Embracing Ignorance and Asking Questions: Raising our Collective IQ

by David Ince

It's all about asking questions. That's what being an atheist, skeptic, or freethinker is all about. It's something that people of faith, as much as they protest to the contrary, seem to have missing from their armoury.

Yes, theists are generally good at stating their positions, telling you what they believe and what you need to do, but they almost never get into interrogatories. This lack of questioning is unfortunate, not only for the believer who loses out on a chance to understand more about the atheist perspective,  but also for the atheist who misses the chance to hone his/ her argument and improve upon it. Iron sharpens iron is what they say, but that only happens when there are questions providing the friction.

When I look back at my education in the Caribbean, I see suppression of an inquiring culture rather than promotion of it. This stems not just from a religious background that says something is true because “I say so,” but from a lack of confidence in our people, an underlying fear of being seen as unintelligent just because you don't know the answer. I know this was at play when I was at school. A teacher in Maths, History, or Science would stand before us and expound on a subject. At the end of the class would be the inevitable, “Everybody understands? Anyone have any questions?”  

Nine times out of ten every hand would stay down and we would nod and indicate we followed everything fully. I guess to some extent we weren't lying. We understood the words, the teacher was speaking English, we understood English. But as I have come to know now, understanding something is far more than just comprehending words. Still, in our minds at that time, words were all that mattered, most times we just sat and wrote out the exact phrases that emanated from the teacher's lips. We could, if called upon, stand up and repeat what Mr. Brown said and that was good enough.

Putting your hand up just was not an option. No, that would be a sign of weakness. It would be perceived that you were a bit of a “slow” child. Twenty-nine children nodding away confidently and you are the only backward one that doesn't get it? If you wanted to not be taunted for being stupid the thing to do was to keep quiet, don't open your mouth and show your ignorance, that's how we were trained in the Caribbean and to a large extent that's how many of us have remained in adulthood.

I have asked myself many times, how to change that mindset. How do we reverse what we learnt in school and convince people that it is the smart kid not the idiot that is the one who asks the questions? The answer to me seems to be education. I can say for my part, the further I have gone in my education, the less concerned I have become of displaying ignorance. It has often been said that the more you know the more you realise you don't know. The more knowledge you have the more comfortable you are with your lack of knowledge. Comfortable not from the perspective that you are happy to stay in that state forever, but comfortable to admit that you just don't know the answer to some things. You are willing to defer to an expert when you find yourself out of your depth in an area, taking your ignorance not as a badge of honour, but as a fuel to drive you towards greater knowledge on highways that were completely free of traffic before.

They say that ignorance is bliss, but I find ignorance exciting, a potential for enlightenment and discovery, and there are few things more thrilling than that. I think the embracing of ignorance needs to be a key part of what we promote in the secular movement  It is something I am enjoying doing myself on the  podcast 'Freethinking Island' which I am co-hosting weekly. It is easy when you put a podcast out to look at it as an instrument to get your message out, get your voice out there to the world. It is great to be able to add your voice out there, but I am quickly realising that the true value is in listening to what others have to say. These last two weeks we've had Seon Lewis and Jonathan Bellot, both of whom took us on their journey from faith meanwhile teaching us so much in the areas where they have their expertise. Here the beauty of the shows is not in how much you can say but in how much you can ask, what more can you find out about the person on the other side of the microphone or computer screen. 

However, what we in the skeptic community find when we take our questioning  habits back to those in belief is an attitude a bit like back in those school days.  Sometimes they think we are deliberately being cheeky, like the class clown, who asks the biology teacher if she was alive with the australopithecines.  Other times they may believe that we are just trying to catch them out with a “gotcha” question. What I find though, is that more often than not they think we are just a little bit behind. Slow learners in the subject of Spirituality. We have to be kept in detention, write “lines” or go to their extra classes until we get it right.  When we consistently say we don't understand them they are flabbergasted, because for them the concept is simple: God sent his son Jesus to die for our sins so that believing in him we can be saved. 

