The Dead End of Epistemological Skepticism

When I first read Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," I enjoyed the book immensely. It is chock full of interesting information about the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, though it focuses mainly on the dogma of the Catholic Church. My basic problem with the book, however, was a quality that I had noted before in Richard Dawkins, and many other modern so-called defenders of reason: epistemological skepticism. 

The skeptic begins his criticism of religion with the premise that we must start with a tabula rasa plane of ideas, and that the religionist must demonstrate through logic that there is reason to believe in God. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. After all, what is science if not the process of postulating hypotheses and setting out to prove or disprove them. On this view, the religionist should be required to offer evidence in support of his claim before being taken seriously, right? So what's the problem?

The problem is in the starting point--the Skeptic takes his skepticism as a given, but is unable to support why one should start with skepticism, nor why reason is the method that we should use to discover truth. Further still, underlying phenomenon that the skeptic takes issue with in the religionist is not fundamentally the religionists's mystic fantasies--it is the religionist's sense of certainty. The religionist's sense of certainty does not come from any kind of rational process--it is based on Faith; or in real-world terms, their own conviction that an "I Wish" is better than an "It Is." The modern Skeptic's view of certainty is that "absolute certainty" is impossible to achieve about anything, but as we acquire evidence, we can move asymptotically closer and closer to "the real truth." This opens the Skeptic to the argument that their confidence in reason is itself an article of faith; thus reason fails, and faith is really all we have to go on.

As Henry Petroski puts it in his book, "To Engineer is Human":

 A scientific hypothesis is tested by comparing its conclusions with the reality of the world as it is. Yet, no matter how many examples of agreement one may collect, they do not prove the truth of the hypothesis, for it may be argued that one has not tested it in the single case where the theory may fail to agree with reality. On the other hand, just one instance of disagreement between the hypothesis and reality is sufficient to make the hypothesis incontrovertibly false. That honeybees always build their hives with hexagonal cells is a hypothesis that has accumulated so much verification that it is hardly called a hypthesis anymore. It is assumed to be a fact. But let some apiarist discover his bees making octagonal cells, and not only would the hypothesis that bees always use the hexagon be forever smashed, but there would also be quite a bit of excitement among the world of honeybee experts. That the sun rises each morning may also be considered a hypothesis, and our experience that indeed this happens day in and day out serves to confirm--but not prove--the hypothesis. Yet all it would take would be a single "morning" without a sunrise to make the contention that the sun rises every morning categorically false. While it may be behond our comprehension that this could ever be the case, it nevertheless remains true that our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is basically a matter of faith rather than of rigorously established fact.

At this point, the debate ceases to be about reason vs. faith, and becomes one about what kind of world you'd rather live in--one in which nothing is knowable, morality is unjustifiable, and man in merely a mite of dust in the cosmos, or one in which the Truth is revealed, morality is the province of a Just and Loving God, and man is the centerpiece of the universal table.

Since reason has been discredited as just another form of faith, and since the only choice is which "I Wish" you're going to treat as an "It Is," which one do you find more attractive?

As Em and I were listening to Hitchens' book in the car, I pointed out how a competent religionist could completely discredit Hitchens' approach by attacking him through his Skepticism. That's exactly what happened.

On November 1, 2007, I found a Fark headline linking to an oped by Dinesh D'Souza attacking Hitchens on exactly this point. From "What Atheists Can't Refute"

 

This atheist attack is based on the Fallacy of the Enlightenment. It was pointed out by the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn't been breached since. His defense relies on the only framework that today's atheist proselytizers say is valid: reason.

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know: reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover.

In his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. Kant showed that human knowledge is constrained not merely by the unlimited magnitude of reality but also by a limited sensory apparatus of perception.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient?

Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or "take" on it. Kant's startling claim is that we have no basis for assuming that a material perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.

...

Ours is a world of appearances only, in which we see things in a limited and distorted way - "through a glass, darkly," as the apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians. The spiritual reality constitutes the only permanent reality there is. Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, it cannot on its own fully comprehend that domain.

Thus, when Mr. Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.

[emphasis added]

You should really read the whole thing. You need to be able to defeat this argument in order to properly defend reason.

On November 5th, 2007 I found out from the Principles in Practice blog that there had actually been a debate between Hitchens and D'Souza. You can watch the debate on www.youtube.com -- the first part starts here. You should really watch the whole thing in its entirety. D'Souza completely dominates the debate. Every time Hitchens attempts to argue reason vs. faith, D'Souza argues that reason is faith, and redirects the debate toward which side you'd rather have in control. When D'Souza pointed out that more deaths have occurred under atheist regimes (Soviet Union, China) than Christian ones, Hitchens attempted to argue (correctly!) that allegiance to Communist propaganda is itself a form of religion. He was unable to make his case effectively because he was never really able to frame the debate in reason vs. faith terms.

If reason is going to win out over mysticism in our culture, what is needed is for scientists and leading intellectuals to drop epistemological skepticism, and embrace an objective foundation of reason. Nothing less will do.