Practically Speaking about Evidence

This is the third post in a series of posts about evidence. Here are parts 1 and 2.

 

In this post, I want to focus not on the philosophical benefits of truth or my personal experience of truth, but rather on the simple facts (that’s what skeptics like, right?).  So I’ve heard some people say things like: “All of my beliefs are based on evidence”. When I hear someone say that my first reaction is “WHOA DAMN WE HAVE A GOD HERE IN OUR MIDST”. Now I can tell just from looking at it that you haven’t taken the time to examine the evidence for that statement, because unless you are a robot and not a human being you have come to beliefs by a different route at least once. So by saying it, you’ve actually just proved yourself wrong. You’ve also essentially asserted that you’re not tripped up by petty things like human psychology.

 

I am willing to bet all the money that I own that there is not a single person on the face of this planet who does not hold a single belief tainted by faith, wishful thinking, prejudice, stereotypes, emotions, assumptions, or other non-evidence based things. I know for an absolute fact that I have TONS of beliefs like this. I know for a fact that most of the people who have said this to me have beliefs like that. Every single person I’ve met has demonstrated non-evidenced based beliefs to me.

 

As human beings we have evolved to have emotions that affect how we act. We have fight or flight instincts. We have paranoias and irrational fears. We have histories that paint how we view things. We are susceptible to societal biases and easy to manipulate based upon quirks of our minds. We may think we can verify the truth or falsity of things with our senses, but our senses are easy to fool too. We’re not made to work only on evidence and it takes a lot to overcome some of our emotional nature that asks us to come to quick conclusions to protect ourselves.

 

And you know what? THAT’S OK. It is entirely 100% acceptable and not shameful in any way to have some beliefs that aren’t perfectly based on evidence. Because it is human and we are not capable of perfection. What I strive for is to do my best, not for perfection. There’s lots of instances where I don’t have the time or the ability to find all the evidence I might need, there’s times when I’m straight up lazy because the thing isn’t important, there’s times when I am physically incapable of finding all the evidence, or there’s times when the evidence is about half and half for two different things and I just kind of have to guess, or assume or hope that I’m right. I might even just have to go on faith a bit by listening to others.

 

I realize that the word faith has a dirty connotation to a lot of atheists, but we go on faith a lot of the time. When someone tells you something and you don’t have the time to check their credentials or check for yourself, and you trust this person and then go on to act in accordance with what they’ve told you….that’s faith. I bet you every single one of you has done that at one point or another. Or at least I hope every one of you has trusted another human being at some point in your life. It’s more practical than feeling an obligation to personally check the facts for every single situation. It’s useful. It’s often necessary.

 

The MAJOR difference between this kind of faith and a religious faith is that this kind of faith is open to new evidence. It’s a temporary accepting of whatever seems most plausible at the moment, or of someone else’s evidence, or of their authority. If your boyfriend tells you he loves you and you don’t have any access to a brain scanner to make absolutely certain, you’ll probably believe him. But if you find out he’s a compulsive liar and has been cheating on you, you’re likely to adjust that belief. But you did take it at least somewhat on faith the first time around. You had some evidence, but not as much as you could have had, not enough to make it as certain as possible. You accepted it without certain. You accepted it through trust. By some people’s accounts that’s a bad thing to do, but in my mind it’s highly practical and quite rational.

 

So if we can all accept that sometimes we have flawed beliefs that aren’t based wholly and strictly on evidence, then can we look again at the people who believe in god with a little more compassion? Because honestly they’re not doing anything morally WRONG by believing in god. Their actions based upon their religion might be harmful, the specific teachings of their religion might be harmful and the actions they take because of it might be harmful, but the belief in god itself is not harmful. It’s an understandable lapse, just like all of us make understandable lapses. To perhaps reach a more compassionate view of theists let’s take a look at another false set of beliefs and see how we approach those (caveat before I continue: I am not trying to call religion a mental illness in any way. It’s a metaphor. METAPHOR).

