How do you justify your beliefs? Part 2 of 2

In part 1, I divided religious people into fundamentalists and moderates, and noted that fundamentalists have a fairly consistent epistemic basis for their world view: Our Holy Book speaks complete truth, and in areas where it is silent, we must fall back on fallible human science. It is not untroubled, as there are some contradictions in every scripture I’m aware of, but as a basic principle, it is sound. Moderates, who accept such scriptures as “mostly true” or serving as sources of useful truths, but do not accept their complete inerrancy, are in a trickier situation, because in saying that the scripture is less than perfectly true, they have implicitly conceded that its claims are subject to external validation and that the scripture itself is not an authorative source.

God of the gaps

To recapitulate the end of the last post, if the Bible is subject to independent verification, none of its claims that isn’t supported by independent evidence can be taken for granted, and there’s no longer any reason to believe in any of it. Even those who like to see their god in every gap where science has yet to shed light—to claim that he interacts with the world by manipulating quantum uncertainties, for instance, as certain apologists do—have no justification for stretching this (already very flimsy) argument to a specific theistic deity. We can all see how lame an argument it really is: “According to quantum physics, we mere humans can’t tell exactly where that electron is at any given moment; therefore, it may be that God is moving it; therefore, Jesus died for your sins.” Some hand-waving modern theologians claim this; skeptics don’t take them seriously, and neither do fundamentalists, and nor should they.

The God-of-the-gaps argument is, of course, very weak to begin with. By saying that “God acts where science has yet to explore”, your god will shrink into smaller and smaller gaps as science advances—but this is really incidental. More to the point, your god becomes an unfalsifiable claim, and unfalsifiable claims are inherently worthless.

If it isn’t falsifiable, it isn’t true

Strong words: Let me back them up at least a little. It is of course common knowledge that science places great value on falsifiability: We won’t accept a hypothesis, let alone graduate it to the coveted status of scientific theory, unless you can use it to generate falsifiable predictions—in essence saying, “This hypothesis is what I believe; if I’m right, we can run an experiment/look through a telescope/check under a rock and find X; whereas if I’m wrong, we’ll find Y instead.”

But if we think about this for a moment, it’s important not just to science, but to epistemology. If something is not falsifiable—if there’s no hypothetical observation you could possibly make that would lead you to decide that a belief is false—then what you are saying is, in fact, that you can think of no difference between a universe where it is true, and a universe where it is not. What does it even mean to say that something is true, if a universe with or without it are indistinguishable? It certainly doesn’t mean “true” in the sense that I am accustomed to using the word!

Errors in the Bible

Now we get back to these nagging little nitpicking things: Did Judas hang himself, or burst asunder in a field? Does Yahweh, or does he not, plan for some people to be damned? Did he, or did he not, ever change his mind? I agreed earlier that these are incidental things that don’t alter the central message of the Bible, and I wasn’t playing games with you: I believe this is true. It does, however, cast aspersions on biblical inerrancy—in fact, they disprove it. No matter how minor the errors or contradictions may be, if the Bible has any, it’s not an inerrant document, and even if you argue that they are all minor (with which I would not agree), the basis of presumed inerrancy that made it a sound epistemic basis has collapsed. Either you can accept everything the Bible says as fact, or you cannot; since you cannot (without severe cognitive dissonance), you can’t use it as the basis of your epistemology.

If the Bible was wrong about how Judas died, if it disagrees in parts on what such-and-such person said, how can you be absolutely sure that it’s correct on some other matter of what someone said? (Even small errors can change meaning, and it doesn’t get better in translation, let alone multiple translations.) If you can’t be sure whether Yahweh ever changed his mind, or whether some people are predestined for Hell, how can you be sure that Yeshua was his son, that man was created before woman, that…well, anything? Once you admit that the Bible is at all less than perfect, you’re down to saying “Whatever the Bible says is probably true…only some things aren’t, and here are some samples”, there’s no reason to hold any individual claim as necessarily true without independent verification—and so it goes.

Question for the readers

I am genuinely curious, if any of the religious among ye have had the patience, time, and energy to read this far: What is the basis of your epistemology, and how would you falsify your belief? In other words, why do you believe as you do, and what would it take for you to change your mind?

To be fair, I will give a sample of an answer for my own beliefs. I’m tempted to specify what I would need to falsify beliefs in, say, universal gravitation, or the non-existence of fairies, but I’ll play nice and address issues that religionists are in fact likely to disagree with me upon.

For instance, to convince me that my position as an atheist is wrong, a god might show up and blaze writing in burning meteorites across the night sky: “Hey, atheists, I exist!” Or you might find, written in the human genome, encoded in, say, ASCII and English, or Unicode and ancient Hebrew, a message like “This human made by Yahweh, father of Yeshua; all rights reserved”. Or faith healers might develop the ability to actually perform miracles that can’t be explained away—restore lost limbs under laboratory conditions with skeptical magicians like James Randi or Penn and Teller present. There are lots of ways.

On the subject of evolution by natural selection, the famous fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian is a good idea. We needn’t go so far, though. The cdesign proponentsist idea of irreducible complexity is not actually a bad one. (As we should expect, they didn’t come up with it but took it from Darwin: Chapter VI of Origin, the famous absurd in the highest degree passage.) If any purportedly evolved structure could be shown to be impossible to produce by gradual evolution, evolutionary theory as we know it certainly could not be true. It’s not an inherently silly idea; it’s just that all of the instances fall flat, and all the evidence is for evolution, so it’s sufficiently unlikely that a solid instance ever be found that I’m comfortable in accepting evolution as a fact. But certainly I can conceive of a difference between a world where evolution is true and one where it is not.

How about you? What do you believe—if differently from me? What is your epistemological justification? And, most importantly, how would you know if you were wrong?