"The Fatal Flaw of New Atheism" [Distributist Archive, November, 2017]
Understanding the Cult of Confidence
(The following is a written transcript for a video published in 2017)
As viewers of my channel know, I'm a former “New Atheist”. Having at one time found thinkers like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Penn Jillette to be compelling, I subsequently left this perspective behind before eventually coming back to religion, specifically Roman Catholicism.
This being the case, many of my fans have asked me if I could make an essay describing a critical juncture, or some idea that led me away from atheism and towards religion. In other essays, I've alluded to the myriad reasons that I've rejected secularism generally, but I get the sense that most readers are looking for the big reason that I left atheism and started a path back toward the spiritual.
While conversions rarely have one motivating idea, when I reflected, I did see that there was one concept that marked my intellectual transition away from scientific materialism and towards a broader understanding of knowledge. In short, I achieved a realization that the atheist and materialist approach to knowledge was fundamentally flawed, and amounted to little more than a barrier to understanding the truth of the universe and reality around us.
And if there is one thing that I hope a committed atheist, “New Atheist”, or skeptic might take from this blog, it would be understanding this fatal flaw in the materialist worldview.
But I would like to start first with my history as a New Atheist. Indeed, in my late teens and early twenties, I found myself very much sympathetic to the ideas of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. I found the skepticism movement fascinating. It was a view that elevated science as the only real method for knowing the true things that humanity had available to it, and a movement that subsequently denigrated all previous spiritual, non-rigorous, poetic, or mystical ways of obtaining knowledge and information about the universe.
This attitude was quite common in 2006, as it still is in many places on the internet and in society. The attitude could be succinctly summarized in many of the quotes from the New Atheist leaders. Here I'm thinking of Christopher Hitchens, saying that religion came from a period of human prehistory where no one had any idea of what was really going on; or, when Carl Sagan described science as being “the only light guiding humanity in a demon-haunted universe”; and, most condescendingly, Stephen Hawking, when he described religion, and the religious concept of heaven, as “a fairy story for people who were afraid of the dark”.
Indeed, these quotes were meant to be sardonic, irreverent attacks on religion. But behind the showmanship and hyperbole, there was a philosophical perspective. In fact, in these quotes, one can see the core of the atheist worldview and the skeptic view on the progress of history. Even though New Atheists very rarely admit they have a worldview, I have found that the skeptics and New Atheists of my age had a very distinct view of epistemology and the development of human knowledge throughout history. The perspective was simple and formed a type of creation myth for the atheist community in general.
To sketch the view briefly, imagine we could conceptualize all facts in the universe as a box; the set of statements that could be subsequently explored by human knowledge. Then suppose we could map human knowledge over time, watching the progression of man's exploration of this universe of knowledge as the years and millennia passed by.
Under this model, the atheist view of human knowledge and the progression of history is very easy to illustrate. As human civilizations emerged several millennia before the Common Era, man would know almost nothing about the universe. It would appear black to him, with no illumination whatsoever. Mankind's ability to explore this universe would be incredibly limited, and the number of things that would require explanation would be large, much larger than his very limited capacity for knowledge could address. Due to this fundamental inability, primitive and ancient man invented a concept of God or Gods to fill in the gaps of knowledge that could not be explored otherwise. Thus, as human civilization progressed pre-scientifically, it became filled up with notions of superstition and gods that acted as a chaotic filler for human beings' ignorance.
And, because these concepts existed pre-scientifically, they had almost no relation to the truth and reflected little more than the cultural prejudices of the individual tribes who thought these concepts up. Thus, spirituality, religion, and theology acted as little more than a gap and a veil on a totally chaotic and indiscernible universe. Then, after millennia of dwelling in ignorance, a revolution happened in Europe sometime in the late 16th or early 17th century. This revolution brought about science, a systematic, reliable, and empirical mechanism for measuring truth and understanding the universe. Through the application of science and the scientific method, man could, for once, gain true knowledge about the world that surrounded him, and through the application of that knowledge, become the master of his environment.
Moreover, the scientific method provided a mechanism for further exploring the universe and expanding its base of knowledge. Scientific revolution, scientific knowledge continued to grow, expanding into further and further areas of knowledge, exploring more of the universe of truth that had previously only been filled by superstition. In the process of this expanding scientific body of knowledge, the concept of God, gods, or other superstitions and mysticism were displaced by orderly scientific facts. Thus science being ever-expanding, was the only true form of knowledge.
