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March 13, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:21
679 Hostility to Rationality

Why oh why must the most rational always give way?

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
Good stuff. I'm going to take a little bit of a walk.
We shall be spared the outdoor sounds.
I'm just strolling around a sub-level of the parking lot because, you know, I'm an outdoorsy Grizzly Adams kind of fellow.
But I wanted to shake some cobwebs off my legs and brain from my work, so I wanted to come down and we'll just walk back and forth a little bit here.
Get yourself a nice artistic echo and I'm going to continue on with...
This is not exactly part two of the subjectivism podcast, but it's not that far off, so you can let me know what you think of this.
So this is the same lady who was posting earlier about faith and subjectivism and so on.
And when somebody pointed out that faith is sort of destructive and irrational and dangerous and so on, and I've pointed out before that religious institutions and the resulting...
The heinous and bloody conflicts that they engender have resulted in the deaths of about a billion people throughout history, the murders of about a billion people throughout history.
Certainly, we can understand a Jew being sensitive about Nazism because of six million dead.
Certainly, I think an atheist has the right to be nervous about religion and skeptical of the positive effects of religion when we look at a billion dead.
It's quite a considerable number more than the Holocaust, what is that, 14,000% or something like that, more than the Holocaust.
And so this is what atheists and people who don't believe in nonsense like gods and goblins and so on have faced and do face in the world.
And so when people say that it's a negative and destructive mental state, faith, then...
She says, well, that's your experience with it.
Others do not have that same experience.
Why project your experience onto someone else who is comfortable and content with life?
And just about everyone in the world has a little faith in something.
You plan for your future, right?
You have faith that you will wake up tomorrow.
You have no proof you will.
You just assume that it will happen.
We exercise faith each and every day.
And if someone wants to believe in a God of some sort, who cares?
If it works for them, so be it.
Just because you don't pray and don't get anything out of prayer doesn't mean someone else has that same experience.
Or must you force people to be non-believers, to be like you, to be accepted by you?
And then later she says, Why are you folks around here so afraid of having a little faith in something?
Faith has nothing to do with religion or the presence of a supreme being or some spiritual force.
Faith... It's merely the belief in the unknown.
The willingness to accept that we do not know everything we can in this world, and we certainly know nothing beyond this moment.
Sure, science can, say, explain the relationship between the Sun, our Moon, and our planet, and all the other stars and planets, and tiny little objects out there in space.
It can point to the historic evolution of various critters who walk this planet It can explain why little currents of charged particles behave the way they do.
It can explain why bacteria grows in certain environments.
Science can offer probable reason to assume something will continue, but it does not guarantee anything continues beyond right now.
There are infinite possibilities out there, and nothing is certain.
To believe that anything beyond this moment will happen takes a little faith in something, be it your science, someone's god, or whatever.
It is merely an acceptance of the unknown.
To discount the notion that people live happy lives while living under faith of something simply denies the possibility that they might be onto something that is worth exploring.
To be so closed to that option seems like a proposition fueled by arrogance and conceit.
Perhaps if I had all the answers too, things would be different, but I'm willing to say I don't.
And I'm also willing To go out on the limb and say, none of us do.
Anytime you believe the evidence presented, you're expressing a faith in that evidence.
You have nothing on which to base your conclusions, other than facts and figures someone provides you, unless you go out and do all of the work yourself.
In order to trust someone, or something, or have some collection of data, you have to, at some point, exert a little faith in that person presenting that information.
Like most things in this world, Faith in and of itself is not a bad thing.
When abused and misunderstood and exploited, it becomes a bad thing.
But damn, around here, you'd act like faith was a four-letter word.
Well, certain four-letter words do spring to mind, but we shall get into those at the moment.
I mean, this is an absolutely wonderful and concise post.
And the only reason I'm not trying to pick on this woman, but...
This is the kind of stuff that you come across with depressing regularity when you talk about reason and evidence and science and logic and so on that you run smack dab into these people.
