Brian K
Member
I thought this was an interesting essay from a blogger who goes by Camels With Hammers. His basic thesis is that it was the very personal quest for "TRUTH" demanded by his religion that led to his atheism.
I simply thought this was an interesting essay. In some ways, as his essay itself makes clear, he has retained some dogmatic ways of thinking...somewhat, at least, which would make him less amenable to some atheists or non-theists.
Elemenope
Moderator
The Nietzschean Dromedary is actually an occasional commenter on the blog-side.
It's an interesting notion; it seems to me like the flip-side of the Principle of Explosion; from a contradiction, anything follows. If Christianity, and its subtended morality, are contradictory, then many (mutually contradictory) conclusions could proceed from it, one being self-annihilation of the ideology itself. I think it might naturally proceed that way in some cases, because whatever follows from a contradiction has no necessary referent, no requirement of an actual connection to an available truth in the world. In some sense, while there may be an infinite number of roads that lead from a contradiction, they all lead away from the proposition that generated it.
It is certainly true, on another level, that any system of thought that fails its own justification schema is self-swallowing and self-negating. Humans have only a finite power to wish away inconsistencies, because when they present themselves they always present themselves in terms of experience, which necessarily have referents to facts in the world, and so are always superior to the dispositionally situated predictions of theory. We can ignore or wish away a contradiction in theory with ease, but is much harder when the contradiction is given form and consequence. Apostasy, in this conception, is simply picking the less common road to resolving the contradiction, and as Mr. Camels-With-Hammers pointed out, is in some sense a more unflinching, uncompromising application of the rules that lead to the contradiction, and so a valid expression of the faith that motivated their original adoption.
For some unfathomable reason, religious folks rarely see it that way, though. :)
FO
Member
Well, Evid3nc3 in his series says something like "I never imagined that I may had to choose between Truth and God".
Thing is, most people (and religious people more so) don't care too much about truth but rather to validate their beliefs.
But I like how Camel says it:
the love of truth was preached to me religiously, as a matter of absolute importance because of the religious stakes that rode on it. It mattered that people believed the truth and that they did the good because their very salvation hung on this.
Unfortunately most people are very lazy about truth, which is understandable however.
And this I also like a lot:
The religious devotion to truth involves learning to not make an idol of truth since that would be to dishonor it.
All in all, he makes me feel kinda religious... ^_^
UrsaMinor
Member
I suppose that if you consider religion to be the search for TRVTH, as it were, then the questions that you ask and the answers that you find could lead you to atheism. But this can only happen if you are really open to accepting the implications of what you find if they do not lead in the direction that you expect.
I think a lot of religious people start out sincerely wishing to know the truth, and more than half-confident that the evidence will lead them back to their starting point. When it doesn't, then more often than not cognitive dissonance sets in, so that the emotionally important God-myth can be retained. But a few people do manage to break free of that.
Overall, I'd guess that faith is not a reliable path to atheism.
kessy_athena
Member
Well, my first thought is that I'll wager that Nietzsche never actually met a camel. Neither have I, but from everything I've heard, "obedient" and "reverential" do not seem like the best adjectives to describe their temperament. LOL
In any case, humans have a mental model of the world that we use to understand our environment and frame the way we think. This model naturally evolves over time for all of us. Although temperament, the initial state of the model, and what sort of experiences the individual has can give us a probabilistic idea of how those models will evolve, it's impossible to predict how any particular individual will react. clearly the sort of evolution Camel went through will occur for some but not others.
In mathematics, when you get a singularity (as in a point where the value of a function is not defined) what that tells you is that the approach you've been using has reached its limit, and if you want to proceed any further, you'll have to revise it. I think that similarly, when you hit a fundamental contradiction in the evolution of your personal model of reality, it means you need to back up and take another tack. The thing is that doing that will often lead to highly unpredictable results. Very small differences in how you back up and change direction can lead to radically different results.
Of course, you can also just leave the contradiction intact and proceed along the path you were on before anyway. The Universe is not under any obligation to be self consistent, and a human's mental model of it certainly doesn't need to be. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. There are even times when that approach is very helpful. For example, relativity starts with the idea that an individual photon will move at exactly c in all frames of reference, which certainly sounds contradictory.
