I know these are long arguments. But this one was my favorite since I think it deals with the problem inherent to the atheist assertion that faith claims are inherently irrational or even stupid.
The term "motivated belief" is used by Polkinghorne. Read more here in this fantastic review of a book that Polkinghorne wrote for The Times. I am posting the re-post on Dawkins' site because the comments reveal how many atheists are guilty of simply towing the line uncritically as many religious people do. Also the comment about Polkinghorne's credentials at the top of the re-post do nothing more than to stir the pot. The fact is that he is a scientist (a particle physicist by trade), then a priest and he writes from both perspectives of the cosmos.
From October 2007
From where do our motivations and passions to know the world and our experience of it come? Do these motivations and passions affect how we experience the world? Is one way of experiencing the world more legitimate than another?
Knowledge is a clear product of one’s motivation for learning which is essentially axiomatic in theories of learning and cognition. That is to say, if you have a completely unmotivated learner, while they may be able to articulate the meaning of something, the chances of that meaning affecting their personal structures of cognition go down exponentially unless something happens to that learner’s motivation to assimilate that knowledge. This is confirmed in the degree to which a student can succeed in a course of study, test or other means of measuring a learning outcome. It is also clear in literature on memory and cognition. Hence, learning is not a static procedure, but one that is intimately associated with motivations and passions of the learner.
We may qualify knowledge so termed “motivated knowledge”. This is not a new concept at all, but one that hearkens back to the Greek notion of knowledge as something dynamically personal and embodied rather than as an object floating in the container of the mind. But what seems to have happened is a divorce in educational theory between the motivations of the learner and the learning outcomes themselves. Paradoxically, or stupidly as the case may be, we know this to be the case, yet programs of standardized testing such as No Child Left Behind continue to ignore motivation as a factor in how we assign meaning to what we learn. So for clarity of terms I am referring to learning and cognition as that ability of the mind to quickly apprehend and discern patterns and sequences of data in order to infer predictions of future events and data.
Knowledge is the process by which one assigns meaning of some sort to what one has learned. The relation of the two is not a static process or sequence, but a dynamic interaction with both terms acting in a more or less synchronous relation. Belief then follows from this meaning-making process inherent to knowledge so understood. Two epistemological issues follow from this that are at least tangentially related to issues of faith versus knowledge in a scientific sense of that to which we can bring material proofs to bear.
First, the process of knowing is related to how we make meaning. When we perceive and learn data, the structures of our minds in relation to the physical structures of reality convert data into information and meaning. When we assign meaning, we are making a judgment that ascribes legitimacy to some knowledge and de-legitimates other forms or objects of knowledge. Moreover, our experience itself is a product of judgments since we can only have this or that experience at any given point in time. Some of these experiences mean more than others to us and have a far more profound impact on our experience and meaning-making from that point onward. Finally, it affects the values we ascribe to different motivations, beliefs, and experiences.
Does not meaning and legitimacy we ascribe to knowledge contain a certain degree of intellectual satisfaction? That is to say, our natural inclination to be curious, seek foundations of things, explain reality and so forth is a motivation of knowledge conditioned by experience and prior meaning-making. How we make meaning in the present and future has a definitive sense of what is satisfying to our curiosities. Moreover, as we discover or are presented data that we convert to meaning that satisfies these curiosities about the nature of things, we make judgments and generalizations about reality in order to predict occurrences and define things in a general enough sense that our very cognition can become flexible enough to comprehend what is novel in our interactions with other objects and events. This may be called belief as such. Thus, it seems that beliefs in terms of generalizations about reality are intimately connected first, with how we approach learning something new, and second, with the degree to which our intellectual curiosities about the nature of things are satisfied.
This structure of meaning-making so conceived is how we ascribe legitimacy to some knowledge and by which we de-legitimate claims to knowledge in others. If we were to logically order the process it would be perception, learning, knowledge, belief all conditioned by the motivation of the knower that does not exist apart from the process of meaning-making. Note: I am not suggesting that motivated knowledge is subjective in the pure sense of the term where motivation determines what we know (even though that clearly happens in too many cases to enumerate), but that it does condition how we assign legitimacy of knowledge.
Second, it seems that the degree to which our intellectual curiosities are satisfied has some influence on how we ascribe legitimacy to truth. This is not to say that there are and have been very clear representations of reality that seem to govern their own properties of legitimacy certainly in terms of the outcomes of so many scientific investigations. But even here there are clear patterns and structures of behavior that do condition the curiosity of the observer. These are largely governed by the norms of the academic professions in general for many areas of investigation. Again, this is not to say that these normative structures are therefore somehow lacking in legitimacy in how they condition the motivations of the knower, but only that they do condition this process. Nor does it suggest that these normative structures condition knowledge to such a degree that it is necessarily de-legitimized by the conditions. But it does raise a suggestion of why we tend to accept intellectual norms that do legitimate our knowledge, and may also therefore condition the very motivations that will satisfy our intellectual curiosity.
While we may ascribe good justifications for why an intellectual curiosity is satisfied, these justifications alone seem conditioned by the same conditions in which the knower has developed his or her sense of intellectual curiosity and satisfaction. Here I am suggesting that knowledge and social norms are intimately connected.
So what does this mean? It means for many that there is a preference to scientific knowledge over any kind of knowledge that is not properly considered scientifically based. This preference is the source of legitimacy for certain knowledge statements and is itself a value judgment. It seems that in our world scientific knowledge just has more legitimacy due to its objective verifications of objects and events and its principles of repeatability and predictability. But all of these attributes of scientific knowledge when held in higher esteem to other ways of experiencing and knowing the world are value-laden and as statements to legitimate scientific reasoning have no more objective clout than another way of knowing conditioned by different ways of experiencing the world.
Scientific knowledge may tell us about the chemical and natural process for partnering with other persons, biological success, gene transference, the effects of hormones and other chemicals on mental processes, etc. But are all of these ways of looking at the effects of love adequate to explain the core meaning of love itself? Can science help us to become better people, to have a better moral conduct in the world? While it can no doubt aid our understanding of rational behavior and so, enhance our understanding of these concepts, scientific knowing is nonetheless an abstraction from the experience itself. A mother looking into the eyes of her child is not experiencing the chemical process in the brain nor does she consider genetic competition and success in that moment. The desire to be happy and live a good life can be assisted through rational critique, but enacting these motivations is not achieved through a scientific procedure. Life is not lived as if in a lab even if there are pundits who would lead us to believe that this is so or ought to be so.
Even the passion a scientist has to find the simplest explanation amidst a myriad of other possible explanations for the same thing is itself a motivated source of knowing that has its root firmly placed in the soil of human desire and creativity and not in the test tube or beaker used to run this or that verification or test.
There are good judgments that take into account and assimilate other knowledge about something before a decision is made. There are poor judgments that simply ignore these other sources and work in a silo of pride. But these are all judgments made in terms of the inclination of the will to seek legitimation in this or that kind of experience. And this inclination or desire comes from previous meaning-making activity in previous experiences.
So is God an important reality or just delusion? This is not the fundamental question at all. The question really is: Why does one prefer to legitimate knowledge by one means over another? At the base of this core judgment the real discussion seems to bear the most fruit because it call into question the very conditions of our selves – our very identities – through which we construct our understanding of the world and find structure and coherence in our experience of it.
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