Epistemology.

[Epistemologyⁱ/ɨˌpɪstɨˈmɒlədʒi/ (from Greekἐπιστήμη (epistēmē), meaning “knowledge, understanding”, and λόγος (logos), meaning “study of”) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.^[1][2]

It addresses mainly the following questions:

• What is knowledge?
• How is knowledge acquired?
• To what extent is it possible for a given subject or entity to be known?

Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification.]

[Thanks to wikipedia for the above. The following article is an excerpt from a longer essay I’m currently working on.]

I don’t think the importance of epistemology can be stressed when we’re talking about issues like the truth of a worldview. As I see it, human beings tend to be very rational when it comes to mundane everyday things. For example, people tend to look both ways before they cross the busy street, without having to deliberate upon why is it that such an action is deemed rational. In these cases, people are intuitively expert epistemologists- additional discussions on epistemology have little use here. However, when we start talking about things like the truth of a worldview, it’s a different story. People often employ a different epistemological judgment when it comes to worldviews. A common notion, for example, is expecting absolute proof. Now people rarely do this in their everyday life. I don’t ask for absolute proof for the claim that my mother loves me, or that my breakfast is not poisoned, or that I will survive tomorrow. Instead of asking for proof, we remain perfectly content with a claim being more plausibly true than its alternative e.g., while I don’t have any absolute proof that my mother loves me, I do think this is more plausible than the alternative i.e. my mother doesn’t love me, but has been acting that way for the past twenty-one years for some sinister hidden agenda. Sometimes, we take certain things to be true at face value, based on a strong intuitive impulse. Instead of asking for proof, I intuitively trust my sensory experiences- I just go with my intuition in that regard. I don’t think there’s any good reason not to treat worldviews this way as well. People might disagree with me by saying that the claims that worldviews, especially religious worldviews  generally make are different from our everyday experiences. This is something few people would disagree with: a Prophet of God splitting the red sea with a strike of his staff is a claim of a different proportion altogether, compared to the claim that there’s an apple on my table. I don’t see how that changes how we should judge the truth value of a proposition. If evidence does accumulate which leads us to believe that the plausibility of the Prophet splitting the sea is higher than such an event not occurring, then there shouldn’t be any good reason not to accept it (although admittedly, stronger evidence might be needed to justify such a proposition). It should be noted, that these fallacies in judging (especially religion-oriented) worldviews are not only committed by the skeptics, but also by its believers. Sincere believers are sometimes anxious about whether they are indeed on the truth or not, and in trying to give the skeptics too much benefit of doubt, they may inadvertently succumb to these fallacies i.e. underestimating the truth value of the worldview. Generally speaking, these fallacies result from psychological biases, though the nature of the biases are different in the case of the believer from the skeptic.

With all of this said, an important question arises: what is the appropriate truth value for a given worldview? It is understood that such a worldview needs to be more plausible than not, but what is that specific level of plausibility, upon reaching which we can comfortably say worldview X is true? In this regard, I’m a particularist. I don’t think it is productive to hypothesize about a general plausibility level that would hold true for all worldviews. Rather, if a true worldview does present itself, we’ll know what that plausibility level is. Or more generally, we can productively talk about whether a particular worldview is true or not even without establishing a general truth-meter. The truth-meter (almost spontaneously) arises when we are dealing with particular worldviews, and it is not necessary to hypothesize about a general truth-meter beforehand. If you have difficulty agreeing with my view, consider this: to this day, epistemologists do not have a unanimous consensus about the definition of knowledge. Does that mean we don’t recognize knowledge when we come across it? Of course not. An epistemologist can, on one hand, admit that there is no consensus on the definition of knowledge, while on the other hand, be perfectly happy to accept E=mc², or that the earth goes around the sun, or any other such proposition as examples of knowledge. This is essentially similar to my stance regarding worldviews, just because we might not have a general definition of what the “plausibility level” of the true worldview would be, we would nevertheless know it to be true once- or if- we come across it. It would be helpful, however, to have a vague, descriptive (as opposed to quantitative) idea as regards how the true worldview might be. For example, I have already argued that the true worldview would need to be more plausibly true than not, and I hold that this assertion is valid because this is how we normally judge the truth value of propositions.

How to handle the objection that the supernatural ideas in the Qur’an and Sunnah are nonsensical or necessarily false

A very popular line of attack against religion in general, and Islaam in specific, has to do with the supernatural. Descriptions about the supernatural realm are quite common in Islaamic scriptures, like angels, details about paradise and hellfire, jinns (unseen creation from smokeless fire), devils, miraculous feats done by God through the hands of Prophets, and so on. People often say these ideas and information in the Qur’an and Sunnah are absurd, nonsensical, or patently false.

The argument has its variations, depending on the critic’s level of discomfort about the supernatural. Here are two examples.

1. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily false.
2. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily unscientific, and therefore necessarily false.

