Christian skeptic... an oxymoron?

[Brian Jackson]

Hello all.

Have been a fan of Randi and this forum for a while, but in "lurking mode" until late. This site should be absolute must-reading for any scholar and teacher alike.

I am a 41-year-old "noob" here, an engineer by trade, a skeptic, and good friends with way-more Atheists than Christians. This seems odd to me because I’m Christian. I’m neither proud nor ashamed to say this. It does demand a couple of interesting questions however… [1] How is it that a Christian can relate better to Atheists than his “own kind?” And [2] Why hasn’t skepticism swayed him from the notion of God?

I ask these questions frequently with no satisfactory answer.

Best I can figure: [1]: Because skeptics/Atheists tend to rely on empirical evidence and rational judgment over emotion and hype in “deriving” (not “arriving at”) a hypothesis or conclusion. [2]: Belief that an outstretched arm of cells of incredible structure isn’t aimed at nothingness.

I’d like to believe (operative word= like) that a divine force is at work so I can plead ignorance of a higher wisdom’s “judgment” when some great catastrophe happens. “Thy will be done.” Gives comfort during catastrophes, though which crime this “judgment” is for remains unclear. Must be for something.

At [2] I can only say there IS SOMETHING more powerful than us, and NO it ain’t death. Consider the earliest points of “Man’s” beginnings (cheesy I know…) or of some great event that brought about Man in an instant. Who cares… we’re here. Regardless of what enabled you to have optic nerves & eye lashes to read this, you can. The fact that you can… does something that quickly dissolves into religious rhetoric.

I’m kinda caught in two worlds here. I believe in God, and I believe in Science. Doesn’t necessarily make me a Skeptic or a Christian. I do believe in logic.

Lastly, Oh crap., heck I dunno.

 

[blutoski]

Hello all.

Have been a fan of Randi and this forum for a while, but in "lurking mode" until late. This site should be absolute must-reading for any scholar and teacher alike.

I am a 41-year-old "noob" here, an engineer by trade, a skeptic, and good friends with way-more Atheists than Christians. This seems odd to me because I’m Christian. I’m neither proud nor ashamed to say this. It does demand a couple of interesting questions however… [1] How is it that a Christian can relate better to Atheists than his “own kind?” And [2] Why hasn’t skepticism swayed him from the notion of God?

I ask these questions frequently with no satisfactory answer.

Best I can figure: [1]: Because skeptics/Atheists tend to rely on empirical evidence and rational judgment over emotion and hype in “deriving” (not “arriving at”) a hypothesis or conclusion. [2]: Belief that an outstretched arm of cells of incredible structure isn’t aimed at nothingness.

I’d like to believe (operative word= like) that a divine force is at work so I can plead ignorance of a higher wisdom’s “judgment” when some great catastrophe happens. “Thy will be done.” Gives comfort during catastrophes, though which crime this “judgment” is for remains unclear. Must be for something.

At [2] I can only say there IS SOMETHING more powerful than us, and NO it ain’t death. Consider the earliest points of “Man’s” beginnings (cheesy I know…) or of some great event that brought about Man in an instant. Who cares… we’re here. Regardless of what enabled you to have optic nerves & eye lashes to read this, you can. The fact that you can… does something that quickly dissolves into religious rhetoric.

I’m kinda caught in two worlds here. I believe in God, and I believe in Science. Doesn’t necessarily make me a Skeptic or a Christian. I do believe in logic.

Lastly, Oh crap., heck I dunno.

Depending on who you ask, the person may or may not say you have a tenable position. The term you're seeking is "Fideist," which refers to a person who maintains belief because it makes them feel good. I can think of many worse reasons to have a belief, so you have my support.

My opinion - not necessarily shared by others on this forum - is that skepticism has both domain-specific and general-domain elements, such that a person can function quite skeptically in certain scopes of competence, maintain an overall skeptical approach to new subjects, but have one or two ideas that are not completely aligned with skeptics elsewhere.