What's so difficult to understand about that? They are right, it is easy to understand, at least the words. We can repeat them just as easily as they can, but we need the follow up. Do the words make sense? Is there logic there? Does it mesh with what we observe or understand in other areas of the universe which we experience? If only our Christian friends could come to understand that we really do follow the words and that's why we just can't understand why they follow the words. 

I don't know about other atheists, but often when I speak to theists it is to just clarify what they are thinking, what they believe and how they see the world. In finding this out, it allows me to learn more about them and I can appreciate why they may have certain attitudes even if I don't endorse their views. What happens often is that they get stuck even in trying to clarify their own positions. What do they mean by words like God, spirit, faith, transcendence, immaterial, omnipotence, sanctification, transubstantiation? Often they can't tell you, because they have never asked these questions of themselves. They are like the nodding students just repeating the words of the teacher. Parroting words that have that veneer of intellectualism, but no intelligible meaning. Why do they find themselves in this position? It's down to their embarrassment with ignorance. They hear these concepts spoken about by the eloquent orators in their midst. They don't understand, but they are ashamed. Ashamed to say that it all sounds like gobbledygook to them. Their lack of self-belief makes them think that the confusion is on their side, that if they had a little more education, the speaker's words would all make sense.  They don't want to let anyone else around them know that they are confused so they listen and nod knowingly, hoping that their apparent comprehension of these highfalutin concepts will win the admiration of those sitting around. 

Many people in the faith community are well aware of the ignorance phobia in their ranks and they milk it for all it is worth. This is how you end up with people like Deepak Chopra, William Lane Craig, and others in the “baffle them with bullshit” brigade. These peddlers know full well that their audiences have a number of people of average education but who want to be perceived by their peers as erudite scholars. Such members of the audience are prime candidates for lapping up all on the pseudo-intellectual menu. They dance in delight when they get to hear a talk that includes realms of paradigms of infinite regresses on quantum levels of degenerating orbiting electromagnetic layers of amplifying magnitudes. Now they can bring out this vocabulary on demand to make themselves sound impressive. Sad to say, but phrases like that often work like a charm on Caribbean people. In our islands, big words are often the measure of brilliance. He who uses the most rises to the top of the pile in the minds of the masses. Once you have a reputation to go along with the verbiage, you are set. The more the talk is out there unchallenged, the more  people in the community will pick  it up and use the ideas as if they are their own, then their lesser informed friends will join in the smiling and nodding, hoping to show that they too are sufficiently informed to understand the babble. Oil is scarce in the Caribbean, but every day more and more of these “nodding donkeys” pop up. 

It's a hard road, but we have to encourage people to be honest about their ignorance. If you don't understand, say you don't understand. Admitting you don't know may make you feel small for the moment, but you will leave as a larger person because your knowledge is greater. I recognise that this is easier said than done. If you have a doctorate, you can be pretty sure that being shown to be ignorant about one obscure fact or concept is not going to make people think you are an idiot. You know you will have more than enough opportunity to come back later and show your superior understanding in the area where you have your expertise. However, it's a different thing when you are among people and you know your level of education is low in comparison, when you know that failure to understand something simple could make you be perceived as a simpleton. That's why I say that education is the key to curing ignorance-phobia. The greater the percentage of our populations that have a sound education, the less likely that persons will feel intimidated about displaying or demonstrating what they don't know.  

Yes, in this new era of critical thinking in the Caribbean, we need to stand up and be confident enough to say we don't know. Ignorance followed by questions, that's the key to critical thinking. We don't know, but we'll try to find out. If we don't have pride in admitting ignorance, people will continue to try to hide it and there is no better place to hide it than under the rock of religion—the place where “I don't know” is somehow covered over by the idea that a God whose mind we can never know, knows everything. 

Just Who Is This God You Speak of?

