On today's episode of Let's Ruin Something You Thought Was Fun and Interesting, we examine the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. Doubtless you've seen these four-letter acronyms flying around, and perhaps you've even taken a version of the test to find out all about yourself. Is it really, useful, though? For anything? Well, yes and no. Mostly no.
The MBTI was developed by a mother-daughter team, Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, over several decades in the early twentieth century. It was originally the brainchild of Katherine Briggs, who was inspired to build on and refine the "psychological types" theory of famous psychologist Carl Jung. The pair's tireless efforts culminated in the introduction of a formal version of the MBTI test in 1962.
The method behind the four-letter type indicators is largely an extension of Jung's theory of introversion vs. extroversion and how that distinction manifests itself in personality preferences. It splits an individual's personality into four dichotomies: Introvert-Extrovert, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving. The theory supposes that everyone displays a dominant preference in each dichotomy, indicated by one's corresponding four-letter score: ENTJ, ISFP, ESTP, et cetera.
The MBTI has enjoyed uninterrupted success and popularity for decades, mostly because it's a fun test to take, and people love being able to label themselves as something. (Buzzfeed is subsisting almost entirely on this idea.) We humans insist on forcing discontinuity onto our categorically continuous reality, so the idea that every individual can be classified as one of 16 personality types is fantastically appealing. Modern versions of the test even have a heroic-sounding label for each type, like "The Showman" (ESFP) and "The Confidant" (INFJ). (Click here to see which superhero you are!) One wonders how popular the test would be if it labeled people by their stereotypical negative character traits instead, like "The Insufferable Elitist" (INTJ) and "The Oblivious Materialist" (ESTP). Actually, has anybody done that? Let's do that.
Not so excited to add "ENTJ" to your dating profile anymore, are you?
As fun as the MBTI is, there are serious and numerous problems with it. The two women who developed it, for all their enthusiasm and tireless effort, were not psychologists. Neither of them had any formal training in psychology or in any science whatsoever, so the development of the test was patently unscientific. Even though the test has been administered for decades, many psychologists continually question the validity of the MBTI, and for good reasons.
First of all, the test relies on the honest input of the test-taker. Anyone not answering the questions honestly for whatever reason will obtain an "inaccurate" result. Secondly, there's no way to argue with anyone's result, because the test is unfalsifiable. It's impossible to demonstrate that someone isn't an ENFP, for example. Anyone who takes the test is free to agree or disagree with the result, and nobody could possibly argue.
Another reason that experts openly question the validity of the test is its alarmingly high rate of test-retest unreliability. People who take the test and then take it again several weeks later have a significant chance of getting a different score. This is because the test relies heavily on arbitrarily-defined dichotomies, pushing people to one side of the spectrum or another, when most of us are somewhere in the middle. Someone who displays an even mix of introversion and extroversion in different situations is likely to receive different results on retests. For example, two individuals who have nearly identical personalities could receive polar opposite MBTI scores if each one skews just slightly to the ETSJ (totally extroverted) or INFP (totally introverted) side of the line, indicating falsely that these people couldn't be more different.
This is the problem with a test predicated on dichotomies in general: there is no such thing as an introvert or an extrovert. Statistical models of all four indicators consistently demonstrate that the general population fits a bell curve between the two extremes, not a bi-modal (the opposite of a bell curve) distribution. Only a small percentage of people are mainly extroverted or mainly introverted; the majority of people fall in between somewhere, and the MBTI is blind to this reality. Nobody is an INTJ, or an ENFP, or an ISTP. These people do not exist. Every individual is a different mix of EI, SN, TF, JP, and nearly nobody skews heavily to one side of each of those.
There is also no significant data showing that these MBTI scores correlate with vocational performance. The official exam even openly states that the test only measures preferences, not aptitude, so even though one personality type might prefer a certain vocation, there is no guarantee of success or competence in practice. (This is probably why the official test also explicitly states that the MBTI should not be used to screen job applicants.) There is also no significant correlation between MBTI and industry: every vocational field has a more-or-less random sampling of MBTI types. Most actors are not ESTPs, for example, nor are most CEOs ENTJs.