Having said that, engineers are not - as a profession - known for their skepticism. They are technologists, and like other technologists such as nurses or doctors, they are vulnerable to assuming that their exposure to some sciences gives them better insight into other scientific questions.

You will find, for example, that a lot of the signatures on the Creation Science petitions are engineers (with opinions on a biology question). You will find therapeutic touch is more or less established within nursing as a bona-fide quantum energy healing modality (opinions about quantum mechanics). You will find doctors losing millions in real-estate scams (opinions about finance and law). Even scientists get sucked in by psi frauds (opinions about psychology).

The fact is: I have never met a person who is a 'whole skeptic'. There's always something that gets evaluated hastily and emotionally - usually something outside the person's competence, or something for which there is no established authority anyway.

My opinion also is that skeptics need to foster alliances with those whose interests overlap. Religous people hate healthfraud, psychic healers, urban legends, MLMs, real-estate scams, pyramid schemes, ponzi schemes, free-energy scams, UFO abduction scares, failed exorcisms, quack psychology, and the rest of the skeptical foes. My wife is a S. Baptist, an MD with a PhD in research medicine, and during a meeting of our skeptical organization, one guy felt that her religous beliefs meant she should leave the meeting because she was therefore no use to us. Whereas, I can't think of a better ally for combatting healthfraud. So you can tell which one was actually not invited back.

 

[c4ts]

The fact is: I have never met a person who is a 'whole skeptic'. There's always something that gets evaluated hastily and emotionally - usually something outside the person's competence, or something for which there is no established authority anyway.

Possibly because critical thinking requires a lot of thought, whereas coping with daily life does not. Things can easily slip right by.

 

[clarsct]

Hmmmmm.

Mlynn claims that she has had an intense personal experience that has lead her to believe ther eis a god. Not something reproducable, and she admits this.

kittynh and MoeFaux are also Xian, are they not? Though I think Moe left us again.

Skepticism isn't a belief, it is a methodology. You may use the methodology as you will. It is a tool. Nothing more.

How you use it is entirely up to you.

 

[blutoski]

Possibly because critical thinking requires a lot of thought, whereas coping with daily life does not. Things can easily slip right by.

Well, that's a different discussion, though. I think its self-evident that critical thinking leads to bad conclusions if the person has the wrong information as they go through the process. Garbage in; garbage out, as they say.

In the case of Engineers and creation science, I find they are usually very attached to the Second Law narrative, even if their exposure to thermodynamics is less complete than, say, a biochemist's. As far as they know, they are experts and have done a lot of real work getting a degree in a technical field. What they are unaware of is that the specific knowledge about entropy was merely an analogy intended for this level of application.

My feeling is that the explanation is very different: it is a lack of exposure to alternative viewpoints or recognized authority that leads one away from skepticism. Often, this is a result of a lack of willingness to entertain opposing viewpoints, so certain is the woo that he is able to ignore alternative lay viewpoints, or authorities, because he has done a lot of work to come to this particular conclusion. It's sometimes all the work (investment) that makes people dig in.

 

[Huntster]

...I believe in God, and I believe in Science........

No problem there.

Both can be, and simultaneously.

 

[.13.]

I’d like to believe (operative word= like) that a divine force is at work so I can plead ignorance of a higher wisdom’s “judgment” when some great catastrophe happens. “Thy will be done.” Gives comfort during catastrophes, though which crime this “judgment” is for remains unclear. Must be for something.

Comfort is a great thing I agree. Though I don't see a difference between determinism and will of God. Things 'just happen' or God makes them happen, either case I have no control over those things. Believing one can influence God through worship is another matter entirely. One where skepticism can be applied.

 

[Jono]

My opinion - not necessarily shared by others on this forum - is that skepticism has both domain-specific and general-domain elements, such that a person can function quite skeptically in certain scopes of competence, maintain an overall skeptical approach to new subjects, but have one or two ideas that are not completely aligned with skeptics elsewhere.

