By Solomon Schimmel*

Solomon Schimmel in Action

In addition to the philosophical critique of evidentialism, there is another ground for questioning the priority of reason in deciding what we should believe and how we should live our lives. The human capacity to use reason is, after all, nothing but an evolutionary adaptation that enables our species to survive. Moreover, human reason is far from perfect. We make all kinds of logical errors in a variety of contexts.

Reasoning skills do not come naturally, but require disciplined training, often of many years’ duration, and for numerous people they never come at all. Most human beings believe things that do not meet the criteria of logical deduction or scientific induction, or even plausibility.

We frequently make inferences about events of the past, or predictions about the future, which on strictly logical or probabilistic grounds do not make much sense, and we act in accordance with these erroneous assessments or expectations.

Ancient and medieval philosophers pointed to the deficiencies of human reasoning in ascertaining “truth,” and modern experimental psychologists have demonstrated these deficiencies in numerous contexts. Simply put, human “reasoning” doesn’t live up to all that its devotees have claimed for it. It is nothing but a flawed, imperfect evolutionary tool that has been conducive to our survival as a species until now. There is no guarantee that it will continue to serve this function in the years ahead (just as our affinity for sugar helped us survive in the past but might not be conducive to our health today). Indeed, some of the most impressive products of human reason, such as nuclear physics—one of the pinnacles of reason’s achievements—may yet prove to be the instrument for the destruction, rather than the survival, of humanity.

Consequently, if at times non rational, intuitive, experiential, emotional, or even irrational beliefs and behaviors are more effective than “reason” for a particular individual or group in enabling them to survive, physically or culturally, then “reason” has no a priori claim on how they should lead their lives.

Reason is only an instrument to be used when it is the best instrument available. If falsehood, self-deception, and psychological mechanisms of denial are better for certain purposes, so be it. “Reason” is not divine; it is not more or less “human” than are emotions, or self-deception. If self-deception, or denial, or faulty reasoning, or deliberate lying can, for example, make an individual less depressed, happier, more fulfilled, and even more humane, whereas reason would lead to nihilism, despair, depression, or inhumanity, then we need not assume that one should blindly follow reason and logic and empiricism to wherever they might lead.

Why not take a Jamesian pragmatic approach to the “truth” or to religious experience and apply them to beliefs and doctrines as well? Whichever worldview bears better fruits is the one that we should, or at least can defensibly, adopt as “truer.” An argument can be made that in some circumstances and for some people, for some of the time, the “objectively false” myths and assertions of religions serve mankind better than do the fruits of “critical thinking.”

There is no reason, therefore, that the presumed “truths” discovered by “objective reasoning” should have a favored status in guiding our lives. Naturally, because reason has evolved as a survival mechanism, it probably is in our interest to use it frequently, when it is shown to be advantageous to do so.

Most religious fundamentalists are not averse to using modern technology and modern medicine, the fruits of reason and science.

However, it is not appropriate to challenge the desirability or the utility of religious beliefs simply because they may be implausible or irrational. One would have to demonstrate that such beliefs are in the long run detrimental to human welfare, relative to the human welfare that would result by following only well-established “facts” and indisputable “reasons.”

So, by acknowledging the limitations of reason, have I conceded defeat to the fundamentalists who are anti rationalists or limited rationalists? No. The issue is not whether reason, scholarship, and science are flawless tools for understanding and interpreting reality, and for living in and controlling reality for human benefit. It is rather whether, all things considered, they are preferable to a non rational or irrational fundamentalist religious approach to life and reality.

One must make a cost-benefit analysis comparing the effects on human welfare of maintaining a non-rational, or a-rational, or implausible religious worldview, with the costs and benefits of maintaining a non-fundamentalist worldview, whether religious or secular, in which reason and empirical evidence are given priority over other alleged sources of knowledge and insight.

The rationalist need not claim that reason and empiricism are the only sources of valuable human knowledge and insight. Art, music, poetry, fiction, and religious myth — much of which are not generated by, and do not appeal to, reason or to the empirical for their value to humanity — can be deeply appreciated by the rationalist for the richness they endow on human experience and the emotional and psychological insights and wisdom that they often convey. Imagination is a natural human faculty no less than is reason. Only when the humanities, including religions, make assertions about human nature, or about reality, in a propositional form, which can be subjected to rational analysis or empirical test, and those assertions fail to withstand that analysis or to meet that test, does the rationalist give reason and science epistemological priority over the humanities and religion.