Just as a “by the way” comment here. In my humble experience, I’ve noticed critics use terms like “absurd” “silly” “nonsensical” “ridiculous” in reference to these ideas. These terms don’t sound like they can be quantified objectively, in fact different people understand them differently i.e. what is absurd to you might not be absurd to me. These judgments are, of course, nowhere near purely intellectual, rather they tend to be emotive for a large part. This tells me that for many people, the argument is not formed out of intellect, but intuition. Personal judgment. Emotions. Maybe this piece of information might benefit you the next time you come across such an argument.

Also, some people, including some Muslims unfortunately, tend to ascribe relatively higher or lower plausibility to some beliefs about the supernatural, as compared to other such beliefs. They would find the existence of angels, for example, to be kinda-sorta plausible, while the night journey of the Prophet to be overly far-fetched and less plausible, while both of them are mentioned in the same source. A critic would sometimes count the idea of talking animals to be absurd and an argument against Islaam, but he would not do the same in the case of the existence of the Day of Judgment, because he views the former to be less plausible than the latter. So much so that to him, the idea of talking animals disproves Islaam, but the existence of the Day of Judgment doesn’t. I think this discrimination between different supernatural ideas is unfounded. I understand where people are coming from when they say these though, depending on one’s personal beliefs and circumstances, certain ideas might appear to be more plausible to him than others. But this distinction is purely emotional, and it would easily crumble when subjected to intellectual scrutiny. At the end of the day, all such beliefs are supernatural, and the supernatural is by definition beyond the natural laws we are used to. There is no way we can make educated guesses or informed judgments about the supernatural by ourselves. Given this premise, statements such as “supernatural belief X is more/less plausible than supernatural belief Y” is insensible, because these plausibility considerations are done according to the standards of the natural world, and are therefore meaningless in the context of the supernatural. So I don’t understand why one supernatural belief should be considered to be any more or any less plausible than the next, given that all of them are equally “supernatural” in nature, and one view doesn’t have any intellectual previlege above the other. An intellectually sound case against the supernatural, therefore, should be against the reference of any supernatural information in the Qur’an in general, and not selectively against certain pieces of supernatural information and not against others.

So, to get back to where we left off. Let’s observe the argument(s) again:

1. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily false.
2. Any supernatural proposition is necessarily unscientific, and therefore necessarily false.

What’s common with both of these arguments is both of them claim that there is no such thing as a “true” supernatural proposition. If any idea is beyond the natural realm, it is patently false. Put differently, for a proposition to qualify as a candidate for truth, it must necessarily be explainable by natural phenomena, and any other proposition fails to qualify. This idea is common in both arguments.

What’s different is the method employed to reach this common conclusion. Argument 1 is quite straightforward and it doesn’t utilize any transitional “step” or premise to reach the conclusion. For this critic, just the fact that a proposition is beyond natural seems to evidently imply that it is impossible. As for argument 2 however, the critic introduces the intermediate premise of science. After this premise is in place, he goes on to argue that what is not science, is not true. Let’s break the argument up into its constituent premises:

Premise 1: Any supernatural proposition is necessarily unscientific.
Premise 2: Any proposition that is necessarily unscientific is necessarily false.
Conclusion: Any supernatural proposition is necessarily false.

“Unscientific” here refers not to something that contradicts science, but rather something that isn’t confirmed by science e.g. claims in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics etc. that are not confirmed (or rather, cannot be confirmed) by science.

So let’s talk about argument 2 first. The first premise of this argument states that the anything beyond the natural world is unscientific. In other words, the answers to scientific questions can and should only be sought within the natural world. A scientfic question will never yield an answer which invokes any supernatural causation. This view is what is known in the philosophy of science as Methodological Naturalism, and our critic believes science needs to presuppose methodological naturalism in order to work.

Note that methodological naturalism (premise 1) doesn’t render a supernatural proposition false, only unscientific. Then in the second premise, the argument defines truth to be limited to scientific knowledge only, which gives us the conclusion. This view of equating truth to scientific knowledge alone is referred to as scientism. The following definition of scientism is taken from the book “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview” authored by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, chapter 17, page 346-7:

Scientism…is the view that science is the very paradigm of truth and rationality. If something does not square with currently well-established scientific beliefs, if it is not within the domain of entities appropriate for scientific investigation, or if it is not amenable to scientific methodology, then it is not true or rational. Everything outside of science is a matter of mere belief and subjective opinion, of which rational assessment is impossible.

So argument 2 boils down to two premises, methodological naturalism and scientism. Now I believe argument 2 is a very weak argument, the reasons will be discussed shortly. But as per my experience, with the popularity of the new atheism movement and its apparent veneration of scientism, this argument seems to be more popular of the two, and hence deserving of attention.

