Tag Archives: christianity

Nov 11 2024

Critical 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.

Jul 27 2024

A Set of Hopes

In an earlier post I suggested that, because of fundamental limits of what we understand, an appropriate way to think about metaphysical matters is as “hopes”. In other words, because we cannot be certain about things like the existence of God, or life after death, or the ultimate nature of reality and the destiny of the universe, we need to hope that certain things are true about these questions.

In related posts1, I describe some examples of using this way of thinking to compare Christian and atheist perspectives, describing both as specific hopes. This post will focus on describing just Christianity as a series of hopes in certain metaphysical perspectives.

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Apr 19 2024

Threads of Pointers

Throughout history, there have been stories of the supernatural. These stories were often invoked to explain mysteries such as the origin of the world, the forces behind weather, the causes of disease, and the prevalence of coincidences. However, these stories often went beyond simple explanations and were personal accounts of people encountering things beyond natural, everyday experience. The fact that these things could also have explained some mysteries may have been interesting and possibly useful at the time, but was beside the point in many cases.

More recently, and especially over the last few centuries, many other unknowns either have not been explained by science or, like consciousness, have actually become bigger mysteries.1 In addition, mathematics has shown that there are fundamental limits of our understanding in any rational system, and science has discovered what appear to be fundamental limits in our ability to explain physical reality.2

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Mar 2 2024

Hope and Trust

In a previous essay, I introduced the idea of describing our beliefs as “hopes”, reflecting the reality that we cannot be certain about many metaphysical topics. However, a friend suggested that the way I was using the word made the belief seem too weak, and pointed out that I may have been using the word with a meaning that is now archaic.

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Feb 13 2024

Science, Religion, and Uncertainty

The idea that there is a war between science and technology is very common and it’s easy to believe it from some of the very public conflicts that have occurred. Because of this perception, it’s often difficult to have relaxed, interesting conversations about science and religion. Many of us instead just assume that it’s not really that important or even worth talking about. After all, this is the realm of metaphysics, something that doesn’t really impact daily life, right?

However, it turns out that metaphysical considerations are the basis for most people’s ethics, even when we don’t think about that. In other words, our views on things typically considered religious, such as a formal code of ethics, life after death, a moral creator, and so on, really determine our moral views. The fact that most people in the west have ethics based on Judeo-Christian ideals, whether they are Christian or not, is not widely understood.

So if it’s important to have a considered opinion here, how do we deal with the issue of their apparent conflict? Perhaps we can start by looking at where some of the conflicts seem to come up.

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Jan 22 2024

Science and Religion Conversations

Many people believe that there is a conflict between science and religion. This is often exemplified by debates about evolution, the age of the Earth, claims of miracles, and so on. Historically, events like the Galileo affair and the Scopes trial seem to illustrate the existence of a broad conflict. While these disagreements certainly exist, when looked at closer it turns out that they are isolated cases of disagreement based on specific ideas and do not necessarily represent broad conflict.

Most scholars today see the relationship between science and religion as more nuanced and dependent on each individual’s views. One common view is that science and religion deal with different domains entirely, so that as long as each stays in its proper domain, there could be no conflict. Others believe that there is interaction between them, and that resolving apparent disagreements is a way to improve understanding of both domains.

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Apr 20 2023

Complex Motives

Discussions of the weakness of religion sometimes end up attempting to address God’s motives with questions that start with an observation about God’s character, then question that observation based on what is seen in the world.

These challenges often take the form of: “Why would a loving God allow…?” or something similar.

The idea being that the characteristic in question, in this case a loving nature, is incompatible with what we see in the world around us.

One of the common responses to this from Christians is essentially that God’s ways are unfathomable to us, so we should not expect to understand why some things happen. However, this approach is often rejected, being seen as something of a copout – avoiding the question altogether rather than addressing it.

However, note how reasonable this answer seems when talking about human behavior. It’s well known that we need to be careful when trying to understand someone else’s motives because there are so many factors we don’t know.

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Dec 15 2022

Implications of Consciousness


The overall theme of this blog is that we don’t know enough to be certain of metaphysical truths.* Because of that, and the fact that metaphysics deals with things beyond physical reality, we need to think about those topics using tools other than science, and move discussions away from trying to prove one view or another, to comparing differences and explaining our preferences.

A good example of this is our limited understanding of consciousness. Although many believe that consciousness is only a physical phenomenon, that view is by no means universal even among secular researchers. Other possibilities, such as the philosophical idea of panpsychism, have been proposed and seem to be growing in popularity.

Given the diversity of viewpoints among subject matter experts, the only rational position to take is some level of agnosticism regarding this topic. In other words, we need to acknowledge the possibility of immaterial minds even if that’s a viewpoint with which one personally does not agree.

To me, it seems that the possibility of an immaterial mind, whatever that might look like, has significant implications for an overall understanding of reality.

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Nov 23 2022

Dance of the Thorns

Sometimes beautiful forms emerge from collections of harsh things, like this set of prickly weeds. Individually they look thorny, but together they evoke graceful movement.

As I’ve pondered my Christian faith and the reasons that it seems like the best answer to life’s deepest questions, a similar pattern has emerged.

It’s easy to get lost in troubling details when thinking about the faith, where some things seem thorny, difficult to deal with. Apparent contradictions, senseless violence, archaic social values, and historical events like the Crusades, can make the history uncomfortable.

And yet, like the weeds in the picture, these individually uncomfortable things seem to be part of something larger that is beautiful, even graceful.

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Oct 20 2022

Convergence

With so many different viewpoints and sources of information today, how can we best tell when something is true? That’s a big question, but one helpful thing is to notice when separate lines of evidence converge to a consistent answer.

One of the problems with interpreting sources is avoiding confirmation bias. This is when we look for sources that say what we already think. It’s a very common human trait and is largely amplified by social media and today’s biased news sources.

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