Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Nov 10, 2020 11:26 am
The problem I have with your reasoning is you never doubt yourself.
Of course I do. I just prefer to wait until it's warranted.
In this case...not so much.
But I think the men I mention do not lack self-assurance at all. Sam Harris, in particular, is accustomed, as I have said several times, to speaking with his eyes closed. And I think that this is no accident: these men are obliged to evince total certainty, a certainty that cannot be justified. For they imagine themselves the only epistemic creatures on the planet, and so if any certain knowledge is to be had at all, it has to be some human sort...else they would have to admit limitations they are at pains to deny.
One of these limitations is the limitation of science. They revere science, and are at pains to present it as the absolute achievement of certain knowledge. It's the field in which they hope to receive all their accolades, and it would suit their purposes if it were the total answer to the question "What is the extent of the real?" So their own prestige rises and falls with their claim that material science IS knowledge...
total knowledge. And this is why elements science cannot "get at," like morality, soul, consciousness, and so on, are always explained away as material epiphenomena, or simply dismissed by them as "unreal."
Other basic human confinements that cause them
angst are limitations of time, locality and embodiment. The Atheist has only his own tools and his own lifespan, added to whatever is already available to him dogmatically, to arrive at conclusions on matters that will not bear delay (as Locke noted), and to achieve a sense of actually having "known". And he is also at pains to guarantee the promulgation of his own worldview, which is put under threat by things like Theism. So gratuitous dismissal serves his purposes better than careful examination...at least in regard to them.
In contrast, the rational Theist, when he is indeed behaving rationally, has a much more comfortable relation with probability. Convinced, as he is, that Good alone knows everything and that mankind is inherently limited in that regard, and recognizing that knowledge is always a combination of certitude and faith, he doesn't become anxious or defensive when he knows his own knowledge to be less than absolute. He's at ease with reasonable faith. He is accustomed to recognizing that to have high-probability information is an adequate basis for taking a fact to be probabilistically true. And he does not feel that he is burdened to -- or can reasonably expect to -- ever experience 100% certainty, or to pretend that he has that. Why should he? No man does, and he knows it.
So he is better equipped to deal with the
degrees of human knowledge, and does not need, like the ardent, propagandizing type of Atheist, to cling to an illusion of
absolute certainty. He is certain
enough, when he is being rational. Faith gets him to a level of security where the posture of absolute certainty would only be a deception.