Let’s look at premise 1 first, methodological naturalism. I think this premise is of lesser importance to the contention we are presently dealing with (although it is very relevant and of much significance to the Intelligent Design movement we hear so much about), because let’s be honest, the important question to answer is whether supernatural propositions are necessarily false or not, not whether they qualify as scientific or not. Princeton philosopher of science Bradley Monton talks about this issue in context of Intelligent Design in his book “Seeking God in Science”, chapter 3, page 75:

After much seeking, you finally reach the Oracle. You’ve come equipped with a long list of questions, but when the Oracle sees you, she says: “Look, I’m busy, I only have time to answer one question…I’ll give you two options. Do you want to know whether intelligent design is science, or do you want to know whether intelligent design is true?”…Even though much of the philosophical discussion of intelligent design relates to that question, by my lights the imoprtant question is whether intelligent design is true.

So even if methodological naturalism is decisively proven to be a legitimate criterion for science, it doesn’t have much significance as far as our current problem is concerned. That said, I don’t believe that it is necessary to presuppose methodological naturalism for science to work. For starters, methodological naturalism- the claim that scientific answers should only be sought within nature- is a claim to knowledge, and needs to be backed up with evidences. Some evidences have been advanced, but they are nowhere near definitive. A somewhat detailed response to these evidences and arguments can be found in Bradley Monton’s aforementioned book. The book is written largely in the context of intelligent design, but contains valuable material on the legitimacy of methodological naturalism as a demarcation criteria between science and non-science.

Also, methodological naturalism is damaging to science in the sense that it limits science’s efficiency as a tool for pursuit of the truth. Bradley Monton comments on this issue in the same book (page 58):

If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism, it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic. More and more evidence could come in suggesting that a supernatural being exists, but scientific theories wouldn’t be allowed to acknowledge that possibility…Science would rightfully be marginalized- what is the point of spending all these resources investigating naturalistic causes, long after it is evident that the causes are supernatural?

Anyways, I don’t want to go into that much detail concerning methodological naturalism, mainly because it isn’t directly related to our discussion. For more details though, the curious reader can consult chapter 17 of Moreland and Craig’s work quoted above, which has a basic treatment of the topic.

What is more relevant to our discussion is the second premise of argument 2: scientism. Like most other ideas in philosophy, scientism has its strong and weak forms, I think the second premise advocates a strong form of scientism. Now even at face value, scientism seems like an extremely weak position to take. It’s kind of obvious that there are truths outside the scientific methodology, for example, philosophical or moral truths. Heck, science as an enterprise itself requires some presuppositions in order for it to work (e.g. the laws and phenomena in nature are uniform, our sensory and rational faculties present an accurate depiction of nature, and so on). The truth of these presuppositions are confirmed by philosophy, not science. If someone embraced strong scientism, the very foundations of science, and subsequently science itself, become meaningless. Even a more basic problem with scientism is that it is self-refuting: the claim “science is the only way of knowing and all other sources of knowledge are unfounded” itself isn’t confirmed by science! The Skeptic’s Dictionary has this to say as regards strong scientism:

Scientism, in the strong sense, is the self-annihilating view that only scientific claims are meaningful, which is not a scientific claim and hence, if true, not meaningful. Thus, scientism is either false or meaningless.

With this, I rest my case, my case being that the second argument which uses science as a stepping-stone to reach the conclusion that supernatural propositions are necessarily false, is utterly baseless. Let’s look at the first argument now. The first argument doesn’t resort to scientism or any other intermediate premise. Rather, it assumes a position referred to as philosophical naturalism, the idea that all human intellectual exercise is necessarily limited to the natural world, and beyond the natural world there is no reality. This is a safer position than scientism, in that it doesn’t limit truth to science. It does acknowledge disciplines other than science (e.g. philosophy) as valid sources of knowledge, but then adds the condition that all of our intellectual efforts combined would only go as far as this natural world.

I would be the first to admit that philosophical naturalism is a contentious topic in philosophy, and I am not very knowledgable about it. At a basic level, burden of proof considerations come to mind i.e. philosophical naturalism seems like a claim to knowledge and the one who makes the claim should carry the burden of proof, instead of just presupposing it. But this raises an obvious but very significant question, which I think is the crux of the topic.

Let’s look away from naturalism for a moment, and refocus on what this article is about. We are addressing claims that are leveled against the possibility of supernatural propositions. Here, the positive claims of knowledge are being made the critic, and burden of proof rests on him. Meaning, we are not making a case for the truth of supernatural propositions, but merely defending the possibility of their reality. Of course, the possibility of the existence of anything isn’t a claim of knowledge. The impossibility of something’s existence, however, is. Up to this point, we have been dealing with the claims of supernatural propositions being impossible (not even “very unlikely”, but “impossible”). I think we have established that the arguments aren’t very strong, and supernatural propositions are at least possible. But the mere possibility of something existing doesn’t really amount to much. For example, the existence of unicorns are at least possible (as for the absence of evidence, what if they live on another planet?) but that doesn’t mean we should start taking the existence of unicorns seriously. Well, can’t the same be said about the supernatural propositions found in the Islaamic scriptures? Even if we acknowledge that these propositions are possible, in that they don’t contradict with any principles of logic, why should we differentiate between them and the existence of a unicorn? This is a valid question, and this is where philosophical naturalism enters the picture. Philosophical naturalism is adopted because in some sense it is useful. Imagine what would happen if we begin to take the existence of anything seriously merely on the ground that it is possible (for one, psychics would find a place in the academia). To discount these possibilities, it is better to assume that whatever is beyond the natural world, logically possible as they may be, doesn’t amount to any intellectual merit: they are as good as impossible.

