This blog emphasizes epistemic humility, where one might say that the only genuinely mistaken position is claiming certainty about metaphysical matters (as well as many other topics beyond this blog’s scope). That’s why I describe my views as a hope rather than a certainty, and I maintain this is the only truly rational stance anyone can adopt given the inherent uncertainty in our knowledge. This means we make a choice — we are not convinced by proof, the presence or absence of evidence, or even profound personal experiences. None of these can be completely determinative; they serve only as data points around which we construct the narrative in which we choose to place our hope.
Continue readingTag Archives: atheism
Intellectual Humility: Thinking About Faith and Bias
The essence of Christianity should be obvious. Love as its foundation isn’t some obscure theological discovery requiring centuries of scholarly debate—it’s there in Scripture, clear as day. The early Christians understood this. Yet somehow, between then and now, we’ve managed to obscure something that should be self-evident.
Continue readingFrom Nihilism to Love: Searching for a Life of Purpose
Although compelling arguments exist on both sides of the debate between atheism and Christianity, each worldview is often associated with a central philosophical difficulty. For atheism, the most intractable challenge is nihilism. For Christianity, it is the problem of evil.
Nihilism, in this context, is the claim that if reality is purely physical and devoid of any transcendent source of purpose, then life ultimately has no intrinsic meaning. This conclusion seems to stand at odds with our lived experience, which instinctively points toward purpose, value, and significance.
The problem of evil—or suffering—presents an equally serious challenge for Christianity. It asks how a benevolent, omnipotent God could permit profound suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent. The emotional and philosophical weight of this question has made it one of the most enduring objections to Christian belief.
Yet both worldviews have developed thoughtful responses to their respective challenges.
Continue readingOpening Our Minds: Why Science Shouldn’t Reject Ideas That Sound Religious
When Christian apologists point to unsolved mysteries in science as potential evidence for their faith, they often overreach. These mysteries don’t specifically validate Christianity—but dismissing them entirely may be equally problematic. The scientific community risks making a critical error: rejecting entire classes of explanations not because they lack merit, but simply because they bear a superficial resemblance to religious concepts.
Continue readingKelvin’s Clouds and Pascal’s Wager
A recent comment on my latest post got me thinking about how Pascal’s Wager compares with the perspective I’ve been developing here.
Pascal’s Wager argues that it is more rational to believe in God than not. The reasoning is that if God exists and you do not believe, the loss is infinitely negative (eternal death). But if you do believe and God exists, the gain is infinitely positive (eternal life). The wager assumes that, since we cannot know the truth with certainty, we must make a choice within that uncertainty.
At first glance, this sounds very similar to the perspective that I’ve been developing here: the recognition that ultimate truth is beyond our reach, and so the real question becomes—where do we place our hope?
Continue readingThe Neglected Core of Christianity
Critics of Christianity often seize upon specific doctrines or practices they find objectionable: the notion of Hell, theological disputes about Jesus’ death, historical mistreatment of women, young-earth creationism, or even Christian attitudes toward science. These criticisms are not trivial, and many of them point to real shortcomings in the way the faith has been articulated or practiced. Yet, there is a significant oversight in these lines of attack: none of these disputed issues represent the heart of Christianity.
Continue readingThe Conscious Universe: A Counterpoint to Cosmic Indifference
There is a statement made by Richard Dawkins that is often quoted as a succinct, simple description of the mechanistic nature of the universe. It is from his 1995 book called “River Out of Eden”:
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
—Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden, 1995.
This oft-quoted statement presents a stark view of our universe—one devoid of design, purpose, good and evil, and possessed only of “blind, pitiless indifference.” While this mechanistic perspective may appear compelling when contemplating the vastness of cosmic scales, it falters significantly when we consider the extraordinary phenomenon of consciousness that exists within this same universe.
Continue readingExtrapolating Scientific Confidence
Throughout human history, our understanding of the natural world has grown exponentially through scientific inquiry. This remarkable progress has led many to conclude that science will eventually explain everything, reducing all mysteries to well-understood physical processes. However, this conclusion relies on a dangerous form of extrapolation that fails to account for recent developments in our understanding of knowledge itself.
