We Never Know
No Slack
Because Joe believes by faith, by which I mean unsupported or insufficiently supported belief. That's always a logical error. Faith cannot possibly be a path to truth if it allows one to believe either of two mutually exclusive ideas knowing that at least one is wrong. Only reason applied to evidence can generate sound conclusions, or justified beliefs.
Note that what I consider Joe wrong about is not whether there is a god or not, but whether there is a reason to believe as much. Joe doesn't need a reason. He only needs the will to believe.
This is why there are thousands of religion and gods, but only one periodic table of the elements. The religions don't use reason applied to evidence, so there is nothing to stop them from generating uncounted numbers of variations. Empiricism requires that we consult nature for answers, and the scientific study of matter has generated only one table. Furthermore, the religions accomplish nothing but comforting people that wouldn't need that kind of comforting had they been raised without religion, whereas the table is extremely useful.
It's not hard to determine what the proper way to decide what is true about the world is, and it's not by faith.
I think it's the other way around. The religious are frequently offended that their beliefs are rejected by others. Why they care isn't clear. I'm not offended by theists rejecting secular humanism.
Skeptics aren't offended by faith-based belief. They simply reject it for themselves, and consider those engaging in it to be making a mistake. We don't try to make theists humanists or care what others believe until there are large numbers of them that have been organized and politicized.
Have you noticed that difference say in public schools teaching evolution and Sunday schools teaching creationism? Your evolution professor doesn't care what his students believe. He never asks them. He just presents the evidence and arguments that Darwin and other used to conclude that life evolves, and tests you to see if you learned it, not if they believe it. These are the standards of teaching in academia.
Contrast that with creationism in Sunday school. All they really care about is you believing their version of the Bible. That kind of thinking is not for the critical thinker, and that angers many theists. They project their emotions onto us, thinking that we hate their god, or thinking that we left religion because we were angry at God or the church, or something similar, when we are pretty indifferent to gods. I just stopped believing. No anger for religion or gods, just no use for it.
Then there is no reason to believe in one. Or in the idea of the supernatural. People who think that declaring that there is a real realm that we cannot detect excuses them from having to present sufficient evidence to the skeptic before he'll believe gets them off the hook for providing evidence don't understand the empiricist.
From Pat Condell: "Faith-peddlers like to put themselves beyond question by claiming that their faith transcends reason, the very thing that calls it to account. Faith transcends reason the way a criminal transcends the law."
This is what angers many theists - this dismissive attitude about their cherished beliefs.
Of course, if they weren't telling us about those beliefs, there would be no need to dismiss them. Like most humanists, I never ask people if they believe in God, because I don't care. If they keep those beliefs to themselves, I'll never know they hold them. But if they want me to hold hands with them while they say a prayer before a meal, we won't have a future together. If somebody at the next table is doing that, I may express disapproval nonverbally for their public display of religion, and they will become incensed and feel attacked, but hey, like your sexual practices, keep them to yourself and we'll be fine whatever they are. Flaunt them, and once again, we won't have a future together. This isn't picking on either, but just saying that if you make others uncomfortable, don't be surprised if they express disapproval or don't want to socialize with you.
We have evidence who thinks critically and who doesn't. And concluding that one who believe by faith isn't a critical thinker is sound. It's definitional. There is no room for faith in reason.
The critical thinker is open-minded, that is, willing and able to consider evidence and the argument applied to it to reach a conclusion dispassionately with the willingness to be convinced by a compelling argument when one is presented. To do this, he needs to know how to interpret evidence properly, and how to reason without error. These skills don't come automatically. They require years of practice, as with the example of the teaching of evolution in academic settings. That's an exercise in critical thinking. One must make a concerted effort to weed out faith-based thinking and faith-based beliefs from his belief set and method of processing information. It eventually becomes automatic. Many theists aren't aware that this is even possible. They just assume that everybody believes by faith.
And it's very easy to tell who can't or won't think that way.
Consider my acquaintance Jack, a conservative Catholic who I was in a recent group email discussion (about a dozen of us have been doing this this for a few years now) about the Chauvin trial. I commented to the group that I had grave concerns about jury nullification of that open and shut case if just one racist or white nationalist makes it onto the jury. Jack assured me that that wouldn't happen, since the jury was all black. I fact-checked him and showed him where he was wrong. I asked him why he had thought what he did, and told me that he heard a black guy on Fox say it, who he believed by faith.
I explained to him again why I reject all of his political opinions, because he is willing to let ideas into his belief set uncritically, and so he believes a lot of incorrect things. How can he possibly generate sound conclusions given his wrong beliefs and his willingness to believe by faith? He can't. So when he tells that this or that is the case, always an unsupported claim, I tell him that I'll file that under what Jack believes and ignore it, that he has zero chance of persuading a critical thinker with his opinions. But he never changes. He never learned to think critically, and he really has no idea what I am telling him - why I don't care what he believes, but rather, what he knows and can convincingly demonstrate, which apparently is very little.
So how do I know that Jack isn't a critical thinker? What evidence do I have? Well, his willingness to believe by faith is a good start.
I didn't read all your book but faith is real.