This is where Islaam’s position on these supernatural propositions become relevant. See the Muslim (at least the one who holds that his faith is intellectually justified) wouldn’t claim that the supernatural propositions mentioned in the Qur’an are true or plausible or worth taking seriously merely on the basis of their logical possibility. Rather, she would claim that we are justified in believing these propositions because there is evidence for them. For example, we believe in the miraculous birth of Jesus (peace be upon him) based on the premise that the Islaam is true, or that the Qur’an is the divinely revealed word of God, and that premise would depend on other premises which present the case for the truth of Islaam. So the Muslim’s belief in these supernatural proposition stems from his belief that there is evidence to support these claims. And this is precisely what sets these propositions apart from, say, belief in unicorns. In fact, I think to take something seriously on the sole basis of it being logically possible is a position no one would adopt, and philosophical naturalism does get this point right. However, I would oppose it when there is evidence to believe in a proposition, but philosophical naturalism is gratuitously invoked to wave the evidences away. Consider this example by Bradley Monton gives:

Imagine that some astronomers discover a pulsar that is pulsing out Morse code. The message says that it’s from God, and that God is causing the pulsar to pulse in this unusual way. The astronomers are initially skeptical, but they find that when they formulate questions in their head, the questions are correctly anwered by the message. The astronomers bring in other people to examine this, and the questions are consistently answered. The message goes on to suggest certain experiments that scientists should perform in particle accelerators- the message says that if the experiments are set up in a specified precise way, then God will cause a miracle to occur. The experiments are done, and the resulting cloud chamber tracks spell out Biblical verses. Then the message explains to the scientists how to form a proper quantum theory of gravity….I could go on, but you get the picture…It would be silly for the scientists to refuse to countenance the hypothesis that God exists, due to some prior commitment to methodological naturalism.

Substitute “methodological naturalism” in the last line with “philosophical naturalism”, and I think the same point is made. What if there is evidence for the God hypothesis, or for the truth of Islaam? Would it be reasonable to ignore the evidence because some form of naturalism is presupposed? I would submit no. I understand an initial skepticism towards claims about paranormal etc, but in the face of evidence such naturalistic commitment would seem unfounded. In fact, it would suffer from the same problem as methodological naturalism, in that the scope of our intellectual endeavors in the pursuit of truth will be limited by a presupposed “pledge”.

Of course, the next question that arises at this point is, what evidences- if any- are there for Islaam? But that’s a whole other topic which requires a whole other set of articles. The point here being given that Islaam has evidences, it wouldn’t make sense to ignore them on grounds of naturalistic commitment.

So to conclude, it is definitely logically possible that supernatural propositions are true. If evidence accumulates in order for us to give this a proper benefit of doubt, we by all means should. Simple disregarding the Islaamic scriptures on grounds of them containing these “nonsensical” propositions is a vacuous claim.

Do note that this is a very basic treatment of the issue, a lot more could be said on the different forms of naturalism. Also, apart from the two argument dealt with in this paper, there is another form of reasoning that combines the two. Barbara Forrest, for example, has argued that methodological naturalism is an indirect logical precedent to philosophical naturalism. This view improves argument 2 by getting rid of scientism. But this position seems to hinge on (at least) the lack of evidence for the supernatural world, which has been addressed in this paper.

How to handle the objection that religious people are biased, and hence their arguments are not worth looking into?

My exams start the day after tomorrow, so I doubt if I will get much writing done in the next month. Today though, I came across something and I just had to post it.

A while back I was reading Moreland and Craig’s “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview”, and I stumbled upon an interesting topic very relevant to popular discussions about religion. I’m sure many of us heard people say stuff along the lines of “Look mate, this religion (or lack thereof) deal, it’s no more than the personal choices and beliefs of people. There are no proofs or evidences or anything for these things. They are constructs of the personal biases, and men will always have differing views because it all boils down to prejudice, personal predisposition toward this view or the other. So this quest for the “one true religion” or whatever is essentially misguided.”

