The Great Hippo wrote:After talking about this with someone else (in meatspace), it's occurred to me that my prior use of the word 'real' in this thread has been unforgivably vague. There are two types of 'real' that interest me; 'real' in the scientifically verifiable, critical-thinking sense, and 'real' in the personal experience, anecdotal, 'I-can't-prove-this-to-you-but-I-know-it-to-be-true' sense. I'll refer to them as real1 and real2, respectively.
One of is those a belief, and the other is knowledge. Knowledge being a special kind of belief that is verifiable and true.
My contention is that it's possible to believe that scripture is not real1, but entirely real2, and that understanding that distinction can be a defensive mechanism the religious use to protect themselves from corrosive values. In short, it's a way to have their cake and eat it too.
True, but I've frequently mentioned positive psychology and the utility of delusional belief for an individual. People can have great emotional connections to schemata that they have been trained in. A connection with the word God can result in emotional reactions and desire for someone that no longer believes in the concept or uses it to describe something that is clearly not meant by the word normally.
But what if believing in that scripture is of immense importance to me? I have three choices: Give something of immense importance to me up, accept (perhaps reluctantly) corrosive values into my life, or find a way to remove the corrosive values while keeping the scripture. Apply critical thinking selectively, allowing me to believe what I want to believe but simultaneously not allowing that belief to sell me dangerous bullshit.
Suddenly, you have scientists who believe that God is real2--but also think that homosexuality is not a sin, that we should teach evolution in the classroom, that sex education is a good thing, etc.
Sure, and in accordance with skill we would call that person a poor, not adept or bad at critical thinking. Skill relates to the frequency and severity in which people make mistakes. If you are selectively applying critical thinking, a skill defined applying reason to ones own beliefs, and choosing not to apply it to your ideology you would be making a pretty severe mistake with great frequency. You would not be very skilled in critical thinking.
I can selectively apply a hammer when driving in nails and instead sometimes use a wrench, but i'm then not a very skilled carpenter.
There are some religious people who are bending over backwards trying to keep their belief but still not allow that belief to corrode their values. Rather than telling them to give up something important to them, I think we should help them reconcile their beliefs. When I defend religion, I'm usually defending it on behalf of them--people who believe, who want to believe, but who also still apply critical thinking in every place where it's actually important. Because there are places where applying critical thinking doesn't necessary result in a net gain.
I think politics, education, values and social influence are important. You can't mean to say that there isn't a net gain in applying critical thinking to those areas.
I do not have, and have stated it frequently, a desire to change people who use religion as a tool to improve their well-being. I have a desire to influence next generation to have healthier means of coping with reality and develop more advanced schemata to allow them to participate with reality, including social systems, in a more meaningful and realistic way. Of course the problem with this relates to adults believing their methods and values are just as good. That building faith based schemata is just as good as ones based in reason. This is a large fight, a fight over culture and over values. The people who 'value critical thinking' but have faith in God and teach their children to have faith in God are training them to use a wrench to drive in nails.
What reasons are there to convince someone to give up God--or give up scripture--when they can demonstrate that neither interfere with their ability to critically answer questions like "How should we treat sex in our schools?" or "Should our children be vaccinated?"? As long as you're being a scientist in the places that actually matter, I don't care what you're being elsewhere.
The reasons are almost entirely social and civil. That while they may have distorted the belief of a religion in such a way that they can rationalize their faith with reason; teaching others to do so, using religions schemata is incredibly imprecise and highly prone to failure.
And again I don't have interest in getting people to give up God. If that delusion is increasing your well-being then you have found a tool that works for you. You've mangled your wrench or the nails enough to make it work well enough for you. I have interest in getting people to not teach or influence others to use those mangled tools when we have developed superior ones. Part of this is the responsibility of those with knowledge of the hammer to make it accessible to those who are still using a wrench, and we are trying refer back to the war over culture and values.
I'm going to refrain from going off on too deep of a tangent, but I'll just say that this is something that has done deep, irrepairable damage to people very close to me. I realize there's an enormous volume of good, positive, indispensible work in it, but there's also a not-insignificant amount of quackery and charlatanism.
Psychiatry deserves a lot of skepticism because it's dealing with so much inescapable ambiguity--and that ambiguity happens to be in very close proximity to the lives and minds of human beings.
I generally disagree with the entire approach of Psychiatry, but to be clear the field is not what caused harm shitty practitioners did and a abused of a position of authority from those practitioners.
Zamfir wrote:Still, there are also many smart, knowledgeable, critically-thinking people who are very sure that god is as real as the chair I am sitting on, that homosexuality is a heavy sin, and that sex education should take the form of thunder speeches about abstinence and hell. It's simply (and perhaps sadly) not the case that well-thinking people will reach the same conclusions on many issues, and it's dangerous to assume that people who disagree always do so out of some failure of thought.
Then you do not mean, what I mean, when I use the term critical thinking.
I am less sure about evolution: at least in my personal experience, young earth creationists really tend to either not very knowledgeable on the relevant issues, or stubborn in a not very recommendable way. Though I still know YECs who are respectable thinkers in other fields, even fields of science. Intelligent design is more malleable around the evidence, that's in my (surely limited) experience where the die-hard protestants end up who really gave the issue a deep and open look.
Being trained to conduct science and do math as well as being trained to think creatively != what I, psychology or wikipedia mean when we use the term critical thinking. It is a specific application of reason (the process of differentiating truth for falsehood and shades of truth) to ones know beliefs and behaviors. Because someone can conduct the scientific method in a field does not mean they are an adept critical thinker.