I've noticed it's slightly more common among women than among men and there are some biological reasons for that which we can get into another time but it is rather dispiriting when you look at this kind of stuff at the amount of illogic that is placed In this sort of context.
And as I talked about in subjectivism, one of the sort of main issues is that people who have evidence for their belief are obviously more logical than people who assert belief without evidence.
That much I'm sure we can understand and accept.
People who have evidence for their belief are more logical than those who have no evidence for their opinions, right?
Who just assert stuff. The world is shaped like a rectangle and full of cheese.
I could just say that and to what degree would you require faith to believe in that?
Well, obviously you need quite a lot of faith because there's no evidence for it whatsoever.
So when you say as a rational person that you have faith in something or you believe in something because of a certain reason, evidence, logic, at least logical consistency, hopefully followed by empirical evidence and so on, Then you have a particular approach to the truth,
that if you just blindly assert things because you prefer to or because you like it or because you like the feeling or whatever, if you just blindly assert things, then you have another approach to the truth, which is really no approach to the truth.
You just blindly state whatever you feel like and then you claim that that is truth.
Now, you'll notice that the difference here, and this is not a difference, this is a difference that this woman is really desperately trying to avoid pointing out, but the difference here is pretty substantial.
It's pretty substantial.
The atheist, for want of a better phrase, says, there's no evidence for the existence of God.
God is a logically self-contradictory concept, therefore God does not exist.
I'm sort of embarrassed to have this many lengthy podcasts on it, but that's really all it comes down to.
And so we are asserting that there is a standard of truth, and God just doesn't meet it.
Gods, goblins, devils, unicorns, and so on.
Unicorns are far more believable, at least they're not logically contradictory, unless they can fly without wings.
That would be a Pegasus, I think.
But the difference here is pretty considerable, in that the people who believe in God believe that God does exist.
People who believe in God believe that God does exist.
Positively and absolutely in an external manner.
God doesn't exist as a myth or as an idea or as a perception or as a belief.
God is an objectively real and valid entity.
Gee, I thought it would be much quieter down here, but there's quite a bit of wind.
Because I guess they don't want people asphyxiating on their way to their cars.
So... Her problem is not with certainty.
Her problem is not with certainty because, as we talked about in subjectivism, people don't say, I believe in God even though God does not exist.
People who say they believe in God are certain.
And so it's not certainty that this type of person or this type of approach...
It's not certainty that's the issue.
So the fact that we say there is no God...
The problem that she has is not with certainty, because people who believe in God say there is a God, and she's not criticizing them.
In fact, she's saying their belief in the absolute existence and objective existence of a supernatural deity works for them, and that's positive, and that's good, and who are you to criticize, and this and that and the other.
But of course, if you flip around the equation, and you look at those who believe that a God does exist, they believe it, In a real, tangible, objective, absolute, metaphysical, epistemological manner.
They believe that God does exist, really does exist.
It's not a kind of maybe, sort of.
They really do believe that God exists.
So here we have two people who claim opposing truths.
We have two people who claim opposing truths.
The atheist claim is that God does not exist for the reasons outlined in about a million podcasts.
The theists, the religious people, they believe in an absolute sense that God does exist.
And what's wonderful about this level of approach, and it's kind of hard to see, it kind of sneaks up on you, right, unless you really keep your eyes propped open.
But when you get a communication of this kind, it's important to understand that the issue that is being criticized is not certainty.
Is not certainty.
Because to have a methodology for determining truth and falsehood is far less absolutist than simply stating that something is true or false.
We are not blindly asserting that God does not exist.
There's a methodology called the scientific method and logical consistency, reason.
There's a methodology by which we can determine the truth or falsehood of the proposition that God exists.
So, this is not something we're willing.
I mean, it could be kind of cool if there was a God.
It certainly would be kind of interesting.
So, I'm just a slave to the methodology.
The truth to be commanded must be obeyed.
The truth to be commanded must be obeyed.
So, the atheists are far less certain in a sort of willed manner.
Than the theists, because we, and sometimes regretfully come to the conclusion that there is no God.
