How Can Rational People Believe So Much Hooey?

How Can Rational People Believe So Much Hooey?

Some Facts of Reality

by Which to Gain Objective Knowledge, 

Especially of What is Right and Wrong

by

Eric Paul Nolte

As airline pilots, we have a captive audience in the cockpit. Not taking advantage of this situation is a matter of compassion or character. Still, we sometimes talk about an amazing range of subjects.

I could write many essays on some of the topics that arise on the flight deck, but I am starting with this one because I find the subject and its setting compelling, and because I just wrote an essay on some of the problems of faith. 

So here is the question: how can it be that so many of these pilots I work with, men and women who are really squared away and run every detail of their lives absolutely ship shape-- how can they run their lives so rigorously by the light of reason, and yet assert that their most important values in life are rooted in a set of religious beliefs that defy all rational belief? How can so many otherwise rational people believe so much hooey?

But first, I should address the possibility that you may be reeling at the notion that while they are in charge of your precious soul, your tender hide, your pilots might be blathering away about the most abstruse matters when they're supposed to be riding herd on this tender tube of aluminum and other materials, this technological marvel, there at six miles above the ocean, and hurtling through the most hostile environment on earth at a velocity of nine miles every minute. Relax. Here's the situation: 

When we reach cruise altitude, we tidy up the flight deck, finish all our fussy little preparations and get everything configured for crossing over the North Pole, or the Pond over to Europe, or wherever. At that point, there is usually very little work to do for many hours. One little channel of the brain suffices to mind the store and make sure we stay on course and don't blunder into storms or other hazards, and that George, the autopilot, has everything right side up and pointing in the right direction. Once every 45 minutes or so, we cross another waypoint and verify that a mandatory report was sent to our company and to ATC, and we then compare the actual versus the estimated fuel consumption and a few other important parameters. The flight attendants kindly see to it that we are fed and watered. And it's otherwise all very quiet.

A blowhard pilot could take advantage of the situation, pull out a soapbox and begin making campaign speeches for some treasured crusade. 

But mostly we just sit back, sip coffee, take in the stunning view from our office, read things like flight manuals to brush up on some arcane question that might have recently arisen about the airplane systems or flight operations, or study the charts for the destination airport and airways. It would not be unprecedented to see an occasional newspaper or magazine. The demands of flight, at that point, are very, very low. We are all vastly experienced and have an acute ability to sense anything out of the expected. Moreover, anything that even begins to stray out of line will provoke a little yellow warning light (or a red light, if serious enough) and a printed and aural message that will begin chirping or dinging or honking at us to rouse even the slowest wit. Not to put it in a morbid way, but the flight deck of a modern airliner is like a little graveyard, in which every piece of equipment, every switch, instrument, and light, is a like a little tombstone and a monument, a testament, to the human capacity to learn from our experience. All that equipment was installed as the result of some pilot who died, and the installation of which now makes it less likely that anyone will ever suffer another fatal accident on account of those mistakes.

I don't think of myself as a blowhard, but I do try to hold this evaluation, like all my beliefs, in a context that is open to revision in the light of new evidence. Although I certainly have some strong opinions on matters about which I've thought long and hard, I try not to bulldoze anybody with whom I disagree. In fact, I wear as a badge of pride, the fact that I seem to be able to talk with almost anybody about anything. Even when I disagree with someone, I try hard to keep the discussion civil.

As the captain, the other crew members are obliged to honor my position in the chain of command, up there in the nose cone, but I am happy to say that we no longer practice anything like the rigid, "Captain as God" system of crew management, as was the case when I was a wet young pup in the 1970s. Nowadays we encourage everybody on the flight deck always to speak up, especially if there are any doubts or questions about the operation of the airplane. By this means, every brain on deck is fully engaged, and not cowering in monkish servitude and obedience while the captain does something stupid, like grazing the top of a ridge line short of the runway. If you had asked the first officer or the engineer, "Why didn't you tell the boss he was about to hit the ridge?" the answer was always, "He was flying, it wasn't my place, and when he wants my opinion he asks me, and besides I thought he saw it. Moreover, in the end, it's not my place."  

Even though I am the captain, I try to be sensitive to the other pilots' feelings. I am genuinely interested in what makes other people tick, and to learn how others have come to believe what they hold important. Nothing to me is more interesting than talking about the Big Questions and the puzzlements and conundrums of life, love, and the cosmos.

                                                *   *   *

So let me pose the question again: how can so many smart people, who run their lives absolutely by the light of reason, nevertheless hold that their most important values in life are religious beliefs that defy any grounds for rational belief? How can so many otherwise rational people believe so much hooey?

You can't just plunge into these deepest of intellectual waters without a long preparation. But the news out of the middle east always raises religious questions, and talking about any of it will draw us into these waters. 

Question: How can loving parents strap bomb vests on their children and send them out to blow up random strangers on busses in Tel Aviv? 

Answer: Religion. Well, there is in fact the religion that must not be named which is the source of this particularly murderous insanity today, but let's leave it, for the moment, with this universal label, "religion." You may already know why this particular religion today is not alone in having a long and murderous   history. I promise to revisit the matter momentarily. 

How can anybody believe the kind of murderous hogwash that leads them to use their children as suicidal instruments of random, mass murder? It's their religion. They grew up with it, they've never known anybody who has ever questioned it. More than that, remember it's a capital crime to question their religion, and, you know, ultimately it's a matter of faith. But Christians and Jews have faith too. But Christians and Jews are not strapping bomb vests on their children. So what's the difference? They all believe in the God of Abraham...

Before you know it, a conversation like this eventually shores up at the question of god. 

Do you believe in God? Yes, they'll tell me. 

You can ask what they mean by god, but eventually it all comes down to asking, "Why do you believe in God?"

Now here is what I find astonishing: the answer is almost always explained with reference to natural phenomena which they view as overwhelming evidence for the existence of god. Not always the God of Abraham, but at least Nature's God, as Jefferson and Adams would have put it.

They almost always say they have perfectly rational grounds for believing in God. They do not initially profess their belief in God as a matter of faith, although, when pressed on the matter, they will eventually feel compelled to say, yeah, ultimately it's all a matter of faith. Yet even when they invoke faith, it becomes clear that they do not mean anything like a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence, which is the key dictionary denotation of faith. They never say they believe things without proof. In their minds, faith simply means the intellectual contents of whatever a person believes. Faith is synonymous with belief itself. And nearly all these pilots I've talked with believe that the existence of God is proved by logic and evidence!

Okay, so they are are naifs. In their minds, God explains the inexplicable, and  they haven't studied logic or philosophy by which they might find better explanations (I hasten to add that if we're talking about the mainstream academic postmodern varieties of philosophy, it might be a good thing that these pilots are thus naive, but, as I shall argue below, I believe there is good philosophy and reliable logic by which to test our beliefs.)

                                                   *   *   *

By the way, my sample here is drawn over the course of something like 40 years, and is mostly male, white, heterosexual, and Christian, but there have been many, many women, blacks, Jews, gays, and even two Muslims, both men. They've all been to college, many have advanced degrees, and there is a wide range of talent and accomplishment up there on the flight deck.

If you ask them about the Bible's talking snakes, talking bushes on the road to Damascus that not only talk but burn without being consumed by the fire, or you ask them about virgin births, or resurrection after death, or any of the other miracles, they're passed off with a shrug and a nod at metaphor and how the primitive peoples who wrote these books knew little about the world. It just doesn't matter to them, and it does not impinge on their perceived, perfectly rational grounds for believing in God.

Now you point out that their argument for the existence of god is the Argument from Design, which is essentially that the world displays astonishing order, that things don't just happen in an orderly way by accident, and therefore some divine intelligence must have brought about this orderly universe. What's wrong with this?

Well, if the apparent design of the universe requires a Designer, surely the Designer displays an even more astonishing order than the thing designed, so why doesn't the Designer require a Designer to explain itself? Be consistent, now! To say the designer does not require a designer would thus be a contradiction, and would lead to the logical fallacy of an infinite regress. So now you have not explained the question with an answer rooted in observable nature, you have offered a riddle in answer to a puzzle, a conundrum to explain a bafflement, a mystical, ghostly other-worldly explanation as the answer to an earthly question. You haven't answered the question at all, you've simply pushed it down the road.

Oy, geeezz!-- the pilot will say, hands held high, now you're going off into la la land. Who needs to go that far? It's like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!

For the average pilot, indeed, who needs to go deeper than the cozy, comforting, unchallenged argument from Design? It's enough, already! If we are going to understand the physics of why airplanes fly, we can learn enough to acquire a practical mastery of a pilot's skills without having to learn all the higher math we would need to understand the baffling world of quantum mechanics.

