Camp Offers Training Ground For Little Skeptics

A camp was opened by founder Nathan Bupp to give those who are seeking alternatives to religion.

But what about faith, one counselor asks? Shouldn't you take some arguments about God on faith?

"As soon as someone mentions faith in an argument, the argument is over," says 15-year-old Ryan Lee, who skipped high school and is entering his junior year of college in Arizona. "Faith and the scientific method can't be combined in the same argument."

Bupp says polls show that people who believe in reason, not God, are among the fastest growing groups in America. And this camp is designed to teach children to investigate and question everything. They study fossils, they learn about morality without religion, they meet an expert who debunks mysteries like weeping icons and ghosts and crop circles.

The problem is that this assumes that reason is inherently naturalistic and creates a fabricated distinction between faith and reason. It is as if someone who has any sort of religious belief cannot therefore question "everything". It is a rather naive and counter-factual position to take. I do not mind the idea of such a camp, but I do think that the fundamental premise by which it is being constructed is false. If they are to critically think about everything, then the very assumptions by which the camp's ideological premises are constructed should also be questioned.

Moreover, the data, perhaps from Pew and others, does not make a distinction between faith and reason, but between theism and non-theism. Again, the way that this is presented needs to be honest with the facts. But I fear that what happens is that the campers are getting a filtered fabrication of the facts that leads to specific conclusions that will not allow for such an open exploration of what truth actually is and the evidence that is actually there to support such assertions.

Here is an interesting exchange between two parents of one of the happy lil' campers that illustrates this problem well enough:

As her husband speaks, Jean winces slightly.

"Well, I do believe in God," she says, "I do believe in miracles, and I do believe in faith when you're at the lowest of the low. And I want to give that to my children.

"As soon as they read Richard Dawkins," he counters, "I win." Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and author of The God Delusion.

Win what? All he has said is that he has an indubitable faith in Dawkins which is perhaps more of an absurd claim to suggest that his wife has a strong Catholic faith which, by the way, has arguably produced the notion of critical thinking in the University system which it founded. So what is more rational: to make a statement of faith in one book that is assumed to debunk all religion when it really challenges a rather specific kind of ideology, or to have a faith in a tradition that has a history, contrary to what appears to be the case here, of questioning the nature of God and itself.

And finally:

Camper Sam LaBarge speaks up. His immediate family isn't religious, he says, but he has several relatives who are Catholic.

"I don't think I'm an atheist," he says. "I just don't have beliefs, but I tell my family that and they think I'm the devil because I don't believe in God."

Yet is his belief that skepticism is an inherently indubitable position to take with the world also questioned as a good skeptic ought to do? All humans have beliefs and if that is not raised as a simple fact about human cognition, then the camp is as utter a failure as Jesus Camp is for Christians who want to love their neighbor as they love themselves.

Camp Offers Training Ground For Little Skeptics : NPR.

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1. standing at the precipice of reason