Yes, I think this applies to everyone more or less.

 

[Godmode]

I'm skeptical of skeptical Xians. I mean everyone's skeptical of something, that doesn't make you a skeptic per se. There's not a person alive who believes everything.

 

[El Greco]

Well, there are Republicans, LA Clippers supporters and those who believe their wives love them. Many of those have *decided* (either consciously or not) that they'll always be Republicans, LA Clippers supporters and that their wives will always be the absolute best thing in their lives. And often they have no proof anymore to sustain their beliefs (even worse, they never had). Yet, they still consider themselves skeptics. Not much different from Christians, I reckon.

 

[deBergerac]

I think of myself as both a sceptic and a Christian and it has worked for me. Religious believes are not rational, but life is not all rational. What makes your position sceptic or not is what kind of evidence you allow for in a debate.

Even though I am a Christian I cannot support anyone using the Bible to prove creation, the Bible is not applicable as evidence in a debate about evolution or design.
On the other hand if someone has the Bible as inspiration for their own personal ethics it is their problem as long as they do not want to stone someone for adultery.

Religion that is not applied to measurable effects is much like a personal taste in music or food, nothing to be sceptical about.

But one do need to be careful with religion because it is a dangerous power that can move people from what is sane to what is murderous and suicidal. Strangely that is also true for other things like belief in your own race’s superiority or the love for you favourite football team (soccer for you in the US).

It is my impression that there are people that have a healthy religious belief and that we who do (I consider myself to be one of those people) are as much appalled, if not more so, by the superstitious religious believes that are out there as atheist.

Sure I believe in strange things like life after death and that there is a God that actually cares about you, but I do not believe in magic, that praying to God will give me a new car. In my opinion people that worships relics or see omens in the sky have failed to understand both science and religion.

On the other hand some atheists fail to understand the diversity of religious believes that exist and should learn that it is difficult to convince a religious person of one’s point of view if one attacks a strawman.

 

[davefoc]

.
The fact is: I have never met a person who is a 'whole skeptic'. There's always something that gets evaluated hastily and emotionally - usually something outside the person's competence, or something for which there is no established authority anyway.

I don't know if 'whole skeptics' exist but I would theorize that they don't. It is the nature of humans that after a conclusion is developed to feel good about confirmatory information and to feel bad about contradictory information. So humans seek out confirmatory information and avoid contradictory information related to established views. Eventually this leads to the establishment of beliefs that can not be affected by contradictory information.

I use the word skeptic to describe an individual who is somewhat aware of this process and who conciously attempts to reduce its effect. But skeptics are not immune to the process and so I suspect that Blutoski is right and that 'whole skeptics' don't exist.

Having said that, belief in Christianity as opposed to the belief in a mysterious, unknowable God strikes me as a particularly strange belief for a skeptic to develop. I have no memory of religious belief so it is a little difficult for me to imagine even what it is like, but basing a religion on the theory that a God created a human like entity that in some way was God himself so that he could come to earth, say some ambiguous things, most of which are lost, and then be horrifically tortured to death as a way of establishing the religon that God wanted people to follow strikes me as wildly unlikely. Coupling that with the fact that most of Christian theology was created by individuals who lived after the life of Jesus and that there is information available that suggests that the religion of Jesus would have been substantially different than Christianity I have a hard time understanding how anybody can believe in this, let alone a skeptic.

As to Blutoski's ideas about non-skeptical engineers:
I was an electrical engineer for thirty years or so. I theorized that it was impossible to be a successful engineer without being a skeptic. The tendency is to believe that your stuff will work. It is a very difficult bias to confront. You've spent all this time working on something, you want to believe that you have found all the mistakes. But the reality, which an engineer needs to constantly deal with is that your stuff will have mistakes, and you need to keep fighting to figure out what they are. You need to figure out tests that will challenge your assumption that stuff will work. If you don't do this successfully, the cost to your company will be huge as products leave the development cycle and make their way into production.

