The Post-Modern Dialectics of Belief

I have been musing a little bit about belief, especially after a couple of outraged comments on the previous post about the absurdity of the moon-sighting charade that occurs ever few months. We get similar comments every time we post something about the irrationality that seems to pervade the thinking of literalist followers of religion. There really is no way to argue against belief. If someone actually believes with all their heart that white is actually black or that the placement of Venus relative to Mars will affect your chances of finding true love, how do you argue against it? A belief, by definition, resists interrogation. A good part of religion involves blind trust - that a beneficient god (or gods) exists, that everything that occurs has a hidden, deeper meaning, that there is a goal to strive towards, and that the path to that goal as defined by the religion is the best route to achieve it.

I should point out that I have no issues with people's personal spiritual beliefs (it's their own space after all and human history shows us that everyone requires some sort of belief system to survive) and I do think that on the whole all major religions (all the ones I know of in any case) share a desire to create a better, more just society (even if their followers' interpretations can tend to lead one to conclude differently). The desire to believe in a power greater than ourselves, to bring meaning to apparent anarchic chaos, is deeply ingrained in the human psyche, and I am not one of those whose mission in life is to go around attacking religion in toto.

But problems do arise when personal belief systems are either imposed on other people who wish to have a different belief system or, as in this case, when belief is substituted for an argument even in the face of tangible evidence to the contrary. If someone really believes that God intended for us to order our lives only by looking upon the moon with a naked eye (as the maulvis of Pakistan seem to believe), there is little that logic can do. They will throw hadees (or hadith to you Arabophiles) at you as if that in and of itself constitutes any rational argument (and I'm not even getting into the theological issues of which hadees is credible and which suspect, that different schools of jurisprudence have different opinions on). Such is the power of irrational dogma that even recalling the fact that the Quran itself encourages, at numerous points, people to use their minds (i.e. logic, rationality) is brushed aside as irreligious.

I am not advocating that science has all the answers to everything - it doesn't, and the realm of the spiritual is not the domain of science in any case. But yes, science is a process through which we have come to understand more and more about the physical world around us and it posits theories based on evidence, not on mere belief. These theories, which may be overturned by new evidence, are the most plausible explanations at the time of how or why things are the way they are. You can well argue against a theory using evidence that contradicts it. But you cannot, repeat cannot, argue against it just on the basis that you believe something is different.

And this is my problem with the bizarre new post-modern dialectic that seems to pervade the world these days and which is evidenced in some of the comments we get on this blog. Everything is not equally valid, especially if it originates from different planes of thought like religion and science. (Personally, I don't even see the contradiction between being a Muslim and accepting the principles of science, and it seems to me a selective reading in any case, since mullahs use all sorts of products based on scientific principles when it suits them.) This is the new cop-out: claiming you can base analyses on nothing more than your feelings. A sort of 'I feel it therefore it's true.' But you just cannot pit your cherished belief as a valid counter to empirical evidence or reasoned logic. Or rather, you can if you want, but we will make fun of it.

Just in case you thought the irrationality of religious belief  is limited only to places like Pakistan's Ruet-e-Hilal Committee, here's a handy reminder of how the whole world suffers from it. First see the following spoof video below and then follow it up with the real video that it satirizes...

Spoof:




Real:




Maybe somebody should enter Mufti Muneeb et al into the Miss USA pageant, based obviously merely on their rejection of logic.