michaelshanesimpson-blog

[michaelshanesimpson-blog]

Shelving Beliefs

At the age of 21 the world is wide and full of possibility.  You can have a thousand new experiences in a day and, in the next, still have a thousand more.  The importance of experience cannot be stressed enough because it is our beliefs that either hold true or wither away as we gather new experience.  I do not necessarily refer to sensory experience either as the empiricists believe or have believed for a long while. Experiences, in the case of this essay, can refer to both the sensory and ethereal, that which we can see and that which we can reason.  Can we take our knowledge and dictate that we know it?  How do we know what we know?  Is there a point to expanding our beliefs?  Oftentimes, it seems, there is more to life than just those initial beliefs and there might be more for us to look at beyond our original assumption, our original knowledge.

At the age of 22, now my age, I take what I used to know and throw it out the window, simply because I know there could be more out there than that which I may know.  There’s always more to what a person may know.  What is the point in believing you know everything?  There’s no way to take everything and filter it so it is better to start from scratch every once in a while and to not pursue every bit of knowledge that could go your way.

As we grow older, we develop certain beliefs for ourselves, taking into account what our parents had believed and the environment in which we grew as individuals.  Aetius, a pre-Socratic philosopher, said this: "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon.”  Each person takes what they see and what they hear and form a worldview around it. Where the empiricists are incorrect is their inability to see that reason also is taken into account in the development of worldviews from a young age upward.  What we must do is take into account both the experiential and reasonable to create our beliefs.  It is not rational to take only one into account and not the other when questioning or developing beliefs.  Should our beliefs be purely sustained by what we reason them out to be?  If we take a picture of a leaf with two leaves on it and see that it is green, does it matter if we reason it out to be green through argument?  Both should be seen and taken into account.

What happens when we have developed a belief of some sort?  What must we say when we have formed the bases for our argument?  As we develop and sustain these worldviews, it seems to me that what we believe may not necessarily hold up to the standard of scrutiny that it should.  When we were young, we believed, of course, in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but as we grew older and saw evidence to the contrary, we realized that there were no such beings.  It was simply two stories that parents gave us to either teach morality (as in the former) or to entertain (as in the latter).  Once certain evidence came to our attention, such as parents telling us they were lying or finding it out the hard way on the playground, we take those beliefs and discard them as being wrong and childish.  We only believed what we did because we were told to believe a certain way.

“Reasoning is something we do. Experience is something we suf­fer (Short 2).” Experience is far less narrow a term that observation, which is how, according to empiricists (those who believe we gain knowledge solely from experience), we actually gain knowledge. “In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence (Hume).” We take what we see and we either conform it to our worldview or we let it conform us to its worldview.  There are several philosophers who would disagree, though, with that line of reasoning, believing that our senses and observations are too inaccurate.  We must be able to logically reason a belief before accepting it as accurate to our life.  This is why I do not believe in a god and would not accept any evidential arguments.  If a position cannot be reasoned from logic as well, observational evidence is not enough to convince me.  

We as adults now have certain beliefs, whether political, philosophical or just about life in general, and one can never be too sure how well it holds up under the scrutiny of actual evidence.  Do I believe the way I do because I was born under the proper conditions to believe that way?  Of course, you believe that way and feel are right to believe that way as it is the correct way to believe, but can you honestly say you looked at your belief and critiqued to the point where you feel comfortable saying that you believe that way because YOU absolutely believe it?

At what level do we take our beliefs and say that it is good enough to believe it?  There are thousands of groups devoted to Bigfoot and the possibility of Sasquatches but the amount of evidence for there being an actual Sasquatch seems small.  It requires what seems to be a lot of faith to believe in this being without ever seeing it, relying on rusty eyewitness accounts and old journals from former Presidents.  Terrible videos later proven false tend to bring out the influence that there is a Sasquatch.  So many live under the belief that there is a Bigfoot based on slim evidence and reality television shows.

Imagine a seven-year old who believes that the ice cream truck will always stop at a certain place each day at a certain time to sell ice cream.  If the seven-year old wanted to be sure of his belief, what evidences would he use to confirm or deny his belief?  Perhaps, he would use sensory experience in this case.  He sees the ice cream truck at noon each day in front of his school building just in time for his lunch hour.  This happens every single day of the school week.  Now, if this were to happen every day, he could reasonably assume that it will happen again the next day because the experience provided him.

An easier way to gain knowledge is a posteriori. If he really wished to know when the ice cream truck came, it would be very easy to find out.  After all, somebody must, reasonably speaking, drive the ice cream truck and, unless the kid is mute, he would be able to ask the ice cream truck driver if he was going to keep coming by every day.  He could, further still, ask someone in a position of authority at the school.  Would it be reasonable to believe that somebody gave the driver permission to sell ice cream at the lunch hour?  What is to stop the kid from finding more information about who set up the permission and thus know more than before?

