How to Be an Honest Life-Long Seeker of the Truth
Given that so many billions of intelligent people down through the millennia have been wrong, dead wrong, about so many important things, you should commit yourself to being an honest life-long seeker of truth. Given the extremely low odds of being right about everything important, this is the only reasonable intelligent position to take regarding knowledge of any kind. To be blunt, there are some important things you are sure about, things that you do not doubt, that you’re probably wrong about. Let that sink in. You are probably wrong. We all are. Only intelligent or highly educated people know this completely, for the more we know then the more we know that we don’t know.
Got that? You should. Philosopher Daniel Dennett said, “One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.” Recognizing one’s own fallibility and ignorance is the inaugural point to any honest person’s search for knowledge. You’ll probably fail to completely realize this until later in life. It may take years or decades for this to dawn on most people. Others may never realize it. They may never be convinced they have been wrong about some important things. They just happened to get lucky to be raised to believe correctly about everything important, that’s all. We should all be so lucky, or something!
This commitment to searching for the truth must be brutally honest and maintained throughout one’s life. It must be there at the commencement of the would-be religious apologist’s studies too. I think this commitment is of paramount importance. It’s so important there should be an initiation ceremony for anyone deciding to be an apologist. Sort of like ordination services, where the ministerial candidate swears to preach the gospel truth, the initiation rite of the apologist candidate should be where aspiring apologists swear to become honest life-long seekers of the truth, no matter what the results may be. For only that kind of person with that kind of commitment has a chance to know what religious truth to defend, if any of them can be defended at all. Anyone lacking this kind of commitment should not aspire to become an apologist at all. You probably cannot get any better indicator of it than this. Don’t pursue this goal. Drop out now before it’s too late. Do something else in life. You are not the right kind of person for this kind of task. It says you are not really interested in the truth, come what may.
More often than not, when young college people first decide to become Christian apologists, they have not studied long enough nor plummeted deep enough into the range of issues needed to know which religious truth to defend. It’s like getting married at the early age of twenty-one, the drinking age in the United States, and committing oneself to another person for life, not knowing how things will go in the future. It’s just too early to expect most of these marriages to succeed in today’s world (although it still is a worthy goal), and it’s just too much to ask of would-be apologists to defend what is believed at the age of twenty-one too. So, the better commitment is to become a life-long honest seeker of the truth, by far.
In this essay I’m going to offer some sound advice for would-be religious apologists, or anyone for that matter. Since the goal of any apologist worthy of the title is to defend the truth, such a person should first of all be committed to an honest life-long search for the truth no matter what the results may be.
Don’t Trust Your Brain
My first and probably most important piece of advice is not to trust your brain. It will deceive you if left unchecked. Does this sound like contradictory advice? After all, I’m trying to reason with your brain by telling your brain not to trust itself. No self-respecting brain would ever fall for that, right? If this advice is considered the cure, then the cure is worse than the disease, correct? Any functioning brain will object to this advice, yes.
Not so fast. My advice is not contradictory at all. I should be more specific though. Your brain does not work that well at getting to the truth. It needs help. It needs better inputs, the objective inputs of science. Without these objective inputs it can easily be deceived. For the brain is a belief engine. It creates stories out of random data. It sees patterns where there are none by connecting random dots. It will “see” that which supports its own conclusions and ignore that which doesn’t. Your brain will believe and defend what it prefers to be true and what is familiar, over evidence to the contrary. It can even justify what it concludes in the face of some incontrovertible evidence. In fact, when confronted with contrary evidence, the brain can and will dig itself deeper and deeper into the intellectual trenches of its own making, refusing to budge from what it has previously concluded. Once the brain latches onto an idea it can be extremely difficult to dislodge that idea from the grasp of the brain. The more important the idea is to the brain then the less likely it can be dislodged. There is a massive amount of solid research supportive of these undeniable facts. Alvin Plantinga and others talk about cognitive faculties that are not functioning properly. Brain science shows that none of us have cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, or more specifically, they don’t function correctly to a large degree.