Except ... that this argument from design is not enough to answer the question of god. This argument for the existence of God is not a practical solution to the matter. Far from it! This argument for god still leaves open the very basis of the dogfight between all of these other warring religions, namely, that each of them is asserting its own absolutes above all the others, and the fact that these ideas all contradict those of the other religions! It's a Tower of Absolute Babel.

And more: truly, the argument from design for the existence of god is bushwa, it explains nothing!

Moreover, there is a long list of arguments for god that have challenged the best minds that ever lived, and, in the end, we find that not a one of these arguments is valid, not one of them will hold water, logically, much less walk on water.

So what? My colleagues are intelligent, decent people, and are mostly devoted to being good people and to doing good in the world. In fact, it is this seeking after goodness, it is the pleasures of being in a community of the like-minded who enjoy each other's company, and helping each other out-- it is all of these things that motivates most of them to be religious.

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To most religious people, religion means the very source of goodness. If you ask them, they almost invariably say, echoing Dostoevsky, that if there is no god issuing rewards, threats, and punishments beyond the grave, then everything is permitted, so without God, life on earth would become a brutish war of predatory aggression of all against all. Without God, there are no standards for right action, no answers to how to be a good person in the world.

I disagree with the idea that a god is required to set standards or good and bad.

For one thing, there is no god.

No! They'll splutter indignantly, how can you say there is no god? They may then move on to asserting an alternative definition of god. Alright, they say, alright! What if by god you simply mean the impersonal forces that obviously animate the universe? Something is going on here! 

Well, okay, there are certainly forces at work in the universe, and we have not yet broken the code on what all these forces are, so what's wrong with calling these forces "god?"

Or what about the idea that some people's definition of god is simply the concept to which they appeal when they square off to the many enduring mysteries of existence? We do not have all the answers! Why not call this feeling of awe, god? Why not call God this cosmic sense of awe and astonishment at the beauty of the earth and at the way we feel when standing before all these enduring mysteries of life and the universe? We don't have all the answers, so what's wrong with calling our feelings about all these things, god?

Well, I share the belief that there are forces we have yet to understand. I agree that there are enduring mysteries of existence. I agree that all these things can inspire deep feelings of cosmic awe before the beauty and mystery of life. 

But I do not agree that calling these feelings "god" will do any good. Why not? Because we already have this word, god, and it already has a definition. Adding more definitions to the long list of definitions of the word will do nothing more than add to the problem of equivocation and provide grounds for even further confusion!

Remember also that this idea of god already comes with a long and bloody history. Untold millions have been murdered in the name of god, and millions more will surely die unless we in the world improve our rational understanding of the nature of existence and our relationship to it.

When I say there is no god, I mean the obviously true fact that there is no place and no entity anywhere on earth where any two people can go together to ask God questions and expect to hear divinely confirmed answers delivered in a voice sounding maybe like Charlton Heston, portraying Moses in "The Ten Commandments," that everybody can hear simultaneously and agree on what words are being said, and also agree that it is God who is incontestably saying these words.

There is no public god, no god available in a public square. Who in their right mind can deny this? There is no address, no phone number, no state of the union addresses being issued over the networks or the internet for all to hear. There simply is no god.

Instead, we have billions of Homo saps on earth who embrace countless texts which they claim to be the sacred, inerrant word of god, and all of these holy texts conflict with each other's pronouncements on many radically important points. Moreover, these holy texts are all said to be validated by the testimony of credible witnesses to all kinds of miracles like virgin births, flying carpets, talking snakes, resurrections of dead people, and so forth.

But these religions are all making claims that conflict with each other! They can't all be right. They could all be wrong, but they can't all be right. So how can we know which, if any, is right? And what about the possibility I mentioned above, of a new and better definition of god that might bring everybody together?

Another definition of god will not diminish the level of confusion and disagreement here. 

We need a replacement for the concept of god that will point to the universal facts of reality by which we can say with confidence what is objectively true and false, and what is right and wrong.

Ha! This is precisely what most of the world believes to be impossible! 

The religious believe that absolute knowledge of right and wrong is possible, but only because God gave us the absolutes. 

The postmodern left believes it is altogether impossible to name such absolutes. As least as far back as David Hume, in the 18th century, we have these allegedly unbridgeable chasms. One is said to be an insuperable problem with the nature of induction that renders all our universals and generalizations untenable. A related problem is with the generalization of causality. Still another uncrossable sea is called the "is-ought" dichotomy, which is the pronouncement that there are no facts of reality (nothing which is) by which we can derive any normative values (which would be to name something which ought to be as a result of this fact of reality.) 

(See Quee Nelson's wonderful book, The Slightest Philosophy, for a devastating stake in the heart of this vampire stream of thought, which has delivered us into the arms of postmodernism and the idea that all judgments are social constructs, laden with warping theories that render objectivity impossible.)

So here we have religion which says there are moral absolutes, but only God makes them absolute, and a secular opposition which says there are no absolutes at all (except for the one that denies that there are any absolutes) and therefore all pronouncements on right and wrong are entirely subjective, socially constructed, and tribal. I am persuaded that these are profoundly false alternatives that do not exhaust the possibilities for us to consider on the moral and normative realm.

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It turns out that we do in fact have some earthly standards, some facts of reality, to which we can turn for our questions on what is true or false, and right or wrong. I am persuaded that there are some perfectly good answers by which we can dismantle these unexploded mines on the killing fields of religion and postmodern philosophy. (The suicide bomber might represent the religious problem, and for the postmodern problem, think of a killer in the Cambodian genocide, like Pol Pot, with an AK-47 in one hand, and copies of Rousseau and Foucault in the other.) The absolutism of religion and ironically absolutist postmodern nihilism are pointless, false conundrums that have inspired people to kill and enslave each other, and there are perfectly good answers to them. These answers flow out of the stream of philosophy that begins with Aristotle and now reaches Ayn Rand and many others whose work carries on in this tradition.

Aristotle lived 2,400 years ago, and Ayn Rand's major works have mostly been available for half a century. How come many more people don't see that we have some good answers that can serve to dismantle the insanity?

Well, for one thing, maybe the most basic fact about human nature is that, while we certainly have instincts, these do not comprise a comprehensive knowledge of life, and so we are not born knowing what survival and flourishing demand of us. We have to figure it out by reason and observation. We pass this knowledge on to our children and they pass it on to theirs, along with any new knowledge they may have accumulated along the way. Reality can prune away the craziest ideas we have because these craziest of ideas tend to kill off those who believe them. But, obviously, we are a long, long way from having all the insane ideas carved away by natural selection, and see them drop to history's cutting room floor.

For another thing, it turns out, as Richard Dawkins eloquently frames the matter, human beings are hard-wired mostly to believe what we hear as we're growing up. Why does nearly everybody grow up believing the religion they were born into? We have a deep tendency to believe our elders! We believe what our parents and teachers tell us! Even the crazy stuff! To the point here, especially the crazy stuff!

Another matter here is that we are not born with minds that strive for independent thinking. Intellectual independence is a high virtue that must be discovered, or taught to the young by those who already hold this idea as a virtue. We live in world where many cultures absolutely revile such independence of mind, and for some of these cultures, critical thinking and independence of mind are capital crimes. They will kill you for daring to offer a critical thought! 

It is simply unrealistic to expect that ordinary people will display extraordinary independence of mind when nobody in their whole circle of friends, family, and acquaintance has ever displayed the first whiff of a question about, say, the existence of god, or to have an inclination to question any of the tribe's beliefs, or to exhibit a powerful curiosity about anything. The status quo embodies a powerful inertia. 

For yet another thing, consider what I myself call the real original sin of humanity, which is confirmation bias.  You may already know that this the hapless tendency of everybody to filter out anything we do not already understand or believe. Granted, there is survival value to an animal that possesses this reticular activation system, which allows us to filter out of the tsunami of sensory data that forever floods our senses, things like our own name, uttered across a smokey crowded room, or the cry of our baby from a distant crib, heard above the street noise outside. But it is a deep problem too! Confirmation bias tends to make us deaf and blind to anything we do not already believe to be true and right. The only antidote I know is to practice a ruthless intellectual honesty and force ourselves to pay attention to ideas with which we know we will disagree, and try sympathetically to understand why anybody in their right mind would hold such beliefs.

Another reason for why the world remains pretty much blind to the facts of reality by which we can come to hold objective knowledge of what is right and wrong: the Iron Law of Oligarchy, by which small groups of highly motivated elites tend to get their way over large groups of people who do not care nearly as much about the issues that so arouse the passions of the elites. It remains a very large majority of people who believe in these opposing false alternatives of religious absolutism and secular skepticism. The inertia of those who hold these orthodox views is enormous, and is militantly arrayed against the success of any alternatives.