Most of the time, I think this tendency is a result of the intellectual laziness of the individual and not any well thought-out rationale. We’re not supposed to judge the hearts and minds of people though, but if it is indeed the case, then their view itself is based on some sort of bias, and hence kind of self-refuting. This aside, apparently this view is an essential component of postmodernist philosophy. Here’s how the authors explain the postmodernist stance [page 146]:

“Postmodernists also reject the notion that rationality is objective on the grounds that no one approaches life in a totally objective way without bias. Thus objectivity is impossible, and observations, beliefs and entire narratives are theory laden. There is no neutral standpoint from which to approach the world, and thus observations, beliefs and so forth are perspectival constructions that reflect the viewpoint implicit in one’s own web of beliefs…” 

Here’s how the book responds to this objection (note: the authors are Christian, hence the Christian references) [page 150]:

“As a first step towards a response to this claim, we need to draw a distinction between psychological and rational objectivity. Psychological objectivity is the absence of bias, a lack of commitment either way on a topic.

Do people have psychological objectivity? Yes, they do, typically in areas in which they have no interest or about which they have not thought deeply. Note carefully two things about psychological objectivity. For one thing, it is not necessarily a virtue. It is if one has not thought deeply about an issue and has no convictions regarding it. But as one develops thoughtful, intelligent convictions about a topic, it would be wrong to remain unbiased, that is, uncommitted regaring it. Otherwise, what role would study and evidence play in the development of a one’s approach to life? Should one remain unbiased that cancer is a disease, that rape is wrong, that the New Testament was written in the first century, that there is design in the universe, if one has discovered good reasons for each belief? No, one should not.

For another thing, while it is possible to be psychologically objective in some cases, most people are not psychologically objective regarding the vast majority of the things they believe. In these cases, it is crucial to observe that a lack of psychological objectivity does not matter, nor does it cur one off from presenting and arguing for one’s convictions. Why? Because a lack of psychological objectivity does not imply a lack of rational objectivity, and it is the latter that matters most, not the former.

To understand this, we need to get clear on the notion of rational objectivity. One has rational objectivity just in case [My interjection: “just in case” here means “if and only if] one can discern the difference between genuinely good and bad reasons for a belief and one holds to the belief for genuinely good reasons. The important thing here is that bias does not eliminate a person’s ability to assess the reasons for something. Bias may make it more difficult, but not impossible. If bias made rational objectivity impossible, then no teacher- atheist, Christian or whatever- could responsibly teach any view the teacher believed on any subject! Nor could the teacher teach opposing viewpoints, because he or she would be biased against them!

By way of application, a Christian can lack psychological objectivity regarding the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus and so forth, and still have and present good reasons for the empty tomb, the reality of God and the like. Rational objectivity is possible even if psychological objectivity is not present, and this is what makes civil debate, rational dialogue and the development of thoughtful convictions possible. When a Christian, Sharon, for instance, tries to present objectively good reasons for a position and is greeted with a claim of disqualification on the ground of bias, the proper response is this: Tell the other person that she has changed the subject from the issue to the messenger, that while the Christian appreciates the attention and focus on her inner drives and motives, she thinks that the dialogue should get refocused on the strength of the case just presented. Perhaps at another time they could talk about each other’s personal motivations and drives, but for now, a case, a set of arguments has been presented and a response to those arguments is required.” 

What I find particularly awesome about this is the distinction made between the two kinds of objectivity, and hence the two kinds of bias. The postmodernist (or the random internet junkie who doesn’t have a clue what postmodernism is but advances a similar argument) is confusing psychological bias with rational bias, and he seems to suggest that since the religionists are psychologically biased (which is true), it must be so that they have no rational objectivity in believing what they believe either. This is patently false as the author points out, psychological bias doesn’t render rational objectivity impossible, just difficult. So denouncing the rational case for something merely on the basis of the possibility of psychological bias is unfounded.

A lot more could be said about this of course, but I think for a basic level, this passage alone suffices.

Solving the Problem of Doubts: Keeping Perspective

See the way I look at the issue of skepticism is kinda like this: the problem of doubts is not merely an intellectual problem. People are people, not machines; they are not driven by intellectual motivations alone. We do have a certain freedom in choosing our beliefs, our emotions can play into our choices, and they have the potential to make our decisions biased toward either side. Psychologists, with their knowledge about the subconscious and other related issues, can shed more light on this. So it very well may be that the doubt in your mind owes its existence at least partially to emotional reasons. We will talk more about this a bit later.

But with this said, I also maintain that the problem of doubts isn’t merely an emotional or spiritual problem either. Some people mistakenly think whenever someone has a doubt, it is because of the fact that he is spiritually lacking; and therefore their solution to these is to bottle up the problems, instead of facing them. But it might very well be that the doubt in your mind is a valid, genuine, legitimate intellectual question, requiring an objective answer. Bottling up such a doubt will only increase the “itch”. In such a case you would have to get your hands dirty and do the research yourself from the proper sources.

Since doubts may potentially originate at either of the two levels: intellectual or spiritual, our defense against these doubts need to be at these two levels as well. Very often people forget this, they try to cater to their intellectual need, and completely ignore their spiritual need. This is what this article is about.

