Category: Religion

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By John W. Loftus at 5/18/2020

I think Anselm’s dictum “faith seeking understanding” is to be understood in the history of theology and philosophy to be equivalent to “Faith Seeking Confirmation.” If that’s how it’s historically used then that’s what it means. Below is an updated edit from chapter 2 of my my book, Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End.

There is a common theme among St. Anselm’s work and the work of other obfuscationist theologians and philosophers that needs to be highlighted. It’s called faith seeking confirmation. We see this in Anselm with regard to his new atonement theory and his ontological argument.

Anselm therefore is exhibit “A” in defense of what atheist philosopher Stephen Law said: “Anything based on faith, no matter how ludicrous, can be made to be consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity.”1 If I could pick one sentence, one aphorism, one proverb that highlights the main reason philosophy of religion (PoR) must end, it’s Law’s. I’ll call it Law’s law of faith.–Begin Excerpt:

Faith Seeking Confirmation

Anselm’s most enduring legacy just might be his statement, credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order that I may understand”), or in its most famous form, Fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”).26 While others have expressed this idea, the point is that people first believe then seek to understand. First they believe then they seek data. First they believe then they seek to confirm their beliefs. No one in the history of the confessional church probably said anything different, or if they did, faith was surreptitiously smuggled in the back door. Few if any Christian intellectuals ever said “understanding seeks faith,” because the obvious sequitur is that if they achieved understanding they wouldn’t need faith. Seeking confirmation of one’s religious faith rather than truth reverses what reasonable people should do with one’s religious faith. In fact, it goes against science since science is based on the search for truth. So in this sense, faith should be recognized as a known cognitive bias sure to distort any honest inquiry into the truth, confirmation bias.

In 1987 a large-scale US antinarcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America launched. It featured two televised public service announcements (PSAs) and a related poster campaign. The original thirty-second ad showed a man who held up an egg and said, “This is your brain.” Then he showed a hot frying pan and said, “This is drugs.” Then he cracked the egg and put it in the pan. It immediately began to cook. He brought the pan closer to the camera and said, “This is your brain on drugs.” He ended the PSA by saying, “Any questions?” It was a very powerful commercial.

I want people to consider the drug metaphor for faith, taking our cue from Karl Marx, who described religious faith as the opiate of the people. When you think of the commercial you need to hear the actor say, “This is your brain on faith.” That’s what I think. Here then are five ways faith makes the brain stupid:

1. Faith causes the believer to denigrate or deny science.
2. Faith causes the believer to think objective evidence is not needed to believe.
3.Faith causes the believer to deny the need to think exclusively in terms of the probabilities.
4. Faith causes the believer to accept private subjective experiences over the objective evidence.
5. Faith causes the believer to think faith has an equal or better method for arriving at the truth than scientifically based reasoning.

Any questions?

Christian, before you mindlessly quote mine from the Bible or the theology based on it, consider what you think of other brains on faith, like those of Scientologists, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, pantheists, and so on. Clearly you think their brains are on the opiate of faith just as I do. Watch some videos about these other faiths. Study them. Talk to practitioners of them. Try to argue with the best representatives of them and see if you can penetrate their brains with reason and science. Can’t do it? Why? Why do you think their faith makes them impervious to reason and your faith does not make you impervious to reason?

I had a discussion with a person of faith not long ago where she said there was nothing I could ever say to change her mind. I simply replied that no scientist would ever say such a thing. I went on to say she should think like a scientist and recommended that she read Guy Harrison’s chapter in my anthology, Christianity in the Light of Science, titled, “How to Think Like a Scientist: Why Every Christian Can and Should Embrace Good Thinking.” I recommended it because thinking like a scientist is the antithesis of thinking with the drug of faith on one’s brain.

Scientifically minded people argue we should reason like a scientist. Believers in different faiths will demur, saying we cannot justify our own reasoning capabilities, since we accept the fact of evolution. I think my evolved brain can make reliable (though not perfect) judgments based on the evidence of course, and that should be good enough. But ignoring this for the moment, what if these believers are correct? Then what? It gets them nowhere as in no-where. They still cannot settle their differences because they are left with no method to do so. They will argue for faith over reason, which leaves them all back at the starting gate, with faith. They are special pleading and that’s it, thinking that if they can deny reason in favor of their particular faith then it follows their particular faith ends up being the correct one. No, if they deny reason in favor of faith the result is there’s no way to settle these disputes between people of different faiths. My claim is that religions debunk themselves and because this is clearly the case, the only alternative to know the truth about the world is through scientifically based reasoning.