I mean, for many atheists, there was a painful transition.
Julia Sweeney talks about it quite a bit in the sort of one-woman monologue, letting go of God.
So, atheists are far less certain, and far less willful, and far less arrogant than the theists, right?
The theists who just say that there is a God, and by God there is one.
And if you disagree, that's too bad, there just is.
So what is the real issue that is going on here?
What's being criticized? It's not certainty.
Atheists are far less certain of things than theists.
So what is it that is occurring?
When you have a standard of belief, there's a kind of humility that's involved in it, right?
And there's a willingness to subject yourself, despite sometimes your desires, to a methodology of truth that is outside your own consciousness.
So... When this woman says that faith has nothing to do with religion or the presence of a supreme being or some spiritual force, faith is merely the belief in the unknown, the willingness to accept that we do not know everything we can in this world, and we certainly know nothing beyond this moment.
So we certainly know nothing beyond this moment.
So... What is the real issue that she has?
She can't have an issue with positive claims of truth.
She can't have an issue with positive claims of truth.
Because then she'd be spending far more time on Christian or Muslim or Jewish sites trying to tell them that there was no such thing as God and they shouldn't believe in it.
Because she's telling us that we should not believe in reason and the scientific method and objectivity and empirical evidence and so on.
And since there are far more religious people in the world than there are atheists, if you have a problem with positive beliefs, with absolute beliefs, you would never spend your time on a...
You certainly wouldn't spend your time on an atheist board mostly populated by, you know, a couple hundred market anarchists, right?
Relative to the billions upon billions of people who believe positively and absolutely that there is a God, you would not be spending your time on...
In this kind of forum, right?
You would go to, I don't know, Christianboard.org or whatever it is, and you would go and talk to the Christians.
If certainty was your problem, if people's belief in certainty was your issue, that's where you would go.
Now, the definition says that faith has nothing to do with religion.
Faith is merely the belief in the unknown.
The belief in the unknown.
So the way that she spins the logic out, and I can appreciate that it is logical, is that we have faith that we are going to wake up tomorrow morning.
We have no proof that we will, because it hasn't occurred yet, and we could die, the world could end, could get hit by an asteroid, and so on.
But frankly, it's not faith to say that it's likely, and this is what any rational person would say, is that it's highly likely that I'm going to get up tomorrow morning.
It's highly likely. I mean, I've been doing it for 40 years and change, and I'm healthy, and I have not heard any sounds of approaching asteroids or anything like that, so it's highly likely.
But people, of course, fully recognize that there is the possibility that they won't wake up tomorrow.
That's rational, too. We all know that life is precarious.
I could have some blood clot moving through my system that's going to hit my Medulla and crash me like a downed plane.
And that's why I have life insurance, right?
So we hedge our bets, right?
We try to enjoy the present.
We balance it with the need to remain healthy for the future and so on.
So belief in the unknown?
Yeah, we're just going with the odds here, right?
We're just going with the odds.
And the odds are not created in terms of waking up tomorrow.
The odds aren't created after nothing.
Just sort of manufactured or imagined.
I'm pretty sure Winston Churchill isn't going to wake up tomorrow because he died like 30 or 40 years ago.
So I'm pretty sure old Winnie is not going to rise up tomorrow and stretch himself and wonder what happened to the Cold War.
So I'm fairly sure that that's not going to be occurring.
But as for me, well, I have been waking up for the past 40 years.
I'm sure I'm not going to be waking up In a hundred years from now, but fairly sure that tomorrow, but of course there's a chance that I won't.
And that's why I say my prayers every night.
No. That's why I have a life insurance and so on, right?
So, I don't think it's a belief in the unknown.
I think it's just a matter of weighing your odds based on probability, based on prior experience and logic, right?
I mean, so this is not the end of the world.
If I planned on jumping off a bridge tonight, I would be fairly sure that I wouldn't wake up tomorrow, at least not Not in my own bed, but more in the arms of Jesus.