So, what does your MBTI say about you? Well, certainly nothing that you didn't already know about yourself. The test really only needs to be four questions long:
Are you more extroverted or introverted? (I/E)
Do you primarily gather information via your senses or your intuition? (S/N)
Do you make decisions more by thinking or feeling? (T/F)
Which is more important to you, #2 above or #3? (P/J)
If you find some or all of these questions difficult to answer definitively, congratulations! You're a normal person who can't be easily classified by the MBTI. If you have a clear preference in each, then you can easily identify your "type," and most likely so can anybody who's known you for longer than 10 minutes.
The only thing that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator result shows definitively is... that you've taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. Any conclusions drawn beyond that should be taken with a football stadium full of salt.
For all the virtues of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, one unfortunate drawback is that we're all now painfully aware of how bafflingly ignorant and stupid the opinions of most of our friends are. We've all got that one friend who can't seem to shut up about how GMOs are evil, or President Obama is a Muslim/Socialist/Kenyan, or global warming is a myth, or 9/11 was organized and carried out by the Bush Administration, or vaccinations cause more harm than good, or whatever the hot-button issues du jour happen to be.
Now more than ever, everyone could use a healthy dose of skepticism in order to filter out the bullshit that bombards us incessantly. First, a few words about skepticism - what it is, why it's useful, and how it can improve critical thinking skills.
As many words that end in ism, skepticism comes from Greek. The verbσκέπτομαι means to look at or consider carefully, and inspired an ancient philosophical school of thinkers who called themselves "skeptics." In the modern sense, skepticism simply means questioning assertions and withholding judgment until evidence is considered. When should you be skeptical? Well, certainly in some situations more than others. If your friend Bob calls you and says "apples are 50 cents off per pound at the grocery store this week," you probably needn't seek out confirmation of this from other sources. If, on the other hand, Bob calls and says "there's a magical tree giving away apples in front of the grocery store," some skepticism is reasonably warranted. The amount of skepticism shown towards a claim should be inversely proportional to how likely the claim is to be true, based on your knowledge and experience. The less believable a claim seems to be, the more you should be skeptical about it. So, how can you form well-reasoned, well-informed opinions that don't suck? By following these rules: 1.Be a sieve, not a bucket. Or, as the saying goes, be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out. Be open to new ideas, but not universally accepting of them. Keep your bullshit detector switched on at all times. 2. Be willing to be wrong. Good skeptics should be open to new information, even if it contradicts long-held beliefs. I cannot stress this enough: if you're unwilling to consider that you're wrong about something, you have no hope of discovering the truth. "When an honest man is mistaken, he either ceases to be mistaken, or he ceases to be honest." 3. Be aware of common pitfalls of reasoning, and know your logical fallacies so you can spot them. Our brains aren't actually wired perfectly for critical thinking; we have an overactive tendency to find patterns, and we are frequent victims of our own confirmation bias.
4. Don't fight above your weight class. Admit when you simply don't know enough about an issue to have a strong opinion about it. Not everyone can be an expert on everything, and if you don't know, just say so.
5. Question the sources. Not all information is created equal. Not all scientific studies are equally valid. Just because something is published or reported doesn't mean that it's accurate. Some scientific journals have better reputations than others. It can be extremely difficult to wade through scientific studies and decide what is credible and what is questionable, but it's an exercise well worth the effort.
With these things in mind, let's take a look at some typical areas of discussion in which people frequently have poorly-reasoned, irrational, or ignorant opinions.
Issues Involving Complicated Science
See point number 4 above. There are some things in this world which are simply best left to the experts to debate, so if you're not an expert, be aware of your limitations in understanding. A perfect example of this is climate change. Unless you're a climate scientist, I'm not interested in your opinion on the issue, because you have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion. If you disagree with the majority of climate scientists, and you're not a climate scientist, chances are good that you have a biased or uninformed opinion on the matter. Chances are not good that you have somehow understood something that thousands of experts have not. Highly Polarizing Issues
Some issues tend to polarize opinions heavily, with few people remaining neutral. In situations like these, especially if the issue is a complicated one, polarized opinions are generally based on one-sided information and confirmation bias. A perfect example of such an issue is the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as "Obamacare." Opinions on this piece of legislation tend to be polarized along political party lines, and several polls have shown that the general public (the same people who are eager to tell you how much they love or hate the law) has absolutely no idea what it says or does. (See The Onion for a sadly accurate portrayal) This is because the act is 906 pages long, and so the public is at the mercy of news outlets to paraphrase and interpret it. As with most complicated issues, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.