Of course, Blutoski's point was that an individual can exhibit skepticism selectively. An engineer can function skeptically in his job and non-skeptically in other aspects of his life. This is true, but I still have trouble imagining a person that could work successfully as an engineer and be promoting something like creationism outside his job. It is at least possible that these "engineers" were not functioning as what I would consider to be an engineer in their careers. The engineering world is divided loosely into technicians and engineers. Technicians have a lot of skills that engineers often don't have. But when it comes to understanding the big picture and the underlying theories people who thought and acted like engineers were key. Sometimes, people who held the title of engineer, were actually more closely fulfilling the role of technicians. I wonder if some of these creationist engineers might fall into that kind of classification.

ETA: Welcome to the forum Brian Jackson. For what it is worth there are quite a few people that regularly participate in this forum that have beliefs similar to yours. One of the speakers at TAM, a good friend of Randi's and an earlier administrator of the this forum is one of them.

 

[tkingdoll]

I think if you walk around calling yourself a Skeptic with a capital S, that implies you don't belief in irrational things without sufficient evidence of their existence, so of course being a Christian is un-skeptical. Christianity simply doesn't stand up to the application of critical thinking.

However, as a human being, you can believe what you want. If you are happy suspending your skepticism to be a Christian, but applying it to everything else, good for you. That's a million times better than no skepticism at all, in my opinion.

Yes, it's an inconsistent position for you to have, but you can do exactly what you like. You may get judged for it by other Skeptics, and you may even get called on it (because presumably you can't produce any evidence for the existence of God), but as long as you are comfortable with that then few people here will think less of you for it.

Personally I don't understand it, it's in effect saying "I don't take anything without evidence...oh except this one thing cause I'm scared of going to hell" - but really, who cares what I think? If you are comfortable with your way of thinking and can reconcile your beliefs with your skepticism then you have gone further than many Christians do. For a start, you recognise the conflict. I respect you for that.

So, groove on. There are other Christian skeptics here, and I am proud to count several of them among my friends. They are generous, warm-hearted, wonderfully intelligent people, and you're in good company.

Welcome to the forum!

 

[blutoski]

Of course, Blutoski's point was that an individual can exhibit skepticism selectively. An engineer can function skeptically in his job and non-skeptically in other aspects of his life. This is true, but I still have trouble imagining a person that could work successfully as an engineer and be promoting something like creationism outside his job. It is at least possible that these "engineers" were not functioning as what I would consider to be an engineer in their careers. The engineering world is divided loosely into technicians and engineers. Technicians have a lot of skills that engineers often don't have. But when it comes to understanding the big picture and the underlying theories people who thought and acted like engineers were key. Sometimes, people who held the title of engineer, were actually more closely fulfilling the role of technicians. I wonder if some of these creationist engineers might fall into that kind of classification.

Yes, that was my point: most people are competent within their sphere of expertise. As it happens, the majority of engineers I work with are like the majority of scientists and doctors and nurses I work with: they're almost all religious. In particular, though, the engineers are all bible-thumpers (Mennonite Brethren) and hardcore creationists. Their engineering degrees give them special authority in their congregations regarding this issue, because they are regarded as 'credentialled scientists'. I'm not saying that all engineers are like this, just making one example of how a technical field can be mistaken for science by the lay public and by its own membership.

And we can't forget Aum Shinrikyo, which is probably the only cult with a functioning laser death ray, thanks to the fact that it was almost entirely composed of engineers!

 

[Godmode]

I agree that we all have some irrational beliefs. As humans, we are suseptable to making connections where there are none, and making the occasional "leap of faith" out of nowhere.
I guess I draw the line at KNOWINGly doing it. If you are skeptic, one presumes you are well aware of the lack of evidence of xianity and other religions. Not just the lack of evidence of god, but tons of evidence against several claims of religion. I guess the notion of saying "Just because you can't prove it doesn't make it false" isn't enough for me. That statement is true, but it's also a poor reason to believe in something.

