Believers' double-standard

Why is it more offensive to doubt than to believe?

If you prompt Midjourney with “preacher” they’re white. If you prompt “angry preacher” they’re black. Yikes.

I’m a happy sceptic, but in the doubter–believer dynamic there’s a double standard that has always bugged me. It crops up in any situation where one person says something is real and the other one doubts it.

Let’s say I’m talking to a devout Christian, a Biblical literalist. The situation should be symmetrical. We each have worldviews that negate the other’s. I think the Christian’s central concepts are nonexistent. By implication, they’re wasting some of their precious free time in the only life they’ll ever live. The Christian, meanwhile, thinks that I’m perfectly wrong about the most important thing in the universe. My penalty will be eternal torture. It’s high stakes. 

But there’s an asymmetric edge here. I’m serenely fine with them believing I’m mistaken. I even welcome them bringing it up. It’s slightly weird when they don’t — do they not care about my immortal soul? To them, however, I sound hostile or aggressive if I say that I consider their entire worldview to be mistaken (even though they think mine is). The doubter or denier is taken to be the more judgemental one. 

This isn’t just about god or traditional religion. This asymmetry exists with the doubting of anything sacred, ideological, mythical, or otherwise foundational for a worldview. Examples include: free will, “the one”, fate, astrology, ghosts, positive thinking, the efficient market hypothesis, new age belief systems, indigenous belief systems, teleology, karma, an afterlife, the pure motives of those in power, communism, the arc of history, mainstream media’s reliability, the reliability of our senses, the reliability of memory, a correspondence theory of truth, substrate independence, nutrition “science”, moral realism, et cetera.

Worldviews are weird anyway

Any time you interact with someone who has a different worldview, you have irreconcilable opinions of the fundamentals of reality. 

This almost never matters.

Mormons and Marxists living in the same place act the same in public, obey the same laws, and might occasionally vote the same way too. One of them thinks religion is merely an opiate and that economic conditions determine reality; the other thinks the zygote is ensouled at the moment of conception and that when we die we not only live again but live forever. On a matter like abortion, these views actually clash (be weird if they didn’t). Generally, though, people’s basic metaphysical views or their views of human nature rarely get in the way of the cultural and historical stuff that makes them similar to those around them. 

So I’m riding public transport with people whose views of the world are, according to mine, utterly insane. They believe in the literal existence of whole classes of things that I think are not only made up, but obviously made up for understandable wishful-thinking-based purposes. (Again, this isn’t just believers in the major religions.) From their POV, they’re sharing a bus with a guy who doesn’t even believe in the like five most important things in the universe, the things which make life meaningful and determine right and wrong. Still, we ride the bus together and I actually love this person and perhaps (if they’re a certain kind of Christian for example) they love me too. We both recognise the general precept of “don’t kill anyone”, the fungibility of one Australian dollar, and the custom of giving up a seat for an aged or pregnant person.

My problem: I want to be able to say to this believer’s face (if asked) what I believe and don’t believe in, no sugarcoating. Part of my worldview is that we should be honest about the conditions of life and treat one another like adults. It would be tragic if we couldn’t. But I sense — in fact I have ample unequivocal life experience to back it up — that this will offend them deeply. Which is fair. What I’m saying contradicts their most cherished ideas and, by the rules of their worldview, merely saying it is offensive.

What causes the double-standard?

Why do I not care about others professing their own views and even debunking and undermining my own, while most believers do mind?

1. One possibility is that most believers don’t really believe what they profess. Luckily. The extremists presumably do. For rank and file believers, who don’t take it literally, all that exists is the profession of that belief (and a whole train of practices and social connections). If you know that you don’t really truly believe, that you only do the public lip service to maintain your community or your own psychological health, then it’s the lip service that needs to be protected wherever it’s publicly challenged. If someone contradicts the lip service, there’s nothing left.

2. Another option is that they personally do have faith in their faith, but they fear the effect on others of my heresy. This might also be sound. If doubters like me keep making killjoy points, maybe one or two people will change their worldviews. Hey, maybe The Stark Way has changed someone’s mind about something. That wouldn’t be a violation of the laws of physics. But if I were the believer I wouldn’t be too worried. The scepticism cat has been out of the bag not just since Darwin, not just since the higher criticism, not just since the Enlightenment, but as long as belief itself (see below for details on Doubt by Jennifer Hecht). Doubt has disadvantages. It takes more calories to doubt. It’s uncomfortable. It’s a downer. And it is just obviously attractive to believe that, for example, you don’t really die when you die, that your destiny is looking good, that things work out in the end — and these are the very human, very understandable, very well-documented reasons for religious and spiritual beliefs (also see below for Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer). 

As I’ve said before, rhetoric just isn’t very effective. It’s virtually impossible to change someone’s mind just by presenting an argument. The more effective way to influence their beliefs is to control when and where they are born. People’s beliefs are best predicted by the beliefs of the people closest to them in a social network graph.

One belief, common to believers of almost all kinds, is belief in the power of words to persuade, or logos, or some other word magic. So they are likely to be threatened by the mere expression of dissenting views.

3. Another possibility is that it’s an effect of being in the majority. If the world was primarily doubters like me, and we heard the occasional dissenting voice advocating belief, we would do everything we could to discredit and debunk these threats to the status quo to maintain our social dominance. 