Guy P. Harrison explains how the brain works when confronted with claims counter to its conclusions. If a skeptic disputes a psychic’s readings, then “the believer’s brain is likely to instinctively go into siege mode. The drawbridge is raised, crocodiles are released into the mote, and defenders man the walls.” He goes on to explain, “The worst part of all this is that the believer usually doesn’t recognize how biased and close-minded he is being. He likely feels that he is completely rational and fair. It doesn’t happen just with fans of psychics. We are all vulnerable to this distorted way of thinking.” This process happens whenever the brain feels threatened by contrary data.
What Harrison says accurately reflects that current state of science on the brain. So don’t trust you brain. Don’t trust it when evaluating philosophical arguments without the hard evidence. Don’t trust it when considering conclusions that are near and dear to your heart without the hard evidence. The nearer and dearer to your heart then the less you can trust your brain without the hard evidence. Even with the hard evidence the brain can and will deceive you. Your brain will even try to deceive you about what is to be considered evidence. It will try to trick you into thinking the lack of contrary evidence is positive evidence for what it wants you to conclude. Truth is, the lack of evidence is the lack of evidence. It neither affirms nor supports any conclusions, all by itself.
Your brain distorts and deceives. This we know. We know this without a shadow of doubt. We know this based on a whole host of recognizable cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking processes that produce dubious decisions and mistaken conclusions.
Here’s what I mean with just two easily recognizable examples. I have seen intellectuals, extremely reasonable people, defend themselves, their family members, and their personal friends from personal attacks with such stupidity that it even makes a guest on the Jerry Springer show look good. The reason is that when people are emotionally engaged they usually cannot reason very well, even intellectuals. They are in a protective mode. They seek to defend themselves, their family, and their friends from being personally attacked at all costs, even if it means they must sacrifice their intellectual integrity to do so. They don’t even see that’s what they’re doing. We see the same phenomenon when people are in love. It’s really true that love is blind. Love is blind to the faults of the person loved. Others who are watching the lovers, who are detached objective observers, can see each of their faults. But people in love cannot, or perhaps more precisely, they do see the faults, but they are dismissed, disregarded, and rationalized away.
What I’ve just described is called motivated reasoning, something we all do as human beings. There are underlying motives for why we reason as we do—most of the time they are hidden. The brain does this. Most of the time. Again, we know this. Your brain operates on its own. There is no higher judge or arbitrator of how it thinks or what it concludes. While it’s usually reliable there are many times it cannot be trusted. It just keeps on working, grinding out beliefs and justifying them without even caring if it’s the truth. It deceives itself. The reason it’s so incorrigible is because its primary purpose, if I can even speak this way, is in its own self-preservation. If left to itself your brain will try to fit all facts into a grid of self-preservation, a procrustean bed of its own making. Many times it doesn’t care when coming into contact with reality. It only cares if what it concludes helps it to survive. For that’s how the process of evolution works. And that’s because the brain evolved to act this way.
Given that the brain is such a deceiver, how is it even possible to be an “honest” seeker of the truth, as this chapter challenges? The brain doesn’t think honestly in the first place. Its main function is to endure in a dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest survive. Coming to “honest” conclusions is not its main function. Yet there are ways to keep your brain honest. I hope to tell you how to train your brain. It can be done. The brain seems to find truths inadvertently through trial and error. Thinking like a scientist augments the truth-finding capabilities already in the brain.
Ask Lots of Questions
People who are truly seekers of the truth have their heads filled with questions on a daily basis. As they look around them at nature, at animals, at the sky above and the sea beneath, they are filled with wonder. The questions come just about as soon as one looks away from one object to another, from hearing one sound to the next, from touching something different, smelling something different, or tasting something different. Children have this natural curiosity. This curiosity is the desire to know, and it produces an astounding array of interesting and potentially fruitful questions.
Let’s go back to a time before humanity had very many answers to the kinds of questions that honest truth seekers ask. At one time a child asked, “Why is the sky blue?” An adult answered, “Because God made it that way.” “Why did God make it that way?” “Because he did.” “Could he have made it red instead?” “Sure, but he didn’t for a reason.” “What is that reason?” “Only God knows.”