Issues About Food And Medicine
Issues that have a possible direct effect on our personal health are treacherous because they evoke an emotional response. Our hearts are for circulating blood, not for thinking, and an issue that stirs up emotions might also obfuscate our critical thinking faculties. A perfect example of this is GMO food and the lightning rod Monsanto Corporation. People are susceptible to one-sided or blatantly false information about GM technology or about companies like Monsanto because the stakes are so high - our well-being could be negatively affected. In fact, this has become such an oft-cited bad argument that the fallacy has taken the name argumentum ad Monsantum. Basically the failure in logic here is associating an evil corporation with an evil product. It does not follow that GMO food is bad simply because you think Monsanto is bad. It may still turn out to be true that GMO food is bad, but bias-free evidence must be put forward to prove it. In cases like this, the only rational course of action is to follow the science and the findings of regulatory organizations. See point number 5 above.
The anti-vaccination movement is similarly misled by emotion, especially because the issue frequently gravitates towards the health of children. On this issue, see point 5 above and the section below on opposing scientific consensus.
Conspiracy Theories
There's a reason that you never hear of a conspiracy theory actually being validated and becoming the new mainstream explanation for an event. Conspiracy theories are the product of a comprehensive failure of reasoning, a worst-case-scenario of irresponsible cognition. The most salient example of this sort of nonsense at present is the 9/11 Truth movement, proponents of which claim that the terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the government, and that basically every finding of the official investigation is wrong. To give an extremely abbreviated list of what's wrong with these sorts of arguments: people who think this way are obviously tainted by strong biases, are unwilling to evaluate evidence fairly, assume the conclusion of their argument and insert it as a premise, and live in a highly-protected echo chamber in which they only communicate with other people who agree with them. Conspiracy theories aren't actually theories at all; a theory is a set of testable propositions which can be used to explain certain phenomena. Conspiracy theories don't explain anything - they simply point out what they deem to be unanswered questions in the accepted theory and then wildly posit alternatives based on no evidence. This is a perfect example of what happens when your bullshit filter fails, and your brain falls out of your excessively-open mind.
Contrary to Consensus
While it's fun to be a contrarian, there are risks when standing on the wrong side of the majority. It depends who that majority is, however; an appeal to majority opinion to support an argument is a logical fallacy (ad populum), while an appeal to scientific consensus can be a strong justification for one's position.It's certainly true that scientific consensus can be wrong, but the comforting thing about science is that it is adaptable to new information and open to change.
The wonderful thing about truth is that, by necessity, it breeds consensus over time. If something is demonstrably true, eventually there will be no choice but to accept it. Thus popular misconceptions about the natural world have been eradicated over time with the discovery of new information. We now realize that the Earth isn't flat, and it isn't the center of our solar system, let alone the universe. It would be ridiculous to hold a contradictory position on these matters today, because the truth is undeniable.
Still, there are other such issues of overwhelming scientific consensus today about which some people obstinately hold contradictory views. The term manufactroversy has been coined to describe these beliefs, as they pretend that a controversy exists when in fact there is none. Darwinian evolution by natural selection, for example, is overwhelmingly supported by evidence and accepted by scientists as fact (as made hilariously manifest by Project Steve), as is man-made climate change, and the efficacy, safety, and necessity of vaccinations to prevent communicable disease. There is no controversy whatsoever in the scientific community about any of these matters, and one disagrees with these assertions only at one's own peril. To refer again to point number 4 above - if you really feel like you can justify your opinion when you disagree with overwhelming scientific consensus, you should run to the nearest scientific journal and publish your innovative competing theory. If truth is on your side, and you can demonstrate it empirically, then science will have no choice but to agree with you. Science loves to be proven wrong, and that's why it can be trusted above any other method of finding the truth.