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Now, we live at a time that remains at an abysmally low level of philosophical development, in my humble opinion. Academic philosophy continues to take tea at the table of postmodernism with the Mad Hatter in Alice's Wonderland.

Philosophy is the discipline that should give us the power of a solvent to scrub the worst absurdities out of our minds. Don't tell me that by this formulation I am advocating brain washing! I am asserting that there are profoundly destructive ideas in the world, and it is the discipline of good philosophy by which one can learn the intellectual technology to separate truth from nonsense, and of right from wrong.

But most people do not understand that this is what philosophy is or can be. Far from it. Even worse, most people agree (and yes, there are excellent survey data to support this claim) that there are no grounds apart from religion and arbitrary social constructs by which to support any ideas on morality, or on anything in the normative realm. There is in science a limited belief in the means by which we can distinguish truth from falsehood, but these truths are generally said to be delimited and contingent, never certain, and never available to any claims of a normative or ethical nature.

Even worse, we have a whole tribe of mostly university academics whose minds have been poisoned to some extent by the ravings of nihilistic postmodern skepticism that deny even the possibility of knowing anything with confidence. These are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Frank Lentricchia, Andrea Dworkin, Richard Rorty, and so forth. These thinkers have all claimed to be the true inheritors of philosophy, properly understood (not that they believe that anything can be "properly understood.") By their view our every utterance is irredeemably incoherent. There is no "reality," whatever the hell that might be, no world or self to have an intrinsic nature, there is no correspondence between the world and any truth we might try to assert about it. We have deconstructed reason, truth, and the very idea of any such correspondence! Quoted by Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism, Foucault writes, "Reason is the ultimate language of madness." By this view, we are trapped helplessly inside our own minds. 

It would be lovely to leave the postmodernist skeptics to their own nonsense, but, ironically, they continue to wield enormous intellectual influence in the world, and so they must be addressed.

So, what are these facts of reality that can give rise to objective knowledge of right and wrong?

Ayn Rand got it right here:

In the shortest thumbnail sketch I can make, let me first to draw your attention to the fact that there is one basic alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence. All life forms face a fundamental alternative: life or death.

Nature provides every life form, plant and animal alike, with a basic means of survival. For each life form, the good consists of the set of things which allow it to survive, the bad, or evil, are those things which threaten its life.

For a human being, survival and flourishing depend on rationality, observation and logic applied to the evidence of experience; in a word: reason.

To survive, we must take certain actions to assure food and shelter (or else someone else must act on our behalf.) Which actions? We must discover what is efficacious. We need knowledge of what supports us. This knowledge must be discovered by reason. 

The good, therefore, for a human being is life, its own life. Life is a property of each individual. The good is the set of things which support an individual's life. Life is the standard of the good. 

Nothing is possible without its life. No action, no thought, no value judgment, nothing is possible without its life. 

Think about this: one's life is the very grounds for making any value judgments, including even the decision to take one's own life, as might be the case with some poor soul who is stricken by a fatal and hopelessly painful illness, and who therefore decides that the pain of daily existence trumps any pleasures remaining in life.  

So life is the foundational good, the very standard of the good. Everything that threatens its life is the evil.

Let me flesh this out in just a little bigger way: if we want to live, then we must hold some values by which to guide the actions we take in order to support our lives. 

A value is something that inspires us to take action in order to get it. A value is the goal of the actions we take in order to acquire it. Reason is the cardinal value that supports our ability to live because reason allows us to acquire the knowledge of what we must do if we are to succeed in reaching our goals. 

Our nature endows us with free will, the power to choose to pay attention to one thing rather than another. We must choose a purpose, which will be the happiness that we want our life to be about, and it is this end towards which we must then use our reason to achieve. 

Self-esteem is the basic energy that moves our feet out of bed in the morning; it is the sum of two things: first, the knowledge we achieve that provides us with the certainty that we are competent to survive; and, second, the unshakable conviction that we are worthy of happiness.

Virtue is not some musty old idea that is said to be its own reward, not some ancient battle axe that threatens our happiness, but is instead a means by which to achieve a value. Most to the point here: the starting point of goodness and virtue is not self-sacrifice for the lives of others. The purpose of our lives is not to give up our lives for the benefit of everybody else, but to enjoy our own lives. 

Virtues are the means by which we achieve our values. The purpose of our lives is to live our life and achieve our own flourishing.  

The cardinal values are achieved by employing the primary virtues. Among these virtues are rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride, and benevolence. There are many other virtues as well, of course, such as courage, confidence, curiosity, and an unlimited number of others, all arrayed so as to support the values pursued. 

If flourishing and happiness are the purpose of our lives, then a predatory, grasping abuse of other people can never be a viable or enduring means for achieving these values. We achieve our values by dealing with other people voluntarily, respecting the fact that their purpose in life, like ours, should rightly be the pursuit of their own happiness, and that we can greatly enhance everyone's ability to achieve this happiness by dealing with each other as traders, exchanging value for value, to mutual advantage.  

A proper development of these ideas requires a hefty book (many of which have already been written in this Aristotelian/Randian stream I have mentioned above), but this the essence of the factual basis for judging what is right and wrong, in its most distilled form.

All of this is to draw attention to why the postmodern skeptics are mistaken about the impossibility of an ethics rooted in the facts of reality, and also for why all the warring religious absolutists are mistaken about the mystical basis for their absolutes, when there are perfectly good, earthly facts of reality by which to acquire objective knowledge and values.

I want to flesh out more of this, another time, when I will turn to the question I keep running into with the college students in my circle, namely: the cultural relativists' utterly helpless inability to find unassailable moral grounds on which to condemn those who believe that the highest good is to strap bomb vests on their children and send them out to blow up random strangers. 

The postmodern skeptics claim that there are no objective grounds by which to make such a condemnation. The religious absolutists, many of them anyway, are actually among those who believe that there is no greater glory or good than killing infidels, and meanwhile the world is wriggling with all kinds of religious people who affirm other absolute truths which conflict with each other's ideas hopelessly and irreconcilably. 

There is a way out. Stay calm, carry on, and apply logic to the evidence of experience. Eventually, better ideas will come to mind. 


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2014.1114 

Flourishing v. Religious Epistemology

Flourishing versus Religious Epistemology

and the Problem of Objectivity

by

Eric Paul Nolte

The claim I heard today is that, had the Muslims in Gaza simply carved out a small piece of land and spent all the money they received on cultivating the land and engaging in peaceful trade (instead of blowing it all on terrorism) they would be among the wealthiest and most productive people on earth.

Now, the creation of wealth takes vastly more than merely a decision not to blow your neighbors to Kingdom come, but they have a little point here.

And isn't it funny ... so counter-intuitive! -- how firing crude rockets into city centers, and dressing one's precious children in bomb vests and sending them out to board city busses and blow up random civilians ... isn't is odd how these pious actions do not swell one's material coffers? Huh! Go figure!

Echoing Golda Meier's wisdom on the matter, obviously these Islamist lunatics hate Jews more than they love their own lives, or even the lives of their children. They do not want to live in peace, they want the Jews dead. 

Contrary to the deplorable bias in the western press, the destruction in Gaza will not stop if the Jews lay down their arms. 

If the Muslims were to lay down their arms, there would be peace. Period. 

But if the Jews lay down their arms, there would be a mass slaughter of Jews. Instantly. 

Peace will result only when the Muslims decide to live and let live, which anybody who has read the Quran must know is a policy contrary to Sharia law. 

The degree to which a Muslim's beliefs are consistent with the Quran and the Hadith is the degree to which he is willing to kill the infidels. 

This conclusion is not a baseless accusation of fanaticism, it is a matter of logic: if you believe that the Quran is the word of God who, in their view, is the very same God of Abraham worshiped by Jews and Christians; if you believe that the very essence of Goodness is submission to the will of God (and every Muslim knows that "Islam," the very word itself, means submission, submission to the will of God); if you believe these ideas, then God must be obeyed. So, when God, speaking on page after page in the Quran, commands Muslims to kill the infidels, then the Muslim is obviously acting against against God Himself ... if he does not comply with this injunction to kill the infidels.

The degree to which a Muslim does not take his holy text quite so seriously is the degree to which he may be willing to live and let live ... and this is exactly as it is with Christians, namely, that the Christian who does not comply with the Bible's injunctions to kill unbelievers and homosexuals does so contrary to his religious authorities.

These religious injunctions are claims to knowledge. Their adherents believe these tenets are true, meaning that these claims to truth are aligned with the facts of reality. They believe that the ideas are the revealed word of God and must be obeyed under threat of terrible penalties. How does one know these ideas are true? Because they're in The Book of Truth, whichever holy text the believers feel like they want to call their sacred text of truth.