 

So. I have a pretty firmly engrained set of false beliefs that come not just from evidence (because there is some evidence involved), but also from emotion and assumption. I believe quite firmly that I am a useless lump of fat. I can give you a list of the reasons why I think that, the evidence I believe I have, but in the end this belief and its attached conclusions and attitudes are very emotional.

 

I have never, not once in my life, had someone believe that this makes me an appropriate target for ridicule, condescension or mockery. And if they did it would be the most heinously unfeeling thing anyone has ever done to me. I’ve had these beliefs for a good 4 or 5 years now. At different times I’ve tried to shake them, but a lot of the time I have no desire to shake them because they seem like the single most important set of beliefs I’ve ever held in my life.

 

But just because I have one set of false beliefs does not make me stupid. And just because you don’t hold this particular false set of beliefs doesn’t make you better than I am, smarter than I am, a better person than I am. It means I have more work to do in one area. That’s it. And if you suddenly start to think that I’m unworthy of your compassion because I have been willing to hold on to these beliefs for this long, then I don’t think you’re worthy of my respect anymore. If you feel that the correct way to disabuse me of these notions is by condescending to me, telling me how stupid I am, telling me that my beliefs are crazy and ridiculous, or by acting like you are more intelligent than I am, I can promise you now that I will never change my beliefs and I will never have the happier life that true beliefs could bring. If you feel that the appropriate way to make yourself feel better about your life is to tell me that I’m ignoring all the evidence, that I can’t think straight, that my beliefs are destroying the world because they’re false, or that those beliefs are the worst form of oppression because they are false and I am content to keep them that way, then your life is sad indeed.

 

If instead you take an attitude of compassion and say “yeah, you have some wrong beliefs. And I have some wrong beliefs too. Let’s try to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong together so that we can all be happier” I would be far more inclined to listen.

 

So let’s apply this all to religion. When you come towards religious believers acting as if all of your attitudes and beliefs are based strictly on evidence, they see someone blowing smoke out their ass because that’s a bullshit claim, and they see you acting like you’re a lot better than they are for absolutely no reason. They see us patting ourselves on the back for being so damn enlightened. Well you know what? Atheists have a lot of shitty beliefs too. Some of them have even shittier beliefs than some Christians do. Being an atheist doesn’t make you a perfectly intelligent, fault-free person. Neither does being a skeptic. None of these attitudes rid you of the fact that you’re human and ALL of our decision making is tinged by emotions (when psychologists study people who have had damage to emotional parts of their brain and who act strictly on rationality, these people are often incapable of making decisions). And when a Christian or theist of any kind sees someone blustering up to them acting like God incarnate with no false beliefs, they’re going to shut down mighty fast. Atheists are often accused of seeing themselves as God, and I think we should do our best not to make it easier to stereotype us this way. Saying that we never are flawed in the way we come to conclusions is a really BAD way to make people realize you don’t think you’re God.

 

Look I know how fun it is to feel smarter than someone else. I KNOW how much fun it is to verbally and intellectually rip someone to pieces (I was on the debate team, I practically get high from doing that). But it’s not always the time or the place to do that, and you don’t always have a right to do that simply because another person has a mistaken belief. Imagine if we felt that because we had a right belief and someone had a wrong belief it was not only our right but also our duty to leave them in quivering pieces of destroyed self-esteem. Imagine if we did that to EVERY mistaken belief. That sounds like a damn shitty world to me, and I know that I’d end up a hermit if people did that to all of my mistaken beliefs. I know most of you would feel pretty crappy too (because you do have badly formed beliefs. Seriously, just accept it).

 

Now yes, some irrational beliefs are harmful. My irrational beliefs are harmful. And it’s great to promote the idea that we should strive for more and help each other come to better beliefs. But if we’re trying to promote a better world through truth, then shaming people for not living up to your expectations is just as bad as religions that shame people for not being able to live up to the impossible expectations of god. You end up with just as much guilt and hatred.

