Embrace the truth; unless…

Based on a comment on my last post, I’ve been thinking much about how fascinating it is that many people superficially urge truth-seeking without committing to embracing the truth when it’s found. I myself am guilty of this at times; everyone pays lip service to the truth, but it’s hard to hold your views loosely enough to allow for frequent personal paradigm shifts. It’s a very human thing to do to pick out patterns from our experiences and learning, and it’s easy to become trapped by these patterns. Karl Popper illustrated this by the idea of a single black Australian swan falsifying the European hypothesis that all swans are white, which might have been based on thousands of observations.

Having said this, though, it also must be noted that while one must seriously take in counter examples to one’s world views to remain intellectually honest, one must also have realistic thresholds and categories for what one will accept as evidence. This is the argument at the heart of the tired old Russell’s Teapot spiel, and it’s modern, much less subtle variant “The Flying Spaghetti Monster”. One can never have any solid intellectual existence if one constantly engages in breaking down one’s world views in reaction to every absurd counter example that comes along. Whitman may have famously said he had the freedom to contradict himself because he “contained multitudes”, and Emerson denigrated a foolish consistency as “the hobgoblin of little minds”, but in everyday existence it’s a mark of mental instability to never have any constancy or pattern in one’s ideas.

This issue of realistic evidence categorization and threshold is at the heart of atheism, I believe. One can easily switch from atheism to theism and vice versa depending on which set of reality “filters” one chooses, and everyone has these filters. This is the foundation of what’s being spoken of in the term “worldview”.

So how does one go about analyzing the reasonableness of one’s reality filters? I personally think it comes down to explanatory power. If my worldview fails to explain much of the human experience, if it fails to explain aesthetics, the existence of the universe, morality, etc., then it may be time to examine my thresholds for accepting evidence contrary to my current beliefs.

In my experience, while atheists are often admirable in their congniscence of the necessity of explaining these aspects of reality, they accept evidence that’s far too flimsy and too much of an intellectual stretch to support their already unstable house of worldview cards. As an example, a helpful (but incomplete) analysis of some of atheist poster-boy Richard Dawkins’ intellectual canyon leaps can be found at this link.

As usual, I’d like to end this post with a reminder that though I feel pretty confident in my Christian worldview, I always welcome counter examples which may change my mind. In respect to my own reality filters, though, I ask that such submissions be pretty compelling. No lame, disrespectful divine pasta metaphors, please.