How do we take into account emotions in our pursuit of change and in our reasoning?  Should we discount it entirely in our pursuit of the self?  Plato did not feel we should rid ourselves entirely of emotion but we must keep our soul properly ordered for ‘passions’ to overwhelm us into the bad qualities that emotions may have.  “But in a disordered soul its passions nourish exaggerated aggression and vainglory (Dabrowski 8).”  His pupil, Aristotle, felt that emotions were based on beliefs, meaning that what we believe will dictate our emotional state and well-being. For example, if you live an entire life believing a certain group of people are bad, emotions towards said people will be dictated on that belief (Dabrowski 9).  Hate leads to anger, after all.  When our emotions dictate action, therein lies our moral state.

“The challenge for a man was to know and accept the nature of things, his own emotionality included (Dabrowski 12).” The importance of finding oneself includes finding where our emotions come from and why we do or must feel certain ways.  Why does my heart skip a beat when I see my friend?  Is the emotion that I feel positive or negative, and for what reason is either?  As we change belief or look at our own belief, it is important to note that sometimes our passions for our previous belief may change.  Oftentimes, we may feel disgust for what we had believed previously.  The changes within ourselves may even bring about disgust or dislike.  It is natural and healthy.

Sometimes, in belief, it is better to not settle once you are no longer convinced that your belief is not the proper one.  For a time, when I was younger, I wasn’t entirely convinced of Christianity so I instead dabbled with Buddhism and incorporated those ideas into my belief system.  I was influenced by a summer camp I had gone to the summer before my senior year.  My course I went to (it was an unusual camp, dealing primarily with those whom could pass a rigorous application) dealt with purely philosophy.  It was the most fun I ever had in a class before, expanding what I knew and convincing me there was more out there than before.  However, I could not fully get a grasp of my belief. “Philosophy is in large part concerned with questions that we have not yet found a satisfactory and systematic way to answer (Searle 544).”  That which I knew were the questions previously unanswered or of which I was unsure. There is not always a good answer to a question and the point of philosophy is to pursue the answers that make you feel most uncomfortable.  As a Baptist Christian, anything that did not conform to my worldview would make me uncomfortable.  The class did not make me feel uncomfortable because I was not yet ready to fully question my own worldviews.  There were several moments when that which was said was also accepted in my pubescent mind.  It was wrong to do this and it was wrong to do that simply because someone reasoned it from Scripture and reasoned it from what another pastor said.

Maybe this is a better example for you. Imagine your parents teaching you that all cats are bad creatures and give you several reasons to fear them: scratching and biting, potential to be allergic, feral tendencies in the wild. It is possible to convince a younger person that something as benign as a cat could be mean or evil towards them and thus needs to be avoided.  That could be enough for anyone if your parents have convinced you of their evil. Take it one step further.  Let’s say they let you near a cat one day and the cat was feral.  They convince you this is the example of a cat, and this cat is representative of all cats.  Now, it is based on your experience that all cats are evil based on the one example you are given.

The above example sounds like how racism is indoctrinated into younger people; give a bad example of a person and chalk it up purely to race.  It happens quite often in other countries and happens here in the United States.  In reality, one could create an assumption around a religion, gender or sexual orientation, making them an evil to the individuals being taught.

Unfortunately, poorly-evidenced beliefs and bad assumptions are a dime a dozen in society and are generally held by most people, regardless of the make or take of the belief.  It seems impossible to change ones’ belief with or without evidence affirming or denying it.  What an individual can do, however, is take what beliefs they know and recognize in having and seriously regarding them, looking at what evidence supports or denies it. Take an analytical approach to who you are as a person.  One can never be too honest with themselves if action is the next step.

Plato described the process of removing bad beliefs in an allegory.  Imagine being in a cave where you have been tied to a wall since birth.  The only thing you are able to see is the shadows in the wall directly in front of you, shadows cast by a fire behind you.  The shadows come from the people behind you, and their voices seem to come from the shadows because of the echoes in the cave. You will spend your entire life believing this to be your reality because this is all you know to be.

The prisoner, in the allegory, is freed and takes a look around him.  The fire directly behind him blinds him, so he is unable to see all that is behind the fire.  He walks around and stumbles out in the bright light, and it is difficult to adjust at first, being used to the total darkness.  The freed prisoner doesn’t know how to comprehend what is around him. It takes time to adjust his eyesight and mind to the new images around him.  He sees the trees and beauty around him once he does.  Everything has changed for him.