 

Having a bit of compassion for the fact that every human on this planet is doing their best to get by in a way that allows them to survive when things are hard and cruel is the best place to start. Adding to that that truth can help us is a good place to move next. And accepting that all of us sometimes sacrifice truth to our emotional well-being or simple practicality is crucial to coming across as human beings and to being relatable and kind individuals, as well as to having a flexible and working value system. I think it’s time that we start remembering that kindness and compassion can be part of the atheist value system as well as truth.

I Am Human

Trigger warning: suicidal ideation

So this may come as a shock to all of you but I am in fact a human being and not a robot. Because of this fact, there are certain things that I mess up on, have emotions about, and respond to in biased and sometimes irrational ways. There have been a number of people who have been pushing my buttons lately, and I apologize to people that I went off on, but there is something that I need to address, which I will try to do in a series of posts today and possibly into tomorrow to explain my reaction to a particular mindset.

This is the mindset that truth is all important and that we must never ever let ourselves be irrational or think things without evidence. I think this can be a toxic mindset for a number of reasons. The first I’m going to introduce in this post is extremely personal, and so I may end up disabling comments on this post if things get out of hand at all. This is not meant to be much by way of an argument, it is not meant to be rooted in any deep or intellectual philosophy. It is rooted strictly in my personal experience and what I perceive to be the experiences of others.

So last night after feeling frustrated about this mindset for some time, I finally realized something and I sat down and wrote this:

The temporary suspension of the need for evidence is so important to me right now that it feels like a punch in the gut when someone tells me I should always look for evidence and only believe based on evidence. Right now, I have suspended judgment on something very important: whether or not I deserve to live. I don’t think the evidence points in life’s favor, but I have decided to trust those around me when they say I do deserve it, and take it on faith for now because it’s an incredibly important conclusion and because I know that others believe I’m wrong.

I don’t have enough evidence yet, and I don’t know how to get enough evidence to prove to myself that I deserve life. I’m trying to have faith in the people who tell me that they have enough evidence, or that they can interpret the available evidence in a way that’s better than what I can do.

When someone tells me that all faith is wishful thinking, I can’t help but hear “You deserve to die and anything else is wishful thinking”.

You may not like the language of faith, but sometimes we need to recognize when we are not in a position to survey the evidence, and on occasion we might need to abdicate that responsibility to others for a while. I know that my brain cannot accurately survey the evidence around me right now, and so for the moment I am asking others to do it for me. That is faith for me. It’s trust. It’s why I’m alive, and it is far from irrational. On the contrary, it’s the best kind of rationality I can muster when my brain refuses rationality.

 

After writing this, I am certain that I’m not the only one who has to sometimes abdicate rationality to others. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like sometimes the only way to get through my life is to trust someone else when they say something kind, even when you firmly believe it’s not true. While I strive for rationality as an ideal, we are all human beings, and we all have emotions and difficulties that make pure rationality impossible, and sometimes harmful. Sometimes the most rational thing we can do is recognize our emotions and then trust others to help us see around them. I see that as a form of faith, and I think that it’s beautiful. If you have a problem with the word faith, then just replace it with trust, and I think it’s just as wonderful. We can’t always know the evidence for everything. We can’t always see it correctly or interpret it correctly. Oftentimes our brains or our senses work against us. We need help. We need to rely on each other to see the world as correctly as possible. This intersubjectivity is the faith that I believe atheists need.

Ask An Atheist Answers!

So I got a couple of questions from people, but if you still have anything you want to ask go right ahead! My first two questions are from John 🙂

What aspects of a religious community do you most miss, if any?

