I think JV is on to something, but I would make an edit to his comment that changes the direction by 180 degrees. I would say that it is "safe to assume that the choices people make tend to reveal underlying belief or beliefs". This still fits with JV's examples, such as the first example of the scholar: The scholar believes in the importance of improving themselves intellectually or in contributing to a body of knowledge, and their consistent actions reveal that belief.
Dave made a point that hits on what I think is one of the most honest parts of the Atheist position. He said that, "...one of the big reasons to have a religion (read: God) is to have the value set of the religion, and the comfort of the belief that someone or something is out there guiding us," And I think that most Atheists truly believe that is why most people "have a religion". Atheists, as Christopher Hitchens said in the debate JV introduced us to, as well as in an essay conversation with Wilson on Christianity Today in 2007, choose not to believe in God because it would be "too easy and too comfortable", but it would not be intellectually honest. To tie this in to the comments above, their actions reveal their belief that sound reasoning and intellectual honesty is something that can be attained and something to strive for, which I also believe. But what about those many many people, me included, that believe in God because they believe it is the most intellectually honest position?
Atheists and Christians, Buddists and Muslims, Democrats and Republicans (just to provide a non-religion example) all have their value sets. These value sets often, if not always, direct their actions. Obviously, value sets (read: beliefs) are not a simple thing. They are often convoluted and obscured and complex which makes it difficult to articulate what we believe and what we think other people believe. I think this is a good place to re-quote Sister Carlotta:
You are so convinced that you believe only what you believe that you believe, that you remain utterly blind to what you really believe without believing you believe it.'"
--Shadow of the Hegemon, pg 80-81
Dave made the excellent point that (difficulty aside) we should be able to articulate the positions of our counterparts [people who believe differently than we do]. And that's what I was trying to do with Atheism in my last post. So maybe using "god" was a little goading on my part, but I don't think that it was confusing the dialog. Because what I'm trying to get at is: what do you trust? Christians believe that there is a Truth out there and that it can be articulated and understood as God. Atheists believe that there is a Truth out there, but that God doesn't fit anywhere in the picture. The truth, as they see it, is that Nature explains everything.
To put it another way: Christians believe that God created the world. That at some point in time nothing existed but God and then He created the Universe. Atheists believe that Nature created the world. That at some point in time nothing existed and then the Universe came into being of its own accord. Does one of those things really require more belief than the other? And you can't get out of this question by saying that science proves one or the other. Christian sceintists believe that science provides evidence of a Creator's design. Atheist scientists believe that science provides evidence of Nature's development from nothing to the current state. Their assumptions and value sets affect how they interpret the scientific data.
The reason I keep pushing on this whole assumptions / value set thing is that I think it is crucial to being able to get anywhere with the next two questions. I don't think that we have to agree with each others' value sets in order to dialog, but I do think that we need to be able to try to understand (at the very least) our own value sets in order to have an honest dialog.
As JV mentioned and Dave alluded to, evaluating the "rightness" and "wrongness" of a person's value set is a lot harder than defining it or understaning it. But I think trying to evaluate the "rightness" or "wrongness" points to something that people don't always want to say directly, and that is that each person believes that her or his value set more correctly describes the world.
So what are your values? What are the rules that can't be broken? What can you trust and fall back on with any certainty?
Okay, I'll give it some time to get feedback from you on this latest one, and then in the next post we'll move on to the next question that I wanted to address: Is there a God?
Thanks in advance for your comments.
