A lot of very smart, well-informed, and apparently earnest thinkers look at the world and infer wildly different conclusions. Dawkins sees pitiless indifference where Willard sees a world pregnant with purpose. Hume sees senseless sameness with animals, How can we account for this wide divergence in beliefs between smart, informed, and earnest thinkers without surrendering to the notion that the truth of a matter is . Our reasoning isn’t up to the task. There are many reasons for our divergent beliefs, of course, but one looms up the rest.

A lot of very smart, well-informed, and apparently earnest thinkers look at the world and infer wildly different conclusions. Dawkins sees pitiless indifference where Willard sees a world pregnant with purpose. How can we account for this wide divergence in beliefs between smart, informed, and earnest thinkers without surrendering to the notion that the truth of a matter is . Our reasoning isn’t up to the task. There are many reasons for our divergent beliefs, of course, but one looms up the rest.

I’m not sure there is an afterlife. OK. If there is one, here’s what I think it is. I think it’s whatever you think you’re going to get. Those suicide bombers, if they really believe that they are going to wind up in heaven with 71 virgins, yeah, that’s probably what they’re going to get in the afterlife. This is sort of predicated on the idea that there’s a part of your mind programmed to create the way that dreams are created what you’ve been expecting to kind of ease you out of this life. Think of it this way. I think of the brain as this great, big, crenelated library with many rooms, billions and billions of books, rooms without number, but at the very end of all those rooms, there’s a little tiny box that says “pull lever in case of emergency,” because that’s the door out, and when you go out, you get pretty much what you expected, because some chemical in your brain is programmed to give you that particular dream at the very end. If you’re expecting [H.P. Lovecraft’s] Yogg Sothoth, there he’ll be, along with the 900 blind fiddlers, or whatever it is.

It is worth considering the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient. Never before have there been so many different national news sources ? different now in terms of both medium and ideology. Major newspapers from anywhere are available online; there are the broadcast networks plus public TV, cable’s CNN, Fox News, CNBC, et al., print and Web magazines, Internet bulletin boards, The Daily Show, e-mail newsletters, blogs. All this is well known; it’s part of the Media Environment we live in. But there are prices and ironies here. One is that the increasing control of U.S. mass media by a mere handful of corporations has — rather counterintuitively — created a situation of extreme fragmentation, a kaleidoscope of information options. Another is that the ever increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which “the truth” is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda. In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin.

[Karin] One day someone called me from behind the wallpaper. I looked in the closet, but no one was there. But the voice kept calling me, so I pressed myself against the wall, and it gave away like foliage. You think I’m making it up?

I enter a large room. It’s bright and peaceful. People are moving back and forth. Some of them talk to me and I understand them. It’s so nice and I understand them. It’s so nice and I feel safe. In some of their faces there’s a shining light. Everyone is waiting for him to come but no one is anxious. They say that I can be there when it happens…

[David] Why are you crying?

[Karin] It’s nothing. Nothing to worry about. But… sometimes I have this intense yearning. I long for that moment. When the door will open and all the faces will turn to him.

[David] Who is coming?

[Karin] No one has said for certain. But I think it’s God who will reveal himself to us. That it will be him coming into the room through that door.

Is this all for real? I don’t know. I’m caught in the middle, and sometimes I’m uncertain. I know I’ve been ill and that my illness was like a dream. But these are no dreams. They must be real. They must be real.

A god steps down from the mountain. He walks through the dark forest. There are wild beasts everywhere in the silent darkness. It must be real. I’m not dreaming. I’m telling the truth. Now I’m in one world, now in the other. I can’t stop it. 

[T]he idea that the current scientific consensus on any topic deserves slavish deference betrays stunning ignorance of the history of science. Time and again, scientists have shown themselves just as capable of
being blinded by fanaticism, prejudice, and error as anyone else. Perhaps the most egregious example in American history was the eugenics movement, the ill-considered crusade to breed better human beings. During the first decades of the 20th century, the nation’s leading biologists at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford, as well by members of America’s leading scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Museum of Natural History, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were all devoted eugenicists. By the time the crusade had run its course, some 60,000 Americans had been sterilized against their will in an effort to keep us from sinning against Darwin’s law of natural selection, which Princeton biologist Edwin Conklin dubbed “the great law of evolution and progress.” Today, science is typically portrayed as self-correcting, but it took decades for most evolutionary biologists to disassociate themselves from the junk science of eugenics. For years, the most consistent critics of eugenics were traditionalist Roman Catholics, who were denounced by scientists for letting their
religion stand in the way of scientific progress. The implication was that religious people had no right to speak out on public issues involving science.