I grant that the Sufis and most of the Muslims I have ever known seem to be perfectly willing to live in peace.

The Sufis' beliefs are also rooted in holy texts. They believe the words are true.

But the call to violence is indeed in the holy texts too, so how can the Sufis simply deny that these calls to kill infidels are to be disobeyed? They have, ah, yes, auxiliary holy books, or maybe more liberal, poetic interpretations of the texts. How do they know these are true? Faith. What's wrong with that?

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What's wrong with faith? Everybody has faith in various things, no?

There is a deadly equivocation going on here because of the wide variation in meaning of the word faith.

Here is one denotation of faith: when you say you have faith in your orthopedist to slice open your leg, saw off the ball of your femur, scrape out the socket of your pelvis, and replace the whole ruined mess with a nice, new hip made of titanium and ceramics, what do you mean by faith? You mean to say that you have confidence in a system of which you have at least enough knowledge and experience to conclude that it is trustworthy. You most likely do not understand every detail of the process, but this lack of comprehensive knowledge is not the same thing as a mystical belief without logical support.

By contrast, when someone says he believes in Orks, or gods, or unicorns, everybody knows these beliefs are rooted in faith. But this denotation of faith is a fundamentally different kind of belief than one's confidence in a surgeon. Here, faith denotes a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence. This is what religious faith means.

One deep source of trouble here is that the word faith has so many meanings: the idea of belief itself, trust, confidence, alliance, obligation, and so forth. There are so many other important concepts too which, like faith, each have a myriad of denotations, and this blur of confusion makes it difficult for us to understand each other clearly. Too often we do not talk with each other clearly. We talk at each other, or past each other, while gazing out uncomprehendingly, or glowering at each other.

The reason that faith is such an important concept here is because faith claims to be a path to knowledge. So what? Why does this matter? Because knowledge is what makes a properly human survival and flourishing possible. Knowledge, the kind of comprehensive knowledge that allows human beings to achieve lives that are at a more exalted level than the Hobbesian level of life as brutish, nasty, and short, is not something we are born with. There are instincts, to be sure, but there is no comprehensive, innate knowledge that is sufficient to guide human action. This kind of life-serving knowledge must be discovered, accumulated, protected, and treasured.

The means by which such life-serving knowledge is discovered is reason, observation, and logic applied to the evidence of experience. Knowledge thus acquired and defended is part of a rational epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and acquisition of true knowledge. 

Faith, religious faith, belief in the truth of a proposition without proof or evidence, has no place in a rational epistemology. I'll go further than this: I say religious faith is a big obstacle to the acquisition of true knowledge. Why?

Faith is an obstacle to knowledge because belief in things without proof is nothing more than feeling, emotion. And what's wrong with this? 

Well, what are feelings? Feelings are automatic, psychosomatic manifestations of the ideas we already hold to be true or false, right or wrong. 

Our emotions well up in response to our encounters with life situations, and function like the warning lights of an airplane's flight deck, automatically illuminating to draw the pilot's attention to any potentially life-threatening changes in parameters such as the temperatures and pressures of the machine's vital systems. The warning lights draw our attention and confirm our already existing beliefs, such as that an engine's high oil temperature and low oil pressure signify an impending failure. Such warning lights do not provide us with instruction that allows us to acquire knowledge of a subject that is new to us. 

In the same way, emotions draw our attention to something on the basis of things we already believe. 

These beliefs may be correct or insane, but the emotion as such cannot examine or revisit the subject for deeper or fresh examination. 

We can allow ourselves to believe anything we like, but believing doesn't make it true. We can believe that the proper function of a gas turbine engine requires operation within certain limits of temperatures and pressures. We may believe that we can fly by telekinesis, levitating like transcendental meditators in the Siddhis program claim to be able to do. We may believe that truth can be found only by reading the revealed word of God as found in some holy book. We can believe that logic is the method by which we can begin to unravel truth from nonsense.

So when our feelings about anything are aroused in the course of a day, they reveal nothing more than what we already believe. 

Feelings therefore can never be a door into a room of new knowledge. Faith is a feeling. Faith is therefore not an alternative epistemological tactic for the discovery of what is true or right. Far from it!--faith is a roadblock to new knowledge, especially if we believe that faith truly gives us such new knowledge! It's like saying you believe that a heavy steel shoulder vest is a life preserver, and so you jump overboard, expecting the vest to float and save your life!

                                          *   *   * 

One can't blame Islam for all the violence in the middle east. The calls to violence are also in the Bible, and history's oceans of blood spilled in the name of God is evidence for the truth of this claim. And Christianity is no better than Islam, as measured by the depth of the ocean of blood spilled in its name. But today there is a huge difference between the two.

The main difference between Islam and Christianity in this respect is that the Christians underwent a bloody reformation about 500 years ago, followed a century later by the Thirty Years War, during all of which something like a third of the population of Europe was murdered by Protestants fighting Catholics, good Christians all, killing men, women, and children, all in the name of God. 

Thoughtful Christians, looking at the resulting slaughterhouse of Europe, decided to stop treating a difference of opinion as an unforgivable sin that needs to be punished by death. 

No such reformation has yet shaken Islam to a point like the one that gave Europe its secular enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Of course, there was a bloody transformation in Islam, many centuries ago, in which the forces of Al Ghazali murdered the moderates like Ibn Rashd, thereby destroying, or least arresting, most of the amazing, mindful and scholarly Islamic achievements up to that point, and it was this blood-soaked ascendency of Al Ghazali's forces that has rendered Islam intellectually stuck in the 12th century CE. 

So here is the crucial point to remember about Islam today:

There is no way that a culture of peace, productivity, and rational personal unfolding and flourishing will ever emerge in a culture that celebrates above all else self-renunciation and personal submission to the will of authorities, and, moreover, reviles above all else the spirit of inquiry, the critical mind, and the pursuit of personal flourishing. In this light, particularly given its huge number of worshipers, Islam may be the most profoundly destructive force on the planet today, and a dead end like no other...

... except perhaps for the destructive and asinine claims of those who assert that anthropogenic global climate change is the worst threat in the world today. 

                                         *   *   *

So here we shore up at a misanthropic, geo-centric, earth-worshipping environmentalism as another profoundly destructive religious epistemology. I call it religious because, while the discipline dresses itself in the robes of science, so many of its adherents are as credulous and naive as holy rollers at an Appalachian faith healing: they believe because they want it to be true. They may also be blinded because they allow their understandable awe and astonishment at the beauty of the earth to guide their politics, ignorant of the most basic concepts of economics, and heedless of any knowledge of good science. 

I also call it religious because there are radical environmentalist leaders who have captured something like this religious crusading spirit of self-renunciation and submission to authorities who are purveying something the believers feel is beautiful and right. But the "science" of these radical leaders, in fact, is about as "settled" as that of the religious naifs who believe that religious Creationism is a "science" equivalent to the real science of evolution.

There is today a frightening assertion by leftist bullies that no one deserves so much as to be heard whose opinion on climate change disagrees with the alleged "97%" of scientists who believe that global warming is caused by man and must be controlled by, essentially, handing over to government regulators the control of most industrial activity. It is propaganda to say that 97% of scientists believe that man is the source of climate change, and government the solution, but even if it were true, it would not be the most important point here. 

The absurd claim of leftists here is that consensus is the basis of science. What!? When was consensus ever the basis of scientific progress? Moreover, it is frightening to hear the tyrannical politics of those who claim that dissenters must be shouted down and forbidden to speak up! 

The major paradigms of science proceed not by consensus but by a process in which tiny minorities appear with theories that are widely dismissed at first. The peer review process rightly attempts to find any grounds by which to dismiss the new ideas as false! This is the essence of Karl Popper's radical contribution to the philosophy of science, which is his response to the widely accepted belief that the problem of induction renders us unable to validate the truth of any proposition with 100 percent certainty. Popper argued that if we are unable to validate the truth of a proposition, we can achieve a measure of confidence in a claim to truth by attempting to falsify that idea. If we try our best to disprove a claim to truth, and fail to falsify it, this lends a measure of support to the likelihood that this proposition may be true.  

In genuine science, it is crucially important to hear the dissenters, not to shout them down, and exclude them merely because they assert unpopular ideas. 

You don't have to go back as far as Copernicus or Galileo to see that consensus is not the basis for good science. For example, in geology, plate tectonics was widely dismissed as recently as the 1950s, but is today seen as the most important concept in geology. 

Anyone who claims that climate science is, or can be "settled" today is not likely to have so much as an elementary grasp of the nature of science itself. 

There are many others who do have a grasp of the science, but are like Jacques Chirac, the former president of France, who simply have another agenda altogether, and therefore ignore what they know about science. 

