Our First Meeting Today

What a great group of guys today, meeting to talk about not what we think, but how we think.  Men schooled in the the sciences, math, engineering, social work, history, urban studies, from many church and faith backgrounds, a wealth of life experiences -- a wonderfully diverse group.


Barrett is careful to talk not about the content of religious faith -- what we may or may not "believe" about gods -- but about why we believe what we do.  He notes that most of us haven't arrived at "what we believe" by careful, thoughtful logic.  


Even those beliefs for which we seem to have lots of reflectively accessible reasons often, in fact have been arrived at nonreflectively, and the explicit reasons amount to justification after the fact and have little to do with the actual formation of the belief.  (page 16)


If religious faith is as important as its adherents claim, it would seem important that one think as honestly as one can about his faith -- be it in a God, or in no God.   Cognitive science helps us understand the process by which our minds engage the world, and determine how we act with one another in the world.  And Barrett argues that the basic "tools" of the mind point us toward belief in some sort of supernatural being.   But should we be satisfied with simply going where those tools lead us, or shouldn't we think reflectively about such beliefs?


We'll read chapters 4, 5 and 6 for the next gathering, two weeks from today -- May 22nd.