Conclusion
It is incredibly difficult to approach all questions with an unbiased and open mind. It's even more difficult sometimes to separate the good information from the bad in order to discover the truth about anything. To adopt a skeptical approach to evaluating claims means not to make a judgment before careful analysis of the best available evidence. It's too easy to agree with our friends on complicated questions or look to our favorite news outlet to tell us how to feel about controversial issues. Thinking for yourself is hard work, but being a skeptic is the best way to be sure that your opinions don't suck.
I was a faithful Christian for the first 20 or so years of my life. I mean a fully indoctrinated, Bible-thumping, Jesus-loving, nightly-praying, church-going believer of The Word. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, went to church regularly (even after I was old enough to stay home if I wanted), and even played bass in the praise band during my church's hip contemporary service. I know what it's like to be a believer, I know how most Christians acquire the beliefs that they hold, and, most importantly, I know what it's like to live in a world where those beliefs are constantly being called into question, or as Christians might say, tested.
I got the idea for this blog entry from watching a YouTube video made by a British fellow who goes by TheraminTrees. This video is actually the second in a series about his transition from faith-based beliefs to atheism, and his explanation in this second part is simply a perfect illustration of the effects of having beliefs that are inconsistent with our life experiences.
The phenomenon I'd like to talk about is one that is inherent in any faith-based belief system, and one that every Christian (and Muslim, and Jew) experiences and has to find creative ways to deal with. That phenomenon is something I'll call cognitive dissonance.
That sounds like a fancy phrase, but it simply comes down to this: we all have a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world in which we live, many of which we acquire directly from our parents during our formative years as children. We all also live in a world which is constantly bombarding us with sensory data and experiences. We try to interpret all of these experiences through the lens of our beliefs. Sometimes the two are easily compatible, and there is congruence - our beliefs and our actual experiences coincide harmoniously. Sometimes our beliefs and experiences, however, seem to be at odds with each other, and this produces a problem, which I'm calling cognitive dissonance. Picture it this way:
As you can see, when our beliefs about the world and experiences of the world coincide, there is congruence. When they don't, there is dissonance. Congruence makes us feel comfortable and confident in our beliefs; dissonance makes us feel uncomfortable and uneasy about them.
I'll recount an example when I can clearly recall experiencing this sort of cognitive dissonance. When I was in high school, I took an elective course in Philosophy. One day we were talking about the origins of life on Earth. The various theories were laid out, most specifically creationism/intelligent design and evolution. (The theory of evolution does not actually seek to explain the origin of the first life form, a phenomenon known as abiogenesis, but let's just pretend like we're dealing with apples to apples here.) As a Christian, my belief was that God had something to do with the creation of life on Earth. In the theory of evolution, there is no mention of God whatsoever; the theory works without any such supposition. Looking at the evidence for evolution, however, produced a problem for me: the explanatory power of the theory was overwhelming and undeniable. I simply could not reject the theory outright, even though it did not align with my beliefs. This troubled me greatly, until I heard about a third option, namely special creation. This hybrid theory states that evolution occurred, but God intervened at several key points in order to ensure its success. I immediately latched onto this theory and, for a period of time, accepted this as my belief for the explanation of life on Earth.
In order to correct the dissonance between my belief and my experience, I needed to distort the theory. There was no compelling evidential reason for me to insert God. I was beginning with the assumption that God simply had to be in there somewhere, and so I distorted my beliefs until I could square them with my experiences. This is one way that believers can reconcile dissonance and try to make their beliefs and experiences congruent. The problem is that, just as in my example, this process invariably produces garbled nonsense. In the end, my conclusion was an incoherent bastardization of two different theories, but crucially, it alleviated my cognitive dissonance about the matter at the time.
A more salient example that many Christians are facing right now is the issue of homosexuality. Among younger people especially, this seems to be extremely important - I know people who have decided to attend different churches based solely on this one issue. In this case, the cognitive dissonance arises between the Christian belief that homosexuality is a sin and the increasing acceptance of homosexuality by our culture. Many people who have close friends or family members who are gay find it difficult to condemn these people to hell for eternity as vile sinners.
