The difference between a Religionist and an Atheist
a Christian poster said:
So I wonder: if we're largely honest and consistent, and courteously we'll assume we all are, how is that we differ so much?
In the spirit of good faith, I will speak plainly.
It is my experience that one fundamental difference between religious and non-religious thinkers is the idea of personal infallibility. Not in some silly sense, but in a deep and subtle way. Theists are of course aware that they can be mistaken. However, what does not seem natural to them is to doubt the veracity of their personal experience.
There is a classic experiment going around where you watch a video of people playing basketball. Halfway through it a man in a gorilla suit walks across the screen. A full 50% of subjects do not see the gorilla. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that those people are absolutely shocked that they missed the gorilla.
The lesson here is not that people are often inattentional. The lesson is that they don't know they are. They assume that if a gorilla walks through the room, they will see it.
If you know you have a bias, you can correct for it. I know I have a bias. I know what it is. I know what I want to be true, and how much it can affect what I perceive to be true. In my experience, theists do not know they have a bias, or what it is, or just how much you can fool yourself when you want to. They intellectually understand that these things happen, but they can't actually name a time when it happened to them.
We all fool ourselves, but some of us don't think we do.
Secondly, I have found an epistemological difference. As I put it the other day, my fundy at work thinks that the point of an argument (or discussion, if you prefer) is to understand the truth. I think it is to uncover the truth.
He starts out knowing the truth, and works backwards from there. But if you ask him how he knew it in the first place, he just looks at you funny.
The way he gains new knowledge is by authority. Somebody he trusts said it. He assumes this is how everyone gets new knowledge. No matter how many times I explain to him that my confidence in expectations based on past experience and inductive logic is not faith, he doesn't get it. To him, the source of all knowledge is authority: experience (and tests) only serve to prove or explain the truth, not discover it.
You see this attitude constantly in the Creationists, who keep trying to prove their theory true by disproving the other theory. You've got two people saying two different things, so if one of them is wrong, the other is the one you should listen to. The entire notion that both of them could be wrong, and that you should appeal to some entirely different method to determine the truth, simply does not occur to them.
My favorite Medieval joke: Two farmers are having an argument. One says a mule has 32 teeth, just like Aristotle said. The other says it has 26 teeth, like Plato said. As they are yelling at each other, a monk on a mule comes by. The monk says... why not just count them? So of course they kill the monk.
A joke, yes, but illustrative of my point.
As children, we absorb everything our parents say. Once we become adults, we stop. But what if we need new information? How do we get it? Well, we promote some person to the status of parent, and absorb what they say. I believe this is how cult leaders work, and why otherwise intelligent and educated people believe whatever crazy nonsense they say. It is because they have re-established the parent-child relationship. They had too, because their life wasn't working, they needed some new information, and this was the only way they knew of getting it.
If you don't teach your child how to gain information through some other source than authority before your authority runs out, I think you're pretty much out of luck. But if you teach your kids to gain information by rational thinking before they're 13, it might be true that they'll gain some information you'd rather they didn't have, but it will also be true you'll still have a way to give them new information when you're no longer a privileged source. A backdoor to the program, as it were.
Now consider how Christianity operates. People are taught to accept God's word without question. Exactly like your 2 year old. People are taught that their reason cannot adequately understand God's rules. Exactly like your 2 year old cannot understand the reasons for your rules. Christianity strives to recreate the parent-child relationship between the adult human and god. Ever notice how God is described as Father so much?
(Sadly, God is an abusive and neglectful parent. Christians often behave surprisingly like children behave towards their alcoholic, abusive fathers. Including blaming themselves when He lashes out. But that's a different topic)
What the Christian cannot even begin to comprehend is that atheists don't need a parent-child relationship. They understand well enough about not wanting one: every child dreams of being independent. But they don't understand how you can live without one: how will you know what is true and false if you don't have someone to trust? They simply do not understand the empirical, inductive scientific method, and if they do, they have no faith in it. And they can't believe that it's enough for anyone else to live by, which is why they are constantly saying stupid things like how atheists must be unhappy or immoral.
Hopefully you can see how these two topics are really one. The notion of personal infallibility and argument by authority are linked. One accepts argument by authority because one believes the other person, who has expertise in the issue, is also personally infallible. So verification simply becomes accepting that he is not lying about his experience. You already know his experience is adequate to determine truth, because yours is.
It's all about epistemology. How do you know what you know? Either you buy into the empirical, scientific, logical, inductive method... or you think it's what people experience. Again, note how often atheists are materialists, and theists are idealists. One thinks truth derives from the world, and the other thinks the world derives from truth.