So, feeling of belief in the unknown, I think that there's quite a bit of difference between looking at statistical trends such as I've been alive for 40 years, I plan to be alive for another 50 years, and I'm in good health, and there's no particular reason to think that I might die tonight, although there's certainly always that possibility.
There's quite a bit of difference between looking at those statistical probabilities and then just blindly sort of willingly Asserting the existence of supernatural deities.
Well, there's no evidence that the idea is entirely self-contradictory.
So, belief in the unknown.
Well, frankly, whether I'm going to...
The odds of me waking up tomorrow alive is not unknown.
It can't be pinpointed with perfect precision because Lord knows what's going to happen.
But it's not unknown.
There are trends which you can sort of figure out.
So there's quite a bit of difference between learning empirically from past experience and projecting that into the future, and then just making up the existence of supernatural beings.
An acceptance, so it's a belief in the unknown, the willingness to accept that we do not know everything that we can in this world.
And this, of course, is the appeal to ignorance.
And this really is a very core thing that I have been fighting low these many months.
Tooth and nail, and will go down in my life fighting this tooth and nail.
Which is to say, because we can't know everything, we can't know anything.
I mean, it's just ridiculous, right?
Because we can't eat all of the food that is produced in the world, we can't have a single meal.
I mean, it's just complete lunacy.
And it's not something you would ever logically come up with.
This is more of a virus than it is an argument, but you would never make that sort of, you know, I can't get married because I can't marry everyone.
I can't read any books because I can't read all books.
This just makes no sense.
Of course, we can't know everything in the world, but does that mean that what we do know is completely invalid?
Because I don't own all of the money in the world, does that mean that the money that I do have is non-existent and I'm actually completely broke?
Well, of course not. I mean, that's just ridiculous, right?
So, this idea that when you are an atheist and you say that God does not exist, that You are claiming to know everything in the universe is ridiculous, right?
Is ridiculous. And you'll notice, of course, again, the problem that she has, though, is not with certainty.
Not with certainty.
Because atheists make far more conservative claims than theists do.
So it's not certainty.
If certainty was the issue, she'd be off talking to the religious people, not nagging at the atheists.
To discount the notion that people live happy lives, she says, while living under faith, Of something.
Simply denies the possibility that they might be onto something that is worth exploring.
To be so close to that option seems like a proposition fueled by arrogance and conceit, right?
So arrogance and conceit is the issue, right?
So because an atheist will make a positive statement about the non-existence of God.
And, oh Lord, if I had a nickel for every time I was accused of this or other atheists were accused of this, I actually would end up owning all the money in the world.
But then this statement is that if you make any kind of positive claim, then it's arrogant and conceited.
When, of course, the true reality of being a philosopher is that it's exquisitely and sometimes unbearably humbling because you keep coming up with all these ideas and then you keep putting them to logical tests and you keep testing them vis-a-vis reality and empiricism and history and you're a complete slave to the results.
A complete slave to the results.
Who is more arrogant, right?
The guy who pours sugar water...
Into a vial and then sells it as a cancer cure, or the person who spends 20 years trying to find a cure for cancer and is defeated by every empirical test that comes back.
But who's more conceited? Who's more arrogant?
Well, if you are a philosopher, if you're a thinker, a scientist, you submit yourself to empiricism and logic.
Arrogance and conceit is absolutely the last thing that you could be accused of.
I mean, the idea that I'm putting out my opinions in the world and people should listen to me because they're my opinions.
Madness. Madness.
Nobody cares about my opinions.
Nobody cares about my opinions.
The degree to which I can show proof and evidence, or at least a reasonable theory.
Consistent approach to these kinds of issues that we talk about here.
To the degree that I can achieve that, then sure, people are interested in what it is that I have to say, but not because I'm saying it, but because I have a methodology that is sort of valid.
So, it's sort of hard for me to accept a criticism that I am, or atheists are arrogant, when it is the most humble thing in the world to be an atheist, right?
I mean, If you believe that God created you and is obsessed with your every move and talks to you and gives you all this wisdom and exists because you want him to, well, that's ridiculously arrogant and conceited, right?
