I’m reading an excellent book right now called Parenting Beyond Belief. It’s a collection of essays written by various people on
parenting without religion and covers multiple topics related to parenting. One
of the chapters stuck me as particularly useful given what my children and I
have been discussion lately. The chapter was a letter written my Richard Dawkins to his
daughter when she was 10. I found an online copy here and discovered it’s been
passed around for a while now.
Dawkins starts by saying “Have you ever wondered how we know
the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which
look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun
and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling
round one of those stars, the Sun? The answer to these questions is ‘evidence’.”
He talks about three very wrong reasons for believing anything:
tradition, authority, and revelation. I’m not going to talk about those today
but I would encourage you to read the article as it is very good and helpful
even if you aren’t a parent.
The question of evidence and proof is something I’ve
been talking to my kids about lately. How do we know if something that someone
tells us is true? Well, we ask for evidence. Tradition is not evidence.
Revelation from someone’s god or goddess is not evidence. An authority figure
saying so is not evidence.
So the most important question I am teaching my children
to ask when told something is true is “How do you know?”
My 4th grader came home last week saying a little
girl in her class said that the world was going to end on September 27th
because it would be hit by an asteroid. K, my daughter, was a bit concerned but
still didn’t think that sounded quite right. So we got to have a great
discussion about how to tell whether something is the truth or not. It went
like this:
K: “Mom, Sarah said that the world is going to end on the 27th
because of an asteroid.”
Me: “K., did you ask her how she knows this?”
K: “Yes, she said her mom said so.”
Me: “And how did her mom know?”
K: “Because she looked it up on the internet.”
Me: “And is everything on the internet true?”
K: “Well, no.”
Me: “So what should you ask if someone says something like
that to you?”
K: “You should ask them to prove it.”
Then the rest of the kids and I talked about The Most
Important Question: “How do you know?” And we applied it to all kinds of
things, which got interesting when they discovered the Tooth Fairy isn’t real,
which I didn’t actually know they didn’t know, but that’s another story.
We talked about how Moms can be wrong, so Sarah’s mom saying
it doesn’t mean it’s right. We found a story on the internet about how a man
said that God told him the asteroid would hit the earth on the 27th.
I explained how that’s “revelation” and not a good reason to believe anyone and how he has no evidence for this at all. If
the man has no evidence, then he could be lying or fooled or crazy. If the only
answer to “how do you know?” is “God/Odin/Zeus told me”, that’s not good
enough.
This is a very basic way to explain to children how to ask
questions and think through assertions. It empowers them to not only think
critically but to not fear every time someone tells them unbelieving people go
to hell, Jesus is coming to destroy the earth, or Yellowstone is going to
explode. Critical thinking doesn’t have to mean diving into books on Socratic
questioning or learning logic equations. It can be as simple and profound as
teaching a child to ask “how do you know?” and to demand a good answer. Teaching
them from a very young age good and bad reasons for believing something. Be warned: You will have to step up your game. No, you don't have to know everything and it's OK to answer with "I don't know". A good follow-up would be "But let's find out!" Teaching kids to question means being willing to question yourself. Don't worry, it's good for us.
Can you imagine a world full of kids who are taught to
question like this? High-schools full of teens who were raised to demand
evidence and thoughtfulness? Colleges full of adults to whom critical thinking
skills are daily used and expected? It’s not that religious parents can’t teach
this to their children, it’s that they don’t. Because usually these questioning
skills are a threat to a dearly held belief system based on tradition,
authority, and revelation.
I can’t help but think how many adults need to hear Dawkins’
message and how much better off the world would be if they did.
I'll end with this quote from Dawkins:
What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
Even as a Theist, I think this is great advice. Many of the great reformation movements (from the Protestant one on down) utilized this process. Do you really "know" this, or is it about authority, tradition, and far too much certainty about what "God" said.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the best thing about this approach is that it helps solve one of the great theological issues of our time. If one's theology conflicts with the evidence, can one simply disregard the evidence? If not, then one might have to reconsider one's theology, and that is apparently too scary for many.
ReplyDeleteThat's how I became agnostic. LOL I just started applying the same criteria to my religious beliefs that we used on every other subject to determine what is true. Some of the greatest Christian apologists outright claim that if evidence contradicts the Bible, they will stick with the Bible (which really means they'll stick with their interpretation of the Bible). That's scary. That's not intellectual integrity. That's how people end up believing all kids of whacked out things.
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Deletesame here.
Delete'Agnosticism' though, is a position of knowledge uncertainty, so it requires tying to a belief position for meaning (atheism, or deism and theism).
Atheism is still too unspecific for me, upon reflection. While the new atheists insist it means 'lack of belief' in God's existence rather than 'belief He doesn't exist', the fact remains it's still 'theism' with the prefix 'a' appended. 'A' comes from the Greek 'a/an', meaning 'not; without; opposite to'. Now I suppose these meanings can be said to sit within the ambit 'lack of belief. However, because of the (unfounded) certainty with which theists proclaim their beliefs (Answers in Genesis' notorious 'believing it, defending it proclaiming it' [face palm] for example), for those who have better things to do than learn obscure taxonomies; 'a' renders the mirror image of theism, replete with the fundamentalism and triumphal certainty. Hence, the indictment of 'militant atheism', all because of a label overshadowed by the connotations of the root word, theism.
So I searched and found 'nullifidian' (literally 'no [null] faith [fidan]'), a word coined by playwright Ben Johnson. It means 'one of no faith or religion; a skeptic in matters of religion'; one who lacks faith; a disbeliever; having no faith or belief.' Not only do we get a word free of theistic baggage, the locus of opposition shifts to the process permitting the acceptance of assertions without evidence and critical thinking.
- TheLemur
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIf you read the article, you'll see that Dawkins addresses your idea about authorities. They can all be fact-checked, for one. And Kant was an interesting person for sure, lol.
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