We need to ask, does a particular fundamentalist religious worldview enhance the welfare of the individual believer or of the believing group? What is its impact on the welfare of people who do not subscribe to it? The same questions would have to be asked of the “rationalist,” empiricist worldview. There are no single or simple answers to these questions.

Solomon Schimmel is professor of psychology at Hebrew College and the author of The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth” (Oxford University Press, 2008 from which this excerpt is taken by the author.

Snow en route

Skepticism is a funny thing, even among the Greeks – especially among the Greeks. The “original” skepticism would have been completely palatable to modern religionists, because it challenged pre-Socratic efforts to attain a true picture of the world and stoic claims to have the map to true knowledge. To the early practitioners of skepticism Thales’ notions just didn’t hold water, and if Heracleites was right today, he might well be wrong tomorrow. “‘What I may think after dinner is one thing,’ returns Mr. Jobling, ‘my dear Guppy, and what I think before dinner is quite another thing.’”

A little healthy skepticism never hurt anyone, except those with fixed and final positions, those who claim to possess the whole and unvarnished truth, or the careless throng who pride themselves on leading an unexamined life. The Greek word skepsis has about a dozen definitions in the big Oxford Greek Dictionary, the most common being “examination,” or “inquiry,” though it can also mean “doubt,” and “revision,” – as to revise an opinion – like Mr. Jobling at dinner time, but for cause, not whim or indecision. It always implies a certain restlessness or impatience with answers and “positions.” According to an unreliable tradition (and most ancient traditions are) it was Plato’s nephew and “successor” Arcesilaus who revised (Diogenes says “meddled with”) the teacher’s system by stressing the importance of arguing both sides of a case, giving weight to evidence and argument. How this was “new” is not clear from the reports; the sophists did it; Socrates did it.

Even Arcesilausian “skepticism” seems to have come from Uncle, who had said that “nothing can be known with certainty, by the sense or by the mind,” a conclusion which taken to its limit means that the conclusion cannot be known with certainty. So there we are. Skepticism always lands you in the solipsistic mud and solipsistic mud exists only outside the mind, and hence cannot get you muddy. But in paving the way for what academics like to call Academic skepticism, Arcesilaus paved the way for an important development. Take those arrogant troglodytes, the stoics. The followers of Zeno were the reductivists of the ancient world. This means they only believed in mud puddles. Sensory impressions or rather katalêpsis – a mental grasping of a sense impression) – guarantees the truth of what is grasped, or in this case, fallen into. If one assents to the proposition associated with a kataleptic impression, i.e. if one experiences katalêpsis, then the associated proposition cannot fail to be true. To put it simply: for any sense-impression S, received by some observer A, of some existing object O, and which is a precise representation of O, we can imagine circumstances in which there is another sense-impression S’, which comes either (i) from something other than O, or (ii) from something non-existent, and which is such that S’ is indistinguishable from S to A. Questions?

So the definition of truth, which Plato had made an Idea (call it I if you want), fell on the knife of the stoics’ claim that only kataleptic experiences are true and that the true stoic wise-man (who was seen to be a more perfectly developed type of humanity—a bit like Aristotle’s megalopsuchos except taller) is capable of infallibility.

For Arcesilaus, this is folly: first because we can be mistaken about sense impressions (as the Arab philosopher Al-Ghazali noted centuries later), and second because the world and life-in-it that we experience is more complex than our senses can grasp, and also because our sense experience fails to de-code the world of value that is also an essential part of human perception — lived experience. It is all, as a teacher of mine used to say, about our epistemic limits — a nice way of saying that to some people a palm tree is a cycad within the genera palma and to others a meeting place for an evening rendezvous on a deserted beach. Not either – or, of course, but when – then.

Why all this about skepticism and a nephew of Plato, barely visible in the footnotes? There is a confused idea that modern science has vindicated the stoic view of the world by refining and redefining what constitutes a kataleptic experience. True, the skeptics were correct to suggest trickery, hallucination, error, and deceit weighed heavily against the infallibility of the senses. But hasn’t modern science improved the thoroughgoing empirical model espoused by the stoics, to the extent that the skeptical caveats now count for much less? Freud deciphered the dream state; Einstein the continuum of time and space. –Jews since Moses have been busy wondering what was so promising about the Promised Land.