Just Who Is This God You Speak of?

by Jonathan Bellot

            It is easy to forget that “God” is a proper name. For most theists and some deists, God, after all, is supposedly in some sense personal, if not a person outright; it’s only convenient he, she, or it have a name one can refer to. But while it may seem convenient for this thing, this deity, to have a name, it’s ultimately more problematic than convenient. A name, after all, should refer to someone or something one is in some way aware of, acquainted with. To use a name that does not clearly refer to someone or something is a bit odd. In a talk entitled “What’s Next for Atheism?” A. C. Grayling put the problem like this: if we replace God’s name with something more common, like “Fred,” the oddity of our claims becomes pretty apparent. If I say that Fred went to the 7-11 on Friday, and, once pressed, must admit that I do not know much about this Fred—what he looks like or sounds like, how old he is, where he lives, even if he is truly a “he”—you would be right to ask me how I can say that “Fred” went to the 7-11, since “Fred” has no clear meaning in this context. No Fred could be identified by me or anyone else on a security camera, either, since no one has the faintest idea what Fred looks like, assuming Fred looks like anything.

            Or, as Grayling put it: “Who made the universe? Fred. I have a deep personal relationship…with Fred.” By humanizing God, by making this indistinct person seem more intimate by nothing more than the change of a name, you might suddenly realize how empty the space seems beneath the word “God,” in the sense that it’s not clear who or what should go there. If I were to say I have an intimate relationship with Melissa, but have no idea what she looks or sounds like, no sensory details at all, indeed don’t even know she’s a “she”—well, you’d be right to look at me with raised eyebrows and start stepping back.

            The same, you may be about to say, goes for God. While it’s true that some speakers will provide specific definitions and traits of “God,” it’s also true that many people use the name to refer to whatever “supreme” being they have in mind, regardless of whether or not that being’s characteristics may accord with someone else’s. Thus, a Christian, a Muslim, and a deist who do not know each other’s respective beliefs can all say “I believe in God” and think they are speaking about the same being, though each one of them may have a being with different properties in mind. It’s not unlike if we imagine that there are two people chatting in a café, and each has a friend named Brian; without asking for further identification, each assumes that the “Brian” the other person is talking about is the same Brian, when, in fact, each is talking about a different person who simply happens to have the same name. This can easily lead to misunderstandings. One need only turn to various American conservatives’ attempts to claim that America is a Christian nation because the founders (such as, say, Jefferson and Paine) believed in “God” to see how easy it is to make mistakes, if not simply deceive the simple-minded. Jefferson and Paine, after all, were deists; Paine, in particular, took pain to emphasize the fact that he was not a Christian by ridiculing Christianity in an infamous pamphlet of 1807 (in its final form), The Age of Reason. Yet he spoke of believing in God, and misunderstanding—or manipulating—such passages might lead one to believe he was talking about the same “God” fellow as the founders who actually were Christians. The same, of course, is true for Einstein and Spinoza—and Spinoza famously equated God with “Nature,” thus revealing a singularly different being from the God of the Abrahamic faiths.

            Clearly, then, it matters what person—or thing—we mean when we say “God.”

            But it’s interesting to note that this seeming emptiness behind the word “God” doesn’t only extend to potential ambiguity; it extends even into the more complex definitions of God one may run across. The Reformed Epistemologists, like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, for instance, have made—though they did not invent the definition—a certain description of God infamous: God, we are told, is spaceless, timeless, eternal, immaterial, changeless, enormously powerful (if not omnipotent), omnibenevolent, and metaphysically necessary (uncaused). On the surface, this sounds great; God has finally been pinned down. But on closer examination, the matter is hardly clear—or perhaps it’s all too transparent. Taken literally, these definitions inform us that God takes up no space, consists of no matter (appropriate, really, given that he takes up no space), and exists outside of time. One could stop there. God, if we take this literally, is theoretically indistinguishable from nothingness—or, at least, frighteningly close. Mind you, like Parmenides, I don’t quite know what nothingness is, not having ever experienced anything but something; as Wittgenstein said in a 1929 Lecture of Ethics, “it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.” But God here is as close as I can get.

