Faith is bad

Inspired in part by reading the first half of Sam Harris's The End of Faith, here are some more thoughts about religious faith.

1. Backwards

In almost any area of human discourse that concerns itself with attempting to understand reality, our society accepts that using logic and evidence is the preferred way to form conclusions upon which to base our actions.

• If a scientist were to offer an illogical theory with insufficient supporting evidence, that theory would be rejected by the scientific community.
• If a businessman invests in a project that makes no sense and has no research to suggest it would be profitable, he's being irresponsible with time and money. He might be fired by his boss, or sued by his shareholders.
• If our legal system were to convict a woman of a crime without any evidence against her, we'd condemn the court's actions as a travesty of justice.
• If a doctor urged an untested course of treatment for a diseased patient without presenting an available and highly successful conventional treatment method, he'd be guilty of medical malpractice.
• If a newspaper regularly published stories without any facts to back them up because the writers just felt that they were the truth, that paper would be ridiculed for its lack of journalistic integrity and would end up on the tabloid rack if it even managed to stay in business.

And yet somehow religion manages to completely evade this standard that works so well in science, business, law, medicine, and journalism. Not only does a vast majority of our population accept illogical religious claims without a shred of evidence, their unfounded belief is exalted as a virtue called "faith."

This backwardness never ceases to astonish me.

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2. Grouping

With that idea in mind I'd group people of faith into these categories -

1. The (Functionally) Insane Fundamentalists - those that absolutely refuse to consider the merits of any idea that contradicts their religious beliefs in any way. These people simply have closed their minds to reason entirely, and live their lives on blind faith. Not only do they shun basic values that most of the free world has embraced, they often endorse the use of violence to advance their Insane Fundamentalist beliefs. In fact, many of them believe that being killed while fighting for their beliefs will win them eternal rewards in their afterlife. Harris argues convincingly that such people being armed with weapons of mass destruction pose a grave threat to the entire world.
   
2. The Misguided - those that generally appreciate the value of empiricism but don't see how faith runs contrary to that way of thinking. Basically they don't know how to properly evaluate evidence and apply logic, and consequently they're easily duped by junk like Intelligent Design that is couched in the language of science but without any genuine scientific content. They also tend to invoke Pascal's Wager.
   
3. The Inconsistents - those that generally appreciate the value of empiricism but think of it as just one way of seeing the world, but not necessarily the best or most effective. They realize that their faith isn't rational, but they think of that irrationality as part of a reasonable overall worldview. You hear them say things like "the methods of science do not apply to matters of faith," but usually only after someone has pointed out the failing in their attempts to defend faith with reason. For them, it seems like reason is the #1 way to explain something, but you can fall back on faith as #2 if reason fails. So they basically pick what they want to believe, regardless of evidence, and if they can then find evidence to support it, they use it. But if they can't find evidence, they invoke faith . The Inconsistents cling to the "god of the gaps," claiming that any area that science hasn't (yet) reached is the domain of faith. Is that the best way to decide which ideas are best viewed through the lens of science and which are to use faith? If science makes an advancement into those gaps, doesn't that show that science was the best way to look at those ideas all along?

None of that should suggest that believers are necessarily unintelligent. All 3 of those groups can and do contain smart people. Insane Fundamentalists simply refuse to apply their intelligence to be critical of themselves, but I don't think anyone would doubt that Osama must be a pretty smart guy to have organized his terrorist network. The Misguided often just haven't been trained in logic or the methods of science, which can be counter-intuitive even to a very intelligent person. And The Inconsistent are often very intelligent and college educated, but they combine a lack of self-critical thought and incomplete understanding of science. They actually tend to use their education to create more elaborate (but still illogical) arguments to support their beliefs, and are more adept at picking out (often legitimate) problems with the arguments of their opposition.

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3. Hidden Threat

Obviously a well-armed and martyr-minded Insane Fundamentalist poses a threat to anyone within his blast radius. The Misguided and The Inconsistent seem harmless by comparison. But Harris shows an indirect but powerful way that these groups are dangerous as well.

Consider what would happen if you were to tell everyone you know that Zeus has chosen you for a divine quest to defeat the forces of Poseidon. After the first few dozen people look at you funny and slowly back away, you might start to feel insane. Maybe you'd even question your belief in the divine quest.

But if you did that in Rome 3000 years ago you might be able to recruit a whole anti-Poseidon team. Most people are strongly influenced by those around them. Its hard to stand up and say something that nobody around you will support, and it is easy to get swept up into something that everyone else supports.

If you truly accept that martyrs and their families hold a higher place in the eternal afterlife, you'd want to strap a bomb to your chest and get on the nearest bus. You'd be crazy not to blow yourself up. But if nobody else believed it, maybe you'd think twice before taking your own life along with the rest of the bus.

By making it seems normal for people to accept irrational religious claims without supporting evidence, Misguideds and Inconsistents contribute to the warped views of the Functionally Insane Fundamentalists. I call them "functionally" insane because unless their brains are literally damaged in some way, they might start to question the insanity of their beliefs if they were the only group in the world that embraced irrational faith.

In this way, the liberal philosophy of tolerance and respect for religious beliefs is dangerous.

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4. How to Fight Back?

A common trait that I mentioned about both the Misguided and the Inconsistent is a poor understanding of logic and science. Combine that with the hidden threat of more benign faith, and that's why I think it is so important to improve the quality of our science education. The conflict between science and religious faith is pretty obvious though, as I mentioned recently, and religious people fight pretty hard against science education (evolution vs ID being a popular battleground of that fight).

A specific area of education I'd like to see improved is teaching people about how their own minds work. People should be educated about our brains' built-in cognitive biases, the distortions in the way our minds perceive reality. We should teach people about the logical fallacies we're all prone to committing.

Most students wouldn't be introduced to those topics until college-level courses in psychology and logic. I think they should be built into curriculum as early as possible. If we expose people to the idea that their minds don't always work as well as we'd like, and if we teach them to identify ways to compensate, we'd start closing the cognitive and logical loopholes that the bad ideas of faith tend to exploit.