There is a serious lack of congruence here between belief and experience, and there are many ways in which believers try to force a reconciliation. All attempts to do this require either distortion of belief or denial of experience. The believer has to convince himself that the scriptures must be interpreted in a different way; the translations are wrong, the verses apocryphal, the cultures incomparable, et cetera. The believer desperately wants to find a way to harmonize his sensibilities with his preconceived beliefs, and it is particularly difficult on this issue.
Christianity has some very serious dissonance built into it from the onset, in the form of obvious contradictions. Two examples that come to mind easily are the Garden of Eden story and the entire concept of prayer. Any amount of serious critical thought about these two things will reveal some serious cognitive dissonance, as I will attempt to illustrate.
The Garden of Eden story in Genesis is ridiculous for many reasons, but even if we dismiss it as entirely metaphorical and not descriptive of any actual event, it still has bigger problems. (Mind you, there's no textual justification for dismissing it as a metaphor - the Bible never suggests that the story is anything but literal truth.) We all know the story: God creates Adam and Eve and two magical trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. God tells Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge. A wily snake slithers up and tells Eve that God is lying, so she eats from the forbidden tree and gives some to Adam too, so they've both made a mess of it. Yadda yadda yadda, original sin.
The contradiction comes in God's reaction to this incident. By his very nature, God is said to be omniscient. He knows all that ever was, is, and will be. If that is the case, then God should never be surprised or react with any emotion to anything that ever happens, because he already knows exactly what will happen. This makes it absurd that God would ever be angry for anything that anyone ever does or doesn't do. If God is omniscient, then he knew that Adam and Eve would eat from the forbidden tree and be cursed forever. This story is supposed to explain original sin, but it actually implicates God as the originator of sin. God knew what would happen; he set Adam up to fail. The God we read about in the Bible does not react as if he is omniscient. The believer must try to square this massive inconsistency of experience with his beliefs in order to produce congruence.
Prayer is another head-scratcher of a contradiction. This is perhaps the most resonant source of cognitive dissonance among believers, because everyone has experienced a so-called "unanswered prayer." The process by which believers reconcile this troubling experience with their belief is by invoking "God's will." If anything happens, it is because God willed it to happen, and if we cannot understand the reasons, this is simply because we cannot understand God. Invoking "God's will" is a tacit admission that God does not listen to or answer prayers. He's going to do whatever he wants to do anyway, whether you pray about it or not. And remember, since he's omniscient, he already knows what you want. There's nothing you can tell him that he doesn't already know, including the fact that you don't want your grandmother to die from cancer. Praying is one of the most futile, contradictory, arrogant, misguided acts imaginable, and believers all but admit this themselves. One can make giant leaps towards congruence of belief and experience by simply disavowing the idea of a God who answers prayers; by our very experiences we know this to be simply false. Prolonging this clash between reality and unfounded belief only invites unnecessary suffering on oneself.
The problem with faith-based belief is that it demands that we reject our experiences. Instead, people are raised to believe completely arbitrary and unsupported claims like God is perfectly good. We have to dismiss our own experiences, which tell us that any God who offers eternal punishment for a transgression is unjust and cannot be good. No crime, however severe, could ever possibly justify an eternal punishment. One can only reconcile those conflicting statements by distrusting and rejecting one's own intuition. This is profoundly unhealthy behavior.
In the video above, TheraminTrees talks about atheism as a congruence. When you don't begin with a set of beliefs which you did not arrive at through evaluation of your experiences, congruence occurs naturally and much more frequently. There is no struggle to contort your experiences into a rigid predetermined framework. Atheism is not a rejection of God, it is an admission that there is no evidence for God. This is the only logical framework that promotes harmony between belief and experience. Believing things on no evidence, and rejecting evidence which does not fit with beliefs, is a recipe for constant struggle to reconcile belief with the real world, and for the believer, it must be exhausting.
If you believe things on faith, ask yourself why you have these beliefs. You will discover that you don't actually have faith in Christ. You've never met Christ. You have faith in other people who have never met Christ but have told you about Christ. You have faith in The Bible, which was written by people, none of whom knew Christ. This is no way to form beliefs about the world, as it leads to dissonance. Base your beliefs on your experiences, and you'll be stunned how quickly everything falls into harmony and makes sense. I've found that it's much easier to sleep at night as an atheist than as a Christian.
