A Manual for Creating Atheists (16 page)

An admittedly over-the-top counterexample, but in the context of our relationship it was appropriate. I’d tried various intervention strategies and they’d all been unsuccessful. Consequently, I often experiment in our conversations. Street Epistemologists are flexible and are encouraged to experiment and develop their own script and style. It’s important for your growth and for the development of the techniques to experiment and develop your own ideas and strategies.

HD
: Oh, Peter. Those two things aren’t alike at all.

PB
: You’re right, but my point is that not all things that give you comfort are morally good, or even good for you, right? Like the homeless alcoholic near the underpass who clings to his bottle.

My immediate goal was obvious: to get her to acknowledge that not all things that give one comfort are good. I again used a rather extreme example in the hope this would increase the likelihood she’d accept my counterexample, thus undermining the hypothesis.

HD
: I’m not harming anyone. I’m not one of these people who pushes my beliefs on others.

PB
: Do you think you’re harming yourself?

This question was popularized by German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). It’s also a question I frequently use with those who hold their views less tenaciously. Sometimes this question can create just enough cognitive space to make one aware of possible contradictions in one’s reasoning. It does this by forcing people to reflect on a new line of inquiry (justice toward oneself) and then seeing if the belief in question is a form of injustice toward oneself.

This question is also effective on a much broader level: I often use it when asking people about epistemological systems, “Do you think using a bad way of reasoning, a way of reasoning that takes one away from reality, is a form of injustice toward yourself?” This is also very Socratic—thinking in terms of harm to yourself or society as a measuring stick.

HD
: What do you mean?

PB
: I mean do you think having a belief because it’s comfortable and not because it’s true is a form of harm to yourself?

HD
: I never said it wasn’t true.

She might not have explicitly stated that her faith beliefs weren’t true, but if she believed they were true then in response to, “why, after all of our conversations, do you still retain your faith?” she would have said, “Because it’s true.” Because this was not her first response, my suspicion was that her verbal behavior didn’t align with her beliefs.

PB
: Are the beliefs in your faith true?

HD
: I don’t know Peter. They make me feel good, and you seem to want to take that away from me.

I knew she wouldn’t claim her faith beliefs were true, only because we’ve had similar discussions before. I never allow people to steer these discussions from
faith is true
to
faith is beneficial
(comforting) unless they explicitly acknowledge that faith is not a reliable guide to reality. In this case, however, I was targeting “it gives me comfort” for refutation, as I genuinely do think she receives comfort from her faith.

PB
: I don’t want to take away your comfort HD. I just don’t understand how much you could be comforted by something you know isn’t true. Did you ever watch professional wrestling with Vince McMahon?

Now, I’m setting the stage for the counterexample—I’m attempting to undermine the hypothesis: faith gives her comfort. I also wanted to bring more levity into the conversation, in the hope that this would act to lubricate the discussion and make her beliefs more likely to become unstuck.

HD
: No, but my husband used to.

PB
: Well, maybe you can explain something to me. I’ve never understood how people can root for a “wrestler” [finger quotation marks] when they know the outcome is rigged. When you know who’s going to win, you know the match is fixed, I just don’t get rooting for someone in that context.

HD
: It makes people feel good.

PB
: Yeah, that’s what I don’t get. How so?

HD
: Because people want someone they like to win.

PB
: I guess that’s kinda like faith. You know it’s false but you subscribe to it anyway because it makes you feel good?

I inserted the word “false” here hoping she would just resign herself and accept that her faith beliefs are actually false. I wanted her to wonder, “Should one subscribe to a belief because it makes one feel good?”

(Long pause)

PB
: What if I told you that you could feel good because of something that actually worked? Something that was real. Reason makes you feel good. It makes me feel better than eating bacon. [laughter] It makes me feel awesome to know that I can solve problems based on something real. What would it take for you to open yourself up to that gift?

Here I used specific language from the cult exiting literature. There’s a body of research that analyzed factors influencing why people had fallen prey to cults. The phrase “open yourself up” and the word “gift” are frequently used to indoctrinate people into faith systems. These terms may also be effective in nudging people toward embracing reason.

HD
: I’m fine just the way I am.

It appears the intervention was not effective. However, one can never really be sure what long-term effect a treatment will have. I will continue to engage HD on the subject of faith and will continue to try to help her by experimenting with different dialectical strategies. I remain hopeful HD will eventually abandon her faith.

Intervention 3: Ineffective

The following Socratic discussion is from a research study I conducted with prison inmates at a nearby prison (Boghossian, 2010). The purpose of the study was to improve subjects’ critical thinking and moral reasoning abilities, and to increase their desistance to crime.

The subject, Subject 6, had been incarcerated for approximately nine months and was a recent born-again Christian. I did not have institutional review board (IRB)approval to help the subjects abandon their faith,
⁴
so I did not continue the particular line of questioning. If I did persist, I would have targeted specific beliefs about what he conceptualized to be the historical Jesus. His doxastic closure about specific propositions was too entrenched—as often occurs in the initial stages after one catches the faith virus. There was some room in this conversation to create an openness with ancillary beliefs, so that’s what I attempted.

Subject 6
: You made a comment about Jesus needing to be clever.

Researcher (PB)
: I was asking, was Jesus clever?

