gadgetry asked:

Apologies if you’ve addressed the subject before, but what are your religious views (if any)? What is your opinion of supernatural faith in general?

Don’t have any religious views by most definitions (institutions of organized religion, belief in canonical doctrine, etc.). I currently identify myself as agnostic, irreligious, and a Jesusist.

I was raised kind of a generic Christian plus some hippie stuff. My family background is Irish-Catholic, French Catholic, and Manx Jewish. By middle school, I was skeptical of organized religion and by college I was an outspoken atheist. I was influenced by reading/listening to Dawkins, Russell, Shermer, Hitchens, and Stenger. I believed positively that no gods or supernatural entities existed and that belief in ‘the supernatural’ was the cause of much human misery.

After doing labwork in cell bio and studying scientific methodology (specifically Popper) and epistemology (Wittgenstein, Feynman, etc.), I tempered my position and became an agnostic. I realized that “supernatural” was a non-concept: we have no empirical understanding that limits “natural” to anything. We don’t know all the laws of nature and are probably enormously ignorant of them.

We call “objective” those things that are either absolutely necessary for us to assume in order to articulate or construct anything (classical logic, functional assumption that physical reality exists as perceived, etc.) or those substantive things that on which we have intersubjective consensus.

So if someone makes a claim that is by definition outside that intersubjective consensus on objectivity, like a “personal faith” claim on ontological free will or gods or beauty or morality or whatever, it can neither be falsified nor confirmed objectively. If it can, there’s something wrong with somebody’s epistemology. Popper put this nicely in Skeptic Magazine:

Religion is so vague about God, and rightly so, that one can hardly say there is anything tangible which can be tested. It is only something which appeals to our feelings. So far as religion is testable, it seems false. This is not an accusation because religion is not science. This is an accusation against theologians who go on treating religion as if it were science. I have introduced the falsification criterion in order to distinguish science from what is not science. Because something isn’t science, however, does not mean that it is meaningless.

The real issue is not what you believe regarding metaphysical speculations about “God” or or anything else, but rather what you believe is appropriate to do to other human beings. Here is where I think Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. are wrong. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Islamism or the Inquisition or the state atheism of Soviet Russia - the problem was not their position on “the supernatural,” but their ideological position on other human beings.

I still have some big problems with the institutions of organized religion, and I don’t adhere to any of them myself (hence I’m irreligious). However I have no problem with personal faith as such, and just don’t really know (hence I’m agnostic). Maybe there’s some personality or intelligence on some greater level of complexity. Maybe not. There’s no way to even talk about probabilities. I like most of the things the Q document Jesus is reported to have said (hence I’m a Jesusist) and if something of what I consciously perceive as “me” continues after I die, great. If not, oh well. For the most part, I’m pretty apathetic about the question because I see no way to answer it. Theological debates bore me.