Think about the perspectives of the child and the adult here. The child wanted to learn. The adult already had the answer. The child was seeking knowledge. The adult was not. In this scenario and many others, supernatural answers stopped the search for knowledge. If people had continued accepting those kinds of answers science would never have arisen. We would still be in the dark.
We know why the sky looks blue on a cloudless day. It’s because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. We know this because of science. We studied this because we first asked questions. Honest truth seeking begins with questions. All inquiry begins with honest questions. So, ask questions about everything. Question to learn. Question to know. Question to grow.
Thankfully an ancient Greek scientist named Thales began our quest for knowledge by asking one simple question, “What is the source of all things?” His answer was “water” and he was wrong, given what we now know represented in the current Periodic Table of Elements. So we’ve learned people don’t even have to answer questions correctly. We just need to ask them. If we cannot figure out the correct answers perhaps others will.
Socrates taught us to ask two questions over and over again in his search for the truth. In his day the Sophists were known as wise Greek educators who taught the youth in the fifth century B.C.E. They debated Socrates over such issues as piety, knowledge, politics, and beauty. Over and over Socrates would ask them to clarify what they were talking about. The first question he would ask is, “What do you mean by that?” He would also ask another question, “How do you know?” You should be asking these two questions several times a day in various contexts by using differing words and sentences. These two questions can lead us to truth. We must first clarify what we’re talking about and then search for any evidence that will either confirm or deny a proposed hypothesis. The evidence will subsequently produce the range of probabilities. Go with them. Think exclusively in terms of the probabilities based on the evidence and reasoning about that evidence. Keep in mind there is little if anything human beings can know with certainty. So, believers who claim to know with certainly that God exists are surely being deceived by their brains.
If you want to be an honest seeker of the truth you must develop the courage to question everything, if needed. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Some things we can take for granted, although even those things might deserve to be questioned, just in case we got it wrong before. We all hold to an integrated web of beliefs, as they’re called. The beliefs located at the center of the web are the surest ones and the most difficult to question or doubt. Those beliefs at the rim or perimeter of our web of beliefs can be easily disregarded if shown false, without affecting anything closer to the center of the web. Probably very few of us ever question beliefs close to the center of our web of beliefs, or need to. But we should be willing to if we’re honestly interested in the truth.
We need to develop a questioning disposition or attitude. A questioning disposition is a skeptical disposition. Honest truth seekers are therefore skeptics, reasonable skeptics. They seek reasonably good answers to honest questions. The term skeptic should not be seen as a pejorative or negative term at all. It should be a positive description of thinking people. Every reasonable adult should be a skeptic. We should all be skeptics, scientific skeptics. Skepticism is a virtue, probably the highest intellectual virtue of them all. One might need to distinguish this virtue from a radical skepticism if needed, but a healthy or reasonable skepticism based in scientific thinking weeds out the chaff of falsehoods from the flowers of truth.
Think Like a Scientist
If asking questions is the beginning of our quest for knowledge then thinking like a scientist is the way to gain that desired knowledge. Given that our brains deceive us we should think like a scientist. Many of us already know how to do that when it comes to bizarre paranormal beliefs of others. The problem is our brains won’t allow us to fairly test our own paranormal beliefs, if we have them. Perhaps we should even consider ourselves to be trapped inside our brains and in need of escaping from its clutches if we want to know the truth. The brain can and does hinder us from knowing the truth if we don’t train it to think correctly. We must therefore think like a scientist.
I had a friend who wanted to know more about me from my handwriting. She had a deck of handwriting sample cards by Bart A. Baggett, called “The Grapho-Deck Handwriting Trait Cards.” Unlike the science of handwriting where handwriting samples are compared to determine or exclude an author, Baggett’s handwriting cards are supposed to determine one’s personality. On the back of the deck it promised we were holding in our hands “the most accurate method for discovering someone’s true personality.” Yep, that’s right. “Just by comparing anyone’s writing to the sample on the card, you get a snapshot of the true personality in seconds!” I was writing a book at the time so I handed her a page I had just handwritten (I was without my computer). I first asked her the important question of how the cards could predict people’s character traits based on their handwriting. “Where’s the science in that?” I asked. “Where are the scientific studies showing these cards accurately can do this?” She didn’t know any. A scientist would want to know how the samples and personality traits were determined in the first place. So all someone has to do is to ask to see these scientific studies. If they were not done there is no reason to trust these claims at all. End of story.
