{"id":2932,"date":"2011-03-09T13:37:39","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T13:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=2932"},"modified":"2011-03-09T13:37:39","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T13:37:39","slug":"autonomic-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/autonomic-beliefs\/","title":{"rendered":"Autonomic beliefs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Norm<\/a>, I learn about an attempt to brand religious belief and religious worship immoral<\/a>, by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is apparently immoral to believe propositions for which one does not have evidence. \u00a0 My first reaction is to infer that neither author is an entrepreneur, famously people who strongly believe things (for example, that they will be successful) for which the evidence is usually absent or if not absent, then mostly contrary. \u00a0\u00a0 And neither author must be a pure mathematician or an artist, people who pursue dreams or visions while only having vague intuitions or intimations of their truth.\u00a0\u00a0 Mathematics (and hence most of modern science and technology) would come to a sudden, shuddering halt if mathematicians could only cogitate or publish on that which they could first prove.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mathematicians even have a name for results they suspect are true but cannot yet prove:\u00a0 conjectures.
\nOf course, the greatest defence against this attack on religion is that most religious believers DO indeed have evidence for their beliefs, as I have repeatedly argued before<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, this evidence is usually not independently verifiable or replicable, which makes it inappropriate for use in the social activity we call science.\u00a0\u00a0 But that fact does not alone disqualify its use as a basis for deciding personal beliefs or personal actions.\u00a0 The state of being in love is also not independently verifiable or replicable (at least not yet), but most of us do not therefore not use it as a basis for personal decision-making, and nor should we.
\nThe ignorance Aikin and Talisse demonstrate about religion is shown also in their argument about worship:\u00a0 Not all believers in or practitioners of religious ideas are engaged in the worship of divine entities.\u00a0\u00a0 One could make a very strong case that worship plays no part at all in Buddhism or in Taoism, or in the mystic strains of other religions, such as Sufism or the Kabbala.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These traditions seek to commune with the divine, not worship it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps this distinction is lost on people without personal experience of non-material realms, but most pure mathematicians would get it, since they commune with, but do not worship, mathematical entities.
\nAikin and Talisse reject religious worship as being demeaning to the dignity of an autonomous human person.\u00a0 Why so concerned with human autonomy in this aspect, while striving\u00a0 a few paragraphs earlier to prevent humans autonomously choosing what to believe? Like Richard Dawkins they not only want to think for themselves, but also want to think for everyone else too. As an autonomous human, I disdain and reject their attempt at mental colonization.
\nGiven such a weak case, one wonders why they make it with such stridency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Norm, I learn about an attempt to brand religious belief and religious worship immoral, by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is apparently immoral to believe propositions for which one does not have evidence. \u00a0 My first reaction is to infer that neither author is an entrepreneur, famously people who strongly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","p1","y2011","m03","d09","h13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}