Once he goes back to the cave, his eyesight is only adjusted to the outside world, so it is the equivalent of being blind in the darkness of the cave.  He cannot free the other prisoners there, those who see reality as the shadows on the wall.  Because he is blind, the other prisoners believe that what has happened to him is a bad pain.  The only way for them to leave the cave now is by kicking and screaming.  They don’t wish to change their reality.

Several scholars have taken Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and analyzed it to the point of beating it like a dead horse but it is important to understand Plato and what he means by this imagery for our own philosophical journeys.  If there was a philosopher I would recommend first in the overall scheme of exploring your own beliefs, Plato would be the first to read.  You can find the Allegory in “The Republic.”  

We can relate the Allegory back to our discussion on sensory knowledge and its non-reliability as the sole way of gaining knowledge.  “What we see in the physical world, compared to true, intelligible knowledge, is like shadows cast by fire on the wall of the cave, compared to the reality of the objects outside the cave that cast these shadows. (Contemporary Psychoanalytical Studies 42).”  Of course, we must take into account that which we see in our pursuit of what is true, but what we see is not always true.

What we can take from what we read here is actually quite applicable to our lives.  It is important to note that changing belief can be harmful to our interpersonal relations or own selves.  The LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community has experience with “coming out of the closet,” or revealing their identities to closest family members, friends or society.  To become an atheist in the mid-South (born and raised in a decent-sized town in Kentucky) was not a pleasant experience for me, in way of changing belief. I had been an atheist for a while, but felt uncomfortable with expressing that to others.  I really was not sure how my family or friends would react to me.  Both my foster mother and father were strong Christians when I had been growing up and had instilled everyone in my family with a strong sense of belief (they all strayed but stuck to that belief in god).  I was hesitant to say the least.  

Those who had been around me when I was a hardcore Christian saw the difference as hostile towards their own beliefs.  As I grew as a person and in my beliefs when I was 20 years old, I realized that I did not have enough evidence to support the idea of a god.  Experiential evidence and environmental bias was not nearly enough to believe in a god who I believed was, at best, not a strong position I could argue.  I believed in the Christian god because I was instilled those same values as my other family members were.  From an early age, I was taught that those who did not believe in god but it was my duty as a Christian to bring my beliefs to those around me who did not.  My teenage years, I was obsessed with proselytizing and sharing that belief with as many people as I could.  It made for many awkward exchanges and conversations, those individuals expressing discomfort but with my push and non-hesitation.  I was obsessed with the concept and read as much as I could that confirmed my beliefs.  It is quite easy to mold that which you read to your own beliefs.

Does what we believe force us to be obligated to those beliefs?  Let’s say we do believe in a god and that there are those who do not believe in god. If we did not share our evidences for a god and there were to be people condemned to hell because we did not share, the pain is on whose hands?  Where does the suffering of those people go and who should be held accountable?  The same must be reversed.  If we knew a belief to be false and people were to waste their lives when they could do something universally useful, who is truly at fault?

At church, oftentimes, I would sit uncomfortably in my chair as it was explained to me that homosexuals were going to hell. Scripture was taken and analyzed on this large front screen in the front, a PowerPoint pointing out specific verses that mention that certain people will go to hell.  They would tell me that it is never okay to have an abortion, and then other churches would tell me there are exceptions.  Who was guaranteed to go to hell no matter what? The ideological practice enforced it within me a severe discomfort with whom I sat, looking upon and believing were going to one day burn in hell.  They had convinced me that it was my duty to convince those people that this god had loved them but their beliefs and identities must completely change to fit with my own ideologies and worldviews before being able to experience love from this god.

“Very young children apparently have a different conception of the relation of belief to truth from that of adults (Searle 553).” This means it is quite easier to convince a child of a false belief.  Belief is far stronger when enforced at a young age.  You will notice programs are developed in churches specifically geared towards students and children so they may learn about those beliefs. I dislike the comparison but one could imagine Hitler Youth going along the same lines.  Create an official ideology, force the adults of society to voluntarily let their children participate in a group that will convince them of this ideology, and, in no time at all, you have raised generations devoted to your cause, devoted to your ideology.  Hitler had a lot of success.  The Hitler Youth formed their own units towards the end of the war just to fight those invading their native homeland.

Many will take into account only the evidence that supports their position best.  I would read Christian apologetics that would confirm what I already believed. I did not start from the base premises and think about it from there.  Is there a god?  Why would there be a god?  In order to fully understand theology, history must be taken into account.  What basis was there for a belief in divinity? Our own beliefs do not necessarily have to conform to what has been accepted, historically, but should at least take into account what has been thought previously.  The past is important in that role, bringing us thoughts that do not align with our own beliefs and forcing us to examine what we believed previously.  

