Reasonable Religion? Reason & Evidence vs. Faith

When was the last time you saw any Christian leaders promoting skepticism, critical thinking, or a directed use of logic and reason? When was the last time you saw any religious leader proclaiming the importance of using educated reason to investigate claims of any sort and accept as true only those which pass rigorous, strict standards? It would be unreasonable to expect the average person to employ such methodology as a standard part of life with all claims — it's just too complicated and time-consuming — but I don't think that it's too much expect community leaders to hold this up as an ideal to strive for.

After all, religious leaders proclaim the importance of all sorts of ideals which no one expects anyone to actually achieve on a regular basis. Humans are imperfect, so we do all sorts of things wrong — but it's our ideals and high standards which help us see what we did wrong and what we need to do to improve. Unfortunately, many of the standards promoted by religious leaders have more to do with faith than skepticism and obedience than critical thinking.

Contrary to what some might imagine, this has real-world implications for how people approach claims, ideas, and opinion outside of religion. The Grand Rapids Atheist writes:

People here at my work are devout Christians. And to make matters worse, they pretty much only make decisions based on what their pastor says. Here is a list of things that people here have purported to be true, and this is just lately;

1: All the women at a particular restaurant are prostitutes.
I asked how they knew this to be true and this was the response: “Because my friend told me so.” This person never ate at the restaurant in question, and doesn’t know anybody who works there.

2: Email forwards
These are my favorite, they all start out along the same lines as this “This explains things better than all the baloney you hear on TV.” And go on to explain how men hide in the backseat of your car, cut your Achilles tendon while hiding under your car, how you need to check your hotel beds for HIV infected needles, and any number of insane warnings that are not validated with facts. When I ask them about how they know them to be true, I usually get an answer like this; “My friend got it from a friend who is a (insert profession here, cop, marine, lawyer, etc…)”. Right.

3. Resistance to Art
It could be anything, music, movies, TV shows etc.. Example; I was speaking about how my son loves Spongebob Squarepants. The girl I was talking about the show with freaked out! “I cant believe you let him watch that! Its a bad show!” I asked her why it is a bad show and she said that “She heard it was”. She didn’t want to actually find out if it was a “bad show”, she just wanted to tell people it was. She was operating on a claim that was made without finding any evidence to prove or disprove it. I explained to her that she needs to watch the show before she makes a statement of fact like that. She said she didn't need to. OK.

As the author points out, there is a clear pattern here: people who have been raised to accept the word of religious leaders and scriptures on faith continue to accept other claims on faith. There is ultimately little difference between common religious claims heard in churches and the sorts of claims listed above — if anything, the claims above are far more plausible and believable than those typically taught in churches. For a person raised to believe in people rising from the dead, what's not to believe in the above?

What acceptance of the claims above demonstrates, though, is how harmful a lack of even rudimentary skepticism and critical thinking can be. We can't expect everyone to exercise the highest levels of critical thinking in all situations — perfect rationality isn't possible and may not even really be a good idea. We should, however, expect people to exercise at least a bit of skepticism, critical thinking, and logic when it comes to various claims that float around a community. It's not asking too much to expect reasonable adults to ask, when faced with claims like these, "what's the evidence?" Unfortunately, people raised to simply believe on faith don't always become reasonable adults.