Anecdotal personal testimonials simply will not do here, nor would they do in similar cases like one’s daily horoscope predictions, psychic readings, answered prayers, or claims of a miracle. Finding someone who says “I had a miracle” just does not cut it. We must test claims like these if we want to break free from a brain that will deceive us and hucksters and con artists who will fool us. We need scientific studies, clinical studies. They are probably the only way to find the truth given that the brain lies to us.
My friend proceeded anyway, by taking card samples out of the deck of cards to find my personality characteristics from any matches. On each card was an example of a handwritten letter or words along with a description of a personality characteristic. She proceeded to go through the deck and found no consistent matches, none. I was just as surprised as she was. There were a few that were close, but no cigar, as they say. For some reason when I was learning to write at an early age, I was not required to use consistent handwritten letters. I know that sounds strange. I write the letters L or T or B differently depending on the letter that precedes it, or the letter that comes afterward. Sometimes I’ll start a word with cursive script and then abruptly stick in a block capital letter or two, or even end the word with block letters. My handwriting is a jumbled hodgepodge of inconsistent lettering, and the deck of cards didn’t take into consideration that variable.
It turned out my handwriting sample was too large of a sample to use. It was only supposed to be one or two sentences, per the instructions. Because I submitted a whole page it was clear there was no consistent pattern of handwriting to discover, so no particular personality traits could be predicted either. That was big a flaw in the cards. People should submit a large handwriting sample, since the larger the sample the more accurate the results. Puzzled at this, she wondered aloud what a handwriting expert friend of hers might say about this odd result. That’s when I made a prediction. I predicted that if she gave my handwriting sample to her expert friend, showing no hits or matches, then all bets would be off at that point. He could easily say any number of things that could not be verified. He could say I was an amazing one-of-a-kind person unlike anyone else. Or, he could say I was a terrible person. Or that I was the funniest man alive, or the most intelligent. There would be no controls on what he could say.
It was then that she realized the card “experiment” was flawed, since she knew I was right. But I was just thinking like a scientist. I asked important questions that a scientist would ask. I asked for scientific evidence. I made a prediction that would surely have been realized, and she knew it.
There are plenty of ways to think like a scientist. Test everything important. Observe. Look for sufficient objective evidence. Consider alternative hypotheses. Include a null hypothesis in any experiment. Remember that correlation does not entail causation. Avoid any and all logical fallacies. Make predictions based on the evidence and see if those predications turn out to be true. Think exclusively in terms of the probabilities. If after testing an idea it passes muster, then assign a probability level to it and accept it into our brains as knowledge. Assign a lower probability to that which fails to pass sufficient muster. The process can be long, but it works best if we honestly want to know the truth. There are a few superior books that can help train your brain to think like a scientist, written by Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, Joe Nickell, Guy P. Harrison, David J. Hand, Mike McRae, and coauthors Theodore Schick Jr., and Lewis Vaughn, that I highly recommend. If you want to think like a scientist you need to read the books written by these authors. In fact, I’ll say your search for the truth should begin with their books.
You should also get rid of the notion that scientists are out to destroy your faith. To think like a scientist is to intensely desire to get at the truth, period. As Guy P. Harrison said, “Thinking like a scientist is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s a never-ending process of discovery. New information is always coming in, or will if your brain is open to it.”
Become a Generalist
We live in an era of specialization. It seems as though every scholar must specialize in something if he or she wants to make a contribution to knowledge. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. I am a generalist. It’s my specialty. I’m attempting to know as much as I can about all things Christian in related fields of study. No matter how much I read I cannot do it. So I limit myself to the important things one should know. Someone, some individual, must try to grasp as much about Christianity as humanly possible. That has been my goal. I know I fall short, as would anyone. But attempting to do this has greatly affected how I view the Christian faith. It has led me to become a nonbeliever. That’s the result of my searching for the truth.