As my beliefs shifted and my views changed, I became less convinced that any person was going to hell.  Of course, the primary argument against my new founded beliefs was that it was my human understanding was getting in the way. This was leveled at me whenever I made mention of my atheism to those Christians around me God’s way were so far above my own that we could not understand why a loving god could not accept those people into his heaven.  It seemed strange to me that other practices would take it further and say that our belief only exists because this god inspired it within us and that we were chosen by him to believe in him.  Do not take me as an anti-theist though.  Later essays in this series will show that I believe that there are several good qualities to religion, and religious concepts of compassion and non-selfishness should definitely be admired.  Atheism does not need to equate hatred towards religion or religious groups, but merely a general distrust in the idea of there being a divine being.

There are philosophers who believe it is impossible to not believe in a god because where would there be morality without a god of some sort?  Immanuel Kant felt that not believing in god would lead to ‘moral despair.’  You lose a certain aspect of morality when you lose a belief in god.  Tied into directly into his argument is that there must be an overall morality and that it is objectively true, created by an otherworldly being.  This being is what makes and dictates the rules for humanity (Van Impe 766).

Does it mean I am no longer a moral person when I do not believe in a divine being to give me the rules?  No, not necessarily.  Moral subjectivity is a strong view that branches out into what we dictate as our morals to be.  Who should define what our morals should be?  As I wrote this essay, I wondered where I would like to culminate the idea that we should shelve beliefs and critique all we know.  I do not mean to make a single person lose all that they hold dear, but, if all held dear happens to never been analyzed, can those ideas be truly accounted for?  What is next once you realize your beliefs may be wrong or you do throw out your set of beliefs?

It takes a lot of proper research and finding oneself to accumulate valid beliefs.  By finding oneself, I mean to pursue knowledge that will make your life worthwhile.  What should I pursue?  Once, I believed that god or gods were the meaning of life, but now, the question of the meaning of life is open-ended.  I pursue lines of thought oftentimes, asking myself about what life is for me, and where it leads.  The sinnsfrage, the meaning question, asks us what features go about bringing meaning to life, and what we should ask ourselves about life (Rowlands 379).  If you find yourself lacking in belief after soul-searching, it is time to look for that which is meaningful to you and grow as a person.

This New Year, take it as a personal challenge to take your views and look at them a different way.  Find someone who believes the opposite you do and listen to them and see what they say.  If your belief can be researched, research it and find out why it may not make sense to another individual.  I am not asking you give up your beliefs as I would never do that.  I will not tell you atheism or agnosticism is the only to believe or that if you do not believe it, you must be a purely irrational creature.  I ask you to look at your beliefs because of the Shakespeare quote, “To thine ownself be true.”  Why believe in something if it is not true?  Why believe in something, more importantly, that isn’t true to you or you cannot fully prove to yourself that it is true?  The only thing you have to lose, in your search for knowledge, is a false belief and what you could gain is a stronger belief or a better belief.

Works Cited

Dąbrowski, Andrzej. "Emotions In Philosophy. A Short Introduction." Studia Humana 5.3 (2016): 8-20. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Jan. 2017.

Hume, David, and Tom L. Beauchamp. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

SHORT, T. L. "Empiricism Expanded." Transactions Of The Charles S. Peirce Society 51.1 (2015): 1-33. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017

"Notions Of Truth In Philosophy." Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 22.(2016): 39-69. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017.

Rowlands, Mark. "The Immortal, The Intrinsic And The Quasi Meaning Of Life." Journal Of Ethics 19.3/4 (2015): 379-408. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

VAN IMPE, STIJN. "Kant's Moral Theism And Moral Despair Argument Against Atheism." Heythrop Journal 55.5 (2014): 757-768. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Jan. 2017.

SEARLE, JOHN R. "The Future Of Philosophy." Nova Et Vetera (English Edition) 14.2 (2016): 543-558. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2017.

[michaelshanesimpson-blog]

To write is to gain

Modern philosophy cannot be stated enough as the pillar of civilization and the pillar of my life.  I study it religiously and write about it almost as much.  Writing is that thing in life that you have in place to keep you sane even in the midst of turmoil and tragedy.  My goal in life is to make a living off my writing, to one day afford to only write, to publish books and that be my only income needed.  For now, I am happy to write and do so prolifically.

I have three books published, two books of poetry called Tales of a Nerd and Crazy, and one novel called To Dream.  This Tumblr will be where I will publish my serious essays and various thoughts and notes involving my books.  I will also post poems here for your enjoyment and my own sanity.  I hope you enjoy.