As time and history progressed, this scientific knowledge would come to replace and drive out mysticism and superstition from every avenue of human endeavor. The questions that had previously been given poetic, religious, or theological answers were simply waiting to be replaced with a more exact scientific alternative. And as the human race progressed into the future, this process would continue until scientific knowledge had subsumed every, or nearly every, valid human question.
As such, concepts like theology, mysticism, or even God would persist only in the gaps or margins of the universe of truth, where science might not immediately penetrate. Thus, God, or any theological concept, was fundamentally something that existed only on the margins. This was the God of the Gap, the idea of ancient mysticism and religion eternally fleeing from an expanding scientific and technological perspective on the universe. Thus, a very orderly picture was painted of how human knowledge developed and how it would develop in the future.
And as a young man, I found this picture very compelling. I was very ready to believe that science was the only form of knowledge and that technology was the only mechanism for human development.
After all, the non-scientific and non-mathematical truths I was taught in school seemed so paltry. Non-science was uncertain, science was confident. Non-science was subjective, science was objective. And most damning of all, non-science constantly second-guessed itself and never had consistent answers. While science seemed to seldom be wrong.
Indeed, it was this confidence that science provided that I found most comforting of all about the subject, in contrast to the other forms of knowledge and human understanding I was presented in my education. I liked science because it was so infrequently wrong. I could believe something, I could explain it, and no one could challenge it. A scientific fact was unassailable, whereas pretty much any other form of understanding seemed to be constantly subject to contentions, revisions, caveats, and just general uncertainty.
To my young mind, this lack of confidence was unacceptable. But, as I developed this materialist view and felt very comfortable in my new atheism, some questions persisted in my mind. What, indeed, about scientific confidence was so unique? Why had the study of the physical world developed this confidence, while the study of other human endeavors had not? Moreover, how did science build this confidence into itself, almost as an implicit feature of its methodology?
The answers to these questions would become readily available as I became more aware of how the scientific method addressed the question of fact, fiction, truth, and falsehood. The scientific method, indeed, had a very organized approach to categorizing truth and falseness in the universe, which I can summarize here.
If we were to start with the universe, the first fundamental rule of a system of knowledge or epistemology is the ability to divide statements about the universe into one of two categories, either “true” or “false”. This is fairly basic, and I think most people understand this distinction.
However, the perspective becomes more complicated, because in addition to every statement about the universe either being “true” or “false”, we also have to take into consideration the human perception of the universe, under which every statement about the universe can be perceived as either “true” or “false”. The distinction between truth and falsehood as it exists in the universe and truth and falsehood as it exists in the human mind creates an interplay, essentially a two-by-two matrix where we can measure the interaction between truth in the mind and truth in reality.
When the human mind perceives a statement to be true about the universe, and it is in fact true about the universe, it falls into the upper left corner, forming a correct positive belief. When the human mind perceives a fact to be false, and that fact indeed is false in the universe, it falls into the lower right corner, forming a correct negative belief. Thus, as the mind conforms to reality on the diagonals of the matrix, we have correct beliefs.
But more interesting still is when we examine the interplay between belief and reality across the alternative diagonal. Here, we see errors when the mind does not conform to the universe. When the human mind perceives a statement to be true that is not true about the universe, it falls in the upper right-hand corner and creates a false positive belief. Scientists label this kind of error a “Type I error”. Conversely, when the human mind perceives a statement to be false, which is in fact true, it falls on the lower left corner, creating a false negative belief. Scientists oftentimes call this error a “Type II error”. Thus, this 2x2 matrix completely describes the truth or falsehood of human belief in a universe where all statements can be divided into either true or false.
Certainly, as beings that prefer truth to falsehood, we would prefer to stay on the main diagonal, where our minds conform to the universe as it actually is. We would prefer to avoid the alternative diagonal, where our beliefs are false for one reason or the other. However, we might ask ourselves whether one type of error is better or worse in a scientific sense, and what our relative tolerance for each kind of error, Type I and Type II, implies in a world where evidence is limited and human beings have to form their own beliefs in uncertain circumstances.
Is it better to believe something that isn't true, or not believe something that is true? What is worse, Type I or Type II error? In fact, the balance between Type I and Type II error is a critical scientific decision that needs to be made in most experiments, and in most approaches to the discernment of truth in the universe.