As someone who is fairly open about being a strongly not-religious person, it often happens that I get into discussions (they start out that way, at least) with people who disagree with my worldview (or lack thereof). As any non-believer can tell you, there aren't very many criticisms of disbelief; there are actually only a few, and they inevitably come up in any discussion about belief and non-belief, and I'd like to point out why they're silly. The first is that atheism is a religion. The second, that "militant" or "extreme" atheism is just as bad as religious fundamentalism. The third, that blind faith in science is the same as blind faith in God. Lastly, that believing things based on evidence rather than faith is "arrogant." I've chosen these particular sentiments because they've all been lobbed at me by people I know, many of them more than once, and because they're all nonsense. 1. Atheism is a Religion This is a very common retort, and perhaps the most easily dismissed. One need only look at a dictionary definition of the word religion to end the argument, I should think. Dictionary.com says:
a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects.
Atheism in no way fits either of these definitions. That's because there is no dogma in atheism; there's nothing you must believe in order to be an atheist. It's not even a set of beliefs - it's simply the rejection of other belief systems. It's saying to the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, et cetera that you simply don't think their beliefs are true. [If you can't understand the difference between the statements "I don't believe that x is true" and "I believe that x is not true," please stop reading and come back when you can.] If you ask an atheist what they think about these things, namely the "cause, nature, and purpose of the universe," you'll get many different answers, with a common one likely being "I don't know."
As somebody once cleverly noted, if atheism is a religion, then "off" is a TV channel. Actually, atheists can't even agree on what word best describes themselves. Various suggestions come into and go out of fashion: atheist, non-theist, non-religious, free-thinker, humanist, bright, agnostic - the point is that it's really just "none of the above" on the religion list. The only thing that atheists are united by is simply what the word means: a (not) + theism (belief in god.) The reasons for not believing, and the explanations or answers to the questions to which religion generally provides answers, will be different for everyone. Atheism is not a religion, it's the absence of religion. 2. Militant and Extreme Atheism I like this one a lot, because it is self-evidently nonsensical after about 30 seconds of contemplation. Hijacking these adjectives which are generally reserved for religious fundamentalists and applying them to atheism is an exercise in utter futility. When someone is labeled a religious "extremist," for example, it's generally because this person has either killed other people because of his beliefs, or he at least judges it perfectly acceptable to do so. Religious extremists tend to be quite dangerous and frightening, as these are the most devout and hard-core followers of the literal word of their holy text.
What is a militant atheist? An extreme atheist? How often do you read a news report about someone who has violently murdered someone else in the name of atheism? There are degrees of the seriousness of one's religious convictions; there are no degrees of atheism. A casual atheist says "I don't believe in god." An extreme atheist says "I don't believe in god." Does the extreme one say it louder? Does he write it on a sign maybe? Write blog posts about it?
Generally I've found that anyone who is vocal about his atheism or openly critical of other peoples' beliefs gets labeled as "militant" or "fundamentalist," simply because people really don't like to be told that their entire worldview is based on lies. These are complete misuses of those negatively-charged words, and the comparison is laughable at best and offensive at worst. Nobody in the world is rioting in the streets and slaughtering innocent people because of atheism. While thousands of people in the Muslim world chant "death to the atheist bloggers," people at free-thinking rallies hold up signs like "What do we want? Evidence-based change! When do we want it? After peer-review!" People who are vocal about their atheism and critical of others' absurd beliefs are not dangerous, so stop throwing around these awful words as if they're apt. 3. Faith in Science and Faith in God Religious people try as hard as they can to assert (and they all think they're clever, as if they're the first to do it) that atheists simply replace God with Science and worship it in the same way, so at the end of the day it's really the same thing. This is a woefully irresponsible comparison. First of all, "science" is (if I may use my good friend the dictionary again) systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation. Most important in that definition is what's missing, not what's included. There are certain fundamental questions, such as the meaning of life, or what happens after you die, or what sort of moral code we should all adopt, which science does not try to answer. Science is fine with not having an answer to some questions; it's perfectly fine to say "I don't know," or "I don't care" about these sorts of questions. The scientific method, for example, is an empirically testable and productive process of finding the truth about the world in which we live. It allows for independent verification, actively tries to eliminate bias, and is perfectly happy with getting results that prove hypotheses wrong. There is no need to use the word "faith" when talking about scientific observation. We needn't simply have faith that gravity exists, or that the world is a sphere, or that the sun will come up tomorrow. We can go find out all of that for ourselves and prove it to be true, and understand why it's true. It's easy to trust the scientific method because it produces verifiable results. Using it cures disease and develops new technologies and explains phenomena in the world around us. Faith is a particularly nasty attribute of religion, and it amounts to nothing more than claiming to believe something to be true when you have absolutely no evidence that it is. Christians, for example, have faith that they will go to heaven when they die. They have absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever, but assert it as if it's fact, even though they couldn't possibly prove it. This is a nice way to transition to the last complaint about atheism, namely... 