absolutely nothing to do with the accuracy of the claim that it exists. I guess I would say it is really beside the point whether it is rational or not, but then again the entirety of rational choice stood for a very, very long time by building ice cream castle's in the minds of modelers who never thought much to leave their offices and actually see/measure/etc. what was going on in the world around them. So, maybe empiricism negatively correlates with a belief in God. I would also surmise that empiricism is conditioned by the individual's ability to compartmentalize his/her thinking. Testable, I think. But then again, I am an empiricist.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Another take on Anon's point:
I buy that, even on canonical definitions of rationality, we can tell plausible stories about spiritual beliefs as sometimes being rational. I also buy that, in the absence of evidence and sufficient understanding of fundamental science, clever people can justify a bunch of speculative beliefs as at least reasonable. An intelligent and incredibly powerful designer of our universe is one such belief, but so is the premise of the Matrix.
What I don't buy is the claim, made by many religious types, that they actually have knowledge of the stuff they believe in.
Knowledge is a species of justified belief, where the thing that makes our belief true is the same thing that justifies our belief. Religious beliefs fail this test in two ways: either they are highly unlikely to be true (on any plausible definition of truth); or if true, the thing that makes them true is not what justifies that belief for the believer.
Posted 11 months ago # -
I don't. I still have a **** job in a terrible area of the country. And I'm still ****' Ken Waltz.
Digest that for a minute.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"erdos on acid" says that there is a "thing that makes".... What is this "thing"? There is not such a "thing that makes". Forget about it: reality is real and that's it. There is no-thing before reality that makes it real.
"Anon" above recalls Pascal's argument, which in a nutshell says that it is rational to believe in a god because if there is no god you tried but if there is a god you will be fine, so why not believe in a god.... This is silly, and a very old fashioned argument: Which "god" is the one I have to believe in? The god of Muslims? The Christian God? To believe in one god or the other is just to change the hell I will go to. So Pascal's argument is useless because believe or not in a god you will to the other religion's hell - Pascal's argument has nothing rational - it is mistaken.
So what is reasonable and what is rational? If we stick to this premise, then we are stating that PhDs who continue to believe in a god are divided in real-high-IQ PhDs and just-normal-people-with-a-PhD.
Posted 11 months ago # -
I made a very conscious decision to attend church services this morning. I'm going to keep going. For many years the learned people of the world thought the world was flat and that didn't work out so well. Now many of these learned people say there is no god, I'll take may chances, hedge my bets and attend religious services.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Because they are courageous: they choose faith when, in most mainstream cases, it is not professionally useful and the tension between personal conviction and empirical evidence is hard to sustain. Humans flow toward cognitive consistency, so the easy way for most PhDs is to reject a belief in God. Threads like this illustrate the point: despite belief in God remaining mainstream in North America and many other places, the onus remains on the believing PhD among his peers to justify his belief, not on the agnostic or atheist to defend his position. Personally, I find it a bit sad that so many smart people live with a high level of conceptual simplicity regarding their fellow humans and the possibility of something more profound than material existence.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"erdos on acid" says that there is a "thing that makes".... What is this "thing"? There is not such a "thing that makes". Forget about it: reality is real and that's it. There is no-thing before reality that makes it real.
Huh? Read Gettier on justified true belief and you'll get what I'm talking about. It's pretty easy post-Gettier to concoct plausible counter-examples to the definition of knowledge as justifed true belief - cases where I have a belief that happens to be true (you are in the room) and also justified (I saw a perfect wax replica of you from outside that I sincerely thought was you), but clearly my belief is justified by something that isn't true (the replica is not actually you). Science is about getting past superficial evidence that we once thought true, and ensuring that the facts that justify our beliefs about the world are the same facts that make our beliefs true. The problem with many religious sorts is that they claim to have knowledge, but even if their beliefs happened to be true, it's pretty clear that they are never true by virtue of what justifies those beliefs for them.
Posted 11 months ago # -
^What language is this?
Posted 11 months ago # -
“Humans flow toward cognitive consistency”
This is not true at all, something well-recognized in psych lit. For all the trend toward empiricism in poli sci it’s funny how rarely it occurs to political scientists that there is empirical knowledge generated by other disciplines that speaks to these kinds of assumptions (i.e.: those whose only basis is that they seem ‘intuitive’ or ‘common sense’ to the individual positing them).
Posted 11 months ago # -
"What language is this?"
philosophy. Specifically, epistemology:
The Gettier Problem
The problem of knowledge.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"Because they are courageous: they choose faith when, in most mainstream cases, it is not professionally useful and the tension between personal conviction and empirical evidence is hard to sustain."
No, because they're obstinate and not actually very intellectually curious, which is true of a great many PhDs, actually. This explains why brilliant engineers and scientists can persist in believing foolish things about ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, other areas of science, etc.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"... real-high-IQ PhDs and just-normal-people-with-a-PhD."
That actually seems about right.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"Humans flow toward cognitive consistency”
So the psych lit says the opposite? People flow toward inconsistency? Please provide citations because there is a torrent of literature on belief systems that explains attitude and opinion variation using latent and discrete variables (e.g., ideology, cultural cognition, environmental orientations, etc.). The fact that these measures work--ever--points directly to a disposition toward cognitive consistency. There is also the added benefit of these measures being tested on populations other than college freshman.
