Holy Moly! Hirhurim goes off the deep end

I have been waiting for a while now for Gil's promised post on 'epistemic justification', and tonight, he finally delivered. As soon as I saw it on my cellphone, I jumped out of bed, ran to my PC, and settled in for what I was sure would be a long night. I eagerly opened Microsoft Word, cut & pasted the whole post, and got ready to fisk it, line by line.

But after getting through the first few paragraphs I began to realize there wasn't much point. It was all just too silly. Too silly by far.

It's abundantly obvious that fundamentalist religious believers are biased in every which way possible to believe in their particular set of unbelievable beliefs. It's also abundantly obvious that the evidence is entirely NOT in favor of any of those beliefs being true. If you can't see that, there's not much point in further conversation.

I think the problem with Gil & Co was stated quite clearly on Avodah almost 10 years ago to the day. I can't find the exact post now, but in January 99, around the post where Melech Press calls Rabbi Saul Berman a 'kofer', YGB (IIRC) says something like 'The people on Avodah / Areivim are the intellectual elite / creme de la creme of the Orthodox world'.  (Update: Found it! You should read that Avodah thread. It's great.)

And of course, for the intellectual elite, for those who can quote Aristotle and Aquinas with as much familiarity as Gershonides and Maimonides, admiting to 'emunah peshutah' just won't do. No, emunah peshutah is for the simple folk. The intellectual elite are way more sophisticated than that! The intellectual elite are epistemically justified!

Now, in a nod to ej and Post Modernism, I will admit that all of us in some sense live in some kind of mythical delusional bubble, trapped by the subjectivity of our own minds and senses. Still, there's delusional bubbles and then there's delusional bubbles.

Believing that you are real, that you have free will, and that other minds exist is the basis of everybody's experience on the planet. I might even go so far as to say that believing in some kind of 'supernatural' something (be it God, gods or karma) is so natural that you can't really fault anyone for believing in that either. 

However, when it comes to fundamentalist religion, the claims are so bold, the evidence so scant, the contradictions so glaring, that it's really impossible to believe in it, unless you immerse yourself so deeply in your little delusional bubble that you never allow any external objective perspective to ever seep in.

Is it 'wrong' to live in a delusional bubble? I guess as long as you're not hurting anyone you can do as you wish. Do believers have the 'right' to believe in whatever they want? It's a free world, they have the 'right' to believe anything they like.

But that's not really the question, is it? 

The real question, for most people, is whether their beliefs are 'likely to be true'. I didn't say 'provably true'. And I didn't say 'Not provably false'. I said 'likely to be true'. 

And if you have the ability to step outside your little bubble, and peer objectively back in at the fundamentalist inside, you should be able to see that when it comes to fundamentalist religion, it's just not very likely.

The other ironic thing about Gil's post is all that blather about 'religious pluralism' and 'epistemic justification' won't really cut the mustard if Gil's own children decide that Christianity is the one true religion. 

Still, I'm glad Gil posted that post. It contains some good references, and it's a marvelous example of something that Michael Shermer writes about - Why do smart people believe silly things? Because smart people are great at intellectual rationalizing the sillyness.

If I was Gil, I think I would say something like this:

OJ could be true, and it hasn't been proven absolutely false. Yes, that's true of all other religions too, but still, OJ might be true, so I'm going to continue to believe in it because that's what I've been brought up (or that's what I want) to do. So sue me.

At the end of the day, that's about the best you can say. And at the end of the day, despite all the philosophical blah blah blah of Gil's post, that all he's really saying anyway.