So this is an interesting question for me because although I grew up in a Catholic school, I don’t know if I would say I ever felt like part of a religious community. My family was never part of a church, and my parents never participated in church functions, so I’m not sure if I got the full benefits of being in a “church community”. I didn’t do Sunday school, I didn’t have church friends, none of that. That being said, there are elements of church that I miss. I miss singing. A lot. I miss there being songs that all my friends knew and hated or loved, and all could sing that weren’t whatever pop music we obviously didn’t have the vocal talent to reproduce. I miss being in churches. As much as I don’t necessarily like the waste of creating gigantic buildings for the sake of a being that doesn’t exist, I do think that there is an art in beautiful buildings, in large, majestic buildings that try to capture space and grandeur without being overly ostentatious. I think that art is largely lost right now, or at least it isn’t held up a whole lot. I love the feeling of being small in a church. I love the feeling of breathing more air. So I miss the buildings, even though I could just go back and sit in a church and reflect if I felt like it now, I miss being in them on a regular basis.

Do you think humanity would lose an important part of its identity if faith, as a concept, were ever to disappear? If so, what aspects of faith are important?

I’m going to divide this question up a bit, because I don’t think faith has to be relegated to religion. Many atheists really hate the concept of faith and think that it’s making a value out of trusting things you don’t know. In many cases I agree with that. However I believe that we also have faith in many other things, things that we don’t necessarily have empirical evidence or certainty of, but which we need to trust anyway: I have faith that my boyfriend loves me. I’m trying to have faith in my therapists when they tell me that my life will be more worth living if I do the things they ask me to do (they don’t have empirical evidence that it will work). I have faith that the system of government I live in will live up to my expectations of it (which I have SOME evidence for, but not a whole lot). So there are a whole lot of places in which we use an element of faith to move from inadequate evidence to what we hope are good and positive actions. Religion absolutely does not have a monopoly on that. I don’t think those aspects of faith should disappear and I don’t think they ever will disappear because we simply need some of them to continue to function (without some element of faith it’s nearly impossible to have relationships).

I think faith is important when interacting with other people, because you will never entirely know what they think or feel. I think faith that takes us from some limited amount of information to necessary action is good (trusting that we’re acting in the best possible way without KNOWING). But there’s a really big difference between these kinds of faith and religious faith, which asks us to believe WITHOUT or with CONTRARY evidence. I see faith as an extra bump to action when you just don’t have the knowledge.

Now if the question is whether I think we will lose out on something if we lose our religious faith, I would say no. I think that all of the things that religion provides can be found in other places, plus MORE can be provided. I think that humanists need to work to create ethical communities that give support and philosophical discussion, and care, and psychological counseling if necessary, that help to support their members in the same ways that churches do without faith. But that can also provide things like sex-positive teachings, or actual licensed therapists, or advocacy for good medicine and healthcare, things that churches don’t currently provide. I think that science and poetry and art, and all the other human pursuits can give us just as much wonder and joy as religion. There may be a sense of comfort and safety that religious faith gives us that we can’t find anywhere else: I’m not totally sure. But at the same time, I think that a false sense of comfort and safety isn’t worth much and doesn’t allow us to move forward in our lives and as a species. I think that when we rely on each other, on our minds, and on our skills in a way that is in synch with reality and as much truth as we can get at, the certainty and safety we get is a lot better.

And my third question is from my dear from Barrett: Question! Preceded by a long ramble. I, as you know, grew up in a fairly similar situation to yourself, as far as religion/religious education goes. I have memories of praying as a very young child, but since probably the age of twelve or thirteen, I have been fairly ‘meh’ about the whole thing. *Religions* I have opinions on, sometimes vociferous ones, and find theology fascinating, but in terms of having any kind of personal faith, I simply don’t find it to be… necessary, I guess, to me. There’s no gap in my life that I need faith to fill. I don’t really have much of on opinion on the existence, or not, of a higher power(s). If I had to stick a label on it, I suppose I’d go with apathetically agnostic.