Even if the media insist that there are two sides to every story, isn’t it really the case that there is only one — the kataleptic one? And didn’t we all learn to be self-effacing about this when we learned the scientific method? The motto of false self-effacing irony. Science deals with facts, not truth; probability—(heaven forbid) not certainty. After all, a thousand bits of experimental corroboration can be falsified by one patchwork-colored elephant. In the treasury of scientific knowledge, the holy grail is the principle that the limit of the epistemic quest is the possibility a fact can be un-facted. (“Not bloody likely,” is not to be said out loud, especially by Nobel laureates). In this way skepticism has been deflated and subsumed into scientific method. Research professors have given it its own room at the back of the house, like a troublesome grandparent, and invite it to dinner every time a new discovery is announced. C.P. Snow and Karl Popper may quibble with these metaphors. But a true reductivist will bristle. A true reductivist will say that an essential element of the modern outlook — a condition of being modern, indeed — is to enshrine the scientific as the only appropriate way of viewing the world we see. The cultures of those who know a little and those who know better–the “two cultures” debate of the 1950’s–has reemerged as the “Brights| vs. “Dims” scientism of the twenty-first century.

Snow touched on this in his 1959 Rede lecture recalling a group of Cambridge dons (“educated men”), who were speaking contemptuously of the illiteracy of scientists. He comments, “… if I had asked [them]…What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’ — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.” The Snows of the twentieth century insisted they had not forsaken the verities; goodness, truth and beauty were alive and well, and living in the apartment next to a reprogrammed skepticism. But now the good was grounded in the goodness of a particular “way” of knowing particular kinds of things; truth, the basic axioms we need to refine that knowledge, and beauty the beauty of the cosmos – in its deciphered and intelligible form. But this is not a postmodernist screed against science. It is a question looking for an answer, and not just in the scientific arena. Has skepticism no separate voice in the understanding of the world? If it does, is it limited to stabs at religious dogma, debunking miracles and visions, looking for Chiye-Tanka’s poo in the Oregon woods or space debris in New Mexico? –The kind of skepticism that (it seems to me) gives back to credulity as much as it takes away.

The humanist intellectual tradition was shaped by a healthy respect for epistemic limits — not derived from a particular stance toward the infallibility of method and experience. The biblical God (which is not to say “God”) fell to skepticism (not science) only a few centuries after Anselm announced His discovery. Biblical infallibility did not fall to Darwin but to Erasmus and to Luther’s German successors in theology. Church authority began to tumble when Lorenzo Valla went to work on the claims of Pope Stephen II in 1440, not when Galileo was proved right. None of the perpetrators of these designs had any notion of the scientific method; what they did have was a healthy sense of the disconnect between what was claimed to be known (or true) and what a liberal application of skepticism discovered to be the case. Later on, biblical scholars would call this the hermeneutics of suspicion. It’s a phrase worth remembering.

And in the world of human values? Skepticism has done yeoman’s service in a non-scientific sort of way in freeing us from the taboos and stereotypes of tradition. If we point to the “achievements” everyone agrees are politically salutary—civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, you name it, we ordinarily hear in the background the voices of skeptics who doubted the prevailing orthodoxy and the way a social world was interpreted. Is this the same as demythologizing the cosmos? Yes and no, but mainly no. It’s not just that social worlds are made by fools like us, but only Process can make a tree. It is that social worlds are provisional in a way the physical world is not, and to the extent “laws” operate in both nature and society, they are different sorts of laws. Doubtless, ideas whose time has come, come—but not without nursemaids. Skeptics have undeniably been good nursemaids for every liberation movement of the last three centuries: only a Bible rendered politically ineffective by the growth of democratic secularism could be non-instrumental in maintaining the slave trade. Only a secular government could keep in check and (mainly) out of power those who want a Christian America, or for that matter a talibanized Pakistan. with all that might imply for social justice, conscience, and the environment.

If skepticism is defined as a kind of heresy, heresy applied to repressive, cruel or dogmatic social orthodoxies, then it has done a pretty good job in those areas where it has been able to do its work. Skepticism has been less good, however, where it might do the most good. Arcesilaus taught that no intellectual position can be fixed and final. This was not a statement about truth, directly, but about the infallibility of knowing. The two-sides dialectic was not a doctrine about giving equal time to opposing viewpoints—that is an American media obsession not Greek philosophy. What skepticism entailed was the obligation to test good arguments against each other—“The fire of argument is the test of gold.”