If you try to be perceptive about how your doubts work, you might notice the following phenomenon. Let’s say you have a doubt about Islaam. Panic kicks in, but you nonetheless try and work to find the solution. After a while you do find the solution, and it seems plausible. But even after this, it just doesn’t feel right. You have the answer to your doubt, there is nothing of merit that can be said against it, it seems sound overall, but still the agitation doesn’t go away. Or it could be that the problem you have is very, very small, so much so that it hardly challenges the Islaamic worldview at all, but for some inexplicable reason it’s giving you a hard time. In these cases, it is kind of apparent that the problem doesn’t have that much to do with intellect. At an intellectual level, you have your answer, things make sense on paper. Even so, you are lacking confidence or clarity, there isn’t tranquility in your heart. I have experienced this countless times. These are confusing times, because there is no doubt or problem to address, you already have your answer and it seems to make sense; but still at some inexplicable level, it doesn’t seem to make sense. Kind of like an awkward, pesky ‘what if it’s wrong?’ position that you can’t shake off. Many people, when faced with this situation, mistakenly assume their problem to be intellectual. “Maybe the evidence isn’t strong enough” they tell themselves, even after the evidence seems perfectly plausible on paper having no legitimate counters to it.

I have found a way out of this, and here it is. As stated above (and is kind of common sensical), human beings have two faculties, faculties of reason and faculties of emotion. My position is, the clarity of reason is not the same as clarity of emotion. Many people think emotional clarity is essentially a causal product of intellectual clarity. I would disagree. Just because something makes sense to the intellect, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna make sense to your emotional or spiritual faculties as well. In other words, your intellectual clarity- the fact that things make sense in paper- isn’t automatically going to translate into the tranquility of heart. The latter, in fact, might need a different sort of effort, namely prayer or asking help from Allah. People who mistakenly think this problem is purely intellectual might be averse to praying, because it would seem like praying is essentially indoctrinating themselves to a certain direction, done only to cover up the weakness of their intellectual position. So in order to be “intellectually honest”, they view seeking help from Allah or praying as something that fuels an unjustified bias. This mentality is patently flawed because as discussed above, because the problem is not intellectual to begin with, it is emotional; so the question of covering up intellectual gaps or indoctrination to a certain position just isn’t there.

See the thing is, you need to be able to diagnose the nature of your specific problem, you need to know if the problem you’re facing is intellectual or emotional. If you think your problem is intellectual when in reality it is not, then no amount of evidence is gonna give you clarity. To achieve this, you need to have perspective of things, and perceptive of what goes on between your head and heart. You need to be cautious enough to know an emotional problem when you see one, without getting it confused as an intellectual problem. From my personal experience, prayer actually helps in this situation. Maybe it’s the calmness of mind that prayer gives you, maybe it’s divine intervention, maybe both. But from multiple personal experiences, I have seen prayer not only generates emotional or spiritual clarity, it also gives you a clear, objective perspective of things as they are.

All of this is theory. Let me share some personal experiences.

I was on the bus one day, reading a Bradley Monton book. The author is an atheist, and he was talking about some of the refutations of the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. His counter arguments seemed strong and convincing. As a Muslim who takes intellectual arguments seriously, I was supposed to freak out. But I decided to remain calm, and told myself that I will think both sides through when I get home. When I went home, I washed and prayed calmly, and somewhere inbetween these, things started making sense. This is how: I remembered that although I liked to talk about natural theology (i.e. rational arguments for the existence of God), it wasn’t what gave me conviction in Islaam. My conviction in Islaam came more from the specific evidences for Islaam, e.g. the Qur’an’s literary characteristics, prophecies, and so on. So even if Dr. Monton’s arguments against the fine-tuning argument were fullproof, they couldn’t take anything from my faith since I didn’t base my faith on it to begin with. And this is only based on the assumption that Dr. Monton’s arguments are sound and nothing can be said against them. Other considerations popped into my head as well, but I think the point has been made. I was able to deal with the doubt while keeping both my heart and mind satisfied because I had perspective: perspective about the doubts themselves, the potential damage they may cause to my worldview, and the specific nature of my problem.

Here’s a contrasting example to further illustrate my point. A few months back, I stumbled upon an article about Dr. Richard Lenski’s “Long Term Evolution Experiment”. This was an experiment about bacterial evolution, and the results documented evidence of comparatively large-scale change in a species, which was said to be evidence for evolution to an extent. Unfortunately for me, this time I wasn’t able to take my doubt calmly. I promptly phased into panic, and this lasted for a painful couple of days. If I had perspective at that time, this would not have happened. Islaam is not opposed to the concept of changes from species to species at all, much less bacterial evolution (if you want to read up on Islaam’s view on evolution, this is perhaps the best place to go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXxQXX3l7mg); so this should not have troubled me at all. I guess all the propaganda about evolution being fatal to theism contributed to my sorry state of affairs. But anyways, I failed to deliver because I didn’t have perspective of things.