So, my question is, how did you find your way to firm, outspoken atheism, as opposed to my ‘meh’? At what point did you go, There is no god, and this fact is *important* to me?

This is a FANTASTIC question and one that I’m not entirely certain I have a concrete answer for. Part of the reason that atheism has become important to me is because I do feel a deep yearning for something solid in my life. I NEVER believed in a God, and I always felt a bit ostracized for it or at least a little odd or like something was wrong with me because of it. Only as I got older did I begin to realize that it really wasn’t a problem with ME it was an intolerance on the part of others. So in part it became a way of identifying myself against others from a young age. It was a way of bonding with certain peers in high school. And I ABSOLUTELY hated having religion shoved down my throat in high school and was definitely bothered by the expectation that I should participate even though I was only at the school for the education, not the religion. It was a reaction of frustration. For a long time in high school I was an angry atheist and I felt some amount of contempt for the people who acted like they knew so much better than I did.

When I get to college I very much turned to a “meh” attitude. No one was bothering me about it anymore, so it didn’t seem to matter. In the back of my mind I still identified as atheist, and I was still incredibly interested in questions of religion because I didn’t understand it and I HATE not understanding things. So it always gnawed at the back of my mind, and the fact that I felt very depressed and uncertain about my life also gnawed at the back of my mind and made me wonder if religion could have helped.

Like you, I have always been against particular actions of religions, and have never really felt that religious institutions are very helpful. But I wasn’t vehemently atheist. I’m still not sure I’d say I am. But I think the tipping point for me was that sort of on a whim I went to a student atheist/nonreligious group, and got kind of interested in what they were doing, and started reading a variety of atheist blogs. The more I read, the more I realized that what I had experienced when I was younger wasn’t just individuals being frustrating and condescending, but it was actually a societal attitude of prejudice against atheists. I realized that atheists are one of the least trusted groups in America. I realized that huge numbers of public schools are still forcing prayer on their students. I realized that religious opinions hugely affect politics in a way that I consider negative. And I realized that atheists are a largely invisible minority. And so it became important for me to openly and loudly identify as atheist because I wanted others to know ‘this is what an atheist looks like and I’m not crazy and horrible’.

The longer I’ve been part of the movement, the more I realize how patriarchy and racism and a lot of other negative things in our society are wrapped up in religion, and the more I realize that the logic that brought me to atheism is the exact same logic that requires me to reject stupid bigoted beliefs. And I thought that the intersectionality of all of that is SO important. And as someone with a mental illness, religion is one of the sources of the most stigma against me and science and atheism and logic are my best sources of hope and care. And so it became more and more important for me to do advocacy for skepticism and logical thinking. So while I still identify vocally as an atheist because I do think it’s important for me to show that atheists can be great awesome people, and that religious freedom includes freedom FROM religion, and that religious organizations are not inherently great and neither is faith, but my focus as an atheist has shifted more to skepticism. I want most to be an advocate of rational and logical thinking. And for me that involves atheism, but it also involves feminism and mental health advocacy, and intersectionality, and GLBT advocacy…I’m still deciding whether atheism is the arena in which I want to put my efforts, but I think the atheist community is primarily one of people with lots of privilege, who have a fair amount of influence in academia, and I’d love to bring some of the other concerns that I listed to that community.

And then in addition to all of this, I found an AMAZING group of friends through the atheist community. I mean seriously, I have never spontaneously loved a huge group of people more than the atheists. All the people I write with on teenskepchick are like a little family to me, and they are SUPER supportive if people start getting bitchy and harassy. I have met some incredibly intelligent people who I see as role models and have been given some amazing opportunities because it’s a small, internet driven community that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So I do think that Atheism has filled a void that was somewhat created because of my atheism: I got the equivalent of a church community in many ways, with career benefits and personal benefits and political benefits.

So WOW that was a long answer. Short answer: I never MEANT to make atheism a part of my identity but it happened through anger, then through frustration, then through community, then through intellect.