Addressing the terminal Kyoto conference a few years ago (at the Hague, I think it was) Chirac told the assembled worthies that the theory of anthropogenic global warming represented the very best hope that he and his like-minded friends have ever enjoyed for the possibility of instituting global governance for the purpose of achieving social justice. 

This goal of social justice is a political agenda; it is not climate science at all.

Now look at some of these scientists from NASA and NOAA, James Hansen, Michael Mann, or Bill McKibben of 350.org, and the whole pack of fudging, data-altering liers at the University of East Anglia. These folks are mostly all card-carrying scientists, of course, but they appear to have been corrupted by something like a religion of misanthropic earth worship. 

Incidentally, these folks are by no means the worst of the lot. Think of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, founder of deep ecology, inspiration to eco-terrorists, EarthFirst! and other loonies. Nevertheless, it is these folks and their like-minded followers who have captured the purse strings of academic science. 

Think about the fact that it is now the misanthropes, this pack of human-hating environmentalist ideologues, who are now largely in control over who gets grant money to pursue which projects in science! 

This is a development that I find not much less frightening than the situation with Trofim Lysenko in the former Soviet Union.

You may remember Lysenko as Stalin's science minister, who from the 1920s instituted a policy that resulted in the murderous suppression of both the evolutionary theory accepted in the west, and the Mendelian inheritance theory as well. This insanity went on for a quarter century after Lysenko's ideas were discredited by any knowledgeable observer outside the USSR. Lysenko and friends were evidently motivated by a social and political agenda that cared not at all about the actual science of the matter, so long as they could achieve their goals of social justice.  

The corruption of an aspect of science for a political agenda ... can't happen here, can it? It's here now, comrades.

                                         *   *   *

One of the key problems here, in all these cases taken from religion and pseudo-science, is the willingness of people to believe that knowledge itself is a matter that can be discovered by feelings independent of mind, or be "revealed" by a holy text in a way that trumps the light of observation, reason, and logic applied to the evidence of experience. 

In the end, faith means simply believing what a person wants to believe. Where faith is said to be an alternative means of knowledge, where faith is said to a shortcut to knowledge, knowledge itself has been short-circuited (as Ayn Rand eloquently framed the matter.) 

Trying to hold a conversation with those whose beliefs are rooted in faith is as effective as trying to persuade a hungry tiger not to eat you. You can't talk with the tiger. You can kill the tiger, or maybe escape from it, but you can't negotiate a deal to spare yourself, much less to make a trade of value-for-value to mutual advantage ... not with a dumb beast ... and not with a faithful ideologue who is deaf and blind to anything he does not already believe. He has lost his hearing in the echo chamber of confirmation bias.

                                         *   *   *

Another crazy epistemology stacked against human flourishing is found in the sort of postmodern academic mainstream.

It is like is like trying to walk across quicksand when one tries to carry on a conversation with somebody who has a postmodern, cultural relativist and skeptic bent, and thereby believes that knowledge is entirely a product of arbitrary social convention dictated by the accident of one's birth into a particular tribe, race, class, and gender. These skeptics can never be pinned down to agree that any idea can ever be objective, or real, or genuinely outside the mind. You can't get anywhere with them, not because they are correct, but because they have rendered themselves deaf, blind, and I dare say stupid to any grounds on which one might hope to carry on a discussion.

Now, I have sorted my way through all these conundrums of knowledge, and many more besides, with the help of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I am persuaded that this is the best work on the problems of knowledge anywhere in the history of philosophy. In my view, Rand's work establishes the most comprehensive and rational discussion of the subject of knowledge and how to understand what is true or false. Her essay on "Faith and Force" highlights these matters of faith, of the hopelessness of faith as a claim to true knowledge, and especially for why the use of force becomes inevitable when rational discussion is rejected or impossible, as I mention in the passage above, on dealing with a tiger.

Alright, this whole sorry business of arguing with the postmodern skeptic is hopeless ... unless, as a first, humble starting point, you can draw a person's attention to some directly perceptible facts of reality, available to any of us at a glance, and agree that these facts are what they are, independent of the mind that grasps them, and see that the mind does not invent these percepts, it perceives them! 

I am getting to intellectual bedrock here. This is the area of the axiomatic, the place where one can only point at those concepts that pertain to the most fundamental matters. 

And there is a real doozy of problem which, as far as I am aware, no other philosophical stream has adequately addressed: namely the problem of validating some crucially important ideas that seem to defy proof as a result of the roadblock of circular reasoning. Let me defer this point for a moment.

Now, consider the dizzy problem that wells up when the skeptic tells you that we cannot know that anything is true. He then launches into an attack on all knowledge as consisting of arbitrary cultural conventions according to the ideas accepted by the various warring tribes of the world, and therefore everything is subjective, and even if it weren't, you, yourself, would never be in a position to know anything about anything as objectively true.

Whoa!--you might say. One thing at a time! And if you slow it down, here you can see that when the skeptic claims that we can't know anything is true, he is counting on the fact that he can indeed make a claim which he believes is true! He is implicitly counting on the validity of the concept of truth in order to make a claim that the idea of truth itself is invalid. Therefore his statement is contradictory, self-refuting bushwa. Ayn Rand calls this the fallacy of the stolen concept.

Similarly, when the skeptic claims that you cannot rightly know anything about the facts of reality, he is implicitly counting on his own ability to make a right assessment about the facts of reality. He is also counting on your sharing the language and the concepts by which you can understand him. Moreover, he is counting on your ability rightly to grasp these facts of reality, and even to agree with him! 

The skeptic's cousin, down the hall in the physics department, will tell you that physics is incapable of studying the underlying stuff of reality because these facts are unavailable to human sense perception, and so the only thing left for physics to study is to put together mathematical descriptions of the appearances of reality. But he is thereby telling you, in effect, that there can be a speech without a speaker, and a dance without a dancer. Think about that!

There can never be a speech without one who speaks. There can never be a dance without a dancer. Every entity is what it is, and can only act in accordance with its nature. Things have different natures. Due to air resistance and inertia, a whiffle ball the same size as a baseball will not be driven as far as the baseball when it is struck by a baseball bat with same force and angle of deflection. 

The skeptic could know that he himself exists because he could directly perceive himself. If he doesn't exist, who or what is claiming that there is nothing existing that can speak and dance? This is action without an actor. This is abstract existence in the absence of anything that actually exists. This is insanity!

As you can see, fundamentally, the skeptic refuses to be pinned down on the matter of existence as an embodied concept.

So you look the skeptic in the eye and you ask him, "Do you hear me? Do you see me here? Are you here now, do you experience yourself as being present and accounted for at this moment?"

''Sure!" he'll doubtlessly chirp.

"So," you continue, "unless you are in a coma, you are necessarily aware that you exist and that you know it. This idea is axiomatic and self-evident."

If he denies this point, the conversation is hopeless, he is hopeless, and you are wasting you time as surely as if you were trying to teach a schnauzer to sing a song of Schubert!  

But you should know that now we have come to the bedrock of knowledge, and if the skeptic is intellectually honest and hangs in there, we also have the basis for further discussion.

You should really read Rand on this matter, but I can summarize it, on roller skates:

With respect to knowledge of anything, we begin with the ultimate nature of the universe.

What?--you demand incredulously. Who can know anything about the ultimate nature of the universe? I'm not sure that I really learned the ultimately best way to tie my shoes! So how can I know anything so ultimate?

Wait! Consider that, even though we cannot know everything about the universe, we can see some patterns that have held true for everything we have thus far grasped. It's pretty abstract, it's an inductive generalization, it proceeds in the face of the problem of induction and the problem of universals, but forget about these doubts for a moment and just listen:

Whatever the universe is, whatever its elements, it is what it is, independent of human consciousness. Consciousness grasps existence through sense perception. We can say, of whatever it is, it is so. Existence, whatever it may be, is what it is, not what we may wish, fear, or deny it is. What is, is, as Parmenides put it. Existence exists, as we get this idea by way of Aristotle and the radical expansion of it by Ayn Rand. 

This is amazing material! This idea of the axioms of awareness is something that cuts through the insanity of postmodern skepticism and of all the faith-based claims to knowledge, and does so with the natural ease of leading children to their own birthday parties. 

Ah, but the birthday parties offered here are to be held at the house of an atheist objectivist, and are offered to the children of religious conservatives and postmodern skeptics. Hmm. Don't think they're all likely to come.

Nevertheless, for anybody with ears to hear and a mind to think, I believe these foundational ideas are correct and easy to grasp, except that we are, most of us, tainted by backgrounds that are hostile, if not outrightly deaf to these ideas.

