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ANTI-APOLOGETIC #9 

“Life has no meaning without faith.”

This is a remarkably common statement, although I’m not sure how this is a defense of faith. This is a statement about the consequences of faith as opposed to whether or not one’s faith latches onto truth. Many people allege that their lives would be meaningless and that they’d have no life purpose without faith.

If life has no meaning for someone unless they pretend to know something they don’t know, then I would strongly and sincerely urge extensive therapy and counseling. This is particularly true if feelings of meaninglessness and lack of purpose lead to depression, which is a serious illness. Absent a mental disorder, or head trauma, there is no reason an adult should feel life is meaningless without maintaining some form of delusion.

When I hear someone say, “Life has no meaning without faith,” I suggest possible sources of meaning one could find in one’s life: children, music, art, poetry, charity, reading, hobbies, simply trying to make the world a better place, small acts of kindness, etc. I usually try to tailor the source of meaning to the person with whom I’m speaking. I also talk about our daughter who was adopted from China as a “waiting child.” I discuss the meaning and joy she’s brought into our lives.

The overwhelming majority of people will acknowledge that they can find sources of meaning in their lives. For those who don’t, I sincerely recommend seeking professional psychological services.

Being of the Austrian School of Economics, if only as a heretic, I dislike like this line of reasoning. The fact that you happen to find meaning in your religious faith says nothing about where other people happen to find it or not. But the fact that it is not a very good argument doesn’t mean we can’t tear apart Boghossian’s terrible response to it, because he isn’t merely content to point out the argument’s flaws, but tries to use it to suggest that faith is a mental illness.

VD RESPONSE: Who are you to say what does, or does not, have meaning for someone else? That is a fundamental violation of the first principle of human action, which states that acting man alone can provide the meaning for his actions. How can you reasonably say that it is impossible for religious faith, which numerous scientific studies have shown to have material benefits for people, to serve as a legitimate source of meaning on the same basis as the other possibilities you suggest?

You favor a scientific approach, so let’s look at your own claimed source of meaning from a scientific perspective. You claim to derive meaning from a nonexistent “daughter”. You are pretending that she is your child when you know perfectly well that she is not. How can you possibly claim to find meaning in a child who has no genetic relationship to you whatsoever? Such a claim is clearly delusional. Do you also find sources of meaning in random children in Vietnam, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea? Or is this source of meaning only derived from magic little Chinese girls? You should probably seek professional psychological services for your delusions about your imaginary friends and offspring.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #10

“Why take away faith if it helps get people through the day?”

This is a common line among blue-collar liberals who’ve not been indoctrinated by leftist academic values.  I’ve never really understood how removing a bad way to reason will make it difficult to get through the day. If anything, it would seem that correcting someone’s reasoning would significantly increase their chances of getting through the day. With reliable forms of reasoning comes the capability of crafting conditions that enable people to navigate life’s obstacles. By using a more reliable form of reasoning, people are more capable of bringing about conditions that enable them to flourish.

Another interpretation of this statement is that it’s the contents of one’s beliefs that help people cope. For example, if one believes a recently deceased loved one has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground (a belief found among certain Native American tribes) where the wild game is in abundance, this makes it easier to deal with that person’s passing. However, if one used sound methods of reasoning one would produce better results and feel more in control of one’s life than unreflectively buying into a commonly held belief about what happens after death. One would thus rely less on the content of one’s beliefs and more on the process one uses to arrive at one’s beliefs.

To argue that people need faith is to abandon hope, and to condescend and accuse the faithful of being incapable of understanding the importance of reason and rationality. There are better and worse ways to come to terms with death, to find strength during times of crisis, to make meaning and purpose in our lives, to interpret our sense of awe and wonder, and to contribute to human well-being—and the faithful are completely capable of understanding and achieving this.

VD RESPONSE: You’re appealing to your own inability to understand again, and let’s face it, an appeal to Asperger’s Syndrome is an epistemology that is doomed to inevitable failure. Let’s consider that Chinese girl who lives in your house. Let’s suppose she was not a Chinese adoptee, but an Armenian one who looked like you, and she firmly believed that she was your real, biological daughter. Would telling her that she was adopted necessarily make it easier for her to get through the day? Isn’t at least possible that it would make it harder for her?

If you understand that, then you are perfectly capable of understanding how even a false belief can be emotionally and materially beneficial to an individual. The mere existence of nihilist philosophy is sufficient to shred your false claim that “if one used sound methods of reasoning one would produce better results and feel more in control of one’s life.” The historical fact is that sound methods of reasoning can be, and have been, utilized to justify everything from suicide to genocide.