Are you making a postmodern case? Are you saying people are more inconsistent than we think?
I would, however, buy that people are inconsistent at times. It usually creates anxiety when pointed out--which would also support the initial statement.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Again, people, including atheists and agnostics, believe in lots of things that can't be scientifically demonstrated: karma, soul mates, astrology, sports superstitions, tarot cards, chakra, and a whole host of other things.
I'd bet that very few people, including academics, would fall outside the union of all these sets. I'm not a religious guy, but I find it fascinating how academics can focus on organized religion, while overlooking all these other irrational beliefs. Those beliefs are human.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"What I don't buy is the claim, made by many religious types, that they actually have knowledge of the stuff they believe in."
This is the anon who brought up the Kalam argument earlier (I got distracted and forgot to respond): you should really stop being an invariantist about knowledge and embrace some sort of contextualism--and I'm sure that given certain contextual standards, they do have knowledge. Indeed, we might even adopt a Williamsonian subject sensitive invariantism and they could have knowledge.
The problem is that if you don't adopt such a schema, which in turn would allow certain people's beliefs in God to constitute knowledge, you're going to have to figure out how to deal with Cartesian skepticism.
I know, I know, it sucks. Some sort of common sense account of justification and knowledge would be great where it accurately tracks those things that natural scientists say are true and avoids those things that are apparently evidentially baseless from the natural scientist's POV, but it's kind of hard to establish a principled/non-question-begging reason for this.
Posted 11 months ago # -
I'm ^ and I forgot to add that I had a conversation about this topic with a brilliant friend of mine the other day who does claim to know that God exists. He defended this knowledge claim on the grounds that he is a contextualist and given his background beliefs due to his upbringing, belief in God is (inferentially, obviously, since it's coherentism) justified through coherence.
Posted 11 months ago # -
^Sorry for 3 posts in a row. I meant he's a coherentist.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"but it's kind of hard to establish a principled/non-question-begging reason for this."
oh I don't know: bayesians seem to find plausible routes between the Scylla of implausibly strict invariantism and the Charybdis of slap-happy contextualism. To be sure, most of those routes commit us to privileging scientific knowledge over other ways of knowing, but that's a price I can live with if it saves us from ending up like Steve Fuller.
Posted 11 months ago # -
What does Wittgenstein have to say about all this? At the end of the day, that's all that matters.
Posted 11 months ago # -
^^There seems to be (read:is) something fundamentally revisionist about Bayesianism. As such, while it might provide a very good norm of belief, it just isn't knowledge.
I just concede to the skeptic and let bygones by bygones as long as someone's belief-set is internally coherent. (Then I go on my way and work on Plato because I don't think that I can make any real progress towards solving philosophical problems, but I find Plato fun.) And I think that we can all agree that we don't want to end up like Fuller.
Posted 11 months ago # -
...while it might provide a very good norm of belief, it just isn't knowledge.
The "bayesian" in bayesian epistemology is (inter alia) about connecting claims of truth to degrees of belief about states of the world. It gives us a way to make (modest, coherentist) sense of the idea of knowledge as justified true belief after the beating that this approach has quite deservedly taken post-Gettier.
As you suggest, that won't satisfy the sceptic, nor the unabashed barefoot invariantist kicking stones and raving against relativism. But you chided me for being too much the invariantist and told me to embrace contextualism; I'm just showing you the way I already do that.
Look, I'm not out to answer all the problems of knowledge, solve Sorites, etc etc. I just want to avoid wacky sh*t like this.
Your coherentist believer friend strikes me as thinking carefully about what it might mean to have knowledge of the religious objects and phenomena we might believe in. Fair enough. But when many religious folk claim to have certain knowledge about the divine through their personal relationship to God, they aren't trying to stake a plausible position in debates about varieties of truth and ways of knowing.
No, they're talking crazy sh*t, just like the loons waving Loch Ness monsters at evolutionary biologists and insisting that science is all political, evolution is just a theory, etc etc. I just don't ever want my philosophical commitments to lead to me to this corner of the asylum, because that's Steve Fuller land, and as you astutely observe ...
... we can all agree that we don't want to end up like Fuller.
... amen.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Very interesting point above: To believe in a god is just to change hells from one religion to the other.
Posted 11 months ago # -
What is very interesting is to read all of the above and see how religious PhD students try and try after try to justify their religious beliefs with quasi-rational arguments. Somebody said above that this may be due to a flaw of the educational system, and that's pretty close to the truth.... but even closer is that they may be "just-normal-people-with-a-PhD"
Posted 10 months ago # -
This is silly. You can believe what you want. That belief can be consistent, coherent, and rational if measured against your internal beliefs and those external to you. However, none of that would say it is true in a scientific sense. If you want the rest of us to believe, or understand that you somehow hold a "truth" not only in your head but a "truth" the rest of us might subscribe to, then prove it. Show me. Simple. Use the text book scientific method (Kuhn), use a more sophisticated Popperian or Lacatose interpretation, but prove it. And to be clear, using a rational erector set does not constitute proof in and of itself. Otherwise exercise your right to believe whatever, leave the rest of us alone, and make sure your beliefs are in line with public reason or that you keep them subordinated to the state in the event you might be inclined to harm the rest of us for various food infractions, sexual practices, working on the Sabbath, or failing to fall in line with whatever demagogue you hold in high esteem.
Posted 10 months ago #