That something is true just because you want it to be true.
I mean, that's magical thinking and arrogance and conceit.
So obviously arrogance and conceit is not really the issue that is occurring for this woman because then again, if arrogance and conceit were the issue, she'd be off talking to the Christians and not to us.
So she says, I'm willing to say that I don't have all the answers, and none of us have all the answers.
Well, of course none of us have all the answers, but does that mean that nobody has any answers?
Well, she says that she doesn't have all the answers, therefore nobody has any answers.
But of course she's claiming to have an answer, which is that atheists are conceited, that they're intolerant, that they're closed-minded, That they're emotionally afraid of people having a little faith in something, that they claim to have all this magical knowledge about the future, that they claim to know everything.
These are all statements of fact that she's putting out.
So she can't really say that having certainty about anything is wrong, because she seems to be quite certain about an enormous number of silly things.
Any time you believe the evidence presented, you're expressing a faith in that evidence.
Yes, absolutely.
I've never been to, as I've talked about before, I've never been to Greenland, but...
I do believe that Greenland exists because I've seen pictures, because it's not logically consistent, because it's on every map that I've ever seen, and so on, except Middle-earth.
So, yeah, absolutely, there's a tiny leap of faith that, again, is sort of the logical result of processing reality.
In other words, it could be that everybody is conspiring to make me believe that Greenland exists, but why?
Why would they do that?
What would the motive be? It wouldn't really make any sense.
And whereas, of course, when people try to convince me that God exists, I know that that's for particular psychological and, frankly, quite economic reasons that I want to give money to priests and so on.
So, you know, I guess it's possible in a very bizarre kind of way that Greenland could be a big conspiracy that everybody wants to just convince me that it exists.
But... I don't really think that there's any evidence for that.
Does that mean that I'm absolutely, positively, and willing, and totally, completely to assert that Greenland exists?
You know, kind of I am.
I mean, kind of I am.
It could be a massive conspiracy, but there's no reason to believe it.
There's no motive for it to be engendered.
And of course, the scope and degree of the conspiracy would be so large that it would have been proven by now, right?
I mean, if Greenland didn't really exist, it would sort of be out there now.
It's a pretty big one. It's not like 9-11, right?
It's a pretty big one. To sort of miss.
Like most things in the world, she says, faith in and of itself is not a bad thing.
When abused and misunderstood and exploited, it becomes a bad thing.
And, of course, based on what?
Compared to what? What does abuse and misunderstanding and exploitation mean?
What about, would you call, say, parents' Would that be an example of abuse and misunderstanding and exploitation of children?
Yeah, I would say that would be the case.
If an atheist says to a child that fantastical things do not exist, that there is no such thing as the As Santa Claus and there's no such thing as elves and there's no such thing as all this kind of nonsense.
Is that abusive and exploitative?
No, of course not. Telling the child the truth is not an abuse and it's not exploitive.
And it certainly does not engender misunderstanding in the way that imagining there's some sky ghost up there obsessed with your every move.
That engenders misunderstanding.
So to sort of sum it up, we'll have a look at And what's going on here?
And the reason I'm picking on this is just such a very common argument that you hear, and again, particularly from women, and it's well worth sort of trying to understand what's going on here.
Well, if you sort of review what it is, I won't do it here, it's not that long a podcast.
If you sort of review what we've been talking about, she's not against certainty, she's not against judgment, right?
She's not against arrogance, she's not against conceit.
What is she against? Well, it's not that hard to figure out.
If you look at all of the people in the world who believe all these crazy things, and then you have a small group of people who are really focused on being rational and trying to understand the world from first causes and first principles, what is it that we can figure out that this type of argument is actually hostile towards?
Well, it's not that complicated.
This woman is hostile towards rationality.
She's hostile towards the truth.
She's hostile towards humility because she herself is enormously vain.
She herself is enormously vain and arrogant and insecure, of course, which is where vanity and arrogance come from, and doesn't know how to think and is threatened by thinking, is threatened by rationality.
