The other day I encountered an instance of one of those arguments that religious people think is supposed to put atheists in their place. It goes something like this:
Atheists make the following complaint: “Practitioners of Religion X, while they have a perfectly good skeptical outlook on secular matters, such as whether to believe a given urban legend, are inconsistent because they fail to apply the same skepticism to the claims of Religion X.” But their complaint rings hollow because it comes from a philosophical position, accepted “on faith” just as practitioners of Religion X accept its tenets “on faith,” that knowledge is restricted to things that can be proved or disproved by science.
The first and most obvious problem with that argument is that it completely sidesteps the real question: How can anyone ever know when, if ever, skepticism is warranted? The sidestep is accomplished with a veiled pot-and-kettle argument: “You believe things ‘on faith’ just the same as we do, so you have no room to criticize us.” But while it may be silly for the pot to call the kettle black, it certainly is not silly for the pot to wonder what it means to be black, whether it and the kettle are actually black at all, and, if they are, whether it is possible to be some other color. Or, coming back to the terms of the argument, what does it mean to accept things ‘on faith,’ do people actually do it, and, if they do, is it possible to do otherwise? Unless the defender of Religion X, or religion in general, is saying that skepticism is never warranted—and I have never heard anyone say that—then simply defining the outsider’s position by the insider’s terms does nothing to answer the question of whether and when skepticism can be properly applied to religion, and how practitioners can or should respond to the onslaught of skepticism. In short, the argument above is wholly nonresponsive.
The less obvious, but more important, problem with the argument above is that it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding—and misrepresentation—of the outsider’s critique of Religion X, and religion in general.
I should back up a little before going forward. I am using two words: skeptic and outsider. An outsider is simply not a practitioner of Religion X. He or she may be a practitioner of Religion Y, Religion Z, or no religion at all. Anybody who is not a practitioner of Religion X is an outsider. Most people do not need to explain why they are not a practitioner of a certain religion. It would be strange if, when encountering someone who identified herself as a Christian, we next asked, “Why are you not a Muslim? Why are you not a Buddhist? Why are you not a Zoroastrian?” and so on down the list. Practitioners of Religion X generally need very little reason why they are practitioners. But practitioners of no religion at all find themselves in the unenviable position of frequently having to do the equivalent of what we decline to require of the hypothetical Christian above: explain why we are not practitioners of any religion at all—which means we must either have specific answers for every possible religion, which would be absurd, or we must have an answer that is generally applicable to all religions. Skepticism, in some form, typically comprises the bulk of that answer.
But skepticism is not science; it is only an element of science. Science includes a bunch of other techniques designed to help a skeptical investigator amass factual and predictive information about the world. Science is a technology—a tool to extend the reach of humanity. Science is external, something that requires multiple observers (or at least a single observer, plus a means to record data, plus repetition of observation). But skepticism is internal. Skepticism is the part of your mind that says, “I’m not sure I believe what you’re saying.” This comes before “philosophy” and “epistemology.” Nobody has to flesh out a theory of knowledge before they can experience doubt about the truth of a proposition. People understand “truth” and “lies” without worrying about whether they can trust their sense. Even Rene Descartes, who famously tried to build a system of philosophy by erasing all of his knowledge except for a single, foundational proposition—I think, therefore I exist—could not escape the fact that even his foundational proposition rested on the even more fundamental human recognition that some things are true and others are false. Regardless of your philosophy or your theory of knowledge or your sophisticated understanding of epistemology, you cannot deny the experience of suspecting that something your neighbor is telling you may not be true.
Before I go further, there is another basic human drive that lurks with skepticism beneath everything else: our desire to exert control, attain stability, increase predictability, order our experience, and alleviate the suffering that comes from disorder, unpredictability, instability, and our lack of control. People have always wanted ways to make sure they would find enough food for the next meal, get enough rain for their crops, ensure the survival of their children, and protect themselves from the powerful, destructive, and capricious forces of nature. So people have devised lots of different ways to satisfy that their need for control, stability, predictability, and order.
No one should be surprised that, early on, people had the idea to try and communicate with the natural forces that gave them such grief. Rituals, sacrifices, prayers, and magical techniques make a lot of sense when you lack the resources to engage in systematic experimentation. Try something, try anything, be creative. Something might work.