Elemenope
Moderator
Well, my first thought is that I'll wager that Nietzsche never actually met a camel. Neither have I, but from everything I've heard, "obedient" and "reverential" do not seem like the best adjectives to describe their temperament. LOL
As I understand it, Nietzsche was playing with Middle Eastern tropes intentionally with Zarathustra to evoke not only the eponymous character but also to strengthen the (somewhat mocking) stylistic parallel between his text and the Bible. As such, his use of the camel was a choice based on that animal being the primary beast of burden of that region, just as the lion was the most familiar apex predator to the region and the (Western) dragon was the great mythological foe which originated in stories there. I think he was also avoiding using horses instead because people think of horses as majestic and graceful, which would have screwed up his point.
EDIT: And I did not know this, but upon looking up the etymology for "Zarathustra", the name itself, a reasonable translation is "golden camel".
(On a side note, Daniel Fincke is a badass, and anyone who is not familiar with Camels With Hammers should give it a look.)
(On another side note, if someone believed and took seriously certain statements attributed to Jesus, the most direct logical expression of that belief in Jesus would be to reject christianity (at least any recognizable form of christianity). That's not exactly the question here, but I think it ties closely into this question).
"Does faith itself lead to atheism?"
It can (it sort of did with me). But not directly. And not reliably. In a vacuum, belief leads to belief. People believe and then they keep believing. It's a simple enough equation.
But to believe and be disapointed in that belief, to have your belief confounded, to find out things that could not be compatible with what you believe, to have to examine your belief to find out if it is true, to find out it is not true? Yes some potential chains of events could take someone to disbelief as a natural extension of belief.
But what Fincke is describing here is not exactly "faith leading to atheism". More like "attachment to truth leading to apostasy". He's relating it to a religious obligation to search for truth. The main point seems to be that disbelief is not simply the result of a rejection of the god question, but the logical end to the search for god.
The thing is, at its broadest definition religion is a search for Truth. Not the search for truth. Philosophy is the search for truth. Religion and science are two distinct branches of philosophy which propose very different methods for defining and finding truth. Religions stress revelation as the source of truth (this emphasis on revelation is the one common theme of all religions). Early forerunners of the scientific method were explicitly a response to correct a flaw within the revelation based method of seeking truth (ie without testing, anyone can just assert whatever the f*ck they like as revelation, and there's no way to tell).
Ask anyone and they will say they value the truth. Few will be consciously lying about that part. The question is one of how we define truth, where do we look for it, how do we distinguish true from untrue, and by what reasoning we declare something to be true.
As FO mentions faith =/= love for truth. Love for truth (or at least love for "truth") is part of the religious mindset. But not the same part as faith (though this usually won't come up if the person is not consciously aware of any reasons their faith might be misplaced). Faith is committed attachment to the declared truth value of a proposition. It is by nature indifferent to the value of truth.
Faith is often described as belief without evidence. It is that, but the 'without evidence' part is a byproduct of what faith really is. Faith is unconditional belief. With or without evidence. Indifferent to evidence. To really have faith is to not care at all whether the evidence is on your side. What is important is not what is true. What is important is that this is true.
If you have faith not only that your premise is true, but that it is the pinnacle of truth, and the prime basis by which truth is measured, it is very hard to ever seriously consider that it may not be true. Why would you? If some other thing seems to contradict that premise, then that other thing must not be true. How could it be true if it disagrees with the bible/Qu'ran/Book of Mormon/etc?
Most major religions specifically teach that anything from outside their sphere is not to be trusted. There are many barriers to exiting an insular position. But if your starting point is an obviously wrong dogma, and searching for truth is something you take seriously, it should lead to apostasy (and in this equation "apostasy" does not necessarily mean "atheism").
Where faith itself can lead (indirectly) to atheism:
Within the portion of the populace which would be classified as believers, there are those who believe, and there are those who are just there. Those who are just there are just there by default, and unless they get bored with church, they'll basically always be there.
If a person believes in god because why not it's something to do on Sunday, and doesn't really take this god thing seriously or care whether it's real, they can potentially believe forever without being challenged in their belief. If a religious person finds religious ideas too boring or confusing to examine they will encounter fewer flaws in those ideas. Anything they happen to encounter which does challenge their beliefs can be easily shrugged off without even the need for rationalization, since belief is more of a social thing than a belief thing anyway. Because they lack faith, they will continue to have faith.