The fact that I can say nothing to convince most of them of this is maddening. They are impervious to reason, almost all of them. This is what faith does to their brains.

Randal Rauser is an associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, Edmonton, Canada. He and I coauthored a debate-style book together titled “God or Godless?”27 He is a Christian believer. I cowrote the book to reach any honest believers since I consider him impervious to reason. I could say it of any Christian pseudo-intellectual to some degree, depending on how close he or she is to the truth (liberals are closer than progressive evangelicals who are closer than fundamentalists). I admit Rauser reasons well in other areas of his life unrelated to his faith. He could even teach a critical thinking class. So he’s rational, very much so. But like all believers his brain must basically shut down when it comes to faith. When it comes to faith his brain must disengage. It cannot connect the dots. It refuses to connect them. Faith stops the brain from working properly. Faith is a cognitive bias that causes believers to overestimate any confirming evidence and underestimate any disconfirming evidence. So his brain will not let reason penetrate it, given his faith bias. Some people have even described faith as a virus of the brain (or mind). It makes the brain sick. Maybe Marx said it best though. It’s an opiate, a deadening drug.

Alvin Plantinga has argued that what’s essential to have a “warranted belief” is “the proper functioning of one’s cognitive faculties in the right kind of cognitive environment.” I actually think he’s right. But faith, like an opiate, causes the brain to stop functioning properly in matters related to faith. Christian apologetics is predicated on a host of logical fallacies. Take away the logical fallacies they use in defense of their faith and they wouldn’t have any arguments left at all. They certainly don’t have good objective sufficient evidence for what they believe. A critical thinker like Rauser, who thinks more rationally than most others in every area unrelated to his faith, cannot see this, but it is the case. Now why can’t Rauser see this? Why can’t he come to the correct religious conclusions? Why can’t he think rationally about his faith? Because his faith, like an opiate, will not let him. The opiate of faith deadens those areas in his brain that are related to his faith. Rauser surely sees this with regard to other believers in different religious faiths. He will say the same things about them that I say about him. But he refuses to see the same drug deadening his own brain. Once again, faith is a cognitive bias, a virus of the mind, an opiate. It prevents people of  faith from connecting the dots.

Rauser admits that like everyone else he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree. Well then, why won’t he apply the antidote, which is to require sufficient objective evidence for what he believes? That’s the only way to overcome the cognitive bias of faith, the only way to kill that virus in his mind, the only way to nullify the opiate of faith, and the only way to stop being swayed by his own motivated reasoning. Yet he questions the need for sufficient objective evidence apart from a private subjective ineffable feeling. Who in their right mind would do this after admitting he depends on “motivated reasoning” to some degree? No reasonable person, that’s who.

Subjective private ineffable religious experiences offer believers the most psychologically certain basis for believing in a particular divine being or religion. When believers have a religious experience it’s really hard, if not psychologically impossible, to argue them away from their faith. How is it possible then for believers who claim to have had such experiences to look at those experiences as an outsider might? We can point out the mind often deceives us and provide many examples of this phenomenon (brainwashing, wish-fulfillment, cognitive dissonance). But believers will maintain their particular religious experience is real because it was experienced, despite the odds their brain is deceiving them. We can point out that countless others of different faiths all claim to have the same type of religious experiences, whether they are Mormon, Muslim, Catholic, or Jew, but believers will still say their experiences are true ones (or veridical), despite the odds that what others believe as a result of their experiences makes it seem obvious they could be wrong too (and vice versa).

Sometimes in the face of such an experiential argument I simply say to the believer, “If I had that same experience I might believe too. But I haven’t. So why not? Why doesn’t your God give me that same religious experience?” At this point the believer must blame me and every living person on the planet for not being open to such a sect-specific religious experience. Depending on the religious sect in question that might include most every person, 7.4 billion of us and counting. But even this realization doesn’t affect believers who claim to have had such religious experiences. Calvinists among them will simply say, “God doesn’t want various people to have a saving religious experience.” It never dawns on any of these believers what this means about the God they worship, that only a mean-spirited barbaric God would send people to an eternal punishment because that same God did not allow them a certain type of religious experience.

Believers will always argue in such a fashion in order to stay as believers. No matter what we say they always seem to have an answer. What they never produce is any cold hard objective evidence, convincing evidence, for their faith claims. Ever. They are not only impervious to reason. They are also impervious to the evidence. They even see evidence where it doesn’t exist because they take the lack of evidence as evidence for their faith. When it comes to prayer they count the hits and discount the misses.

