Incredulity as a Moral Failure

I keep encountering arguments from incredulity in the speculative religious community. An argument from incredulity is just an assertion by the arguer that they can’t imagine how something is possible. In two recent examples, the arguers are the Christian faithful and are trying to deconstruct materialist counterarguments to their speculations about collections of facts. I think this is both an intellectual and a moral failure. It is an intellectual failure when the speculators don’t choose the obvious stance with regard to unknowns and unknowables: I don’t know. It is a moral failure when the consequences of such intellectual failures leads to weakly-justifiable faith constructs that harm or might harm others.

Let’s take a couple of examples. First, we have Ross Douthat (I know, I know, I spend too much time on him, but he does have a big platform being at New York Times). He has a forthcoming book about why one should believe in a religion, although he is not forceful about which particular one is the right choice for any individual, it seems. But here is a recent set of three arguments from that book. They all rely on incredulity in some way.

1. The fine tuning argument. Ross thinks it is highly improbable that some physical constants in our universe happened by chance. He also thinks that one materialist solution to that happenstance is to speculate about multiverses. In the multiverse solution, there are many universes (maybe a cosmic foam with little universe bubbles!) and ours just happened to be goldilocksish for the structure we observe. Of course, we can speculate all day about this. We can instead say perhaps we have been having infinite Big Bangs as a single universe expands then collapses. Or maybe there is only one configuration possible for all these constants and properties of matter. Who knows? He thinks it makes a designer or creator more probable, at least something/someone like the Deist god who sets the universal clockwork in motion, but also more like us and perhaps interactive as well. But I can’t find a rational way to estimate the probabilities of one claim versus another. Making that choice is an intellectual failure versus the alternative of simply saying that I don’t know, though I remain very curious to find out what is real. The coordinating constellation of other incredulities (see below) doesn’t really help move the needle on this. We need more facts and less speculation.
2. The existence of human claims of divine/mystical experiences. Some people have experiences that they attribute to God or the gods, or spirits, or a transcendent self, or angelic forces, or LSD, or meditation, or art, or poetry. Many people have post-death bereavement hallucinations, some of which they think are spiritual and divine. People also dream every night and have hypnogogic experiences. Lots of schizophrenic folks have auditory and some have visual hallucinations combined with wild, disordered reasoning. Once these disordered thoughts and voices led to shamanism and/or exile in some cultures. But these experiences all have a common fact shared among them: they take place, at a minimum, in the experiencer’s sensorium. They also share the fact that there is no compelling evidence of external, measurable manifestations (insert complaints about claims of NDEs or experiments in parapsychology here; that’s fine, but we need better data). Beyond that, it is incredulous to doubt that those experiences that some attribute to divinity aren’t also just neural systems at work. We just don’t know.
3. Evolution might not be capable of selecting for the depth and kinds of reasoning of us smart apes, much less our experience of consciousness. Pure speculation. We have no idea if this is true or not. It is incredulous to look at the only rational and empirically-verified system for explaining life on Earth (evolution) and declare that it is capable of a wide range of physical and neural changes over time, and where we can see the evolution of hominids and growing brains (still incomplete, of course!), and maintain that there are areas of human capacity and cognitive life that are likely not accessible to the algorithms of evolutionary change. We keep discovering new hominids and new curious facts about language and brain capabilities of other animals. We have a research program and there is no call for incredulity. Speculation is fine but we know how to tame it: peer review and experimental design.

But there is also incredulity in the scholarly Christian community as YouTube’s Paulogia points out in his analysis of a massive, multi-volume analysis of almost two millennia of speculation and scholarship on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this case the incredulity arises in the supposition that the scribes of the New Testament and the described actions of the apostles must have been immune to all of the crazy ways that people rationalize to themselves about the merits and actions of people around them. They simply could not have built up the Christian mythology in the same way that all these other cultures built their own. Meanwhile martyrs around at the world prove every day that they can translate profound, unshakable beliefs into self-sacrifice with far less justification outside of their own systems of ideation.

But now I feel like I am in high school again, gathered with smart friends on mountain sides, high, and fresh with all the hints of culture, speculations, and books, spinning up a vortex of the ghostly unvarnished arguments of youth. What is the importance of something that is unknowable, unprovable, without sufficient support, vacuously worshiped out of childhood grooming, and then wielded like an elitist, sermonizing, and moralizing weapon? Smart folks in the West can roll their eyes at the heathens unwashed by science and rationality watching shadow puppets in cosmic dances on the cave walls. But there is the deeper moral consequence of embracing underdetermined beliefs as we see in topics like the US evangelical support for Israel as part of an end-of-days fantasy, or the cruelty to members of our societies who are different, or the historical Christian support for slavery and European colonialism. All of these things arise from credulously accepting concepts that range from special religious truth to fantastical speculative spin-outs from incomplete science.

There is always pragmatism, some might say. Believing is better than the hollow existential void of unknowability in roles, stances, cultures, and moral positions. But that is as empty as Douthat’s incredulity that leads him to Pascal’s Wager. How many bets and spreads are the correct number to avoid hell or to get off this damn wheel of existence? In pragmatism we run into the challenge that believing often has to do with early training and enculturation. It is rarely something that arises from rational engagement with the facts at hand. Rational engagement always leads instead to “I don’t know” up until we know, and even then we remain on tenterhooks that we might be wrong. In that, in the risk of being wrong, we must be boldly accepting that when others might be maltreated or harmed there is only one solution and that is to reassess our beliefs until we can inch towards operational and moral certitude, grounded in reason and fact, with the great motivation to continue on this journey being just trying to get things right.