Nevertheless, let us proceed. In the marketplace of ideas, truth stands the best chance of winning over the false ideas, because truth has life-serving value, and the false does not. The false ultimately makes it impossible to steer correctly, and therefore tends to lead us into a ditch by the side of the road of life. Slavery was a vile evil, it was practiced everywhere in the world, and it came to an end because, apart from its appalling evil, it was rendered economically obsolete and utterly eclipsed by competition with free labor. It not only with reference to slavery that the truth will set us free! 

Now here it is, short and sweet: a few axioms or axiomatic corollaries: existence, identity, consciousness, the primacy of existence, causality, and free will.

1. Existence.

Existence exists. Reality exists. Reality is what it is, whatever it is.

2. Identity: 

A thing is what it is. 

     A is A. This is the Law of Identity

     A thing cannot cannot be both A and non-A 
          at the same time and in the same respect. 
          This is the law of non-contradiction.

     A thing must be either A or non-A. 
          This is the law of the excluded middle.

3. Consciousness

     Awareness of reality through sense perception
          There is something out there in the world of which I am aware.

4. Causality

     The universe is made of entities. Every existent has a specific nature. Every existent is its nature. Entities can only act in accordance with their nature. Causality is the law of identity applied to action.

In addition to the axioms, we can point to at least two important corollaries:

Reality exists independent of one's own consciousness. This can be thought of as the primacy of existence, and the powerful antidote to Rene Descartes, who, searching for a basis for acquiring certain and unassailable knowledge, concluded, Cogito, ergo sum, meaning, "I think, therefore I am." 

(By the way, Rand countered Descartes in a neat bow tie when she wrote, "I am, therefore I'll think." Reason is the tool of human survival, so, recognizing that one is requires one's commitment to think about how to survive.)

Descartes' is a perspective on the primacy of consciousness as the starting point for establishing the reliability or certainty of any knowledge. It is as if the mind creates reality, a perspective that was shortly to be taken up after Descartes with a vengeance by Immanuel Kant. Rand, building on Aristotle's earlier work, updates Aristotle and makes a strong case for the primacy of existence and the dependent role of consciousness in relation to the existence it perceives.

Finally, there is the axiomatic concept of free will: I can choose. And indeed, as a human being, you must choose. What can you choose? You can choose to think. You choose where to direct your attention. The choice to think or not is the essence of free will and the essence of being human.

Before I leave the matter, I should point out that the denial of free will by the determinists is as self-refuting as it is absurd. The determinist who argues against free will is making a case against the human ability to make choices. Yet he is implicitly counting on your ability to choose to listen to him, to choose to sort through the issues he presents, and then to choose to agree with him, or not! Absurd!

I could well move on from here, but the thoughtful reader, as I mentioned above, may be troubled by this matter of validating the axioms.

                                      *   *   *

Validation of axioms as the key to avoiding the fallacy of circular reasoning:

Anyone who has studied logic will know that proof is a key concept here, as we wrestle with establishing the truth of these axioms of awareness, and we can see that, at first blush, it may appear to be impossible to avoid the fallacy of circular reasoning.

The fallacy of circular reasoning is also known by its Latin name, circulus in demonstrando, meaning to demonstrate a point by means of a circle, and is also sometimes known as "begging the question." It takes the logical form:

     A is true because of B.
     B is true because of A.

If this does not seem obviously ridiculous at first glance, try to flesh it out with particulars.

Consider what happens when we say, "Communism is bad because communism is bad."

We who condemn mass murder and tyranny may feel a twinge of approval for this statement, because we know from history that whenever socialism has gotten its hands on all the levers of power, it achieves not its intended heaven on earth, but a slaughterhouse hell on earth, but this statement about communism is nevertheless expressed in a form that is completely circular and fallacious.

When we say, "Freedom is good because freedom is good," we have committed exactly the same logical fallacy as in our condemnation of communism.

This idea may appeal to our liberal sentiments that cherish freedom and condemn tyranny, but the statement proves nothing. It repeats the claim itself as an argument for the truth of the claim it makes.

The essence of the matter is that we need to find a spot on which to stand so that we can evaluate a statement from a different perspective than the thing asserted. We need independent evidence.

When we get down to the very most fundamental statements one can make about the nature of existence, it all begins to look very circular, a little murky, and encouraging to the gloating skeptic.

You can't prove the epistemological primary of existence. An attempt to do so would be to employ the fallacy of circularity. 

So now what?

Rand observes that, "an axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest."

And more: "Since axiomatic concepts refer to facts of reality and are not a matter of 'faith' or of man's arbitrary choice, there is a way to ascertain whether a given concept is axiomatic or not: one ascertains it by observing the fact that an axiomatic concept cannot be escaped, that it is implicit in all knowledge, that it has to be accepted and used even in the process of any attempt to deny it."

As Rand says, we perceive and grasp these axioms directly, so they are self-evident. 

So, this idea of existence is axiomatic and is therefore validated by its self-evidence. 

Notice this subtle but crucial point: an axiomatic idea cannot be proven, logically, because this case is so fundamental that a proof would require circular reasoning: in an effort to achieve proof, one would be appealing to the very concept that is to be proved.

Circular reasoning is incoherent and establishes nothing as true.

The axioms of awareness avoid this circularity because they are established not by proof per se, but by the validation of direct experience. You know they are true because you have only to open your eyes and experience this self-evidence.

Before studying Rand, I never came across this crucial point anywhere in my reading of the history of ideas: that formal proof is not the only means for establishing the truth of a statement (but, of course, like any student of philosophy, I came across a tsunami of writing on the idea that nobody can know anything at all apart from the subjective burbling of one's own mind, or of the collective delusions shared by human nature, and so forth.)

So here I learned that validation and proof are not synonymous, not at all the same concept. 

Proof draws a conclusion about things already known by means of the laws of logic, logic being the process of non-contradictory identification. Proof treats an idea by means of statements or propositions in an argument. 

Validation establishes relations between ideas and the facts of reality.

So proof is a subset of the concept of validation, but validation is not necessarily formal proof.

We establish the truth of the axioms by direct perception, not by a formal proof. We know they are true by pointing ostensively at the thing in question, and we grasp the thing by direct experience.

Ostensive definition applies to the small subset of concepts which cannot be defined and communicated by means of other concepts, namely, to sensations and these basic axioms of awareness. We draw the child's attention ostensively to various objects and thereby demonstrate the concept of "red," or whatever. The same applies to the concept of existence. 

The axioms are validated by direct, self-evident experience. 

In the end, objectivity is possible. We are not mired, blindly and hopelessly, in our subjective experience or by the ideas we get from our birth tribe.

The mind wrestles with perceptual judgment (such as with the puzzlements of optical illusions), but what we perceive is objectively real and out there, in the universe, independent of our minds, and we acquire knowledge of these things by the algorithms or procedures for establishing objectivity. 

Objectivity begins with a recognition that reality exists separate from any individual's consciousness, and proceeds with the recognition that knowledge entails a correct grasp of the facts of reality, established by reason in accordance with the laws of logic. 

                                         *   *   *

Now, here is the reason that human flourishing is at odds with claims to knowledge that are rooted in faith, or faith-based epistemologies: 

We are not born knowing what life demands of us. Our instincts are woefully inadequate as a guide to success at survival and flourishing. As humans, we have to discover the knowledge required for us to act efficaciously in the world.

One's personal flourishing depends on a correct knowledge of what to do in order to achieve our goals. Our success further depends on our individual effort, intelligence, and the expectation that we can personally benefit from our own work. 

Peace in and among the lands depends on the freedom of all to trade with each other to mutual advantage, and to do so voluntarily, in a division of labor economy. All these features require individuals' rights to be protected, and this whole network of enterprise depends on our acquiring the knowledge to make it work in accordance with the true nature of the things involved. 

This knowledge, on which every aspect of this network of enterprise depends, requires one's personal contact with reality in a way that is verifiable and communicable with other individuals. True knowledge must be based in observation and logic. 

Any claims to knowledge that cannot be shown to be consistent with observable fact, or established by theory rooted ultimately in observation and logic, and tested against the context of everything else we have come to know as true, is ... bushwa, hogwash, nonsense... or at best a claim in need of revision. 

Faith, meaning claims to knowledge without evidence or proof, and the mere desire for something to be true, lead to something worse than the mere absence of a base for knowledge--these religious-like epistemologies lead to a rationalization for the imposition of subjective political force. In a word: tyranny. Faith-based claims to knowledge, when they clash between people, lead us to the situation we encounter when we meet a tiger in a jungle clearing: we can't talk about our differences, so ideas justified by faith lead to inarticulate argument and violence, and this explains the seemingly irresistible tendency of faith-based leaders to veer towards tyranny.