Faith is not the abandonment of hope. Quite to the contrary, faith is an act of hope; it is an axiomatic choice upon which one’s future actions will depend. The faithful understand the importance of reason and rationality much better than you do, because they understand reason and rationality are intellectual tools that can harm as well as heal. They understand, as you do not, that reason and rationality are tools, they are neither imperatives nor objectives.

You commit a category error when you make a reason an imperative, and ironically, in doing so, you demonstrate your inferior capacity for it.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC 7

 “You have faith your partner loves you.”

In 2007, Dawkins was asked this question in a debate with British philosopher John Lennox (Dawkins, 2007). Dawkins eventually replied it’s “not the right use of the word.” Lennox responded, “Oh, it is.” It’s not.

“You have faith your partner loves you” tends to be an “early game” response, given before faith has been razed. It’s similar to, “You have faith in science,” but not as lofty. It’s a more colloquial way of saying that in everyday events you use faith to navigate reality.

Comparing that for which we have abundant evidence (the actions of a real person) to a faith claim, which by definition is that for which we lack evidence (like the existence of an undetectable creator of the universe), is not analogous.

The idea that my wife probably loves me is not a radical hypothesis. The idea that there is a being who created the universe, inseminated a woman, and gave birth to a son who rose from the dead, is an extraordinary, radical claim. Equating an extraordinary claim with a mundane one, and then suggesting they “both require faith,” is disanalogous.

VD RESPONSE: Whether a claim is mundane or extraordinary is irrelevant. In either case, a claim is either true or it is not true. You may think you know your wife loves you, but you don’t actually know that any more than you know exactly how many days the Virgin Mary was pregnant before giving birth to the Christ Child. There are 1,116,000 divorces in the United States every year. Do you truly think none of those people wrongly believed that their partner loved them?

We all use faith to navigate our daily reality every single day. You say faith is “pretending to know what you don’t know”, but that is simply putting a simplistic spin on what everyone really does, which is act on the basis of a chosen assumption. You choose to act on the assumption that your wife loves you, and while that may not be a radical hypothesis, you may well discover one day that it isn’t true directly from her own lips. There are tens of millions of men and women who can tell you, from bitter experience, that all the “abundant evidence” you cite is totally meaningless with regards to proving that your partner really loves you.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC 8

“My faith is beneficial for me.”

I never allow the conversation to devolve into the merits of faith until my interlocutor has explicitly admitted that faith is an unreliable path to the truth. Almost invariably discussion about the alleged benefits of faith are red herrings, distracting one from the main issue—whether or not faith can reliably help one to arrive at the truth.

In your work as a Street Epistemologist, once you’ve started engaging the faithful in dialectical interventions, you’ll notice conversations about the merits of faith will have no clear demarcation. Someone won’t say, “Okay, you’re correct, faith is a failed epistemology and thus highly unlikely to get one to the truth. However, having faith is of tremendous benefit both to the faithful and to society.”

Conversations about whether or not faith is beneficial should only take place after your interlocutor explicitly states that faith is an unreliable path to truth. Once you ask people to acknowledge this, you’ll almost never enter into a conversation about the benefits of faith.

If you do, however, find yourself in this position, I’d ask how an unreliable reasoning process can benefit someone. I’d also ask how an unreliable and potentially unrevisable faulty process of reasoning can benefit an entire group of people.

One of the problems with the benefit argument is that people can be mistaken about what’s in their own interest. On an individual level, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and people in abusive relationships will, at various times, claim these states of affairs are beneficial. And in the realm of religious faith, people are often mistaken about what’s in their interest—for example, decisions about personal relationships that are not sanctioned by the faith (my grandfather, who converted to Catholicism, was prohibited by the Catholic Church from walking my mother down the aisle at her wedding because my parents were married in an Apostolic Church), refraining from engaging in homosexual relationships, staying in a deeply unhappy and emotionally harmful marriage due to prohibitions on divorce, physically harmful self-flagellation or extreme fasting, etc.

On a macro level, the Taliban believe imprisoning half their population and beating them is not only in their interest but also their duty: The more people who share a faulty process of reasoning the greater the magnification of potential harm. Premodern history is littered with cultures that have navigated themselves to extinction in part due to faith.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all or virtually all of the studies you’ll hear people cite about the alleged benefits of belief communities have nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with religion, community, social networks, social support, etc.

It could be that the variables in these studies being tested are social cohesion and group reciprocity. Faith would need to be teased out and isolated before any benefits could be shown. To my knowledge, no study has isolated faith as a variable and shown its positive results.