We could see our tolerance for Type I or Type II error as being a little bit like a scale. Given some basic, necessarily limited piece of information about the universe, we would then have to decide how stringent our standard was for using this evidence to come to positive beliefs about the universe itself. A tendency of the mind to believe things are true would leave it more open to Type I error, and would create a broader and looser standard for establishing knowledge and truth. A tendency of the mind to reject evidence, on the other hand, would lead to a more stringent standard, and would result in more Type II error, allowing for many of the true facts about the universe evidenced to go unnoticed because it could not achieve a certain level of confidence desired by the epistemological system.
To permit a brief analogy to explain this distinction, imagine the evidence we are examining to be a darkened piece of paper with some information about the universe on it. Subsequently, the mind would act like a flashlight, projecting light onto the piece of paper. With a very, very loose standard, with high Type I error, the flashlight would become unfocused, distributing its light across the entire page. At this level, a person trying to read the paper would have a broad view of the document but would have a very difficult time discerning any individual sentence or fact with any high amount of confidence. Subsequently, if we focused the light and concentrated the beams down on a particular segment of the paper, we would lose resolution on much of the document, but would be much more confident about the sentences and information we did read where the beams were focused.
This demonstrates the tradeoff between Type I and Type II error.
With this distinction being made between Type I and Type II errors, is there a particular type of error that science in particular tries to avoid, and that might be the key to scientific confidence?
Well, indeed there is. Science, as a basis of knowledge, is highly dependent on building new truths on existing, established ones. With this consideration, if an epistemological system that was designed to be scientific had a high Type I error, regardless of how fast new truths were accepted into the system, there would be a very high risk that one of the accepted hypotheses upon which new truths were based was later discovered to be false.
Due to the interdependence of scientific theories, such a revision could cause a ripple effect across the entire system, resulting in many subsequent theories having to be revised or discarded. In other words, there would be an enormous amount of wasted work and effort. Needless to say, this would be very bad for scientific practice. However, we do not necessarily see the same bad outcome for Type II error. Under an epistemological system with high Type II error, scientific truths would be much more slowly developed, but there still would not necessarily be a high risk of a false scientific belief.
So although the scientific chain of knowledge would be constructed more slowly, it would be more secure and more confident. While slow scientific progress is usually a bad thing, it is certainly not catastrophic. Thus, we see that when it comes to science and materialistic and empirical projects of discerning truth, specificity and confidence are always preferred. It is better to have a slow, specific, but confident answer than it is to have a faster solution that has a high probability of being wrong or incorrect. Science prefers confidence to broadness. But this leads to another critical question. Is confidence always the most important thing when trying to discern a truth about the universe?
This was a very difficult question for my younger mind, and I didn't really understand the full consequences of it until I encountered a particularly interesting paradox in a machine learning class much later in my academic career. I subsequently called this story or problem the "gold digger's paradox".
The story or thought experiment proceeds as follows. Suppose we have a woman who has one life ambition, that is, to marry a man who has over a billion dollars of net worth. She wants to marry a billionaire. So she does what any modern woman does. She goes to the internet and looks for a relationship. Using Tinder or OkCupid, she goes on several dates, only to discover each time that the man she's dating is not a billionaire. Again and again, this happens, and of course, this shouldn't be surprising at all, because billionaires, as a percentage of the general population, are very rare.
Not satisfied with the paltry offerings available on OkCupid and other dating apps, she takes the problem to a data scientist. Using a supercomputer and data-mining algorithms, can you build me a program that will feed in all of the dating profile information of the men available on these various internet resources, and then select from that group the men who are very likely to be billionaires?
So the first data scientist uses a supercomputer paired with his algorithm to go through the dating pool, passing over and selecting occasionally one, two, three, or four men it thinks are likely to be billionaires. Not satisfied with these initial results, the woman then employs a second data miner to try a different set of algorithms on the same population. Again, the algorithm goes through, passing over and identifying some men as likely billionaires.
The woman then evaluates the effectiveness of the algorithms in successfully identifying whether a given man is a billionaire or not. Using a validated data set, she can see that the first algorithm is only 30% accurate, meaning that it is wrong 70% of the time when it categorizes men as billionaires or not. Using the same validated data set, she sees that the next algorithm is only slightly better. At 60% accuracy, but is still very, very frequently wrong. Frustrated with these two highly inaccurate mechanisms for sorting between billionaire and non-billionaire bachelors, the woman then encounters a third scientist who claims that he has a mechanism for discerning whether a man is a billionaire or not that is 99% accurate, far in excess of the performances of the previous two algorithms.
Indeed, when validated, this machine rarely makes a mistake. Seeing how accurate and confident this particular system is, the woman immediately jumps at the opportunity, even though she does not see immediately how it works.
