Fire and Knowledge

Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.

–Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?“

Life comes to us whole. It is only the analytic lens we impose that makes it seem as if problems can be isolated and solved. When we forget that it is “only a lens,” we lose the spirit of openness.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 283

Here is a 13 min video by Michael Shermer on why people believe strange things:

Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 146

A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such thing as proofs—which is nonsense.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 22.

School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues. (When was the last time someone was rewarded in your organization for raising difficult questions about the company’s current policies rather than solving urgent problems?)

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 25

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 2.

Here’s a comment I made on Justin Taylor’s blog about whether atheists can trust their reasoning abilities or not. It was in response to an Alvin Plantinga lecture arguing that atheists could not trust them.

Plantinga argues in the last talk that a naturalist cannot trust his own mental facilities. That might be true, but that is why methods like the scientific method exist and are used — it takes something out of the mind in order to test if something is really predictable and testable (and thus, scientifically “true”).

So even if we doubt our facilities, the fact is, we can test our deductions. That will help us determine if our minds our reliable in their deductive abilities. It doesn’t matter whether it is probable or not that we can trust them — the question is, can we?

For instance, we may hypothesize that every time we drop a large stone, on earth, under normal conditions, it will fall. We could doubt that it is true – our minds could be tricking us – but that is why we test it. And we find that every time we test it, it happens. So that would lead us, after thousands of years of testing and theorizing and philosophizing, that our faculties are not all that bad after all, which allows us to put more trust in ourselves for higher levels of thinking. (And thus understand and debate on the concepts of mind and reason and truth!)

So I think the naturalist/atheist has every right to trust their mental faculties just as much as a theist. Both the theist and the atheist can be mentally tricked and lead astray, and both have explanations on why that can happen. And both recognize that and seek to minimize it through methods.

In the end, the theist believes that man is able to reason. So does the atheist. And the atheist believes the theist can reason, and the theist believes the atheist can reason. So, ultimately, they can start at the same place to begin building methods, which is why theists and atheists can both (for instance) be scientists and come to the exact same conclusions when running the same test. (And why they are able to argue about it if they come to different conclusions!)