Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle For The Skeptical Movement?

[Belacqua]

The ones who most need to utilize humility are not basing their beliefs on intellectual objectivity.

The danger is to imagine that humility is something that OTHER people need. Not ourselves.

So atheists who are 100% sure that the things they hold to be true are the best ever, the one true way of knowing, and unassailably correct, might demand that the people who disagree with them show humility -- but it's only a way of saying that people who disagree with us should be humble enough to admit that we are right and they are wrong. It is a deeply non-humble demand. 

It's been pointed out by scholars of the Enlightenment that secularization doesn't entail the elimination of religious concepts, but their restatement and assimilation. The science-only pride is a good example of this.

So some atheists will insist that babies are born free of prejudice, that our natural state is actually one of science. This is a pure and sinless nature. But then, like a snake in the garden, religion sneaks in and causes us to fall away from truth. We've been in this darkness for a long time, but now, thanks to a small cadre of the enlightened who will generously lead us to Truth, we finally have a chance of freeing mankind from the fallen state of error which the evil of religion has brought over the world.

Science is truth, and scientists are our saviors! Religion is darkness, and when it is burned away we will at last live in peace! 

It's a fairy tale for Christians, and it's a fairy tale for atheists. 

There is no pure state of uncorrupted knowledge. Science is not conducted, in the real world, by enlightened purists. It's funded by corporations or universities, and carried out by people who need grants or tenure or publications to keep the money flowing. Journals are for-profit and publish papers that get attention. If the world were perfect, and people were angels, science would work as its fanboys claim. But it isn't and we aren't. 

This is not to say that some version of Christianity is, as an alternative, true. It is only to say that getting rid of "religion," whatever that is, doesn't remove the need for humility. 

Science fans who think they don't need humility are part of the problem.

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Roughly speaking, the scientific method that we know and love got up and running in the 16th century. Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, and others, were all Christians. Not just nominal get-along Christians, but believers. Their theology held that God doesn't operate through daily miracles but through orderly knowable principles. (The word "logos," in John 1:1, means something like "principles" or "reason." It is the manner in which the world works.) Hume, Locke, and other Christian philosophers were working on the intellectual underpinnings of how and to what degree the truth of the world could be knowable.

So it's not true about history to say that "religion," whatever that is, is inherently opposed to science or that it has habitually opposed knowledge. That's another myth.