Human flourishing is hardly possible without objective knowledge of what life demands of us. There are difficulties in establishing such objective knowledge, but these difficulties are not solved by the cognitive short circuits which are  religious epistemology, the tenets of faith, or environmentalist Lysenkoism. These difficulties are solved by a rational epistemology. 

Shalom, and bless us all, who would be mindful, respectful of everyone's rights, and champions of the unfolding of our talents for the purpose of our achieving peaceful, flourishing lives and happiness.

                                                E  P  N

2014.1111 

To a College Student on Education and Its Insane Cost

To a College Student on Education and Its Insane Cost

An Earnest Look at a Proper Education

by

Eric Paul Nolte 

A friend of one of our college kids just asked my advice, sounding a little panicked, on finding money for school, which raises the whole daunting question of the value of an education in today's inflationary world.

I'm laid up this week, following some recent adventures in surgery and recovery, and I was able to write at some length because I am a temporary invalid, tamped and bolstered back in my sick bed, with nothing to do for the moment but tilt at windmills, listen to the cat's warmly lopsided purring, and indulge my other fancies, whimsies, grudges, and curiosities! I read a few of my heroes for inspiration, and then a couple of my worst villains, who are nevertheless important figures in the world, so that I might engage and do battle with my own confirmation bias (the awful tendency in all of us to be deaf and blind to anything we do not already believe as true and right.) I also read my villains so that I may be better equipped to understand the worthiest opposition in the world. 

What follows began as excerpts from a letter to a college student on education, and how to think about its value in a world where the dizzy, overwhelming cost of education on conventional American college campuses has risen twice as fast as the general rate of inflation.

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Now, to address your cheerful wish that your letter would find me bored and in a letter-writing mood ... I am in my usual blabbermouth mode, happy to offer up thoughts on anything to do with life, love, and the cosmos ... but I must tell you that I am never bored!  Well ... of course, it's a good thing to be bored ... if you're an airline pilot, like me, and want the flight deck to stay drearily predictable and routine! But otherwise I hate to admit that I have ever been bored elsewhere because I believe boredom is probably something like a crime against ourselves. 

This thought on boredom is directly related to the importance of an effective education!

  
Boredom is perhaps the needless admission of defeat by a mind grown so encrusted with intellectual barnacles that it cannot stay open to the ever-shimmering light of awe and astonishment at the cosmos. 

And should not the cultivation of this living capacity for amazement and wonder be a major goal of a proper education?  

Boredom is a sad confession that we just can't pay the right attention to see the endlessly fascinating workings of the cosmos, and the web of creative love and cleverness that Homo saps can bring into the world! (and thereby turn our attention away, for just a moment, from the stinking morass of malevolence, madness, and mayhem that Homo saps also bring into the world!)

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Now, there are questions on the nature, the content, and the importance of effective education, but we live in a culture where a college degree has become perceived as essential to putting together a good life.

I challenge this notion about a college degree and the good life, but you are already committed to the project, and now you are banging your head against the wall, trying to shake some more money out of the rafters or the branches. I have a couple thoughts that may help you:

Here's a key point: if you keep coming up short of information, if no one knows what to tell you, then the right question is: do you know anybody who might know the answer? No? Then who might know somebody who might know? Don't know? Then who else might know somebody who might know somebody who might know?  Somebody who doesn't have the answers for you might nevertheless know somebody who can indeed help you. Keep asking. Keep driving down that road that leads down to just six degrees of separation between us and anybody else on the planet.  You may be able to get some good answers just by persisting in asking the right questions.

I got some of this idea from Charles Lindbergh's memoir about putting together the deal that stunned the whole world in 1927, and thereby allowed him to win the Orteig Prize for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The trick is to imagine the dream attained, and then works backwards, filling in each step of the way by this means of asking who knows, or else who might know someone who might know how to make the thing happen.

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We need some financial wisdom to make good choices about how much and on what to spend money for college. The stupefying rise of college costs over the last half a century has backed us into the need for making these ruthless cost/benefit analyses. I myself am having to think about these matters too, as I near my mandatory retirement from the airlines in a couple years, and ask myself if more formal school could be an answer for me.

So what financial wisdom counts here? Of the world's financial wisdom, which aspects might be most cogent for thinking about college costs?

Einstein was right: the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. Well, he was joking here, of course, but if we learn to understand compound interest, this will go a long way towards allowing us always to keep the Wolf on the right side of the door.  Failure to understand compound interest can lead one to become a pathetic charity case at the tender mercy of others.  Sorry, but it's true. Nobody can care more about your situation than you yourself. And all political blather about our "being in this together" is nonsense, unless we are each first committed to being self-responsible to whatever degree this is possible.

Charging interest for money loaned is not a sin, contrary to the bible and many other sources, it is the legitimate fee for providing the valuable service of making money or goods available today that would otherwise not be available unless one spend considerable time saving up the funds required.  Money available today is objectively worth more than the same money deferred until enough time has passed to save it for ourselves. This disparity of time value and the convenience of having the money now is the basis for charging interest.

To say, "Buy low, sell high," does not capture the essence of a good deal, because this formulation does not rule out fraudulent deals and allows for giving our blessings to the predatory, "I win-you lose" deal, which may make the predator happy for a moment, but inspires rage and indignation on the part of the poor schlemiel who was thus unfairly ripped off, and sets the stage for revenge and an unfolding dilemma of a Hatfields and McCoys feud (or a Sunni v. Shia feud too.)
  
No, the basis of a truly good deal is the trade of one valuable thing for another, like money for a sandwich, an exchange entered into voluntarily because each party expects that the trade will result in each party feeling better off for having made the deal. This transaction will normally embody the goal of profit, of buying low and selling high, according to one's own subjective judgment, but it is crucial to understand that this is also a win-win trade. It is an "I win and you win" transaction; it is the very beating heart of why free markets (that would be free markets) work well and are an embodiment of good morality. The absence of this spirit of "win-win" also explains why bureaucratic central planning of everything by sanctimonious, meddlesome, Big Brother government regulators works poorly, even when the process does not always create outright economic chaos. Bossy government always embodies an immoral ethos as the basis for how human beings should deal with each other, namely, that of coercion and force, versus freely chosen trade entered with the expectation of acting to mutual advantage. Free trade to mutual advantage is not a zero sum game, one person does not have to win only at another's expense. Free trade adds to the sum of wealth in the world. It creates more wealth than there was before the trade, as measured by the valuation of each of the traders (assuming that the trade went as it normally does) because both parties feel that they received something of more value than what they gave away in trade.

Incidentally, this astonishing dynamic of trade to a mutual advantage that leaves all parties feeling richer, is still very misunderstood in the world, as a widespread feature of the fabric of daily life. That people trade for profit, i.e. to mutual advantage, is still widely condemned as selfish. I recommend Ayn Rand to straighten out the raft of crazy confusion over self-interest and virtue.

These formulations of win-win trade and of cost versus benefit have everything to do with the crazy direction in which college costs have skyrocketed away from sanity in recent decades and how we need to think about it if we're to avoid getting sunk in life. One of the most common problems of frightened new college grads is the sudden insight that paying back the loans can easily cost more than the money you can earn at the jobs for which you are just then qualified. So here's another life-serving nugget of financial wisdom is always to spend less than you earn. It's a little late to think about this upon graduation, but it is oh, so vastly better late than later! 
 
No matter how large the vessel, any leak uncorrected, or any leaking in excess of bailing water, will eventually sink the ship; you can bet your life on it. 

You can see that I have arrived at the idea that ultimately the situation with schools has backed us into a corner where we have to look with withering hardness at the cost/benefit ratio of this great, bloody big pile of debt we accumulate by going to college. It seems that the most important thing now is to focus with steely eyes on the return on investment, if any, that we may expect to make as a consequence of paying for our degrees.

The whole situation for higher learning has changed so much since I was in college in the 1970s and early 1980s!  

In the name of making money more easily available to students, the government has once again produced another sprawling, unwieldy, intractable monster that creates a flood of perversely unintended consequences. In college education, the result now is that money is available, not so much by a market-driven increase in customer (student) demand, but by politically driven increases in money made available to students, with the result that colleges are happy to capture this money by raising prices. The result, according to figures compiled by the College Board, is that the costs of college have been rising at around twice as fast as the general rate of inflation, and have been doing so for the last half a century. This is not a situation that can continue forever. What physically must stop, will stop eventually. It's another bubble, like the dot-com tech bubble of the 1990s that burst in the spring of 2000; like the housing and financial bubbles that burst in 2007 and 2008. And like the earlier bubbles, it is a creature of the central bank, of monetary policy, of political largesse. 
 
This educational situation is the sad question of whether the benefit we can expect from our degree is worth the pile of debt we incur in getting it.
How can we answer this question? 

