Why Dawkins has more credibility than Abaye and Ravah

The current debate about faith and reason playing out here and on Hirhurim raises some interesting questions. No doubt this has been addressed extensively in the literature and ej and arama can provide us with copious links.

Gil himself keeps saying that reasonable people disagree about important things all the time, for example the bailout plan, politics in general, some areas of Science like 'String Theory' etc. So why is that legitimate, but when fundies disagree about religion we all shout 'bias & nonsense' and discard the whole topic?

So here's my take on what is going on.

The world is very complex, there's no way that any one person can sufficiently master every science, every aspect of ancient history, every religion, and so on. We can become experts in one area, if even that. As my late father, a scientist, would often joke, one can learn more and more about less and less (i.e. become increasingly specialized) so that eventually one knows everything about nothing.

So ultimately, we have to 'trust the experts' for most things. Then the question becomes, who are the experts? Who has credibility? And it's not just about the individual people. People are people after all. It's also about the process. In fact, it may be more about the process than about the people. If you have good, smart people stuck in a lousy process then the results aren't going to be great. On the other hand, if you have mediocre people in a great process, you might still get good results. Obviously the ideal is to have good people and a good process.

So the question becomes, where are the experts and more importantly, the good processes?

Science is an obvious starting point. They have experts, and a really great process. In fact the process itself is superb - self correcting, open to review, experimentation, evidence based etc etc etc. It's not perfect OF COURSE, but it's by far and away the best process for determining facts about the universe (and by extension ancient history, linguistics etc). Also of course Science hasn't got much to say about morals and values (except indirectly i.e. given Value V, science might be able to tell you the best way to achieve V).

Religion on the other hand is terrible by comparison. Individual religions have experts in that one religion, but there are few experts in all religions. And those who are tend not to be fundamentalists. It's very rare to find an expert in all religions who is still a fundie. But that's not really what's important anyway. What's really important is that the process for discovering 'truth' in religion is fundamentally flawed. Actually, there is no process! There are ancient beliefs that are passed down, and people are told to believe them or else. That's it. Not a very credible process.

Now, there are some areas of Science where there is disagreement, for example String theory. You have passionate experts on all sides each claiming their theory is correct. What do I say to that? I say a few things:

1. If any one of those scientists would argue that he is 100% correct with no doubt about it, I would regard that person as a little crazy.
2. I have trust in the scientific process (based entirely on evidence of past performance) that eventually the correct theory will win out, or at least we will get progressively closer to the truth. This is what has been happening for the past few hundred years, and there's no good reason to think it will stop (except of course because of the total collapse of Western Civilization).

But imagine if all of Science was like religion. Imagine if we were to have American Science, European Science and Asian Science. Imagine if everyone disagreed about what the laws of science were, if everyone dogmatically stuck to their guns, and there was no process to resolve the issues. Imagine if scientists were all indoctrinated from birth to believe that their science was the one true science. What would you say then?

Obviously then science wouldn't have any credibility either!

There's nothing inherently special about scientists versus religious leaders. They're all good people. But scientists have an excellent process for getting to the truth, whereas religions don't have any process at all. And please don't start talking about 'moral truth'. That's NOT what we are talking about and is an entirely different discussion.

In 5 years of discussion in the blog world and elsewhere, I have seen that the fundies have the following process:

1. I must believe in X
2. Therefore I will argue any which way to make X appear to be true.

That's not a credible process. That's bias. Could some scientists in some areas of Science also be operating like that? Probably. But so what? Then they're not very credible either.

Ultimately, OJ is Rabbinic Judaism, i.e. Chazal. Being OJ means having faith that Chazal were right. The Chareidi model is that Chazal were right about everything. The MO model is that Chazal were right about religion, but not neccessarily about Science. Although this small difference has been the cause of a lot of tumult in the veldt these past few years, when it comes to religion, both Chareidim and MO agree that Chazal were absolutely correct.

So why have faith in Chazal? Are they the experts? Did they have a good process? Ultimately, we have faith in Chazal because Chazal said so. We have no idea what their process was, except to say that it presumably was 'tradition', and we all know how reliable that is. Unless you believe that Chazal had Ruach Hakodesh, like Chazal said so.

If you are non fundamentalist, you don't priviledge Chazal with any special knowledge or abilities, just on their say so. You figure out who the experts on ANE history are (hint: They're sitting in academia in the 21st century, not in the Beis Midrash in the 4th Century), and you proceed from there.

Unless of course you want to have faith. You can always have faith, because faith doesn't require anything other than faith itself. Is faith good? That's an entirely different question.