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An interesting reflection today in the NYTimes on the relationship between philosophy and faith from Gary Gutting (philosophy professor at Notre Dame) here.

An excerpt:

“The standard view is that philosophers’ disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers.  The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can’t agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals?  An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don’t have.

This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers’ disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God’s existence […]. There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals.  Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept — the way we do scientific claims — on the authority of expert consensus.

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case.   This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.

This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments.  Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith.  But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief.   How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?”

A good defense of agnosticism here. Excerpt:

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation “ex nihilo” (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of “uncaused causation” to be created in the first place.

I agree with the skepticism the author aims toward contemporary science and its ability to answer the deepest questions (though at the same time I’ll say we have no better guesses on hand). What bumps me over the edge into atheism, though, is the fact that we have pretty compelling ordinary ways of explaining why people end up being theists, and it would be just too weird a coincidence if theists ended up being right.

Example. I cup my hands together and tell you there is an invisible, massless, chargeless dancing demon in it. I ask you if you think I might be right. I think you ought to say “no, you are wrong” not only because the claim is obviously ridiculous, but also because you know I’m proposing this strange idea only because I’m aiming to make some sort of point about arguments and evidence and theism. You know my motives, roughly, and see how my motives lead me to making this ridiculous claim. Now if it turned out that there really was an invisible demon in my hand — well, shoot, that would really be something, wouldn’t it? Mind-bogglingly weird.

The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for theism. You know why theists believe (all sorts of psychological explanations available here). So if that fully explains why they believe what they believe, then it would be a truly bizarre coincidence for them to end up being right (since certainly the psychological explanations offer no reason for thinking the belief is true; only that it is believed).

Interesting question to raise here: can the exact same sort of argument be raised against the scientistic atheists? Aren’t their beliefs also explicable through psychology? Does that give us reason to discount their beliefs? (Here again I must say: Nz was way ahead of us on this! He ad hominems the scientists alongside the priests in BGE.)

from the NYT. Excerpt:

Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better.1 For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

Or read this book about Montaigne.

A reason for the enduring attraction of Montaigne’s Essays is that they do what all classics do: they illuminate the universal in the particular. In one way this should be a surprise, because Montaigne was a highly individual man and, by his own account, a rather unsuccessful one. He frankly confessed his inabilities and shortcomings, his dislike of business, his yearning for solitude, his regret at being forgetful and not very clever, his physical lacks…. Yet his frankness is refreshing and full of human truth. He found a method of writing suited to the character of his mind—an aleatory, divagatory, exploratory method which meandered along with his thoughts, making his essays unsystematic and random, full of unexpected, entertaining detours.

An interesting article here on how quick internet reading is dulling our capacity to think and reflect.  Is the answer “slow reading”?

An excerpt:

“If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

The problem doesn’t just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too….

So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. … we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other…..”