The real crisis of skepticism is reflected in a skeptical deference to those who feel that science can provide answers to all questions of value, serve as its own guide in questions of ethics, and is ultimately compatible with a species of Truth completely different from the lowercase truth one arrives at in other enterprises. Sometimes, as Snow recognized, humanists abjure the sciences out of ignorance—a real, persistent, and inexcusable ignorance. Sometimes they abjure the sciences because they see through the false modesty to the methodological conceit that locates both the nature of the universe and the meaning of life in the house that the stoics built. Whatever the anatomy of the problem the two cultures still exist, much the same as in 1959, complicated in America, at least, by the fact that outside the circle of educated men and women who cannot define acceleration and energy, there is a subculture of yahoos who defend such ignorance on religious grounds and reductivist humanists who define the epistemic limits as what science can teach us.

A consistent skepticism, like a good sense of humour, includes the ability to turn a critical eye on your own assumptions about the sources of knowledge and truth. It is far easier– as Mr Jobling knew–to be able to define exactly what you mean and to regard everything else as nonsense. Changing your mind after dinner, as long as it doesn’t happen every day, isn’t such a bad thing.

By Mark Vernon*

Humanism is not a specific doctrine or a unified system of thought. Rather it is a tradition that starts in the Renaissance, gathers momentum during the Enlightenment, and becomes a key feature of the modern world. During this development it embraces a range of possible meanings, principles and practices. It is fundamentally an attitude or spirit that values learning, curiosity and imagination aimed at engaging with the questions of life – personal and political – that human beings face and indeed that make us human. There are therefore many flavours of humanism, many philosophers that can be used to underpin it.

The Renaissance is an inspiration, though not because it was a period in which human beings supposedly awoke from a dark age: the medieval period was one of extraordinary invention and accomplishment. Rather, it is because the Renaissance humanists were able to make something wonderful of their times – in their joy of discovery, embrace of the new, cultivation of character, political reform, critical questioning, passion and potential. This still speaks to us, half a millennium later.

Then came the Enlightenment, and it is the intellectual giants, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who impress me most. For Hume, scepticism was the natural position for the Enlightenment thinker – scepticism about religion for sure, but scepticism about the fundamentals of science too. Hume was also sceptical about what he called enthusiasm, defined as ‘presumption arising from success’. That could apply to triumphalist rationalism and scientism as much as religion.

Mark Vernon

Kant found Hume’s scepticism profoundly unsettling. He wanted to put things on a firmer foundation. And he did so, but only by writing Critiques. In these Critiques, the key issue was understanding the limits of human knowledge. When Kant said that Enlightenment was maturity this is what he meant, being able to live with this finitude and not reach out for false certainty. So we have Enlightenment humanism as scepticism and grappling with the reality of human knowledge and experience.

This I would actually relate to a tradition within religion, though it is one lamentably in decline today. It is called the ‘apophatic’, meaning ‘negative way’. It stands in marked contrast to the ‘cataphatic’, meaning ‘positive way’, the strident assertions of indisputable religious dogma and divine truth.

The apophatic is a way of approaching what is ultimately unknown by identifying what that unknown cannot be. In religion it says God is not mortal (immortal), not visible (invisible) – note, saying nothing positive about God. Its spirit is captured in the biblical story of Moses climbing the mountain. As he went up and symbolically got nearer to God, he did not ascend into greater light and clarity, but deeper cloud and unknowing. Thus, at its core is a sense of the sacred – that which is far greater than you and so takes you out of yourself and into the unknown.

In a way what the apophatic theologians explored was similar to what the sceptical Enlightenment philosophers like Hume and Kant articulated: both identify limits and seek intuitions of what lies beyond. It was called ‘learned ignorance’ by the first Renaissance humanist philosopher, Nicolas of Cusa, and he got the idea from Socrates. Socrates annoyed his fellow citizens in ancient Athens because he showed that the key to wisdom is not how much you know but is understanding the limits of what you know. This dimension reaches back right to the antecedent origins of humanism. It runs right through any honest study of what it is to be human.

It is also this dimension that to my mind is needed to combat contemporary fundamentalisms – religious and scientific – particularly if you want to avoid becoming a humanist fundamentalist in response. It is a kind of committed agnosticism – a juxtaposition of words that only sounds strange, if it does, today.

Echoing the same spirit, the last word can come from a famous humanist and agnostic, the anti-Christian though never quite atheist, Bertrand Russell. Towards the end of his History of Western Philosophy, he reflects on how human beings across the centuries have related to their potential and powers. Sometimes, he believes, they have been too humble. In other periods, too hubristic. And today? He worries that we are at risk of thinking of ourselves as gods.

‘In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check on pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication with power… to which modern man, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.’

This ‘cosmic impiety’, the greatest danger of his time, shows no sign of passing. Humanists must ensure that they help mitigate it.