“Any dogma based primarily on faith and emotionalism is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.”
– Isaac Asimov
We are past the days of burning witches at the stake, executing people accused of heresy, or forcing people into slavery because a holy book allows them to do so. Contemporary religious society has made considerable “progress.” Nevertheless, we are still at the age where believers disown their kids for being queer or even send them to conversion camps to “pray the gay away.” Non-believers are condemned to hell and viewed with hostility. Plenty of religious cults would deny their sick children any form of medical treatment and leave them to die out of surrendering their welfare up to God’s will. To this day, a holy war remains possible although its chance of occurrence is dubitable and it is not unlikely for extremists to send another plane with suicide bombers against a skyscraper then call it an act in the name of God. As we have seen, there is a common thread that unites all these practices – dogmatism. This raises the question: can one be morally blamed for the beliefs they hold?
In that regard, we turn to William Clifford’s Ethics of Belief wherein he gave us a thought experiment through the analogy of a shipowner (translated into a more timely scenario by me). A plane mechanic finds that he does not have the time (or is perhaps too lazy) to examine the safety of a plane so he leaves it up to faith to bring the plane to its destination; after all, it always had successful flights in the past. Unfortunately, the plane crashes, thousands of people die, and the plane mechanic receives all the blame. But let’s suppose that he got lucky and the plane did not crash – can he still be morally blamed? Clifford’s answer is yes: the fact that the plane mechanic believed something without sufficient evidence is already a moral wrong in itself. He is already liable for its natural outcome of chaos regardless if it turned out as it did or luck turned in his favor.
It is not enough that beliefs only happen to be true – it is imperative for one to have a culture of justification.
For context, in epistemology, knowledge is traditionally understood to be a justified true belief. It is not enough for one to believe he knows something, the belief must both also be true and justified – meaning you must know why it is true. One must have evidence which takes the form of valid & sound reasoning, correspondence with reality, and coherence with other truths or simply put in his own terms, in the observed consistencies of nature. Now, I am not here to argue what criterions consists the foundations or source of knowledge nor discuss ideas regarding epistemic luck for that is beyond the trajectories of this article. The point is that, it is not enough that beliefs only happen to be true – it is imperative for one to have a culture of justification. If we tolerate a belief without justification, even if it happens to be true, we are in danger of creating a culture of credulity – where one acquires the habit of being too ready and uncritically accepting any belief without questioning. Clifford would go on so far to declare that it is wrong to believe something even if it happens to be true, without knowing why it is true – a belief in truth without justification is not knowledge. He even pointed out that even if we assume that religion is true, if a believer believes it to be true without knowing why it is true is a form of heresy. Clifford’s point was, if you do not have the time to examine the evidence for something to justify it, do not believe it – suspend judgment until you know the truth and revise your beliefs in light of new evidence. Of course, there are few special cases that necessitate exemptions wherein it is justified to believe something without prior evidence which we will not tackle here due to the limits of this article. What is certain, however, is that religion and faith is not one of them. Clifford’s whole idea can be summed up in his statement:
“It is wrong always, for anyone, anywhere, to believe anything without sufficient evidence.”
So why do we talk about this? Admittedly, this was the exact reason why I picked philosophy as my first choice for college. Beliefs will determine the way you live, the way you perceive existence and the world itself, the way you see yourself and others, and the way you will treat those around you. If those beliefs are distorted, everything else will follow and one’s whole life is at stake. While pretension is a thing, it is absurd for one to live by a belief system that he does not believe as we are naturally predisposed to act and live based on our convictions. However, the danger lies in the fact that there is a possibility that the entirety of your life could be spent living a lie that could potentially inflict harm to others. Just how dangerous is this? Return to the earlier examples I stated at the start of this article and see how much oppression was justified in the name of dogmatic religious belief without evidence for its truth. “Witches” would not have been burned without belief in witchcraft or heresy; nor would children be disowned without the belief that homosexuality is a sin; nor would lives be lost to rejected blood transfusions; nor atheists cast out of their homes; nor holy wars or sacred terrorism arise—if not for the dogma that enables such actions.
As Rene Descartes pointed out in the analogy he originally used for his notion of radical doubt where he temporarily rejected all beliefs that could possibly be false to establish a secure foundation for knowledge – a rotten apple can infect all the other apples in the basket of our minds. That, is the very foundation of dogmatism – one believes something, usually out of blind faith, to be an absolute truth that cannot be questioned, doubted, nor changed. A domino effect occurs if we tolerate a false belief we are aware of, the habit of credulity, and the stubbornness to rectify it if proven wrong because it affects all the other beliefs. The only solution to this is open-mindedness that our beliefs might be false, the intellectual humility to swallow our pride if we are wrong, and the habit of justification that equips us eager to know why the truth is true.
“Superstition sets the world in flames, philosophy quenches them.”
–Francois-Marie Arouet VoltaireCover Photo by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash
References :
Clifford, William., “The Ethics of Belief,” Lectures and Essays eds. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886).
Descartes, Rene., Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method trans. Desmond M. Clarke (London: Penguin Classics, 1998).
Erzen, Tanya., Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
Goldenberg, David., The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Levack, Brian., The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2016).
Offit, Paul., Bad Faith; When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
Voltaire, Francois., Philosophical Dictionary trans. Theodore Besterman (London: Penguin Classics, 1984).
Zuckerman, Phil., Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 54, 162.