There is only so much a person can take when dealing with people who have lost touch with reality. Must we always maintain a patient attitude when we already know their arguments? Must we always respond in a dispassionate manner to people who are persuaded against reason to believe something delusional? We know this about them based on everything we know (i.e., our background knowledge). They are pretending to know that which they don’t know when they pretend to know with some degree of certainty their faith is true. If it’s faith, how then can something be known with any degree of probability at all, much less certainty? Faith by definition always concerns itself with that which is unsure. Something unsure involves lower probabilities. So faith is always about that which has lower probabilities to it. So again, how can something based on faith be known with any degree of certainty? It can’t, and only deluded minds think otherwise, minds that are impervious to reason and evidence. We can only hope they can function in life. It can be quite surprising they can.

Concluding Thoughts

Anselm of Canterbury’s key theological contributions in philosophy of religion highlight what reasonable people see as the need for philosophy of religion to end. He holds a preeminent place among the best philosophical theologians the Church ever produced. And yet, as we’ve seen, even among the best of the best there’s nothing here but rhetoric without substance based on his faith and the social climate of his day. His best contributions didn’t solve anything. Almost no one accepts his atonement theory today. His idiosyncratic perfect-being conception was based on nothing more than special pleading on behalf of his parochial Western concept of god. His ontological argument does not work either. Further, we’ve found that when Anselm’s perfect being is compared to the biblical god Yahweh and his supposed son, it doesn’t make any sense nor can it be reconciled. So the only reason to study Anselm seems to be one of historical curiosity. Anselm’s key contributions did not advance anything since we are no closer at getting to objective knowledge about anything than we would be if he never wrote a thing. When it comes to the history of philosophy he made no contributions that furthered understanding, the very thing he sought to do.

It does no good to say we’ve learned from Anselm what is false and cannot be defended, as if by learning what isn’t the case he advanced our understanding. He sidetracked our understanding for a millennium. He was doing obfuscationist puzzle-solving theology unrelated to the honest desire to understand. If we proportioned our intellectual assent to the probabilities based on sufficient evidence (per Hume), we would know all we need to know to know that Anselm and many other unevidenced beliefs are false and cannot be defended.

Karl Barth, considered one of the greatest theologians of the last century, who rejected natural theology with a big fat “Nein,” argued Anselm’s ontological argument was an example of his faith seeking understanding, rather than an argument proving God exists. Anselm did not seek to “prove” the truth of the Christian faith, Barth argued, but to understand it.28 Anselm’s ontological argument in chapter 2 of the Proslogion comes after asking God for help to understand his faith in chapter 1. There he prays, “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, — that unless I believed, I should not understand.” Then just before developing the argument in chapter 2, Anselm prays, “Lord, do you, who do give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you know it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe.” So while there is disagreement about what he was doing, Anselm at least tacitly acknowledges his argument comes from faith rather than leading to faith. And that’s exactly what we find. The ontological argument depends on his Christian faith, which subsequently seeks to confirm his faith, what he already believes about his parochial god. There’s a recognized informal fallacy here I’ve mentioned a time or two. It’s called special pleading. It’s also the mother of all cognitive biases, something to avoid if we want to know the truth.

Philosophers of religion who have dealt with Anselm’s argument and developed their own versions of it, such as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga, should take note. They don’t know their own theology. Or, perhaps more correctly and importantly, they fail to realize they’re doing the same thing Anselm did. He sought after arguments that confirmed his faith rather that seeking out sufficient objective evidence for his God.

What we’re led to conclude is that the problem of philosophy of religion stems from faith. If faith is trust then there is no reason to trust faith. Anything based on faith has lower probabilities to it by definition. Christian pseudo-philosophers do no more than build intellectual castles in the sky without any solid grounding to them. There doesn’t seem to be any good principled reason for not getting fed up with the pretend game of faith with its ever-receding theology.

–End Excerpt

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John W. Loftus | January 31, 2023 | Editor’s Choice, Kiosk Article

After spending nearly two decades trying to change the minds of Christian believers—my focus in what follows—I still don’t fully know how to do it. Regardless, I’ll share ten helpful tips for readers who, like me, want to bang their heads against a wall. I think that it’s worth doing despite the low odds of success, for any success helps rid the world of the harms of religion. Besides, one of the greatest challenges is to change minds, and I like challenges. Plus, I’ve learned a great deal by attempting this important underappreciated task.