When analyzing any system, mathematics allows us to estimate unknown values through interpolation – predicting behavior between known data points. While this approach is generally reliable, extending predictions beyond known observations through extrapolation is far more precarious. This distinction becomes crucial when we examine our assumptions about the future of scientific knowledge.
Continue readingThe Pendulum Swing of Evidence
It is often stated that there is no evidence for God. That’s an easy conclusion to draw if we limit our understanding of the world to the way it seems to operate in day-to-day life. This includes the level of science and technology that we encounter on a regular basis today – things like smart phones with GPS and instant worldwide communication, modern medicine with vaccines and transplants, and AI that has made computers conversational and seemingly creative. In all these things, most people see no clear evidence for God’s existence and in fact, see evidence for the success of modern science and technology.
Given such observations, our minds usually generalize and conclude that they represent the fundamental nature of reality. In other words, what we see is all there is.1 We construct a story that explains what we see and then believe that the story represents all reality. It is then easy to reinforce this with selective learning, confirmation bias, and so on.
Continue readingCritical Thinking and Religion
I’ve heard it said by atheists that religion lacks critical thinking. The general idea seems to be that there’s no rational basis for being religious, so anyone who is, must not be thinking carefully about it. If they did think carefully, they would presumably realize that they were in error.
Although the term “critical thinking” is not always used, I think it does capture the essence of the critique.
Obviously, I don’t agree with this viewpoint; I think that there are many religious people who think carefully about their beliefs. While it might be interesting to address this idea directly, when hearing such a statement being made recently, I started thinking about what we mean by “critical thinking” and what some of the challenges are in general with thinking carefully.
A simple place to start is with the Wikipedia entry for Critical Thinking, which lists a number of abilities that critical thinking calls for. These include things like recognizing problems, thinking clearly and logically, understanding and communicating well, and so on.
One particular group of items in the list has to do with the necessity of seeking information on a topic and testing our existing ideas. This group from Wikipedia is:
- Gather and marshal pertinent (relevant) information
- Put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives
- Reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience
These seem to describe the need to look around and get relevant information, use it to test our beliefs, and do this on an ongoing basis as new information becomes available and perhaps as our life experiences grow. Implied in the first bullet, I think, is to make sure the information gathered covers the topic completely and is not cherry-picked such as when we fall prey to confirmation bias and echo chambers.
In a nutshell, to test our beliefs on an ongoing basis.
Whether this is a perfect list or not, I think it presents the idea that we need to be open and that doing so is a deliberate and ongoing choice.
All too often, and perhaps this is one place where religion falls short, we limit our search for information to places that are likely to have the same biases that we do, thereby reinforcing our opinions rather than testing them.
This is well-known behavior for religious people, reinforced by communities of faith, regular church activities, and so on. As a result, it can take real effort for religious people to learn about other metaphysical views and to test their own. Considering the list above, this may, indeed, be one way that religious people lack critical thinking, if they are not engaging with alternate viewpoints.
It’s less clear that secular people encounter such regular reinforcing activities other than the fact that our culture is increasingly secular. However, this is not a trivial influence, especially in today’s science and technology-dominated world. If I was a secular person interested in learning more about carefully considered religious views, I probably wouldn’t know where to start, unless I was lucky enough to know someone.
Certainly the popular presentations of religious beliefs wouldn’t work.
As a result, whether intentional or not, it seems that secular people can fall into the same trap as religious people of not really learning about different views in the variety and depth needed to test one’s own perspectives. Both groups being composed of people, the common tendency to stay in our own intellectual comfort zones likely operates both ways.
Personally, I’ve had a hard time finding places for deep, considered discussions of such metaphysical topics. If we were talking about something that had little or no practical impact on society and life, perhaps like sports, this might not be a big deal. But these issues are society-shaping questions that influence how we treat each other, and they form the basis of our systems of morals and ethics.
It seems to me that if one is going to feel strongly enough about these matters to comment on other’s beliefs and perhaps even work to silence them, then it’s incumbent upon us to think critically about these things from both sides, and this includes listening and learning carefully.
Kelvin's Clouds 