Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle For The Skeptical Movement?

[Sal]

"It is a pity that the ignorant are always so certain whereas the wise are so full of doubt."

I think that anyone who studies the world with an open mind learns to be humble.

Scientists learn how conclusions that seem completely proven by evidence can fall apart nonetheless. History shows that much of what we hold to be true today will seem laughable in the future.

Historians see that systems and ideologies which their adherents took to be inevitable to human nature pass away with time.

Religious people see that there are good people in other religions, and that their own religion doesn't guarantee goodness.

Atheists discover that the views of religious issues they had when they became atheists are overly simple.

The trouble is that people are only tenuously and sporadically rational. All these groups of people hold to their beliefs with more passion than is justified, and filter evidence to suit their preferences. Humility is always justified, and rarely accepted.

1. Children, from the onset, already have open minds. I forget who said it, kids display a level of honest inquiry not so dissimilar from natural philosophers & researchers/scientists, paraphrasing. You can guess how closed minds come about.

2. The former is easy; anyone that's honest with themselves knows the error-correction we constantly make, and not only in scientific theory, but also in daily life. Also, I think you have a misapprehension about what a scientific model is. It's not so much that a model is wrong, for the most part, rather that we correct them to better fit the available evidence. Secondly, if history has taught us anything, it's the provision that comes with any view, which might later seem laughable. Such as an observation Eric Weinstein made about supposedly smart people, which was that for centuries, people carried their luggage. It wasn't until someone got the not-so-genius idea to put wheels under their luggage, that they realized a better way to move their luggage, and today we take that for granted.

3. Is this another one of those credulous ideas that we have to respect people's point-of-view of old times from their vantage point? This might work for historical purposes, to better understand their systems and ideologies, but does nothing for us now. We know better now, and I have no doubt in my mind with further discovery, inventions and overall advancement, that we will know better still in the future.

4. BuuuuUUUuuuullshit. Show me a consensus that shows this for the average believer for various faiths across the board. Not only are no two faiths the same, they also think that they, particularly, have the special sauce. This type of thinking excludes the possibility of granting errors on their own, and imposes on them the thinking that everyone else is wrong. Think about it in a memetic evolutionary way: The wishy-washy faiths without copying and survival mechanisms built into their tenets died out, being replaced by those faiths that did have those mechanisms. Religions can only survive as mind viruses.

5. Maybe for the lucky atheists that weren't brought up with a faith being shoved into their face every Sunday. Try that same shit with an apostate, you'll get a different response.

6. We are emotional first. Reasoning is built upon a skewy layer of emotions. It's easy to see why too when comparing a decision based on emotion and one on reason. The decision behind, e.g. choosing between 10 different flavors of ice cream takes way too long trying to reason about it, when with an emotion (of I like that particular taste better or whatever other criteria) it takes no time at all. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss emotional responses. With that said, you can't use in a meaningful way, e.g. what path is the shortest between 2 points with emotions, and that's where reason plays its part of an analytical approach. It's with humility that we are able to accept errors on our own part. Faiths hijack this.

[Belacqua]

You can guess how closed minds come about.

Children are open to information, and they take it in from their environment. If they are supplied with science-type information, they form that kind of view. If they are supplied with religion-type information, they form that kind of view. Closed minds come about when either side, once the view is formed, decides it's the only good one and is closed to alternatives. 

I think you have a misapprehension about what a scientific model is. It's not so much that a model is wrong, for the most part, rather that we correct them to better fit the available evidence.

Tacho Brahe's system fit the available empirical evidence and a lot of people believed it for a while. Then a better explanation came along. 

People thought that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and then the guy discovered H. pylori. 

Intellectual humility demands that we acknowledge that many of the things we currently hold to be true will similarly be replaced.

Please tell me what misapprehension you think I have.

It wasn't until someone got the not-so-genius idea to put wheels under their luggage, that they realized a better way to move their luggage, and today we take that for granted.

Technology improves. Someday, if we don't go extinct, the tech we have now will look primitive. People will say it was ridiculous that we didn't see some things sooner. Intellectual humility demands that we recognize this.

systems and ideologies, but does nothing for us now. We know better now, and I have no doubt in my mind with further discovery, inventions and overall advancement, that we will know better still in the future.

Ideologies and political systems are not the same as technology. Sometimes they get better, but in other ways they may get worse. Capitalism, for example, is likely to make the planet uninhabitable. A nature religion that held the earth to be sacred would be better for us now. 

This type of thinking excludes the possibility of granting errors on their own, and imposes on them the thinking that everyone else is wrong. 

And you believe that your scientific approach to knowledge is correct, and everyone who doesn't agree with you is wrong. "Oh, but in MY case it's correct!" But everyone says that. Intellectual humility demands that we recognize the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. 

"Religion" is a big word that includes a number of very different subjects. It can address ethics and metaphysics, subjects which by definition science doesn't deal with. 

Intellectual humility demands that we recognize the boundaries of what science does and doesn't do (this is why it works so well at what it does). Metaphysics and ethics may not be susceptible to proof in the way that scientific issues are. We have to deal with each issue in its appropriate form, and not imagine that our favorite method is one-size-fits-all. 

Religions can only survive as mind viruses.

Any system of explanation only survives because it is passed from one person to another. Concepts aren't really viruses -- you're using a metaphor to express your contempt. 

5. Maybe for the lucky atheists that weren't brought up with a faith being shoved into their face every Sunday. Try that same shit with an apostate, you'll get a different response.

Or with unlucky atheists who have never learned anything about religion other than it is some kind of idiot-making virus. This is narrow minded and historically false. 

I wouldn't be quick to dismiss emotional responses. With that said, you can't use in a meaningful way, e.g. what path is the shortest between 2 points with emotions, and that's where reason plays its part of an analytical approach. It's with humility that we are able to accept errors on our own part. Faiths hijack this.

You're begging an important question. You seem to have the idea that any "meaningful" way will necessarily be a geometrical, analytic approach. But people aren't robots, and meaning is found or created in all kinds of ways. To declare that emotion is never a part of meaning is silly. 

Humility demands that we take non-science seriously, when discussing questions that aren't empirical, repeatable, and quantifiable. 

Your faith in science is hijacking your ability to learn humbly from people unlike yourself.

[Foxaèr]

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

[Angrboda]

By gawrsh, Johnson Johnson is right! We may one day discover that rocks fall up instead of down. My misplaced confidence has been corrected. Thank you, good neighbor!

[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.

[Sal]

Gee whiz, I guess all those human-fueled bonfires were just to light up the ignorance of the peasants.

[Ranjr]

 Hume, Locke, and other Christian philosophers 

[Belacqua]

 Hume, Locke, and other Christian philosophers 

You're right, I shouldn't have included Hume in a list of Christians. My apologies.

[brewer]

I didn't know there was a "Skeptical Movement". Where do I go to sign up?

[Ranjr]

You're right, I shouldn't have included Hume in a list of Christians. My apologies.

Avoid glittering generalities and strawmen.  Such broad statements and cherry picked hypotheticals rarely hold up.  You mention Galileo in one paragraph, then conclude history shows religion is not inherently opposed to science.  It fully opposes science that challenges it's claims.  The rest doesn't matter.  As for history, when it is a crime to not be a believer, we can't be certain who truly was and who wasn't a believer based on what was written.  We can be certain religious leaders routinely denounce science that challenges their claims.