If you choose to follow in my footsteps, begin where you are. You may not feel qualified. But you can question. If you do that, you’ll do well. Nonbelievers are first and foremost questioners, doubters, skeptics. We are nonbelievers because we are more willing than most to question everything. You can’t go wrong in doing that. There are plenty of beliefs that are not just wrong, but palpably wrong. Question them. As you get better at asking questions, learn to use the Socratic method. Use leading questions to help believers begin to doubt their certainties.[1]

I understand the cognitive bias known as the backfire effect. It shows that challenging believers with facts makes most of them dig in deeper, causing them to double down in defense of their faith. If their faith survives, their faith is strengthened. While ridicule and satire have an effect on groups of people[2], keeping personal encounters friendly will be more effective with people that you talk to. We never know if the seed sown might eventually blossom into a changed mind. Most believers cannot be reasoned out of their faith because they were never reasoned into it, but this is still the best that we can do. With enough encounters it might have a cumulative effect, especially if the believer experiences a crisis in his/her life.[3]

Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees. So there’s much to inform them about. As you proceed, inform them about what you know, whatever that is. You will learn as you go. Study as you go, too. The more that you know, the better that you’ll do.

(1) I would start in some cases by informing believers of the role cultural indoctrination plays in the adoption of Christianity, and why it’s an unreliable guide for adopting the correct religious faith, if there is one. Given the accidents of when and where we were born, and how we were raised, our religious faith was unthinkingly adopted just as surely as was our nationality and preferred cuisine. So at least once in their lives, believers should seriously question what they believe. Consider it a rite of passage to adulthood if nothing else.

(2) I would inform believers how hard it is to break free from one’s cultural indoctrination, like quitting smoking but much harder. Research professor of psychology Jonas Kaplan did a study of the human brain and concluded: “The brain can be thought of as a very sophisticated self-defense machine.” He added: “If there is a belief that the brain considers part of who we are, it turns on its self-defense mode to protect that belief.” Accordingly, “the brain reacts to belief challenges in the same way that it reacts to perceived physical threats.”[4] To honestly seek the truth we must determine to disarm the brain. Analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is to recognize that we have a brain problem. It won’t allow us to entertain facts that disrupt our comfort zone, our tribalistic beliefs. It will do everything it can to reject them.

(3) I would inform believers about the cognitive biases that act like viruses on our brains. They adversely affect the ability of our brains to honestly evaluate our religious cultural indoctrination. Just knowing this is significant. Knowledge serves as a vaccine. It helps disarm the brain.

Confirmation bias is the mother of all cognitive biases. We are in constant search of confirmation; hardly ever do we seek disconfirmation. We reject and dismiss out of hand what does not comport to existing beliefs, and easily embrace that which does. There are other relevant biases, like anchoring bias, in-group bias, belief blind spot bias, belief bias effect, illusory truth effect, agent detection bias, objectivity illusion bias, the ostrich effect, hindsight bias, and so on.

These biases lead us to reason fallaciously. Believers are susceptible to fallacies like tu quoque (“You too!”—an appeal to hypocrisy/whataboutism), possibiliter ergo probabiliter (“possibly, therefore probably”), straw man/person, argument from ignorance, appeal to popularity (ad populum), equivocation, false analogy, post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”), cherry picking, hasty generalization, circular reasoning, red herring, non sequitur, and especially special pleading.

(4) I would inform believers that the only way to disarm the brain (yes, basically the only way) is to adopt the perspective of a nonbeliever, an outsider to our indoctrinated religious beliefs. More than anything else, this can help the brain avoid cognitive biases in the honest search for truth. It will help force the believer’s brain to follow the objective evidence wherever it leads. Treat your own religion the way that you treat all other religions, with no double standards and no special pleadings. Assume that your own religion has the burden of proof. See if your faith survives.[5]

(5) At this point inform believers about their holy book and the theologies built on it. Most believers don’t read their Scriptures, or understand the doctrines of their sect-specific faiths. So encourage Christians to read the Bible. Have them read Judges 19-21 to see what the god of the Old Testament instructed the Hebrews to do. Then ask why anyone should trust anything that these bloodthirsty barbarians wrote down. Also ask them why that god commanded genocide and child sacrifice.[6]

The Bible debunks itself.[7] It contains forgeries and borrowed pagan myths, and is inconsistent within itself. It tells a plethora of ancient superstitious tales that don’t make any sense at all. It has a god that evolved from a polytheistic one who lives in the sky above the Earth, who does both good and bad, who makes room for both angels and demons, and who thinks that a god/human blood sacrifice can magically ransom us from the grip of the Devil (the first widely accepted atonement theory).

