Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Perils of Questioning Everything

LAST MONTH I became one of the moderators of a bustling Internet community, Philosophy of Religion. With nearly 19,000 members worldwide, we keep getting a lot of new topics for discussion, mostly from believers in different religions. Many are dogmatic quotes from holy books, inviting the readers to accept them as such.
 
That gives us a problem --- because the motto of our community is "QUESTION EVERYTHING." This  is seldom noticed by contributors who seem to equate religion with philosophy of religion. In fact they are diametrically different. While religion needs dogma and belief, philosophy thrives on the opposite –- free thinking, reasoning, encouraging healthy skepticism. Anything unfalsifiable and not amenable to reason and logic is unsuitable as a philosophical topic.
Ideally, when we participate in discussions at philosophy of religion, we must change our attitudes and way of thinking. We need to temporarily cast outside all our cherished beliefs. While we wear our surgeon's gloves, we should assume an attitude of cold, rational detachment. This can be painful to a believer. Subjecting his dogma to be debated, probed and incised is likely to put him in the unenviable position of a surgeon operating on a loved one. That's why those who do not wish to have their unfalsifiable holy books questioned, better not submit these to scrutiny of our community.
Unaware of the above requirement, members continue to make dogmatic posts. They assume that the tags "Religion" and "Philosophy" are invitations to propagate their own religious beliefs, rather than examining them. We then tell them politely why their posts cannot be accepted. Many understand, withdraw, and later make a second attempt in a more acceptable way. A few cannot even grasp that their statements are religious dogmas because for them, those are rational, scientific, proven truth, "because our holy book, which is God's word, says so clearly." It is difficult to reason with such members without hurting their feelings. Nor can we retain such topics (OPs) because they trigger flaming wars. For every dogma there is an equal and opposite dogma. Sometimes we reach too late after discussion has progressed. Once dogma starts fighting dogma, ad hominem (personal attacks) follow. We first warn the flamer, then block his offending post, then the flamer himself, or if the OP is one of the perpetrators, remove the entire topic with its squirming and writhing mass of flamers attached. (Fortunately it gets that bad only rarely.)

Of the posts that remain, we do allow a reasonable number of dogmatic comments. After all, sometimes it does some good to know exactly what proponents of each religion considers holy and why. Some dogmas can be true eye openers --- like a recent discussion which brought out the monozygotic resemblance between Pentacostalism and ISKCON. In the final analysis all dogmas exact the same emotional toll from believers. As the discussion heats up, the believers naturally become hurt and angry and are unable to listen to the voice of reason. "Now I know who/what you stand for!" "You'll burn in hell for this!" are among the saner protests I have heard.  
Suppose a religiously dogmatic OP gets through our initial screening and an animated discussion follows. Philosophers among us commence their rational procedure -- turn the statement inside out and upside down, and attempt dissection and comparison. For pious believers, all this are unbearable. Dissection of one's religious axioms are often like our family, gender or personal integrity being questioned. Why does that hurt? In religions, we either believe or disbelieve in toto. And what we believe passionately becomes us. When our belief is subjected to an invasive procedure we feel that we ourselves are being denuded, violated. But few of us realize that we are reacting to our ego being hurt, not our God or religion. Knowing this crucial difference can be a great forward leap in self awareness.

Can atheism become a dogma and a religion?

Yes, it is equally vulnerable as traditional religions. Atheism implies a lack of belief in any supreme deity. However, many atheists are "believers" --- they are passionately convinced there is no God and some of the angrier ones dogmatically believe that religion is the source of all evil. [One remembers Karl Marx's belief that capitalism was the root of all evil. We know how it all ended.] Overzealous academics such as Richard Dawkins have spawned "Militant Atheism" which does little harm in academic circles but has spilled over into the Internet and a lot of idle youngsters have taken it as an excuse to hit at something or someone. I had some conversations with some of them and I know how they think, if they think at all. Recently there was a case in US where a young zealous atheist beating up a clergyman who had to be hospitalized. The impending dangers of such uncontrolled atheistic dogmatism should be understood by its well meaning perpetrators, who have the responsibility to rein it in.

Is science a dogma? Are scientists dogmatic?

Science itself can never be dogmatic. It is simply a method of inquiry. Science does not consider itself or its scientists, however great and respected, as infallible. Science by nature is self correcting, willing to discard previous theories on the basis of new evidence.
In my view an ideal scientist should be a spiritual person with natural humility which provides clarity of vision and thought unaffected by personal desires and fears. But that is only an ideal. Real life scientists can be surprisingly dogmatic. They are human, after all. Some of them hold on to their theories in the face of new contradicting evidence. Sigmund Freud and Thomas Edison are notorious examples for this. 

Some scientists can even hold back the progress of science as they achieve seniority. There are several reasons for this. One, they would have benefited from older technologies, and received research grants, promotions and peer recognition. An example is how LENR (low energy nuclear reaction) research is being sidelined for grants. Two, senior scientists are likely to be promoted to positions of administrative control, where they take advantage of their old boy network to maintain teh status quo. Three, older minds [like mine!] are at risk of becoming too pattern oriented to appreciate radically new ideas. (To be fair to the older generation, they also possess the wisdom of experience and know that only a small percentage of new ideas lead to any breakthrough.) In any case, older scientists in positions of power sometimes do block radically new research --- knowingly or unknowingly. Such interference from those in power may have caused science to progress slower than it should have.
Often in discussions in our community, we do come across clashes between religion and science, which is actually a clash between scientists and believers. Both have their own dogmas and both refuse to see the other side of the argument. Each side feel they are superior, which results in no effective dialog.

Scientists'  dogma and herd behavior: A test case

Last week I had the audacity to disturb some scientists who were quietly browsing in their pasture. I said something positive about homeopathy --- partly because of my positive personal experience with it, and partly as a test for dogmatic thinking in a scientific community. It was a formidable Evidence Based Medicine community, for whom the word "homeopathy" is akin to red flag to a bull. The good doctors charged, first at the red flag, then at me. True to form, they glossed over my explanations, put words into my mouth and kept goring those. I was both upset and elated because I was experiencing in real-time how scientists are as subject to tribalism as any religious group. Here's the entire thread:
QED, I hope.

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