I reset the conversation to wonder. I made sure he offered the hypothesis that I would then target for refutation. When administering Socratic treatments, make sure to offer as few hypotheses as possible. If you get stuck and are unsure how to proceed, reset the conversation back to wonder. For example, you could say, “Do you think Jesus needed to be clever?”

Subject 6
: He chose to die. He was God incarnate. His purpose was to be the sacrificial lamb for all sinners.

These are all hypotheses, all potential targets for refutation. I choose sacrifice for no other reason than that I find this concept interesting. Generally speaking, if you select something you find interesting or about which you have a particular knowledge, pursue that line of inquiry—it has a greater chance to be effective, or at the very least, engaging and educational—thus benefiting your own intellectual curiosity.

Researcher
: Okay, so would you consider Him a greater man for having made that sacrifice?

There was no questioning the divinity of Christ at this point in the treatment (because I did not have IRB permission to do so). The subject was clearly in the precontemplative stage. The goal, then, was to elicit doxastic openness in other areas of his cognitive life. I again went back to the idea of sacrifice.

Subject 6
: Absolutely.

It’s easier to elicit contradictions from responses that indicate certainty as opposed to ambiguity. Certainty requires overwhelming warrant—in other words, one needs an ironclad justification before one can claim one knows something as an absolute truth. Showing someone doesn’t have the necessary justification to warrant belief in a claim in which they’re certain is fairly easy. With subjects who are not suffering from severe doxastic pathologies, it makes for an effortless elenchus: all one has to do is find some condition that could possibly hold that undermines the truth potential for the belief in question. (For example: “All Asians are good at math.” To undermine this hypothesis all one would need is a single example of an Asian who is not good at math. However, refuting, “Most Asians are good at math,” is considerably more difficult.)

Researcher
: Okay, so what if the lesser men around Him were actually clever and prevented Him from achieving that mission?

Subject 6
: The lesser men didn’t want Him to achieve His purpose.

Researcher
: Yeah, but if the lesser men, who were clever, prevented Him from achieving His purpose, then couldn’t ya say that the virtue that He should have had was cleverness because that would have enabled Him to achieve His purpose? I mean it couldn’t have been a sacrifice unless He chose it, and in order for Him to have chosen it, He had to have the possibility of choosing otherwise. Therefore He could have not chosen it and failed.

Subject 6
: He achieved His purpose.

This response indicates he’s prehope. The subject is suffering from a severe form of doxastic closure. The more closed the subject is about certain beliefs, the further up the belief chain—the higher in the house, to use our foundationalist metaphor from chapter 4—one must go. Ideally, one would find a belief in which the subject placed a reasonable degree of confidence, and then administer a Socratic treatment targeting that specific belief. The hope is that because the foundational belief is too entrenched, the way to loosen the foundational belief is through the ceiling boards in the attic. Once the attic is demolished, one can destroy the top floors of the house and work one’s way down to the foundation.

Researcher
: Could He have failed, or was He destined?

Subject 6
: He could have failed. He had a choice.

Researcher
: So then He might have needed cleverness to increase the likelihood of success.

Subject 6
: Go back and read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Researcher
: That doesn’t answer the question.

Some Socratic conversations feel unsatisfying and even frustrating. This was one such example. I’ve found that when people are coming out of lows—for example, recently incarcerated prison inmates or drug addicts in the very early stage of recovery—it’s very difficult to dislodge the faith virus. I’ve also found that many people have a type of fundamentalism in their actions and thoughts in the early stages of faith adoption (and addiction recovery), particularly if faith is adopted because of a personal tragedy.

Intervention 4: Immediate Success

The following intervention took place with a security guard (SG) at a university where I taught night classes. SG and I had made small talk a few times, but we never had a substantive conversation. He was a softspoken and kind young man. I liked him.

One day I overheard SG telling someone about training for his upcoming missionary work. He was a Mormon and evidently he was learning how to convert others.

PB
: So what’s your best line? I mean, what’s the line you’re gonna use that will convince them? You can try it on me if you want. Maybe you’ll convince me.

(Self-conscious laughter)

SG
: Okay. So look around you. How did this get here? This had to have a cause, right? All of this.

The question, “How did this get here?” is a statement of wonder (stage 1). The answer he gave to his own question was, “It had to have a cause.” This is his hypothesis. In this example he supplied both wonder and a hypothesis. I moved straight to the elenchus and gave him a counterexample.

PB
: Well, what if it was always here?

SG
: What do you mean?

PB
: Well, you assume that nothing is the default. What if the default was something. In other words, what if there was always something stretching back into infinity.

SG
: What do you mean?

I wasn’t sure if his question was a genuine glimpse of doxastic openness, or if he couldn’t comprehend a universe that stretched back into infinity. Accordingly, at this point I rephrased the question to convey openness and to reinforce the safe environment for our discussion.

PB
: What do you mean what do I mean? You assume the universe had to have a beginning. What if there was no beginning?

(Pause)

SG
: I never thought of that.

I was extremely surprised by this comment. He was about to try to convert others and yet he had not even thought of the most basic objection to his worldview? I was also shocked this point of doxastic openness came so early in the conversation. At this juncture I wanted to make sure he didn’t feel stupid, and I also wanted to make sure I drove home stage 5 (act accordingly). My goal was not just to help him to question his faith, but also ultimately to detach him from the structure supporting and sustaining his faulty epistemology—the Mormon Church.