            Of course, there is another way to take these words, which is to invoke the possibly apocryphal medieval exercise of counting how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. (Such exercises did exist, but it’s unclear whether or not this specific one did or was created later as a caricature of the exercises in general.) It is possible to think, intuitively, of something taking up space without taking up space (and that was the answer to the pins question—angels take up no space, not being material, so an infinity of them could fit on the head of a pin). A mind, Craig likes to assert, is not material and does not take up space as material things do. And, as for time, Craig asserts—though more shakily—God might have created the universe at the exact same moment he desired to do so, since the desire cannot have preceded the creation of the universe, or God would have been acting in time—and time, according to the Big Bang model, cannot meaningfully exist at the moment of the Big Bang (and thus, there isn’t really a “before” the Big Bang, since relativity means that time loses all meaning when the universe is bunched up altogether at once in the point of the Big Bang, the singularity). Mind you, all neuroscience currently points to the mind being a product of the brain and not independent of it, as the dualists would assert (and Craig is not unsympathetic to dualism). Moreover, while we can say that things can take up space “without” taking up space, it’s not actually clear that this is either possible or even a meaningful statement. What is actually beneath those words? What does it mean to take up no space or to be “beyond” space—or, worse, time? (On the assumption that time even is even real, that is, more than just a convenient illusion, which I’m unsure of, somewhat alongside Julian Barbour and J. M. E. McTaggart.) At this point, someone might retreat into saying we can’t understand these concepts, just as a negative theologian—someone defining God by what he isn’t—might say that God can exist without existing. And I don’t deny that it’s possible that we just can’t understand these things but that they may be possible. I don’t believe in a deity, but I’m well-aware of the fact that I do not know everything, and there may be much more out there to learn. Hell, I can’t even disprove solipsism—and you—some irony for kicks—can’t, either. Perhaps God can exist and not-exist at the same time, not unlike Wittgenstein’s parody of Freud’s notion of the unconscious: “Mr. Nobody,” Wittgenstein called it. 
            Or, as Samuel Beckett asked in the addenda at the end of his novel Watt,
                 who may tell the tale
                 of the old man?

                 weigh absence in a scale?
                 mete want with a span?
                 the sum assess
                 of the world's woes?
                 nothingness
                 in words enclose?

            And mystery, indescribability, can be beautiful, in a deep way, as Einstein and Gabriel Marcel knew so well. Perhaps there are names we cannot speak because we will never have the words. 
     But at the same time, we should be careful. If we say something doesn’t take up space, maybe it doesn’t—and maybe that’s all it means, and there’s nothing there. As Julia Kristeva writes in The Feminine and the Sacred, those Christian mystics who went very far in negating God’s existence while affirming it may simply have been avoiding the fact that they were saying there was no God. Kristeva uses the example of Angela of Foligno, who described the divine as “an ‘abyss,’ ‘a thing that has no name.’” For Kristeva, this “thing without a name may betray…a suggestion of disbelief…[t]he latencies of a mystic atheism.” In so negative a theology, God may well vanish if one presses hard enough. Perhaps we cannot escape from this disappearance by using words to cover them up, to cover up the terrifying emptiness and ambiguity behind the very name of “God.”

            But the thing is, I love these discussions. I want to be challenged, to have my world and my beliefs spun on their axis by a new argument or new evidence. I want to hear and have these discussions in the islands—and, believe me, there are people from the Caribbean who are having them. But the average person there (and not only there, of course) does not choose to examine who “God” is or if God is truly Mr. Nobody. We revel in a simple, childish Christianity and, in some cases, Islam. We do not elevate the discussion; we assume that God is as obviously what we think he is as it is obvious that we breathe—and thus to assume God may not exist or may be other than we think may well be tantamount to being a fool or mentally ill (both of which skeptics are routinely called by fanatics, should the topic of skepticism even come up). We need something more. We need to be questioners, to be proud of ourselves for stepping away from simple answers and asking questions.

The world we find behind those questions may not always be pretty or comforting; it may well be bleak and depressing. Or it may be glorious and marvelous. Or depressing. But we will have found it ourselves. And that is the journey—the never-ending journey, like Jose Saramago’s tale about a man searching for an unknown island—we in the Caribbean should be happy to be on. Instead, we tend to attack others for asking too many questions.

Let us make our voices and questions heard—now and not forever after, but for a good long time.