ON FREETHINKING


June 15th 1998


The next issue, Number 25, will appear on July 15th 1998.





Now is perhaps as good a time as any to think freely about freethought itself. What are its limitations?

The first consideration that arises is that freedom, in general, is both relative and absolute. It is relative to the inescapable 'unfreedoms' under which we labour; our freedom is what is left when inescapable compulsions and restrictions have 'had their say' but the residual freedom, the freedom that is left to us, is absolute within the limits that the relevant unfreedoms impose upon us.

To take a trite example, I am free to walk across this room and that freedom is in no way impaired by my being unfree to fly across it and unfree to progress across it, like a fly, across the ceiling and, what is more, my freedom to walk across the room would be in no way enhanced were I able to fly or to walk fly-wise across the ceiling.

What are the necessary compulsions and restrictions to which freethought is subject? What are the unnecessary, harmful even, compulsions and restrictions which others may seek to impose upon our thinking? Most important, what are the unnecessary restrictions that we place upon ourselves? We cannot think freely unless we attempt to answer these questions.



The necessary compulsions and restrictions to which even the most freely thinking person has to be subject are easily identified in principle. They are 1) respect for fact - one's thoughts must not be incompatible with the data - and 2) respect for logic - one's thoughts must not be mutually contradictory or otherwise fallacious in any way. There is no good reason to forbid speculation beyond the data so long as the data and logic are not negated; indeed the construction of conceptual models, that respect the data but go further and coherently so, is a necessary means of thinking productively.

Easy in principle but exacting in practice!

Actually to establish fact, or more usually to estimate its probability, can be very difficult; epistemology is not the easiest of studies. Actually to monitor logic, in other than contrived examples, is difficult too.

Power seekers, control freaks, seek to impose logically unnecessary restrictions upon our thinking freely. Fanatics generally, religious fanatics especially but not exclusively, claim to identify prescribed thoughts and proscribed thoughts in the form of dogma and the only freedom dogmatists concede is the freedom to think within the constraints of their dogmatic framework. They will allow you, say, to interpret the notion of an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, mysterious god; you are not accorded the right to suggest that god can be limited, fully intelligible - let alone non-existent. The same restrictive attitude has been evident in politics; you are denied the right to suggest that abstractions called 'the working class', 'the laws of historical development', the 'master race' the 'promised land' are not what they are cracked up to be. Freethought is essentially the notion that, subject to the sanctity of fact and logic, there are no prescribed and no proscribed thoughts.

Now for the main question to think about - and perhaps the most painful to people who see their thinking as liberated from authoritarian prescription and proscription.

The main vice of freethinkers is to be in thrall to the dogmatists' agenda. For example, failed attempts by dogmatists to 'prove' the existence of god lead some people into failed attempts to prove the non-existence of god. It is a sufficient atheist position to hold that it is up to believers to prove their case and that they have not done so. The god idea is unfalsifiable; anything whatever, that we know or can do, may be attributed to god's act or to god's empowering us to act. There is no test whereby god's existence can be disproved to the satisfaction of a firm believer; if you confront such a believer with cast iron proof that god does not exist then the reply can be "God has put this supposed proof into your mind just to show you how undependable is the human intellect". 'Proof' is their idea, not ours.

It is a waste of time to be lured into supposed certainties, where none can be demonstrated, merely because believers deal in perceived certainty. Perceived certainty is the essence of dogmatism; certainty has a strictly limited place in freethought. Certainty is dominant on their agenda - it is not dominant on ours.

An interesting case of our 'drifting into their agenda' relates to the role of chance in (Darwinian) natural selection. The believer may well ask "How can life have arisen by chance; God, to quote a rather hasty remark attributed to Einstein, 'does not play dice'; the very complexity of living beings rules out chance as the key factor in their emergence".

In other words, God's design and Darwin's theory of chance variations 'taking off' are, in the view of hardline believers, incompatible. Freethinkers all too easily fall for this latter view .... and simply invert it. Instead of saying 'God exists therefore there is no natural selection' ... they say 'Natural selection happens; therefore god is non-existent'.

Of course design and chance can co-exist. If I have a roulette wheel I can play a game of chance with it and this obvious fact in no way precludes other obvious facts .... that the roulette wheel had to be thought of, had to be designed and had to be made, has to be spun for my game of chance to take place.

It is sufficient for freethinkers to hold that natural selection is a credible conceptual model (corresponding with the data and coherent within itself) and that people who wish to postulate a creator who 'thought of the roulette wheel, designed it, made it and spun it' are at liberty to do so BUT, if they are to be credited then they have to show that the creator is a) logically necessary, b) can be accounted for as to his (her or its) real existence and c) has credible motives and satisfactory reasons for not making a better job of creation. The alleged incompatibility between chance and design is their idea, not ours.

People can take sides as between Hume's mediocre architect and Paley's inspired watchmaker but it is sufficient for freethinkers to stick to the data and its logical interpretation without - in the words attributed to William of Occam - 'multiplying entities beyond necessity'.

Another example of allowing believers to set the agenda is in their notion that this planet, Earth, is of prime cosmic importance as the designated home of their god's highest creation (themselves). Freethinkers fall for this easily and invert it; they often say that this planet is an insignificant speck in a huge and complex cosmos so we are unimportant in the cosmos and, by extension, unimportant to any god there might hypothetically be.

Would it not be better to free ourselves from all this and see the very notion of 'importance' as a human construction applicable, often controversially, to elements in human life and that the question of the cosmic importance, or unimportance, of this planet simply need not arise.

'Miracles' are matters in which we often follow the believers' agenda. We tend to ask Hume's question "Is it more credible that this alleged event actually occurred or that reports of it are mistaken or even possibly dishonest?" The faithful might say that it did happen; the anti-faithful can as well say that it did not. Why must we follow their agenda even to invert it?

I suggest that the properly free thought on the subject of alleged miracles is to undermine the very definition of miracle - namely that a miracle is an event contrary to the laws of nature.

A moment's free thought reveals that no event, be it commonplace, rare or unique, can be said to be contrary to the laws of nature UNLESS we know all the laws of nature - and we do not. So an event that is contrary to the known laws of nature may as well be in accord with laws that we do not yet know, as it can be contrary to ALL the laws of nature. We cannot know which it is.

It is insufficient to agonise over whether a surprising reported event can have occurred. It is best to investigate such reports in the knowledge that surprising events can have something to teach us about nature rather than something about nature being countermanded supernaturally.

'We cannot understand how it could happen; therefore it did not happen' is the basis of much inverted superstition masquerading as free thought.

In short, freethinkers should heed the fact that they are not automatically free from the tendrils of an unfreethinking culture merely because they may claim to be. The tendrils have to be cut and to be cut they must be located wherever they are; sometimes they are in our very own minds.

[NOTE: Because of holiday, AT 25 will appear on July 25th or thereabouts] .





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