If a believer really believes (which is to say, if they have faith), they may take spiritual questions more seriously. If a person takes spiritual questions seriously, they might be more concerned with actually asking the questions and trying to find the answers. They may be more driven to actually examine their faith. Most of these will become zealots or apostates. Those who examine the claims of christianity, and the basis of those claims, and the history of the church will find many reasons not to believe. Those who get this far will come to a fork in the road. A choice (which may not even be consciously perceived) must be made. Either it is more important to believe what is true, or it is more important that what you already believe is true. If what you already believe in is following the truth wherever it leads (which some would consider a religious tenet), the choice is that much easier.
I've often said the best reasons (and my main reasons) for rejecting christianity come from within christianity (and its associated literature). There is no shortage of outside evidence. But when faith is contradicted by outside evidence, it is still valid according to its own standard. When faith fails on its own terms, that is when faith goes away. I started as a believer, and I followed that belief to its logical fulfillment. I looked for god, and no god was what I found. Faith can lead you to that. If you don't have too much of it.
swmr1
Member
What a great post, Nox. You've said so well what I always think. I lost my faith because I REALLY believed it and took it very seriously. I also, like Daniel Fincke, value truth. What I thought was the ultimate truth, failed miserably when I actually tested it out. Thanks for a great read.
kessy_athena
Member
I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head, Nox. There's just one small thing I'd like to add. You're using the word "faith" in a pretty specific way here, and while I agree with everything you said about that particular variety of faith, it does come in other flavors. For example, in the other thread I said that it's an article of faith for me that everyone has the capacity for growth. I wasn't being entirely rhetorical. Because of the nature of the statement, it's not really provable or disprovable. For me, saying that I have faith in something is saying that I am making a conscious choice to believe something while acknowledging that it could well be wrong. In this case, I'm choosing to believe that everyone is capable of growth for a few reasons. It intuitively feels right to me and it's in accord with my personal experiences. I've seen people be stuck in one place for a long time, but when the right circumstances come along, when they're ready, they can leave that place behind. Yes, I'm one of those people myself. I also choose to believe it because I think that believing that makes me be just a little nicer to everyone, and that makes the world ever so slightly a better place. And there's a little bit of a Pascal's Wager in there too. If I treat everyone as if they have the potential for growth, and am wrong about some of them, then I've done no harm by it. On the other hand, if I treat some people as if they don't have a potential for growth and I'm wrong, then I really have done them a disservice.
Which I guess is a really drawn out way of saying that there are ways of having faith that don't make the belief itself the most important thing.
Kessy_athena & Brian K,
Thank you.
Kessy_athena,
Mostly agreed. I'm always in favor of being willing to have the discussion and treating people as though they have the capacity to change their position if presented with a good argument. I might not personally believe they will. But addressing people's arguments as though they are arguing in good faith is good general practice. My earlier comment was not meant to suggest otherwise. I just started reading that thread (initially to see which biblical points you were arguing with him about) and was immediately struck by how blatantly Sammy was not arguing in good faith. But I wasn't intending to suggest you give up (just not to have too high of expectations for this one individual). The marketplace of ideas only works when people challenge bad ideas (and when the bad idea you're arguing against is that people should not have equal rights, that sh*t needs to be slapped down viciously regardless of whether the person in question will understand).
Faith that every individual has the capacity to change their mind is well placed. Faith that any given individual will change their mind is a setup for a nearly inevitable disappointment.
My "faith" is in cumulative change. I believe when enough individuals make the choice to change their mind, society as a whole will shift. I don't need any one particular person to change their mind. I just need enough people to change their mind to shift the window and move the worst ideas to the fringe where they can do less harm. I approach online arguments with the belief that even if the person I'm arguing against doesn't get anything out of it, someone else might.
A person already arguing for a position is probably committed to that position. Those seeds will fall on rough ground. There is a possibility of stimulating thought, but if that happens it will probably happen later, and you probably won't hear about it. There is also a possibility that if you thoroughly debunk someone's argument, that particular individual will not reuse that particular argument (as this depends on the honesty of the individual it is still very far from guaranteed).
But as I said on the other thread, you never know who else is reading. Maybe someone not set in their ways. Maybe someone a little more free to listen. Maybe someone just entering the debate who hasn't really thought about it before, but wants to see which side has the best arguments. Maybe someone who holds an opinion entirely because they have never heard of any alternative. A public forum allows you to address not only the person you are addressing, but other forum participants and some indefinite quantity of lurkers.