I'm not saying I don't have my own misconceptions. But I suppose I like to "believe" that my misconceptions are at least within a logical realm of possablity. And to me, god is not.

 

[blutoski]

I agree that we all have some irrational beliefs. As humans, we are suseptable to making connections where there are none, and making the occasional "leap of faith" out of nowhere.
I guess I draw the line at KNOWINGly doing it. If you are skeptic, one presumes you are well aware of the lack of evidence of xianity and other religions. Not just the lack of evidence of god, but tons of evidence against several claims of religion. I guess the notion of saying "Just because you can't prove it doesn't make it false" isn't enough for me. That statement is true, but it's also a poor reason to believe in something.

I'm not saying I don't have my own misconceptions. But I suppose I like to "believe" that my misconceptions are at least within a logical realm of possablity. And to me, god is not.

Fair enough. A question: why do you prefer to work within a logical realm of possibility?

 

[davefoc]

I guess I draw the line at KNOWINGly doing it. If you are skeptic, one presumes you are well aware of the lack of evidence of xianity and other religions.

I have thoughts like this also, but I struggle with it.

It is interesting to me that most of the skeptics on this board share very similar views about religion and about the supernatural, but we disagree about a whole lot of other stuff. What is going on here? If we're so damned objective how is it that we can take the same set of facts and come to completely different conclusions? Maybe skeptics aren't any more objective than anybody else, we just share common disbeliefs in a particular subset of the cultural belief structure?

In one of the threads about Foleygate an individual quoted extensively from somebody presenting one of the Republican talking points on this thing. I thought the talking point was so completely without merit that I thought that any objective person would laugh at it and he thought the talking point was persuasive enough to quote it. How is this possible? Two, theoretically objective skeptics, taking in the same information and coming to opposite viewpoints. Some how the kind of biases that we think we have risen above in judgements about the physical world must be strongly affecting the views of at least one of us because both views can't be true. So what's the deal here. Is there really something unique about the way a skeptic thinks or do we just fool ourselves into thinking there is something that distinguishes the thinking of a skeptic from a non-skeptic.

 

[T'ai Chi]

And [2] Why hasn’t skepticism swayed him from the notion of God?

From Christians (and other religious) whom I've talked to, there are many possible reasons:

1) a negative stance doesn't fill in any void, doesn't replace what it is trying to debunk

2) no one can apparently ever survey all of space and time, so there is always unknown things despite their strongest beliefs against it

3) religion has had a positive effect on their lives, and lives of people they love and respect

4) the Book (take your pick) is one book. The 'book' of nature is another one, one which is convincing support to theists and non-theists alike.

5) faith has probably been a major part of every culture, in every time

6) no matter what, people see (real) design and (real) meaning in the world

I’m kinda caught in two worlds here. I believe in God, and I believe in Science. Doesn’t necessarily make me a Skeptic or a Christian. I do believe in logic.

You are both, and there is definitely not a contradiction IMO. You're in great company; Newton comes to mind.

 

[kellyb]

Why hasn’t skepticism swayed him from the notion of God?

Well, if you were raised Christian, or have been attending church, you might be a little bit brainwashed.
There are also some Christian docterines out there (that you might or might not be a victim of) that work like a kind of trap to keep people in belief.

Deconverting out of Christianity is a really terrifying process when your mind is so trained to look at everything in that Christian way. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, really. It's much, much more difficult than, say, giving up a belief in telepathy.

Anyway, I agree with the "no whole skeptic" idea.
Everybody connects the dots a bit wrong from time to time.

 

[davefoc]

It appears that Brian Jackson has left us.

If he hasn't I came across this article on the sicenific American site that he might be interested in:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=2&articleID=00002D9C-D592-150E-959283414B7F0000

It talks about scientists who have written books about their belief in God.

It didn't talk about any that were Christians although perhaps some of them were.