4. Atheism (or Science) is Arrogant This sentiment is the most irritating to me personally, because it's so inherently contradictory that it's baffling that religious people can possibly think this way. Again, I think the dictionary will help us sort this out quite succinctly: making claims or pretensions to superior importance or rights; a sense of superiority, self-importance, or entitlement. Let's just take some commonly-held beliefs among Christians, since this is the belief system with which I'm the most familiar. Christians believe that God created the universe for the sole purpose of the existence of human beings, and that he loves us and watches/cares about what we do. We now know that our planet is only one of several in our solar system, that our solar system is one of many in our galaxy, and our galaxy is one of many in the universe. With each increasingly powerful telescope we create, we reveal just how completely insignificant and unremarkable our existence is, and yet this completely self-centered belief that it's all for us persists among believers. This sort of thinking is both bafflingly ignorant and tenaciously arrogant. Many people of faith also deny the truth of evolution simply on the grounds that humans are somehow above having evolved from primates, so it's just not possible. The scientific worldview, on the other hand, is one of extreme humility: human existence in the grand scheme of the universe is staggeringly insignificant, and our time on the Earth is but a blink in the massive extent of geological time. Science admits when it's wrong, even after it thought it was right for a long time. I've collected a few catchy little epigrams about religion to make the point: "Science has questions which may never be answered. Religion has answers which may never be questioned." "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings." "Morality is doing what's right regardless of what you're told. Religion is doing what you're told regardless of what's right." The Point The only reason atheists even have to call themselves something is because irrational people invented gods; there wouldn't be any need for such a word otherwise. If you're a believer in some sort of god and have faith that a bunch of extremely unlikely things are true, fine. But don't try to bring us non-believers down by insinuating that we're just like religious people in any way. We define ourselves by not being like you at all.
A little while ago a friend of mine took it upon himself to post on my Facebook wall a rather scathing response to my general tendency to post content lampooning or criticizing religious beliefs. After a bit of (refreshingly civil and productive) back-and-forth, we came to the conclusion that the most important difference between him and me (and likely between many others and me) is simply this: he believes that peoples' personal beliefs deserve respect, whereas I obviously do not believe this to be true. I feel this is an important topic for discussion, because not only are we not obligated to respect peoples' personal beliefs, the fact is that we actually do not. First I'd like to draw the important distinction between respecting beliefs and respecting individuals. I do believe that all human beings are worthy of some measure of respect, by virtue of our own common human experience and recognition of basic human dignity. It is also true that every person is entitled to believe whatever he wants and express those beliefs publicly. It does not follow, however, that the rest of us are obligated to be respectful of the beliefs of others, and it should become obvious why this is so. It is important to realize that the taboo on criticizing religious beliefs is actually a product of our ever-softening, liberal, don't-hurt-anyone's-feelings, politically-correct attitude toward everything and everyone. The guilty people in this case are moderates - people who want to play both sides and make sure that nothing is ever said which might make people uncomfortable. Religious fundamentalists in this country freely and openly criticize other religions, or even different denominations or flavors of their own religion. There is a portion of the population which is perfectly comfortable saying things like "Islam is evil" and "all Muslims are terrorists," for example. Even if those beliefs are bigoted and ignorant, at least those people aren't being held hostage by their own hypersensitivity. There are a few problems with religious moderates, and unfortunately they are fairly large problems with serious consequences. The first problem is that it is intellectually dishonest to assert that we can and must respect the beliefs of others. In every other realm of subject matter, "respecting beliefs" does not even enter into the discourse. Take, for example, a conversation between you and an interlocutor who believes very strongly that the Holocaust never actually occurred and is simply propaganda. You would promptly and rightly dismiss this person's beliefs as ignorant at best and utterly offensive at worst, and you are under no obligation whatsoever to respect this belief, no matter how strongly this person holds it. Now consider how alarmed you would be if you then discovered that this person was your child's history teacher, or if at a presidential debate a candidate openly expressed this belief.