The take-away point from all of this is simple: the anatomy of a doubt is quite often hard to figure out. One thing is certain however, besides an intellectual element, a doubt can even have an emotional element, sometimes almost exclusively so. The Muslim going through his “skepticism” days need to keep this in mind, and work to properly diagnose the nature of his doubts. As a general advice however, do your study to address an intellectual doubt, but make sure you pray and ask Allah’s help to take care of the spiritual element of the problem.

Thoughts on the Internet.

Look, I’m not a historian. But this is how the popular story goes.

Traditionally, people weren’t entitled to unrestricted access to information. Information, like commodity, came at a price; and this price happened to be inversely proportional to the sensitivity of the information in question. This was said to apply most significantly with religious information: the quirks of theology, literature on metaphysics and philosophy which supposedly threatened popular beliefs, these were kept well beyond the reach of laity.

And then, the internet happened. I fast forwarded, sorry.

The big coup of this information age, more particularly the world wide web, has been that quite literally anyone with a computer and anything better than a dial-up connection can dig up any amount of information, study, research, make their own informed judgments on things. People don’t have to rely on any holy-spirit-infused-hierarchy any more to learn about religion. They can read from all sides, without having to be biased towards any specific position, which will in turn enable them to tap into the maximum potential of their faculties of reason. The benefits of this are pretty obvious. Trust me when I say I myself have benefited quite a lot.

With that said, I would argue this “unrestricted access” happens to have some significant downslides as well. I’m in no way shape or form promoting internet censorship, so please hear me out. All I’m saying is this: if we want to properly benefit from the internet, we should be aware of the mudslides and pitfalls as well, so we can stroll in peace. The primary and effective solution to these problems, I would argue, is not to censor the internet or anything, but to train ourselves so we can look past its faults and capitalize on its benefits.

First off, when you have an unrestricted flow of anything, not just information, there’s bound to be a mixture of good and bad. That’s common sense. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the internet with its abundant flow of information would have information content that isn’t, well, good. Don’t get me wrong, when I allude to “bad” information, I’m not referring to information that goes against a certain dogma or religion; I’m referring to information that is logically fallacious, not well-reasoned, cherry-picked out of context, appeals to false authority, etc. All of this are either a direct result of, or somewhat connected to, the personal biases and prejudices of the poster. See that’s just the point: an internet is an open forum, where anyone can say anything, which is good in the sense that we can listen to opinions from all sides. But it is bad, in the sense virtually anything can pass as valid information. When the poster on reddit writes against Islaam, his views don’t automatically get peer-reviewed by the experts in the field.

Someone could dismiss all of this by saying, the internet isn’t shoving anything down your throat. If you think the information is valid, accept it. If you don’t, that’s your opinion and you are given full liberty to reject it, or even write against it. This brings us to the second problem, which is: the internet makes an assumption about people, namely that they are mature, reasonable, and rationally trained enough to be able to tell, effectively, good information from problematic information. This assumption is, if not fundamentally wrong, then at least no more than an assumption. In fact, I would go as far to argue that the opposite assumption is more probable.

On a personal note, my experiences with the internet, forged by my long hours on random forums, image boards, and anonymous chat applications, don’t really conjure a positive image about the intellect of the average internetgoer. I would say it’s pretty obvious that the internet has more of a liberal slant- generally speaking- and much of the information content on the internet is heavily influenced by this bias. The prior probability for any religion, more so Islaam, appears to be vanishingly low here. Which is why much of the literature on religion (more on point: against religion) found on the internet is not very substantial, rather a lot of rhetoric is employed, which is no more than a subjective dismissal of religion.

Of course, I’m not saying religious people on the internet are all very intellectual and deserve to be listened to. Common religious writings on the internet have their own brand of logical fallacies which stem from the zeal of the believers. Driven by this zeal, religious people –again I’m generalizing- kind of assume that their view is so manifestly true that any debate on the topic is useless; and this leads them to call out their adversaries. They- perhaps we- don’t really realize that everything about our religion makes sense to us because we are already in it. If we put ourselves in the non-believer’s shoes, with his low prior probability of Islaam, things would appear to make less sense, and would merit more clarification or stronger motivation for belief. Atheist arguments on the other hand generally display another nuance: they seem to appear sophisticated. The mannerisms of internet atheists in general are superior and their posts are well-worded. But sophistication in style and sophistication in content are, of course, mutually exclusive issues.

I guess I’ve only been talking in theory, so an example seems to be in order. A month back or so, I was studying the embryological description as it appears in the Qur’an, and I was also listening to the criticisms made against it, mostly from youtube. I noticed that the style of the presentations are decidedly sophisticated, at least more so than the religious presentations, which are, as stated above, often accompanied by emotive religious zeal. This sophisticated presentation is accompanied by formidable rhetoric, which makes it sound intimidating. But if anyone manages to look beyond the pretense of sophistication, she would easily notice the fallacious nature of reasoning and the misrepresentation of data (not trying to poison the well or anything, you are welcome to visit their videos and see for yourself instead of taking my word for it). These expose the zeal on the part of the atheist as well, which leads to this bad information. So if such a sophisticated presentation, moistened with rhetoric, is placed in the average netgoer’s mouth, that alone is more or less tantamount to shoving it down his throat. “People’s choice” doesn’t seem to circumvent the problem.