Notice how right here Boghossian even admits that he won’t even try to make a case without having gotten his interlocutor to surrender on the primary point of the discussion. So, this tells us that when dealing with a Street Epistemologist, one should never agree to any of his definitions or agree to concede anything “just for the sake of argument” even if one doesn’t have actually a problem with them. Just like an NFL cornerback chucking a receiver at the line, refusing to go along with Street Epistemologist’s rote routines will disrupt him and throw him off his line of attack. It forces them to improvise, and the more they are forced to actually think and improvise, the more likely it is that they will make the sort of obvious blunder that you can exploit to destroy both their confidence in their arguments as well as their pretense at intellectual credibility.

VD RESPONSE: That is an impressive collection of ignorant statements. First, it is outright hilarious to hear an atheist talking about cultures navigating themselves to extinction given the fact that atheists are much less likely to marry or to have children than people from every faith tradition on the planet, with the possible exception of Catholic priests sworn to celibacy. Even the Taliban are far more evolutionarily fit than you atheists.

Now, wouldn’t you agree that if you could avoid becoming more likely to be infected by an STD, more likely to smoke, more likely to become an alchoholic, more likely to become a drug addict, more likely to be depressed, more likely to commit suicide, and more likely to sexually abuse a child, that be pretty beneficial? It would add years to your life, right?

And that’s just one example of the many benefits of faith. You said yourself that religious faith can lead to “refraining from engaging in homosexual relationships”.

What I find most disappointing, however, is the way that you’ve again shown yourself to be a science denier. You openly admit that there are no shortage of scientific studies that show the benefits of religious faith, but then you turn around and claim, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that all of those scientists are incompetent and unable to understand the concept of controlling for various factors. Whatever happened to your claim that “Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works”?

But what is even worse is that as someone who is actively attempting to destroy those religious communities and those social networks of faith-based groups, your criticism of those studies about the benefits of faith communities shows that you are knowingly attempting to harm people. You are knowingly attempting to destroy something that you admit is beneficial to people. Even if you were correct and the primary benefits of faith come from its community aspects, you’re not helping anyone by attacking their faith, you are trying to harm them by cutting them off from the very communities that benefit them!

And you can’t hide behind an excuse that the communities will exist even if the faith that sustains it vanishes either. You said yourself that you don’t believe religious faith has to be replaced by anything. So, whether the scientific benefits happen to stem from religious faith itself or from the faith-based community it inspires, your actions are clearly both harmful and malicious.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #5

“Science can’t explain quantum mechanics.”

This line is tossed out in conversations when all else has failed in a desperate attempt to fortify the fiefdom of faith. As frequently as I’ve heard this, and asked people exactly what they mean, I’m not even sure how this could be a defense of faith. Quantum mechanics is science, discovered through the tools of science, and is verifiable and testable within science.

The attempt to draw fire away from the discussion may be why I’ve never read this defense of faith in peer-reviewed literature. It also doesn’t fall into one of Harris’s categories. It is not another version of the God of the gaps argument, and is not precisely a deepity.

I think this statement may be a way of saying that we can’t really be certain of anything. On one level, this is a feeble attempt to undermine reason by stating that there are some mysteries even our best and brightest can’t grasp—thus giving the faithful license to pretend to know things they don’t know.

On an even more pedestrian level, I’ve often heard this deployed as a justification for miracles. That is, quantum instability leaks into the visible realm—what Dawkins calls the Middle Kingdom, or what British philosopher J. L. Austin termed the realm of “medium-sized dry goods” (Dawkins, 2005)—and could be responsible for a whole host of bizarre occurrences, like the sea parting or people being spontaneously healed.

In the latter case, the response to this is that quantum weirdness does not lend itself to a specific faith tradition. That is, if somehow what was happening in the quantum realm seeped into the Middle Kingdom and caused unexplained phenomena (and there is no evidence it has) this wouldn’t be relegated to a single faith tradition. Quantum weirdness didn’t cause only the alleged miracles in the Koran (or the Bible)—but if someone claimed to know this is how the phenomena manifested, I’d ask how they knew this and to produce the evidence. (For practice, you can also argue that quantum states do manifest, but only in [insert any faith tradition other than your interlocutor’s].)

In the former case, I’m not sure how a lack of understanding about subatomic particles translates into the need for faith. Because we don’t yet and might never entirely understand how the universe is ordered and operates in the realm of the very, very small, this does not translate into needing to use an unreliable epistemology.

VD RESPONSE: How quickly you forget your own definitions! You have been droning on and on about how bad faith is, and how faith is pretending to know what you don’t know, and now that it is pointed out that you don’t understand quantum mechanics or know how the universe is ordered and operates at the finest level of detail, suddenly you abandon all that? Suddenly you can’t figure out how a lack of knowledge about subatomic particles relates to pretending to know something you don’t about the universe?

The existence of quantum mechanics completely undermines your entire epistemology. It undermines your entire pretense that your materialism is any more meaningful, any more indicative of true objective reality, than the pagan who believes the universe is resting on the back of a giant turtle.