But upon purchasing this algorithm, the woman is shocked to discover that this highly sophisticated, 99% confident method for sorting billionaires is not some sophisticated machine learning technique paired with a supercomputer, but simply the word "no".
Is this man a billionaire? “No”. Is that man a billionaire? “No”.
The method passes through all bachelors in the entire data set and labels them all non-billionaires. And of course, because billionaires are so rare. In the infrequent case of labeling a man not a billionaire when he actually is, the method makes a mistake much less than 1% of the time.
Thus, the method is incredibly confident, because it never actually tries to make an unlikely prognosis. But of course, this method is entirely useless, and the man selling it to the woman is a charlatan because this machine of rejecting all bachelors as potential material for dating precludes the very purpose of the algorithm to begin with. The only thing that this method of saying "no" to everything accomplishes is being very, very infrequently wrong. Essentially, the machine has high confidence, but a very, very low utility. If the woman in question used any of the other two lower confidence machines, she would end up married, perhaps with a more or less high or low probability of marrying a billionaire. But if she uses the more confident mechanism for sorting bachelors, she will have no mate at all at the end of the process.
The confidence will have done her absolutely no good.
Although this is admittedly quite a silly toy example, used to demonstrate the deficiencies of certain algorithms in machine learning classes, it nonetheless got me thinking about epistemology and my evaluation of how science had set itself up to begin with.
It seemed that confidence and an aversion to being wrong was not always the most important thing. In fact, for some questions, this prioritization of confidence could be quite destructive, very destructive. Focusing too much on confidence could be detrimental when answers are needed in an immediate sense and where evidence is not available to provide a required level of confidence. Thus, it is ineffective to develop some standard for error a priori and address questions with this in mind. Rather, our tolerance for error must be developed relative to the question asked. Some questions we ask might have no answer available at a desired level of confidence and simply shirking from the task of answering them will do us absolutely no good.
The question itself and our need for an answer must take priority over the confidence that we can bring to the question we have before us. And this, in fact, leads to an entirely different way of seeing knowledge than the very simplistic notion of infinite scientific progress I held as a new atheist.
Let us now return to the model of human knowledge we discussed earlier in the talk. Here again, the universe of truth is embodied in a box. But as opposed to discussing methods of truth and their development over time, let's first populate this universe of truth with questions that humans have asked over the centuries.
We could populate this with simple questions like: “Does the Earth revolve around the Sun?”, “What will the weather be next week?”, “Is there a God?”, “Is there meaning in the universe?”, “What is beauty?”, “Are there alternative universes?”, “What causes gravity?”, “And what is right and wrong?”. All questions that humans have asked and answered in our own age and in previous ages.
But by starting with the questions first, we can see a critical distinction in the mechanisms available to answer these inquiries. Let us, for instance, examine the mechanism for answering questions we originally explored, that being the scientific method and scientific knowledge itself. Which of these questions could scientific knowledge answer? Well, among the ones that we currently have in the box right now, really only one with current technology and high confidence. And that is, “Does the Earth revolve around the Sun?”.
An astute observer will notice that we are on the cusp of answering yet another question in this box. And that is, “What causes gravitation?”. Indeed, we could imagine the expansion of science to eventually cover this question as well. However, when we look at the other questions we have written here, the issue of whether scientific knowledge can address these questions becomes much more complicated.
Certainly, the question "Are there alternative universes?" and "What will the weather be next week?" are both well-posed scientific questions. They discuss things that are physical, that exist, and that have some effect on how the universe operates. Nevertheless, these two questions will never be answered by science. The question of accurate weather prediction far into the future with high confidence is a question that is prohibitively expensive on a computational level. Moreover, our current understanding of Chaos Theory indicates that the amount of computation it would need to make such a calculation might never be achieved no matter the technological development involved. It's simply out of the capability of humans to answer.
Furthermore, the question "Are there alternative universes?" is similarly prohibited by the fact that alternative universes, by their very nature, cannot be observed or impact our current universe. They, therefore, are forever outside of human observation and outside of the scientific method to detect. So while these questions in many ways are scientific, they will never have scientific answers. We see yet further complications if we cast the net further to the questions on the far boundary. These questions, including "What is right?" "Is there a god?" "Is there meaning?" or "Is there beauty?" are simply not scientific questions to begin with. They are not posed scientifically. They're not asking empirical and physical questions about the universe.