Sam Harris gives a more absurd example of this line of argumentation. Imagine your neighbor has a deeply-held belief that there is a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his yard. This is manifest lunacy; yet imagine also if your neighbor said the sorts of things that religious people say to justify it; "well, this belief that there is a refrigerator-sized diamond buried in my back yard gives my life meaning," or "I wouldn't want to live in a world in which there wasn't a refrigerator-sized diamond buried in my back yard." Obviously not all beliefs deserve to be "respected," and we regularly dismiss the beliefs of others in this way. Consider for a moment how absurd it is to have to tell someone to respect your beliefs. Again, respect never enters into the evaluation of ideas. When you express your ideas or beliefs to someone, he will evaluate your statements and come to a conclusion about their validity based on reason. If your assertions are consistent with reality and seem plausible, he will unconsciously and helplessly accept them as true. If they are at odds with reality and seem implausible, he will reject them as improbable or false. We do this subconsciously every time we are confronted with new information, and going through this process helps us to be confident in what we know to be true. If you present your beliefs to someone who evaluates and then rejects them because they do not square with what seems to be true about the world, it is unreasonable then to command this person nevertheless to consider your beliefs as equally valid or "respectable" simply by virtue of the fact that you believe them. As demonstrated above, we are not in the habit of doing this in any other subject of discourse, and for perfectly good and necessary reasons. Besides being intellectually dishonest, religious moderation is also theologically vacuous. Herein lies the most pernicious problem with the complete unwillingness to criticize religious beliefs. When we grant that certain books have divine authorship and are above criticism, we become completely and helplessly subject to the content of those books. When we assert that people are entitled to their beliefs and we mustn't interfere or be critical of them, we become powerless to address the very real problems that religious views are imposing on the world. Moderates desperately want to believe that religious extremists are just a fractional group of fringe lunatics who completely misinterpret the texts of their holy books. This is a delusion. The truth is that anyone with a Bible or Koran in hand can readily find justification for doing acts of unspeakable horror because it is the will of God. The men who flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center believed that they were doing good and would be duly rewarded for their martyrdom, and this is not a warped, insupportable reading of their holy book. The fact that not every single Muslim murders infidels does not negate the fact that one can easily find passages in the Koran supporting and validating this behavior. Although thankfully not as barbarically murderous, beliefs held by Christians justified by the Bible are also perpetuating unnecessary human suffering. Stem cell research has been repeatedly thwarted or hindered by lawmakers based solely on the unsubstantiated belief that a collection of a few cells in a petri dish has a soul and cannot be destroyed, even if it means medical advances for thousands of actual human beings. Catholic missionaries in AIDS-ravaged Africa continue to preach the sinfulness of condom use to people whose lives would be saved by safe sex education. As soon as someone is questioned as to why these practices are acceptable, a simple retort of "it is my faith" completely halts all conversation or progress. We have collectively agreed that it is a virtue to say "I believe X because I believe it on faith." The problem with this is that these ideas have real consequences, and we can see in various religions throughout the world that people of faith can find completely logical, reasonable justifications for doing literally anything based on what they believe on faith. Instead of being critical, politically-correct moderates want to ignore the problem, pointing out that most people of faith do not behave this way. It's true, thankfully they don't. But we become completely incapable of having a discussion about the people who do, and that severely limits our ability to do anything about it. Either the beliefs of the pious, devout Christian and the suicide bomber are both open to criticism, or neither of them is. Hopefully the problem with the latter is clear.