Regardless of where I’ve ended up in my quest for truth, if you really want to know the truth about your faith you should become as much of a generalist as you can. Christianity has way too many specialists who don’t know that much outside their own specialty. And so one Christian scholar in philosophy may be almost totally ignorant about recent research in biblical studies, and vise versa. But each Christian scholar in his or her specialty will assume that other Christian scholars in their respective fields of study know what they are talking about when defending their faith.
This specialization within Christian biblical studies, theology, philosophy, and science helps perpetrate bad apologetics. Take for instance so-called scientific creationists (an oxymoron). They will read only evangelical commentaries on the Bible and then use their knowledge of science to defend creationism precisely because they are not biblically literate. If they were biblically literate they wouldn’t think the creation stories are to be taken literally, but mythically instead. Their efforts in science are then used to reinforce the evangelical creationist biblical scholar’s efforts to demonstrate that the Bible is literally true, even though they in turn are not scientifically literate.
Consider next the philosophical defense of evangelical Christianity by Alvin Plantinga. He is a brilliant thinker and philosopher. But he doesn’t know much of anything about biblical scholarship, and not enough about the science of evolution. I’ve actually made the argument that Plantinga is an example of a brilliant person who is made to look stupid because of how he defends this faith. He doesn’t know that much in other disciplines of learning. He leans on other evangelical scholars who don’t know that much about epistemology or the philosophy of religion, his expertise. They end up bolstering each other’s arguments, even though they don’t know that much outside their own areas of expertise. Plantinga, an evangelical philosopher, will argue his faith is rational, but it is rational only in the context of results provided by evangelical biblical scholarship—something Plantinga doesn’t know much about, and vice versa. Dr. Jaco Gericke, however, who has PhDs in both the philosophy of religion and the Old Testament, calls Plantinga’s philosophical defense of Christian faith little more than “fundamentalism on stilts.” For as philosopher Stephen Law said: “Anything based on faith, no matter how ludicrous, can be made to be consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity.” Sometimes it takes a generalist to see bad arguments for what they are. A generalist can better evaluate the case for or against Christianity than a specialist can.
Evangelical biblical scholars depend on evangelical philosophers even though they themselves are not philosophically literate. New Testament evangelical scholars are not experts in the Old Testament, and vice versa. But their scholarship reinforces one another. They read mainly inside the box of their given specialty and don’t read widely outside of it. They simply trust each other’s scholarship outside their own expertise. And on it goes. Where it stops no one knows. This is a viciously circular system. Christian apologetics itself needs to do better than this if it wants intellectual respectability. Don’t just be a specialist then. Be one, yes. But strive to be a generalist too.
As a generalist you need to think outside the box. Read books and attend lectures that are outside the box of your comfort zone, outside of your specialization, written by liberals, skeptics, and atheists, but also by others defending other religions. Compartmentalization is the problem when it comes to arriving at the religious or nonreligious truth. One needs to read widely in areas related to science, philosophy, archaeology, psychology, Old and New Testaments, religion, and theology. Read outside the box in a wide assortment of areas. More than anything, think outside the box, the box of your brain.
Fear Not, All Truth Is God’s Truth
If your God is as you believe him to be you should not fear honestly searching for truth wherever it can be found. Don’t let your brain fool you about this by instilling fear within you. Many Christian thinkers have argued that all truth is God’s truth, so act on it. One of the best statements of this is found in a book by Arthur F. Holmes titled, All Truth Is God’s Truth.
Truth can be found everywhere that truth can be found. Since one never knows exactly where truth can be found we should not be afraid to search for it everywhere. If something is true it comes from God no matter where you find it, according to Christian theology. Whether it’s found through science, philosophy, psychology, history, or experience itself, all truth comes from God because God is the creator of all truth, says Christian theology. Following this reasoning, there is no secular/sacred dichotomy when it comes to truth. There isn’t even such a thing as secular “knowledge,” if one means beliefs that are justifiably true. Neither sinful, nor carnal, nor secular “knowledge” exists because it isn’t true, which is the prerequisite for calling something knowledge in the first place. If something is not true it is false, and there is no such thing as false knowledge. There is only true knowledge. To call something knowledge is to call something true. All knowledge is truth, and all truth is God’s since he created it. All truth is therefore sacred, upon Christian assumptions, and it all comes from God, whether learned inside the pages of the Bible or outside of them in the various disciplines of learning.