Therefore, by the construction of the scientific method itself, there's no way to actually answer these questions with science. So, a more nuanced picture of human questioning and human truth emerges. One where science answers some questions very succinctly and very confidently. But where even very basic questions, which have been asked from the beginning of human existence, may never have scientific answers, or may be phrased in a way that is totally out of the purview of science to begin with.
But even though humans can't answer these questions with science, does not mean that these questions do not need answers. Again, the defects of an epistemological system do not preclude the question from being asked, nor absolve us from providing an answer to that question when it is asked. From this observation flows a much more nuanced view of human intellectual history.
Starting from the beginnings of civilization, man asked very difficult questions. And subsequently, he developed a number of sophisticated ways of answering those questions, albeit with very low confidence. This resulted in tools ranging from alchemy, heuristics, mathematics, ethics, religion, aesthetics, and other proto-scientific concepts that helped man in ages before the scientific revolution. When science finally appeared on the scene in the 17th century, it did not mark humanity's first attempt at obtaining knowledge, but simply a very particular, confident approach to questions that had already been asked and addressed through other, less precise systems.
While the emergence of science indeed replaced alchemy and other elements of proto-science, its expansion into the future is not indefinite. While in fact we might imagine a future where all proto-scientific concepts and all heuristic concepts might be addressed by some more exact scientific method, as we established through the previous examination of the questions themselves, there is a theoretical limit to this expansion.
Some questions are just beyond the scientific method's ability to address. And the older systems developed before the scientific revolution remain the only ways to tackle the questions as they exist. While we might not like this perspective and the implicit uncertainty it creates, it is a more accurate way of understanding human historical development and knowledge itself. But this begs a deeper question. Why is the contemporary world beset by the conviction that science and technology are the only means of obtaining truth and that all past forms of knowledge are superstitious or come from an era that could not possibly understand our own?
To answer this question, we will have to delve deeper into human psychology and the meaning of modernity. Initially, in civilization, humans had a number of ways of obtaining knowledge and answering the important questions of life. In particular, in Western civilization, knowledge was seen to have come from one of many sources, be it art, religion, philosophy, or proto-science.
These were largely held to be non-competing ways of knowing things, and their coexistence can be witnessed in the fact that many thinkers addressed each of these different ways of knowledge in turn, with many people, like Aristotle, considering science as only one method to gain knowledge.
However, this perspective on knowledge was turned upside down by the subsequent scientific revolution, during which, the development of new methodological approaches to exploring the physical world allowed technological questions to be answered with an incredible amount of certainty, a certainty that was simply not available to other forms of knowledge discussed before the scientific revolution. This in turn created a fundamental psychological problem for Western man.
As mentioned before, human beings hate uncertainty and lack of confidence. In previous ages, the knowledge presented by authorities, be they philosophers, artists, priests, or scholars of the physical universe, would have all been perceived as being high confidence, of being something that could be relied upon. However, after the scientific revolution, the relative lack of confidence of non-scientific fields of endeavor was immediately recognized by contrast to the high amounts of confidence generated by scientific findings themselves. Indeed, this did not make the other ways of knowing less confident or less reliable than they were before, but through means of contrast, this created a distinct cognitive dissonance among the collective minds of humanity. It made Western man distinctly aware of his own doubt, and a growing need to address that doubt.
As the scientific revolution faded into the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment failed to procure a rational basis for the rest of humanity's quandaries that would put human knowledge that was non-scientific on an equal footing to science itself, the prestige of other methods for obtaining non-scientific truth was lessened until these non-scientific mechanisms for answering questions became seen as not knowledge at all. And we arrive at the modern era, with scientific knowledge standing alone, as Carl Sagan would put it, "a single light in a demon-haunted world." I think more than anything else, it is this development that Nietzsche referred to when he talked about “the death of God”.
Because, in the absence of answers provided by the previous systems of knowledge, modern man is left asking all of the important questions about truth, about meaning, about beauty, with no hope of an answer. In essence, modern man asks the most important questions and throws them into the abyss.
This stark perspective on modern human nature portrayed by Nietzsche elicits a sense of loss and an awareness about the situation we currently find ourselves in. However, the modern world, born out of the situation Nietzsche so accurately described in the 19th century, embodies none of this self-knowledge and introspection. And this, more than anything else, I think is because of a discreet psychological temptation that confronts Western man in modernity.
If we examine the human being as clinging to the knowledge of science in an otherwise demon-infested future, we may consider this a dark and sad vision of our state as a species. But the psychological temptation that seized Nietzsche's immediate followers and almost all subsequent thought in the modern era is anything but pessimistic or introspective. And I, myself, fell into this psychological temptation during my time as a new atheist and skeptic.