I don’t know about this one. There are places where the dominant mainstream ideology seems relatively unconcerned with discrepant views (like most liberal democracies). Also, religious people actually are a minority where I am, especially in my generation and younger.

4. What I actually think is going on here is wishful thinking. In most cases, the believer insists on the existence of something they want to be real. Beliefs in bad things like the devil, the evil eye, or cabals of paedophiles, or el Chupacabra don’t seem to be as important. Denouncing them doesn’t undermine people’s worldviews, apparently. (Counter-example: witch-hunts, McCarthyism, Stalin’s purges? Although these don’t seem to be about stamping out naysayers as much as scapegoating.)

Atheists certainly get nasty when their non-beliefs are questioned. Conspiracy theorists rant when you say the world isn’t as dastardly as they think it is. The most passionate displays, however, and the actual violence or enforcement — where beliefs are defended not only with words but actions — come from those defending the reality of something they think is good: honour, god, utopia. 

Should I share my doubts?

Actually, I’m arguably at fault here too. If I truly think people are wasting their time in this life — which is all I believe exists — then maybe I should proselytise. By my lights, believers squander their meagre endowment of time on a pipedream that buys them some solace or spiritual closure, but which asks of them money, resources, credulity. I tell myself it’s no use preaching, because nobody changes their mind just by hearing an argument. Maybe I just don’t want to be disagreeable.

The other reason I give myself is that, being a sceptic, I obviously assume I could be wrong about everything. And, being a pluralist, I want there to be a diverse portfolio of beliefs and practices out there. Not only because we can’t bank on one worldview being the “correct” one, but because I can’t live other lives. Others have arrived at different views to me because they’re different persons with different histories, preferences, genes, dreams, and hormones. I want them to have what they want.

I’m no relativist though. To the best of my knowledge — I’ve been blessed to have the time and inclination to study all this — believers are misguided. I’m betting my life on none of that stuff existing. And although it goes against my training in perspective-taking and other-worldview-inhabiting, I think I equate not believing in things with maturity. If a part of growing up is shedding layers of wishful thinking, then, deep down, I feel a lot of the world needs to grow up. I understand why that is condescending and rude to many believers. Yet if they said the same about me I wouldn’t mind at all. I doubt myself too.

Appendix: The unbelief books we should have read

These books would replace those by the “four horsemen” of New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Dawkins’ and Harris’ books were screed-ish. Hitchens’ was at least funny. Dennett’s was the only one that included any ideas from cognitive science, anthropology, or economics, in an attempt to offer a “natural history” of religion, as opposed to an argument for why there’s no god or a polemic against fundamentalists. The books were read in reverse order of how good they were, with few actually reading Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

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Religion Explained (2001) by Pascal Boyer. Boyer’s general conclusions are a bit dated now, having been superseded by work in the sub-discipline he founded. His most enduring point is how the nature of the supernatural entities from the world's religions, though seemingly manifold and varied, are strikingly similar and vary only along certain dimensions within very circumscribed limits. A deity might be an inanimate object with some property of living things (e.g. a rock that can fly), or it might be a figure who violates some point of intuitive psychology (e.g. eavesdrop on people’s thoughts) — but not both and it won’t vary in ways that are extraneous to human concerns. Boyer uncovers the basic cognition, what we might call the generative grammar, behind religious concepts.

Doubt: A History (2004) by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Hecht is great, she’s an historian of science, a poet, kind of an old school public intellectual. Doubt catalogues the phenomenon in dozens of times and places, as far back as written records go. Hecht shows beyond, um, doubt, that there have in all times and places been deniers of whatever the orthodoxy was, including all the supernatural beliefs. Hecht’s book provides a useful corrective to the surprisingly popular notion that nonbelief was some kind of invention of Christianity. People like Douglas Murray still throw this one around. Often it rests on as flimsy a basis as the words atheist or secular having their origins in Church disputes. Before those words, there were doubters, sceptics, deniers, heretics, iconoclasts, etc. One of the most salutary features of Hecht’s book is that it took until 2004 for it to be written.

The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011) by Alex Rosenberg. The real deal. He doesn’t bother talking about god or an afterlife (the publisher chose the title) and instead adopts an extreme form of naturalism or scientism, according to which we should be sceptical not only of things like supernatural entities, but also free will, aboutness, teleology, narratives, morality, folk psychology, and so on. He ends up advocating “nice nihilism” and says that if you find all this depressing take Prozac and enjoy the ride. I demur from his scientism (of which I’m sceptical, lol) but I’ve corresponded with Rosenberg over the years and I can vouch for his niceness. I think he’s the most important philosopher alive.

Straw Dogs (2001) by John Gray. Gray’s a legend. He tried out lots of different political identities and settled on being a general naysayer and gadfly. Straw Dogs is also not about major religions. It goes after humanism and the cluster of stories and shibboleths that secular intellectuals clung to in the twentieth century: the faith in reason, progress, Marxism, human perfectibility, liberalism, etc. And unlike almost every philosopher of the last hundred years, he’s a great writer. I just read his latest, The New Leviathans, which is probably his best since Straw Dogs.