But there is skepticism. Does this ritual really work? Can I believe the holy man when he tells me that I need to perform certain acts in order to obtain the outcome I desire? Can I believe him when he says that, even though I performed those acts, I did not obtain the outcome I desired because the forces I tried to communicate with had different ideas for what should happen? For vast stretches of human existence, people had no better way to satisfy their need to exert control, attain stability, increase predictability, and order their experience. But skepticism and doubt were still there. You can even find them in religious texts, some of the most familiar ones being the book of Job and many of the Psalms.
People have always been dissatisfied and they have always questioned things. Religion has been the traditional means of seeking satisfaction, while science is the most robust method for questioning things that people have ever devised. People have also used science to amass an enormous amount of true and predictive information in a way that provides enormous satisfaction to people who doubt. The information that science has squeezed out of the world, organized into so vast and so consistent a system is relatively easy to explore and does an excellent job of withstanding rigorous skeptical scrutiny—in a way that religions fail to do.
That people who reject religion are so satisfied by the findings of science is not evidence that they have taken a flying leap of faith from one set of prior assumptions to another, or from one epistemological philosophy to another. For those people, the problem with religion is not primarily that it fails to withstand the standards of science—even though it does not—but that it fails to withstand their skepticism in a way that science does not, and spectacularly so. Religion, for these people, is like the shady neighbor who, while he may not have done anything wrong, always seems sketchy and doubtful, not to be trusted, while science is like the trustworthy person who always seems honest, forthright, and able to look you in the eye while answering your questions, even when the answers are not what you wanted. This is not a question of philosophical epistemology, but what convinces people and gains their trust.
This is part of what I meant when I suggested the a few weeks ago that atheists need to move beyond atheism:
Becoming a not-atheist also does not mean that you stop criticizing the foolishness of theism, religion, faith, and all of that. It only changes your conceptual center, the place from which you exercise your skepticism, perform your analysis, and issue your criticism. Foolishness is still foolishness, but it stands or falls on its own, not because it compares unfavorably to something else. Religion is not bad because irreligion is better; if religion is bad, then it is bad for its own concrete reasons, which make sense without regard to your personal views about faith or belief or supernatural entities.
If religion is bad, it is not because its “truth claims” are not susceptible to scientific investigation. Rather, if religion is bad, it is because religion, while once a satisfactory means of ordering experience, no longer convinces people—who are simply humans being the same doubting, skeptical people they have always been. Those people are not theoretically-souped-up, epistemologically-informed philosophers with a new key to reality. Nor are they theoretically-ignorant, epistemologically-challenged nitwits taking it “on faith” that their skepticism is justified. They are just people who are not convinced by religion, in large part because most religions are brashly inconsistent, dismal failures at actually improving people’s lives, and astoundingly intolerant of naked skepticism. But the same people are convinced by science, which is about as opposite as you can get from those three failures.
A lot of atheists can tell stories about how they left religion. Many of them can describe an experience of having questions or doubts, taking them to an expert practitioner of the religion—someone like a priest or a pastor—and receiving little except the exhortation to put their doubts or questions aside: religion will not address these things head-on, in open daylight. Many of the same atheists can also tell about taking doubts and questions to irreligious authorities, like expert practitioners of science, and receiving answers like, “We don’t know, but those are good questions, and you should be asking them.” The willingness of practitioners of the scientific method to address questions in the open, with honesty and candor, is like a long-awaited breath of fresh air to most new or soon-to-be atheists.
And, despite the religious critics who scoff that atheists are ignoring mystery and wonder, the ability to dive deeply into the unknown, into doubts and questions, to say, “We know this with great assurance, but that is still unknown and may stay that way forever,” provides enormously satisfying experiences of mystery and wonder. Religious mystery feels trumped up to many people, like a peepshow where the window is kept intentionally dirty so that no one can ever see clearly. Mystery away from religion is like breaking the glass and seeing that not only is the mystery still there, but it is even more enthralling than before without a filthy, smudged pane obscuring it. And the skeptic says, “I doubted before, and I still doubt, but now I trust both the answers and the absence of answers.”