And therefore, when she looks across the whole wide world at all of the types of thinking that are causing problems in the human race, she really zeroes in and focuses her efforts on Trying to undermine the certainty and the confidence of a small group of people who are struggling to use the scientific method, rationality, and empiricism to carve a sort of patch of light in the benighted darkness of the world's thoughts and the world's fantasies.
And so, like a shark in the water, right, she's smelt the blood from many miles away and she's coming in and she's expending an enormous amount of effort and time and energy focusing On the people who are trying to do the most rational thinking.
The people who won't accept mere assertions and history as the basis of the beliefs, right?
So of all the people in the world, who is she focusing on opposing?
Who is she focusing on opposing?
All of the irrational and crazy people that are out there.
Who is drawing her?
Who does she feel compelled to continually undermine and correct?
Is it the Muslims?
No. Is it the Christians? No.
Is it the statists? Is it the communists?
Is it the fascists?
Is it the racists? Is it the patriots?
Is it the military? Is it the policemen?
Is it all of the brutes who roam the world carving up human flesh?
No. That's not where she's spending her efforts.
Those people don't merit her attention.
Those murderous, brutal errors don't merit her attention.
Who is it who merits her attention?
Who is it who merits her attention?
Who is it who is the most important to correct?
Well, the philosophers, the rational.
Who is it who provokes the anxiety and, frankly, the hostility?
Don't miss this for a second.
There is an extraordinary amount of hostility in this, an extraordinary amount of condescension, an extraordinary amount of belittling.
Oh, you're just frightened of people who have faith and you're arrogant and you claim to know everything.
I mean, there's an extraordinary amount of bile and hatred in this kind of communication.
And is the hatred directed at people who are out killing people or abusing children or forcing women to wear burqas or teaching their children that they're evil?
No. That's not why she's spending her time.
So, who does she hate?
What does she hate? Well, she hates thought.
She hates reality. She hates reasoning.
That's what causes her to rear up and claw at people.
Reasoned certainties, philosophical understanding, humble rationality, a submittal, or a submission to empiricism, to the scientific method.
All the humility that comes along with that, that is what causes her to attack and to undermine.
And of course, there's no reasoning in anything she says, right?
It's just all about emotional manipulation and trying to make people feel uncertain or trying to make people feel that...
It's just emotional arguments, right?
Oh, you're vain, you're arrogant and things like that, right?
And I think it's great.
I think it's absolutely great that she's posting and I hope that she continues to post because I think that people need to see this more clearly.
I mean, I would love it if she would just accept that there's a rational methodology for determining truth from falsehood, and that she should just accept that in all humility, as we all do, who walk this path, but that's not going to happen.
But it's more for the other people who debate with her, right, that it's important to recognize what's really going on here, that there is a pretty compelling and propelled hostility towards rationality, truth, and reason here.
That the only unforgivable sin in this woman's universe is to think for yourself with regards to reason.
All the other sins can be forgiven.
All the other sins can be forgiven.
The billion deaths of religious people, the millions, hundreds of millions of deaths of the state.
All of that can be forgiven.
The abuse of children by telling them that they're evil.
All of that can be forgiven.
All of that is put into a big pile of, well, you know, it's sweet and faithful and maybe it goes a little far sometimes and that's not good, but for heaven's sakes, right?
All of the sins of the planet are forgivable.
The one sin, of course, that is not forgivable, that must be forever opposed by these sorts of people, is the sin of thinking for yourself and reasoning from first principles.
That must never be allowed.
That must be opposed with all the force of corrupt personality structures.
I just sort of wanted to point that out and hopefully make things a little bit clearer to the people who do get lost in these kinds of debates.
With these kinds of people and feel like they're, you know, maybe falling down a well or there's a lot of emotional undertow, a lot of emotional criticism and a lot of hatred and hostility in this kind of stuff.
So I hope that this has been somewhat helpful and I hope that it becomes a little bit more clear and more evident to you what's going on in the future.
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