I still believe that the value of one's education is not entirely a matter of any direct correlation between the college degree earned and any particular expected return on this investment, although we can no longer afford to blow off any rational thinking about the expenses, and then go major in the softest of the soft humanities (dare I mention ethnic or gender studies and social justice?), at huge expense, incurring crushing debts, and then reasonably expect to find a well-paying job in industry.

Why go to college at all?

I was deeply influenced in my choice of college by Mortimer Adler's, How to Read a Book, which for me is a deep and inspiring polemic on the value of a classical liberal arts education.  For what it's worth, here is Adler, on an index card: 

Adler asserts that we need to learn enough to listen to what he calls The Great Conversation, namely, the dialogue between the greatest minds, conducted in the hall where human knowledge is accumulated, across the millennia, and disciplines, and cultures. This conversation begins with Philosophy, the mother of everything, because every field depends on answers to the Big Questions found there. What is all this?--one might ask, sweeping one's arm ostensively across the whole universe? How does all this come to be? What is its nature? Is is regular? Or random? Can we expect things to behave reliably? Or capriciously? Did a god create it? What's a god? Whose god? What is the stuff of existence? What is life? Who are we? Where did we come from? Are we puppets dancing on the fingers of the gods? Do we have free will? What is free will? What is determinism? Is the universe finite? Infinite? How would one know the difference? What is Truth? What is false? What is right? What is wrong? What can I expect of others in the way they treat me? How should I treat others? Is my life mine? Do I belong to others? Others to me? What is property? What are rights? What is art? Above all, how do we even begin to know any of this? What is knowledge itself and by what standards do we come to establish these things?

Wrestling with these questions and dozens more, in dialogues between all the great thinkers across the ages, when combined with our own independent engagement with these questions, will give us something like X-Ray vision into the body of thought we hear yammering away from all quarters in the world today. 

Philosophy is the arena in which the best minds have spoken with each other across time, in order to make any sense of life's enduring mysteries, of our place in the cosmos, and our grasp of any of it.  Without life-serving answers to these big questions, we have no ability even to begin to distinguish truth from false, right from wrong, and above all how we begin to know any of these things.  What of competing and contradictory propositions? Of mutually exclusive claims?  Philosophy ... it is both a cause of the problem and its cure.

Footnote here on how philosophy can be simultaneously insane and yet of crucial importance. I know I will not be a very inspiring salesman for philosophy if I tell you that in my humble opinion, both philosophy and religion (which I believe to be an early draft of philosophy) are in a vertigo-inspiring state of backwardness and confusion. Nevertheless, this confusion makes the subject no less crucial. Philosophy is indeed the discipline that ought to work as a solvent to clean all the bushwa and crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses out of the crevices of the mind. Yes, I say again that philosophy remains the primary source of these crazy ideas. That philosophy purveys a dizzying array of crazy ideas is a fact. That we need life-serving ideas by which to distinguish truth from falsehood is also a fact. Without a few crucial answers to what is true and right, even if these answers are held in a patchy and confused way, we would all be dead in a day. I believe the solution to the problem lies in the problem, just as the answer to the problem of high prices at the grocery store is those same high prices, because the problem inspires producers to bring more of the thing to market, the short supply of which has caused the prices to become high. In a free marketplace of ideas, the better ideas eventually seem to win because it is these ideas which are most effective and life-serving to us. I underscore the modifier eventually! Never forget that slavery mostly ended without violence. Why? Because, apart from the moral horror of the matter, slave labor turns out to be vastly inferior to the labor of people whose very freedom unleashes their best energy, inspires their creativity and whips up gales of ambition and intelligence. End footnote.
 
Back to Mortimer Adler's liberal education on an index card: next we need to know some history, so we can have a clue about where this whole antic human project has come from.
  
We need languages too, so as to know that the word is not the thing named, and to see wider truths about the things these words attempt to name.
  
We need science and math, because the language of natural science is mathematics, and without these we have no language by which to distinguish the most astonishing human accomplishments in science and technology from outright magic, as Arthur C. Clarke once put the matter.
  
The appeal of a classical or liberal arts education is to nurture a deep perspective on humanity, a basic understanding of the enduring issues with which the best minds have argued and engaged with each other since the day humans learned to write and thereby began to accumulate our knowledge, and to learn how to learn.

It is difficult to inculcate such a slow, contemplative approach to knowledge as the classical liberal arts, when one is made to feel that every hour in the classroom is leading to a Macy's Day Parade, with your float rolling down the street, festooned with long rolls of print-outs of bills for the current-day's hideously high college expenses.
  
How can one find anything like the repose for thought which is required to engage mindfully and carefully with the big questions, and get a perspective on this unique experience of being human? 
 
And then there is the problem on campus of so much philosophical lunacy, political thumb-sucking, indoctrination against all things essentially human ... 
...  okay, this is veering into deeply unwarranted overgeneralization, but everywhere on campus I see in the background the neon sign of debt flashing: $ $ $.  How can we not be scared out of our wits to pile on debt without some assurance that it will eventually pay off and not bankrupt us, or flatten us financially for decades to come?

I understand that you have some ideas about how to make your way in the world, so this may just be my own worry. With a child of my own still in college, studying a soft science, the question of cost-benefit analysis is sometimes whispering in my ear at night.

So, knowledge, always the crown jewel of humanity, remains as valuable or more than ever.  An education, a real education, is golden.
  
A conventional college education, at a bricks-and-mortar institution, purveyed in an atmosphere of political correctness, and a misanthropic mist of covertly (and not seldom overtly) Marxian indoctrination about everything, all while purveyed at chilling expense, is not something I believe in anymore. 
 
This mist of the far leftist ethos is what I myself experienced at New College of Florida. It provided me with what nowadays passes for a top-drawer liberal arts education, and there were good aspects of my education I celebrate to this day, but I must underscore the fact that education, especially as an in-state student, was not yet so chillingly expensive.
  
Did you get that?  That I no longer believe in a conventional college education, except for special cases. 
   
The huge price tab today has shifted the terms of the equation radically.  Except for those who need a credential, as with science, medicine, engineering, and scholarly studies, I'm not sure college is worth it anymore. 
 
AND, the education bubble is going to burst!  

What goes up must come down.  The rate of tuition inflation is wholly unsustainable, and outfits like the Khan Academy and open catalog programs at MIT are going to be the pins that prick this terrible bubble and begin to promote its replacement with affordable, workable places and methods of acquiring a real education.

As always, the key to everything is how we think.  

What do you want? What are all the things you want? Write them down, develop a plan to pursue them. Rate them, make a decision tree and make decide what to do next, then follow through on your decisions, the painful choices. Put your choices in your calendar, make deadlines ("a dream is a goal with a deadline," said a wise person) and then track your progress in writing! Behavior observed is behavior that can be consciously changed.
 
Remember that to decide comes from a Latin root, decidere, meaning literally, "to cut off."

For everything in our decision matrix, we should ask: how does it stack up against our other goals and resources?  I'm not saying you shouldn't pursue this, that, or the other. I'm saying that you should be able to demonstrate to yourself how you expect the time and resources you spend on pursuing any one thing you want will serve the unfolding of your ultimate, rational self-interest better than any other use of your resources, in the context of this moment.

For example, if you want to be an airline pilot, there are prerequisites that must be accomplished in a reasonably timely fashion with the resources at your disposal. There are options at every step and half-step, but a matrix is being created by setting a goal, and everything must add up and be pointed roughly in the same direction as everything else. 

We are not machines, and recreation, entertainment, rest, love, and friendships, all have a place in putting together a life of meaning, purpose, and joy.  

But having decided to become an airline pilot, if you then decide to take ten years off to go live in the highlands of Tibet so you can learn how to levitate a magic carpet ... hmm ... this might sound like it has some relation to a life in aviation, but, nah, it ain't gonna work!

And then again, maybe a life in Tibet is really what you want after all. The point is to live your life rationally so that you stand a chance of achieving the happiness that you want your life to be about, and this requires consistent, daily focus, action, and planning.

Decide what you want. Write down these goals and make a plan to pursue them. Track your actions every day. Reevaluate periodically, as necessary. 

Read Martin E. P. Seligman's new book on Flourishing. This provides proof positive that nearly all of us are capable of creating flourishing lives of joy, engagement and meaning!

Again, to the point here: a good life requires certain knowledge. That knowledge is a proper education. A proper education is a set of ideas that can be acquired through many opportunities available in the world and in cyberspace today, and therefore it is no longer true--it was never true--that a conventional, bricks-and-mortar school is essential to a good education that will serve your life very well indeed, as you unfold your talents into the best and happiest person that you, yes, you yourself, can be.

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