Hi All, I recently posted some thoughts on Demanding Evidence at http://www.atheistichope.com/
excerpt: "...As anti-essentialists, we pragmatists don't want to think of religion as the sort of thing that has an essence. There is no critique that we should offer about religion as a whole, because there is no particular way that religion must be in order for it to be true its own essence. Instead we need to consider the various ways of "being religious" and critique them individually. Also, since pragmatists don't think that "getting things right" is a demand that floats free from from human concerns, The pragmatist atheist's only concern for religion is, as Richard Rorty put it, the "extent to which the actions of religious believers frustrate the needs of other human beings..." While some atheists (often those who proudly refer to themselves as Rationalists) see the appeals to faith rather than to evidence in relation to religious beliefs as the shirking of the believer's responsibility to have true beliefs or at least to base their beliefs on evidence, pragmatists don't think that we have a duty to Truth anymore than atheists think that we have a duty to God. Pragmatists who happen to also be atheists don't think we have a duty to any such nonhuman powers as God, Truth, Reason, Divine Will, The-Way-Things-Really-Are, or The Moral Law and might then be regarded as more though-going in their atheism than Rationalists. >From an evolutionary perspective, the point of holding beliefs is not to seek Truth but to gratify particular desires. Beliefs are thought of as tools for helping us get what we want. Since truths are pursued in support of particular human interests, before we can even talk about the truth of a belief, we need to sort out what sorts of desire we hope this or that belief will satisfy. This is what is often called "The Pragmatic Method." Likewise, instead of conceiving of evidence as something which "floats free of human projects" and demands our respect, Rorty says that the demand for evidence is "simply a demand from other human beings for cooperation on such projects." Our duty is not to "evidence" but only to ourselves and to our fellow human beings. We want our beliefs to cohere with our other beliefs, and to the extent that we want to participate in common projects with other people, we need to try to get our beliefs to cohere with their beliefs, *but only to that extent*. So the demand for evidence and the corresponding obligation to justify our beliefs only needs to come up when we are engaged in a common project..." Regards, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