A lot can be said on this, but this article is introductory in nature, and it’s not meant to be a database of all instances of logically fallacious arguments that appear on the internet. This post is simply meant to point out that the internet doesn’t deserve our unflinching commitment, and our rationale needs to interact with its information content constantly in order to benefit from it.

Anyways, the solutions I propose?

1. Train yourself to detect good information content. Learn to debate, learn about the logical fallacies, read analytic philosophers to see how they construct their arguments. Eventually, you will develop a keen sense of looking beyond any sort of rhetoric or pretense and judge the argument(s) for what it is. What I found especially helpful in this regard is reading about philosophy of science. In this sector of philosophy, the use of analytic thought seems to be most relevant and prominent. Read about controversial science issues, like the evolution vs. intelligent design debate that’s going on, and you might learn from how the philosophers of science construct and deconstruct arguments, and your analytic skills will develop. This way, you don’t need to have other people to answer your questions or doubts, you yourself can analyze the arguments and come up with refutations. But here again, the question of making sure the source you are reading from provides valid information comes into play, which brings us to our next point.
2. Read from reputed, peer-reviewed sources. Yes, even they can go wrong, but the probability of peer-reviewed material being on point would be much higher than the post of the average internet junkie. Also, develop an attachment to books, as opposed to the internet. There are good, reputable sites and blogs on the internet as well, though. Some sources online and offline as example: if you want to follow advice number 1 above and read about philosophy of science, I would direct you to Dr. Steven Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell” or Dr. Bradley Monton’s “Seeking God in Science”. Both of these books focus on construction of arguments. Meyer’s Signature focuses on how he constructed the argument of intelligent design using the existence of specified complexity in DNA, and Dr. Monton’s book, on the other hand, looks into the questions of whether intelligent design qualifies as science, and he analyzes the popular arguments for and against intelligent design to reach the conclusion that the arguments for intelligent design are somewhat, but not definitively,  plausible. If your interest is in natural theology (i.e. theological issues that are not proven using scripture or revelation, but reasoning. For example, existence of God, problem of evil, free will etc.) then I would very highly recommend Dr. William Lane Craig. His site is www.reasonablefaith.org, where you might find information about his books as well. There are lots of other examples, they will show up in the next posts as the blog progresses, Allah willing. I’m sure the authors will share their favorite sources as well.
3. Learn to see the internet for what it is. Learn to tell opinions from arguments, biases from facts, rhetoric from intellectual discourse. Don’t make abrupt judgments when you come across some thread in a random image board, knock in the proper places for further elucidation of the issue. For example, don’t freak out when you see a post on some internet forum which questions the preservation of the Qur’an. Even if the information he presents seem new, scholarly and convincing, know that a vast amount of research has been done on this, and it is very probable that Muslim academics have figured this out ages ago. Chances are, if you pick up any ‘uloom al Qur’an (Sciences of the Qur’an) book, e.g., Taqi Usmani’s “ ‘Uloomul Qur’an” (it has been translated into English), or Yasir Qadhi’s “Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’an”, open the chapter on preservation of the Qur’an, your doubts will be put to rest. So never make conclusions based on just one side of the story. This is complimentary to both the points above.
4. Don’t go looking for debates, or even discussions, when you don’t know your stuff thoroughly. This is very important. Zeal is an appreciable characteristic in action, but not so much in intellectual discourse and decision making. Patiently do your research, study, internalize, then think about engaging whoever is your potential adversary.
5. Follow this blog. It is impossible to enumerate all the sources you can go to in order to answer your doubts, although 3 or 4 examples have been given above as incidental details. But the authors of this blog were once in your position, they were skeptic of Islaam, but they came back full circle. With the help of Allah, they can answer your questions, or at least lead you to the proper sources, and help you alleviate the doubt that’s biting. Also, as the blog progresses, hopefully more resources, both online and offline, will be made mention of, and increasingly more ground will be covered.

Some concluding remarks would be: a religious worldview is a giant enterprise. It has been the focus of human intellectual discourse for, quite literally, thousands of years. And now with developments in science and philosophy, it only got more complicated and intricate. Virtually nothing in this issue can simply be “written off”. This is something we should stop and appreciate. So if you are a Muslim suffering from skepticism, or claim to be a sincere seeker of truth, I hope a valid expectation from you would be that you would know better than to arbitrarily dismiss claims, driven by a casual reading of the information or this or that random post you stumbled upon. Rather, take your time to patiently study all the relevant, reliable information, analyze, and then try to make a decision being as sincere as you can. The internet will be your friend in this endeavor, only if you know how to maximize its benefit.