Many people who hold bigoted positions are actually bigots. All you can do for them is wait for them to die and be replaced by better people. However, many people hold (or have not completely discarded) bigoted positions (or positions which reinforce prejudice) because they are simply unaware of their own prejudices or how they affect people. There are people who hold (or are not convinced against) bigoted positions because they live in a society that has told them those positions are the default thing people are supposed to believe. Most people like to think of themselves as good people. And a lot of those have been told that hating or fearing gay people (or "protecting marriage") is what good people are supposed to do. These ones, maybe you can help them.
Nearly everyone has the capacity for empathy. Most people simply do not put the thought into putting themselves in the other person's position. That gay people are people who deserve the same rights as any of us, and are being unfairly discriminated against (and that gay people getting married will have zero impact on the quality of anyone's straight marriage), might seem relatively simple and obvious. And it is. But depending on where someone is coming from, it might also be an idea they've simply never been exposed to.
People's opinions on issues have a lot to do with how they're framed. On this issue, there are several pastors and pundits framing the issue in a way that suggests the position they want everyone to take. And there are many people whose entire awareness of the issue comes from within that framework. An entire card house has been built up in opposition to gay rights. This card house provides a whole set of one dimensional justifications for that position that could sound convincing to someone who had never thought about it. But the entire structure relies on never being examined or questioned. Like most things you hear in church, it relies on being the only thing you've ever heard to be remotely believable. By pointing out that these bricks are not bricks but cards, you might be telling someone something they've never heard, and might never have thought of.
So these shifts are possible. And they are worth pushing for. A world where bigotry doesn't exist at all is not something that will ever happen. But what we could make is a world where bigotry is no longer standard. A world where hating gay people is not encouraged as the default thing that people are supposed to do. A world where those who wish to discriminate against people based on their sexuality can not find public support for their desired policies. That world will only come about if we are willing to have the conversation, challenge people on their views and call people on their bullsh*t.
Fifty years ago, a heavy majority of people in the U.S. disapproved of homosexuality. Now a slim majority disapproves of homophobia. That happened mostly because people challenged accepted norms and the window shifted. If we are vigilant in continuing to challenge accepted norms the window can shift further. A hundred years ago the mainstream of the debate on gay rights was between lynching them and running them out of town. Now it's between marriage and civil unions. We should be at equality by now, and we're certainly not there yet, but it's been established that progress can happen.
You don't need to have faith to believe that incremental changes can add up to significant changes. It's already happening. You don't need to have faith to believe that humanity can get better. We already are.
So in this case I would say you are advocating something as "an article of faith" which is a good provisional assumption anyway. Anything which inspires you to promote enlightenment and push for equality is on balance probably a good thing. That you call it an article of faith? That is not how I would approach it, but anything which inspires you to promote enlightenment and push for equality is not something I would discourage.
As you pointed out, the word "faith" is one that can mean a variety of things (see above). My point here was more about the mechanics of faith than the definition of faith. The type of faith I was talking about here can even include varying levels of commitment to a premise. Some levels of commitment to a premise can be justified even without confirmation. There is a very important difference between proceeding as if the premise were true without knowing for sure, and dogmatically clinging to the premise in the face of evidence that it is not true. But that difference is more about degrees than definitions.
With anything that anyone describes as an article of faith, I would suggest there is some possible benefit to asking yourself "would I still believe this thing if I had more reason to think it was untrue than reason to think it was true?".
I don't think faith is always a negative thing. The reason I think faith is almost always a negative thing is not that it is belief without evidence. It is that faith so easily becomes dogma. Without attachment to certain beliefs holding back humanity's search for knowledge, belief without evidence would be a mostly self-correcting problem. As information increases new evidence becomes available, gradually moving things from unknown to known.
And it is belief in the conclusively false, not belief in the unknown which is crippling our species. Tentative, cautious belief in the unknown can be productive. The tenets of faith that are causing all the biggest problems are not the ones which may or may not be true. The biggest problems come from faith in things that were disproved long ago, that people still insist on believing despite clear evidence that they are not true.
Making that better world doesn't require all of humanity to give up on every belief that lacks sufficient evidence. If we could just get the average of humanity past believing things that are definitely not true, that alone would be incredible progress.
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