What if, instead of grappling with the darkness that this worldview presents in place of all non-scientific questions, we instead ignore the boundaries of science and insert ourselves as the person who speaks on the side of science or on “team science”? What if, instead of grappling with uncertainty, we drape ourselves in all the trappings of the scientific method? Regardless of whether we understand it or not, we claim to "love science," we claim to be making data-driven decisions, and we constantly build up the concept of the “scientific modern man”, regardless of whether this image accurately describes the reality of our society. Then, from this vantage point of confidence, we project our desires and our own answers to life's difficult questions into non-scientific and pseudoscientific fields. Thus, we can behave as if our own answers carry the confidence of science, even while being non-scientific themselves.
This is what I have come to term the "cult of confidence.", the belief that confidence is attendant to a methodology and the practitioners and allies of that methodology carry confidence with them as if it were a magic book of spells. And of course, I probably would have balked at that accusation when I was a new atheist, but it didn't change the fact that I was implicitly doing it.
When people asked me hard questions concerning religion and old traditions and thinkers from antiquity, I would respond confidently that these were pre-scientific thinkers who formed their opinions with no appeal to empiricism, the scientific method, and could not answer any of life's questions confidently. I would assert emphatically that I had no beliefs that weren't derived from the scientific method. I only observed the universe and acted accordingly, and I could hardly be expected to seriously take on the ideas of a thinker who formulated his opinions before humans knew that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
But indeed, this wasn't the end of it, because, in fact, as a human, I did have to answer many questions concerning what was right and wrong, what was true and beautiful, that weren't, strictly speaking, scientific. And of course, to accomplish this, I applied a sort of natural intellectual sloppiness, using my own hastily derived opinions and emotions to answer the hard questions, and then subsequently claiming that these answers were superior to the old traditional ones by virtue of the fact that I had contact with science, that I was “on the side of science”, that I somehow had a more intimate understanding of what it meant to be confident. The answers I provided might well be in keeping with the answers of the older philosophers and thinkers, or they might be something completely insane and self-aggrandizing, only believed because my young mind felt them particularly flattering or useful for whatever ends I wanted to pursue at that time. But all the while, while I was creating these answers, I missed the fundamental problem with my own worldview.
Thus, in my position, I could scoff at all of the thinkers that had come before me, and imagine vainly that I was the scion of all age's knowledge. But it didn't take me long until I saw that this perspective on the world was as false as it was self-serving. Because indeed, despite the incredible confidence that science possessed, it did not so much replace the old knowledge as simply outshine it.
The older tried wisdom of the ancients was still there. It still provided a witness and a method for addressing many of the questions that I was grappling with. It wasn't until my subsequent encounter with the wisdom of the ancients in Aristotle and Plato that I realized that these thinkers, from days far before the scientific method was fully developed, were far my intellectual superiors and carried with them a wisdom I couldn't have procured myself.
Far from being the first person to supply answers to these non-scientific questions. The works of these previous thinkers provided answers with a much broader vision than I could have ever managed by myself, despite the fact that I lived in a supremely technological age. But given the nature of the question and the nature of the knowledge that I sought, I should have not been surprised by this.
The predicament reminded me of an old Yiddish joke, in which a man walking on a dark night comes across another person searching for something under the radius of a street lamp. The traveler asks the crouched man what he is doing there, to which the crouched man replies, "I'm looking for my keys, because I had dropped them somewhere in the dark." The traveler is puzzled and then follows up, saying, "If you lost them in the dark, why are you looking for them in the streetlight?" to which the crouched man replies, "Well, I'm looking under the street lamp, because I can't see very well anywhere else."
The easy way of searching is not always the best.
The examination left me with some distinct intellectual conclusions, which permanently severed me from my identity as a skeptic and new atheist. First, there's something brave about demanding certainty as a precondition for addressing a question. A brave thinker examines questions as they become necessary, and accepts the implicit uncertainty that could be involved in any given inquiry, whether it's scientific or not. Finally, and most critically, a humble thinker must also realize that he is not the first to ask these questions. Other great men have gone before him, and if he truly is serious about his endeavor to get good and wise answers, he must examine those thinkers and understand how they addressed the problems that he himself faces.
The relative confidence he has from obtaining more knowledge either through history or science has no bearing on the rightness or wrongness he brings to an entirely different question. And so, we must walk away from the cult of confidence, and seek something true, even if it is accompanied by uncertainty, doubt, and the gnawing fear that we might be walking towards an abyss.