There’s an interesting discussion going on that currently spans no fewer than three blogs and at least one forum.
It all starts with a typically misinformed (and IDiotic, but what do you expect) rant against materialism. I give the link here, but it goes to Uncommon Descent and I don’t encourage you to increase their hit numbers.
The question is: Given materialism, what reason do we have to trust ourselves?
He attempts to channel Plantinga
(parphrase)If we are all products of evolution, then our beliefs are therefore also products of evolution. If our beliefs are wrong, then evolution selected for wrong beliefs.
The conclusion is then
Reductive materialist Darwinism is irrational, because it is self-referentially incoherent. It affirms at one and the same time two mutually exclusive propositions: (1) A belief in reductive materialist Darwinism is a true belief; and (2) There is no way to rule out whether in any given case reductive materialist Darwinism has selected for a false belief.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for my readers to point out the gaping flaws in this chain of… ‘logic’. Here’s a blog with many entries about the flaws.
And I will let the philosphers here dissect the argument and logic of it. But it raises the question… why do we have beliefs?
I think that this follows John Loftus’ ‘what is probable‘ approach. (And John, if you are reading, please correct me if I screw this up.)
John says that we can see all the pieces. Indeed, it may be impossible for a single mind to assimilate all the pieces to anything. We do have some knowledge, some background experience, and our ability to think things through. But how does that form the basis for belief?
I’ll retell a story here. I was teaching chemistry in a high school. We has just finished talking about phosphorescence and how the phosphors in a CRT screen (remember those?) may absorb some extra energy from the environment and then slowly release that energy over time, even if the TV was off. One of my students insisted that it was really ghosts doing it.
I have a system for evaluating claims against my knowledge. I am able to do research, find new knowledge and critically examine it. I have several years of experience in chemistry and the physics of glowing things. Arguably, it’s a belief that I think phosphor screens glow by absorbing and slowing releasing electrons. It’s arguable because I, personally, cannot be 100% certain that everything I’ve every studied is 100% accurate and that there isn’t something going on that no one knows about. Given all that though, I’d sat the confidence level is 5 nines or better.
My student didn’t have my background in science, chemistry, physics, etc. And I was just a teacher. She had a belief system installed by parents who also didn’t know about chemistry and physics. She felt very confident that ghosts were responsible.
So our beliefs are at odds. Fortunately, there is a way to evaluate beliefs. It’s called the scientific method. Yes, it’s materialism. But the one thing that no one has ever been able to show, in spite of claims, is that the scientific method is flawed. To quote Richard Dawkins “Science works… bitches”.
Science is a system for testing our beliefs. If I believe that the moon is made of green cheese, then I have two choices. I can wallow in my ignorant belief or I can investigate my belief. I can fire laser at the moon and use a spectrometer to analyse the results and compare those to green cheese. I could send a probe… or even people to get a sample of the moon and return it to me (I have vertigo… me and spaceships (to my great sadness) are not a good combination).
How can we test beliefs of the supernatural? First, anything that is ‘supernatural’ that somehow affects the real world has got to be at least a little bit ‘natural’. We can find and test the natural bits. We can see what it does to the natural world and test that. We can compare those results to non-supernatural explanations and see which one is better.
Can we ever say that we have eliminated ghosts from consideration? No. Can we effectively say we have eliminated ghosts from consideration? Yes.
There is a very well understood, tested explanation that only depends on chemistry and physics. And we have no good evidence of ghosts.
Confidence that the materialistic explanation is correct: 99.99999%
Confidence that the ghost explanation is correct: 1% (and that’s a really high gimme)
What we have done is examined our belief (in ghosts) and found it to be lacking. There is a much better explanation.
If one wants to get really technical, everything that exists, including us and our perceptions, is a belief.
However, practically, there are things that are not beliefs. If you are unsupported, high in the air, then you are going to fall. It doesn’t matter if you believe that gravity works or not.
Religions have very little (if any) evidence to support them and a great many pieces of evidence against them. To me, this greatly lowers the confidence in that set of beliefs.
Scientific theories have a massive amount of evidential support and no evidence against them. To me, this greatly increases the confidence in that set of beliefs.
