Our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. For instance, people place a heavy reliance on eyewitness testimony despite being embarrassingly unreliable. We have a tendency to place heavy trust in our senses despite its failures as well as our mental failures which interpret these inputs. A good example is holding a pencil on one end, moving it up and down and swearing that you see its ends flap. Our minds often fail to produce accurate portrayals of reality in its raw state and the problem is further compounded by our susceptibility to fall prey to fallacious reasoning.
So to understand the world, we have to cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. But these seem to run counter to traditionally religious epistemologies.
How do most of the traditional causes of belieffaith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certaintyeliminate, rather than generate, such errors as outlined above and how do they lead us to uncontaminated knowledge?
So to understand the world, we have to cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. But these seem to run counter to traditionally religious epistemologies.
How do most of the traditional causes of belieffaith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certaintyeliminate, rather than generate, such errors as outlined above and how do they lead us to uncontaminated knowledge?
