Earlier today, my brother-in-law and podcast co-producer posted to the AOK blog about our chat with DJ Grothe last week, which is now available on iTunes. I listened to it on the way back from work this afternoon, and think that it may be worthwhile to extend the conversation on the complex relationship between how we approach three types of problems: scientifically testable claims, questions of moral value, and problems arising from faith-based assertions rooted in theism.
The above illustration shows three -ism’s to which I personally subscribe: scientific skepticism, secular humanism, and a relatively confrontational strain of atheism. I may well have drawn the above illustration with too much overlap, because it seems to me that the -isms (as distinct from the -ists) don’t actually interact all that much.
Just to give a completely hypothetical example, suppose that my daughter asks me to order her some homeopathic birth control pills. Since we have excellent philosophical and historical reasons for believing that Humanæ Vitæ is not rooted in any sort of divine revelation, I don’t need to entertain faith-based objections to her having control over her own fertility. Since I subscribe to humanist principles about human thriving, I desire for her to responsibly exercise such control. Finally, since homeopathy has never been shown itself to be any more effective than a placebo, I have an excellent reason to find her a completely different means of doing so.
I’d guess that on most matters the most rational methods for addressing (1) claims about divine existence and revelation, (2) claims about which moral values are worth pursuing, and (3) claims which may be tested scientifically tend to inhabit distinctly different spheres. Even while working through a single complex problem, I generally find myself reasoning on one of these three modes at a time. Maybe, though, that’s just me. I’m not entirely convinced that these modes of reasoning do not often overlap, and I’d certainly welcome your thoughts on the matter.