Your epistemology is entirely rooted upon the basic assumption that what we can see, touch, feel, and measure is all there is. Quantum mechanics upends that assumption, and thereby delegitimizes the materialist metric by which you have been attempting to pass judgment on the supernatural.

As for how the quantum world potentially relates to various faith traditions, I would direct your attention to a televised lecture by Bryan Cox, the British pop physicist, called A Night with the Stars. At minute 36 of the lecture, Cox explained that the Pauli Exclusion principle is a universal phenomenon and that by heating up a diamond by rubbing it, all the electrons in the entire universe would immediately adjust their energy states so that none of them would precisely match any of those in the diamond.

Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. You don’t know if it is true or not. The electron state of a diamond-sized object orbiting a star in the proto-galaxy UDFy-33436598 is not the sort of thing we can readily observe. But the fact is that the idea of a Creator God, and any other number of observed supernatural concepts, is considerably less ridiculous to nearly everyone than magic universe-transforming trans-galactic diamonds that operate at speeds much faster than light. Quantum mechanics may not lend itself to proving any faith tradition, but it does tend to destroy the effectiveness of conventional Newtonian science as a basis for ridiculing the various faith traditions.

A citation of quantum mechanics is not so much a defense of faith as it is people pointing out to you that you have the very sort of faith in things you cannot prove and things you do not know that you decry in others. As we can easily observe in your next anti-apologetic.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #6

“You have faith in science.”

This is usually a “late game” line, offered after faith has been demolished and exposed as fraudulent. People say this because they want to show some parity in belief: they have faith in X and you have faith in Y. You both have faith, but in different things. I’ve also found that people make this statement because they’re afraid of being seen as stupid or ignorant, so they want to leave the conversation and save face.

Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism—hypothesis testing—that weeds out false claims.

Claims that come about as a result of a scientific process are held as tentatively true by scientists—unlike claims of faith that are held as eternally true. Related to this, claims that come about as the result of a scientific process are falsifiable, that is, there is a way to show the claims are false. This is not the case with most faith claims. For example, there’s no way to falsify the claim that the Norse god Loki was able to assume other forms.

Scientists also try to prove claims false (falsification), unlike faith leaders who unequivocally state that their faith claims are true. Related to the bizarre notion that there’s a vast conspiracy among scientists to suppress certain lines of research, if a scientist can demonstrate that a popular scientific claim is false, she can become famous, get tenure, publish her results, earn more money, and become respected by her peers. Moreover, the more prominent the defeated hypothesis, the greater the reward. If a preacher states that the claims of his faith tradition are false, he’s excommunicated, defrocked, or otherwise forced to abandon his position.

Science is a method of advancing our understanding. It is a process we can use to bring us closer to the truth and to weed out false claims. Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works. It should be jettisoned if something better (more explanatory, more predictive, more parsimonious, etc.) comes along (Schick & Vaughn, 2008).

VD RESPONSE: Your attempted defense only succeeds in proving the charge is true. Let me remind you that you defined faith as “pretending to know what you don’t know”. And while you say that “all faith is blind”, yours is observably blinder than most. Even if the religious faithful are pretending to know something they can’t know to be true, you are pretending to know something we all know to be false. You make fun of people who believe in fairies in the garden, then promptly proclaim your belief in white-coated fairies working in the lab.

The science you describe doesn’t exist. It has never existed. It is the Platonic Form of an ideal Science that exists nowhere but in your imagination and the overheated imaginations of the scientific faithful. Science, as it is actually practiced by scientists on this planet, does not contain “multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias.” As it is actually practiced, one could make much stronger case for Accounting. You don’t only have faith in science, you have a badly misplaced faith in it.

The fact is that the vast majority of published and peer-reviewed papers are never checked, not even once. The fact is that most published and peer-reviewed papers are littered with basic mathematical and statistical errors that are never discovered because most scientists are mathematically and statistically incompetent. The fact is that modern science is a corrupt big business and most scientists are intellectual mercenaries whose compensation and continued employment depends entirely upon producing results that are in line with their employer’s expectations.

Your declarations are manifestly untrue. Scientists don’t try to prove claims false. They do precisely the opposite. Not only have a statistically significant percentage of published and peer-reviewed papers been confirmed to contain FABRICATED data, but the former editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith has declared: “Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists
are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.”

I strongly suggest you read the paper, published in PLOS Medicine, entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” to better understand how fundamentally misplaced your naive faith in science is. What you are claiming to be “the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works” observably doesn’t even work as well as a coin toss, and that’s before we even get to Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, Global Warming, Evolution by Natural Selection, and a whole host of other “scientific facts” that are no more currently falsifiable than Loki’s purported shape-shifting