Reading this blogpost (it’s in Norwegian) got me thinking a bit on the subject of religion and how it relates to critical thinking. Is religious belief irrational? Well, most of us, including maybe most religious people too, will agree that there are variations of for instance Christianity that are irrational or maybe weird or extreme. But what about non-extreme religion, like plain old traditional Christianity? Can we apply critical thinking to that? Yes, by the way, I will use Christianity as the religion I refer to in this post as it is the one that I know best, and the one that is relevant for my culture.

So, what is «Critical Thinking» anyway?

As Wikipedia defines it, critical thinking «generally refers to higher order thinking that questions assumptions». However the definition is not necessarily that precise as you will notice if you read the rest of the Wiki-page. Regardless, I will stick to this definition and append the definition of the scientific method as a way we could question assumptions. In other words, to accept a claim, we should generally require scientific evidence that the claim is true, or rather most likely true. Absolute truths are best left to those bold enough to claim them.

Critical thinking needs to be objective, or as close as it is humanly possible to get. In a scientific context, i.e. as in scientific research, this is usually achieved by collaboration and peer review. On a personal level it is not that simple. Changing ones mind about a subject you already have made your mind up about is not easy and often takes some time. As a critical thinker I find myself in that situation every now and then. I may have made up my mind about a subject based on an assumption, or based on the opinion of the person I first got the idea from. An example is the idea that chewing vitamin C when you’ve got the flu will make it go away faster. I used to believe that, can’t remember where I got it from, but I eventually found out it was not true. It wasn’t that hard to accept, but it didn’t happen instantly. More deeply held beliefs take longer to change as I will come to later.

Does this apply to religion?

The main requirement of the scientific method is that the claim or theory is falsifiable or refutable. This means that there is a conceivable way of proving the theory wrong. The main religious claims are generally not falsifiable. You cannot prove that God exist, nor can you prove that he does not exist. The claim is a matter of faith. Therefore such a claim falls outside the reach of the scientific method and thus religion is not a part of science aside from the study of religious belief itself of course. So is it possible to think critically about religion then? Most definitely.

My story about faith

Religious belief is based on a set of dogmas or assumptions which are supported by faith. I.e. you choose to accept them as truth despite any lack of empirical evidence. Most religious people have inherited their faith from their culture and/or their family, and so did I. This is quite evident when you look at the geographical and cultural distribution of the various major religions. This does not necessarily mean that every believer is a blind sheep following the flock. Many are convinced their faith is true based on personal experience which are often of a very emotional nature. Personal experience however is highly subjective and biased to your existing belief system and therefore an incredibly lousy basis for truth.

Others again decide to take one step further and study their religion in detail. That is what I attempted. I was raised a Christian, but as I grew older I found Christianity in practice to be too subjective and inconsistent. I found that people’s personal experience were not trustworthy as confirmation of the religious doctrines. So I decided to study at a Bible College for 2 years. Digging into the matter was exciting at first, but I soon realised that the reality of theology was even more shaky than my plain old trust in the religious authorities I grew up with. The Bible is a complex book with many many contradictions, historical and scientific inaccuracies and physical impossibilities. It has been edited by numerous people with varying ideological and political agendas, and even presents several religions rather than just the two I used to think. The whole historical narrative in the first half of the Old Testament turned out to be highly mythological and is to a large degree proven completely wrong by archaeological and historical evidence. So in other words, the Bible is not the authoritative word of God, but a book compiled by men over about a 1000-1500 years in the bronze age. The New Testament is equally a collection of books and letters with varying agendas and content. They are not in agreement, and have been edited to suit changes in religious practice. The authors of the gospels didn’t even know much about local geography and got a lot of details wrong. We can check these today, but what about all the details we cannot check? Are they also wrong?

Fine, so critical thinking pretty much rules out the authority of Christian scripture. But what about the idea of a God and the moral content of the Bible? Well, as for the moral content of the Bible, that is purely a matter of cherrypicking. It has many good passages and many horribly bad ones. That doesn’t make it irrelevant as a source of good ideas and nice quotes, but it disqualify it as a authoritative text on morals. As for the concept of God, that is a bit trickier. I find it pretty clear that the varying image of God found in the Bible is a pretty unimaginative and inconsistent description of an entity we would call God. I do not believe this God exist. However the philosophical theism or deism is not so straight forward to reject.

In earlier times the existence of a creating God was supposed based on observation of nature. It seemed implausible that it had come to be without someone making it so. This is what is known as the teleological argument (in a nutshell). A couple of centuries with scientific progress has rendered this argument more or less dead with the exception of fundamentalist religious people who argue for creationism and its derivative, intelligent design. Both of which are not science, but religion. This fact drastically reduce the plausibility of and even the need for a God or a theos. A creator has become redundant in science. There is therefore no need to believe in one other than for emotional reasons. God is reduced to some abstract idea of an uncaused cause or some universal force which is irrelevant to human life and existence. Of such an entity I am agnostic, not because I think it is likely to exist, but because I cannot argue that it does not exist. Both Einstein and the philosopher Spinoza talked about this kind of God. Einstein himself has been misquoted numerous times as arguing for the existence of God.

Conclusion

So there it is, a short version of my critical evaluation of Christianity, the religion I was brought up with. There is obviously a lot more to it than just this, but these are some of the main points. My point was to demonstrate that religion is subject to critical thinking as much as anything else in our life. The fact that the basic idea cannot be proven right or wrong does not disqualify it from critical scrutiny. It is also demonstrated that atheism and agnosticism is not a requirement for critical thinking, it is rather the other way around: Critical thinking often leads to atheism and agnosticism. I am not saying that religious people are incapable of critical thinking, on the contrary. They usually just choose not to apply the critical thinking to their religion, or at least not all of it. I know many intelligent people who are religious, even in science. I would say most people I know that are religious are also smart, and are critical thinkers in many respects, but the attachment to religion is deep and emotional and resists being scrutinised. The change for me took several years. It was not something I came to realise over night. But it eventually had to happen as I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the religion I inherited.