Letters to the Editor
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why -
do I believe in the existence of the biggest uncertainty epidemic the world has ever faced and it is spread by a virus(people)- who have to express their certainty in order to fight their uncertainty - And why - if all of this is equally uncertain does somebody write a book about the certainty epidemic??
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Rosenkavalier ...
'I daily entertain the possibility that I could be wrong about everything I know, and I am quite confident that even were that the case, I should still continue to live, think, and believe the way I do for the benefit of myself and the world.'
I'm an atheist. I don't find the suspicion that atheists are one good debating point away from murdering everyone in their beds offensive, I find it bizarre.
You've just said it yourself ... it's *not* your faith stopping you.
A thought experiment I like: if you think the universe is theistic ... how would it look or feel if it suddenly became atheistic? What if God vanished for a day, say? Would you act differently? Would physics? Would the sun still come up? Would murdering a nun still be a bad/immoral thing to do?
My guess is that you do nice things because you're nice and want to live somewhere nice. It's more complicated than that, of course, but that's basically it, surely?
What's the basis of my morality? It's the same as everyone else's: for society to function there has to be an accommodation and a set of rules, formal and informal. Many of basics of those are the same for animals as people. Ducks pair-bond for life, apparently, without needing a Catholic priest involved. They punish rapists, too, without recourse to Sharia law. I don't know where they stand on gay marriage.
The modern world has kept all the sensible stuff like not killing people, ditched all the stuff about stoning people who wash their sheep when there's a full moon. More to the point, we've progressed. Dawkins' atheist materialist DNA and evolution inspired attitude to the higher primates (be nice to apes and monkeys, they're almost us) is *infinitely* more positive and 'moral' than the Biblical command to terrorize them because we're special. Jesus could have freed the slaves, instead he endorsed slavery. Wilberforce 1, Jesus 0.
If people need a focus, or something to hang their own personal beliefs on, then ... well, OK. But morality doesn't 'originate' in religion or the religious impulse. It originates because there's more than one of us.
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'Liberals are always telling us we should respect other cultures ... what exactly is it that we are supposed to respect?'
Ourselves. Duh.
We have freedom of speech, and fora where we can exercise it. Ordinary citizens can criticize the leaders without fear of punishment.
The point of freedom of speech is that by allowing *all* forms of speech, it demonstrates its own virtue. It forces challenge and comparison. It allows us to adopt and assimilate what does work.
Every single woman in America is free to wear a burqa.
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A Rail Against Itself
It's striking to me how certain the author seems to be of his conclusions, many of which could not be described as empirically verified.
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Certainty is biologically impossible.
That's hot.
Burton could do well to consult history as much as experimental data for his conclusions, because it was already a foundational tenet of the Buddha's epistemology that the mind was a sense-organ. Likewise, the way Burton invokes the unconscious here seems fairly loosey-goosey and unhelpful when compared to the more robust and useful formulations of Freud, who also made the point in "The Future of an Illusion" that it's not as helpful as it would seem to pull the plug on conviction and beliefs. I wonder if Burton's "aha!" is echoing the "oceanic feeling" of the religious person under Freud's critique.
Other than that, I think the message that "our minds have their own agendas" is one of the most important of the last 100 years, though it isn't Burton's exclusively. Nonetheless, I think Burton is spot on with the irreducibility of subjectivity, even when it appears in its objective entirety before it. There is still that gap (the "aha!") between consciousness and self-consciousness, between thinking and its reflective appearance for itself, which, mind you, is not the seat of something called the soul or anything. It is a fundamentally empty moment in experience that is at once the creative base for it all, which cannot be captured as the certainty of immediate sensuous being, but is nonetheless necessarily present in its coming on the scene. In other words, Burton gets or is starting to get that uncertainty is the only way for anything like certainty to work for us.
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I can't follow this author's writing.
For example, I don't know what this paragraph means,
In his bestselling "Blink," New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell describes gut feelings as "perfectly rational," as "thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously" than conscious thought. But he's flying in the face of present-day understanding of brain behavior. Gut feelings and intuitions, the Eureka moment and our sense of conviction, represent the conscious experiences of unconsciously derived feelings.
I've reread this paragraph six times, and I still don't see how the author can compare his definition of "gut feelings" with Gladwell's, let alone declare them contradictory - there seems to be no common ground to compare them on.
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The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity
Some people commenting in this thread would transform Yeats' words from a lament to a moral imperative. While it's true that the ability to question one's beliefs is an essential quality for life in a pluralistic society, I'm not certain that certainty is always a bad thing. And if I'm reading Burton correctly, neither is he.
The rationalistic worldview holds that opinions supported by the scientific process (reason) are legitimate, while opinions supported by other epistemological methods (such as faith) are not. But over 200 years ago Immanuel Kant showed that reason is not the appropriate tool for every problem. Kant pointed out that there are certain questions (such as the existence of the soul, or God, or free will) which lead to incoherent answers when addressed via reason. (To be clear: Kant argued, fairly convincingly, that rationalistic arguments on both sides of these questions were incoherent: attempts to prove or disprove the existence of God or the soul are equally flawed.) Therefore, he concluded that there were limits to the subjects which reason can meaningfully address.
If you accept that argument, there are two possible paths. One is to say, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, that whereof we cannot reason, we must be silent: excluding the irrational from our discourse entirely. And yet we operate on irrational assumptions every day, so this effort would seem to exclude a massive and important piece of human experience. Another path is to accept that the value of faith as an epistemological tool may be different in kind from the value of reason. Kant argued that these objects of faith cannot be known in the same way that the objects of reason are, but may be believed because reason cannot coherently contradict them: trying to prove or disprove the existence of the soul with reason is like trying to hear a color or see a song.
As far as I can tell, Burton's neuroscience is merely providing further evidence of reason's boundaries, as mapped by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. Science tells us what we can know; faith may tell us what we can believe. As long as each recognizes the proper domain of the other (goodbye to both Dawkins and the religious fundamentalists), we're OK.