Since one can find knowledge outside of the Bible, it follows that the Christian apologist must try to harmonize all knowledge. The defender of Christianity must argue that the Christian faith is what best interprets these other truths. The lessons learned outside of the Bible in other areas of learning must be harmonized with the best exegesis of the Bible it can allow. If a conservative understanding of the Bible must give way to the truths learned outside the Bible, then so be it. Truth is still truth. Above all seek truth. Don’t seek to defend anything less.
The perfectly acceptable Christian idea that “all truth is God’s truth” was the middle ground that pushed me into finally accepting that the sciences can be better trusted to tell us the truth about life in this universe than God’s so-called revelation in the Bible. The truths outside the Bible forced me to reinterpret the Bible over and over until there was no longer any basis for believing in the Christian faith. At some pivotal point along the way it became obvious that I should interpret the Bible through the lens of the sciences, rather than the other way around. In so doing I accidentally discovered how to circumvent my lying brain.
Practice the Intellectual Virtues
Aristotle discussed the kinds of virtues that led to knowledge, and they have been discussed ever since, with some additions. They are known as the intellectual virtues, which are good habits of the brain, leading it to become a better instrument for gaining knowledge. If anyone really desires to train the brain he or she must adopt these virtues or habits. They include the virtues of intellectual honesty, integrity, perseverance in pursuing truth, fair-mindedness with the data, humility in recognizing one’s limitations, empathy in putting oneself in the place of others to better understand them, objectively assessing arguments, courage to explore uncharted territory in hopes of finding the truth, and others. We need to train the brain to function properly. Never forget this. We need to force it to think correctly—to think rightly—which in turn will allow us to come to true conclusions. Nothing else will do.
The enemies of truth involve attitudes such as fear, hate, xenophobia, intolerance, certainty, faith, and gullibility. The enemies of truth are all of the known cognitive biases—too many to even list—but I adjure you to look them up. The enemies of truth are all the formal and informal logical fallacies, also beyond the scope of this essay, but look them up. The enemies of truth are pseudoscience, dogmatism, indoctrination, propaganda, rhetoric without substance, ignorance, specialization, and a lack of inquisitiveness. All of them serve the purposes of your evolved brain in one way or another. Do not embrace them if you want to know the truth. The brain lies. Never forget that. You must master your brain if you want the truth.
Training the brain by forcing it to obey reason and the results of objective science is the most important thing you can do in your search for the truth. Nothing less than training your brain to function properly, by forcing it to surrender to truth at whatever the cost, is going to significantly help you. Adopting the advice in this essay and then disciplining your brain to doggedly follow the intellectual virtues wherever they lead is your best hope.
You must try to develop the olfactory sense of a bloodhound, sniffing through the libraries of the world in your search for the treats of truth wherever they can be found. You must try to develop the eyes of an eagle, looking for any available evidence in your search for the prey of truth. You must try to develop the taste buds of a catfish (which has 100,000 to 175,000 of them) in your search for any delicious morsels of truth, the sense of touch of a manatee in detecting the smallest current of evidence, and the hearing of a greater wax moth (with hearing frequencies up to 300kHz) to detect the faint whispers of reason in an unreasonable world. You must do this to avoid the self-induced ignorance and lies perpetrated by your brain. That is, if you want to know the truth, to really know it, especially about that which is important.
This essay is excerpted from How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
John W. Loftus earned MA, MDiv, and ThM degrees in philosophy of religion, the last of which was under noted Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. He also studied in a PhD program at Marquette University and is the author of Why I Became An Atheist, The Outsider Test for Faith, How to Defend the Christian Faith, Unapologetic, and God or Godless (co-authored with Randal Rauser). He can be found online at Debunking Christianity.