(6) Inform believers about the Church. The history of the Church, and of the people claiming to have the alleged Holy Spirit inside of them, reveals a continuous spectacle of atrocities such that its history is a damning indictment upon the god that they profess to believe in.[8]

(7) Inform believers about science and how it works. It’s answering the very mysteries that produce religious belief in the first place. The fewer mysteries that we have in the world, then the less we feel the need to believe.[9] The crowning discovery of science is evolution. On this issue, as with everything that I’m saying, it helps to provoke believers to do further research. Ask them what would make Richard Dawkins say:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact…. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips … continue the list as long as desired…. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact…. No reputable scientist disputes it.[10]

Be sure to point out the implications of evolution: that there was no Adam & Eve, no original sin, and no need for a savior.

(8) Inform believers about the need for objective evidence in support of the miracle claims in the Bible.[11] There is no objective evidence for any of them, just a few ancient testimonies that we cannot verify.[12]

The way to honestly evaluate miracle claims is to focus on clearly obvious concrete test cases like a virgin-birthed deity.[13] It’s not to construct hypothetical miracle scenarios, to wrestle with questions over what we consider to be objective evidence, or to specify the exact demarcation point between ordinary claims and extraordinary ones.

For instance, believers will claim that nonbelievers have no objective criteria for what counts as extraordinary evidence. To cut to the chase, I respond that I know what does not count as extraordinary evidence. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count, nor does circumstantial evidence or anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events, which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings or experiences or inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence; nor do tales told by someone who tells others that his writings are inspired; nor does putative divine communication through dreams or visions. Once these facts are acknowledged, call on believers to do the math. Just subtract and see what’s left.

(9) Inform believers about statistics. Statistician David Hand shows us that “extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.” He is not a believer in supernatural miracles, though. “No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.”[14] There is a growing list of books making this same point. Extremely rare events are not miracles. Period. We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.

(10) Inform believers about the problem of horrendous suffering. This evidence is as close to a refutation of an omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent God as is possible.[15] The way to honestly evaluate the compatibility of God and horrific suffering is not to specify the exact demarcation point when the suffering in our world is too much to coexist with a perfect deity. Nor is it to fuss much about whether God and horrendous suffering are logically impossible. Those questions are interesting, but in order to honestly evaluate this difficulty, the best arguments are evidential ones about clearly obvious concrete test cases like the Holocaust, or the massive numbers of children who suffer from malnutrition and die every year, or the kill or be killed law of predation in the animal world.

Notes

[1] See Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013). Anthony Magnabosco does this on a regular basis.

[2] See John W. Loftus, “On Justifying the Use of Ridicule and Mockery” (January 17, 2013). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2013/01/on-justifying-use-of-ridicule-and.html&gt;.

[3] This is one of five factors that can change minds. See Loftus, “Five Factors that Cause Christians to Lose Their Faith” (December 9, 2010). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2010/12/five-factors-that-cause-christians-to.html&gt;.

[4] See Loftus, “The Brain Treats Questions about Beliefs like Physical Threats. Can We Learn to Disarm It?” (January 14, 2018). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2018/01/the-brain-treats-questions-about.html&gt;.

[5] See Loftus (ed.), The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion is True (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

[6] See Loftus, “The Hebrew Bible’s Disturbing Attitude Towards Human Sacrifice” (April 16, 2015). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2015/04/the-hebrew-bibles-disturbing-attitude.html&gt;.

[7] See Loftus, “The Bible Debunks Itself” (March 5, 2008). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2008/03/bible-debunks-itself-part-1.html&gt;.

[8] This is amply documented in Loftus (ed.), Christianity is not Great: How Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).

[9] See Loftus (ed.), Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016).

[10] Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York, NY: Free Press, 2009), pp. 8–9.

[11] See Loftus (ed.), The Case against Miracles (United States: Hypatia Press, 2019).

[12] See Loftus, “What’s Wrong with Using Bayes’ Theorem on Miracles?” (January 25, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/whats-wrong-with-bayes-theorem/&gt;.

[13] See Loftus, “The Gateway to Doubting the Gospel Narratives is the Virgin Birth Myth” (March 5, 2008). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/06/the-gateway-to-doubting-gospel.html&gt;.

[14] David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), pp. 197-199.

[15] See Loftus (ed.), God and Horrendous Suffering (Denver, CO: Global Center for Religious Research, 2021).