I've been thinking about the remnants of religion ever since I ended up talking with some secular humanists last Friday night. They were complete skeptics, and according to them, humans can never be certain about anything. These people believe in gravity, in evolution, in God's non-existence, yet they cannot say for certain. I've been pondering why they have this attitude ever since, and here's what I've got.
These humanists have gotten rid of God, but they are still left with altruism, a religious morality. I've decided their epistemology is also a leftover. Skepticism is basically the desire for knowledge to exist without context. They want to know something without sensing it and without forming any concepts about it. These folks will only admit they know something if they know it in the way God knows stuff, by no means at all. They have a religious epistemology, without the religion. Weird.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
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3 comments:
Hi Kelly! Amy Mossoff of The Little Things here. My dad is a former Catholic/current skeptic. Faith and skepticism are two sides of the same anti-reason coin and my dad threw out the baby with the bathwater when he discarded religion. He is actually quite rational, but won't claim certainty about anything. He also uses the phrase, "intuitively obvious" as a way to explain knowledge he can't say is questionable. But he does use reason - he just doesn't know that that is how he knows. He's probably the best of this breed, but your observation is definitely on target.
This is an interesting observation. I find I run into skepticism all of the time and hadn't considered this type of tie back to religious thinking. The skeptics I encounter view any certainty with contempt, claiming that it is necessarily an oversimplified and unsophisticated view.
I often enjoy confronting them with the contradiction blatant in that view, that they are in fact putting forth their own oversimplified view in their "certainty" that there is no certainty. It usually comes out like, "So you're saying that there are no black and white answers except for the one single ultimate truth that there are no black and white answers?"
People who have dropped religion as dogmatic because it purports certainty without evidence are often dismayed to be confronted with the fact that they have just made the same mistake, they have made a religion of unknowing regardless of evidence.
Thanks to both of you for commenting. It is so exciting to see proof that someone read my blog!
Anyway, I was super shocked by these skeptics. They are a part of the rational humanist club that asked the campus Objectivist club I am a part of to come to an end of the year party and tell them a little about our club.
It is scary to me that the rational humanists, the most known bunch of atheists and supporters of science in academia, don't believe we can ever know anything including that God doesn't exist and anything scientific.
Like you, Kevin, I run into people I consider skeptics all the time. But these people were so organized and educated in the skepticism. It was crazy.
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