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It's probably not entirely fair for me to single out Catholicism as they aren't the only ones that make claims about the nature of the universe that I don't think are justified, but in the context of this discussion we can use Catholicism as sort of a named dogma that can stand in for other religions or other claims about reality I don't think are justified.

A VERY Brief History Lesson

• Probably started entertaining questions around 20
• Felt motivated to learn more about Catholicism due to some adversity I'd experienced (difficult questions to answer from those who aren't Catholic)
• Spent time listening to some apologists (Tim Staples primarily)
• Took some classes in philosophy that covered Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (and others)
  • Really much preferred the more honest pursuit to understand from those who were philosophically grounded and religious or theistic from their intellectual pursuits
  • Realized that there are other ways of describing the label 'god' that didn't require all the properties ascribed by catholicism, how would we justify all of them? Can we build a simpler explanation?
• Realized it was possible to believe in a 'First Mover' God but not take on all of the trappings of a religion if I felt like it was the best explanation for why things exist vs don't exist as well as being able to rationalize the Problem of Evil (god could've simply kicked things off, and doesn't need to be all loving or otherwise)
  • No more having to justify 'supernatural miracles' as having been real that don't have any good way of supporting, don't have to justify any of the stories in the Bible, they can just be like The Odyssey or other great old books
  • Don't have to justify all of the rituals and requirements of a religion but still able to 'ground' certain 'objective' things about reality
• Described myself as deistic for awhile
• More reading, listening, and otherwise internally exploring
• Realized I could simply be engaging with God of the Gaps^[1] both with respect to our knowledge of the world and metaphysical things I wasn't willing to give up (grounding morals, grounding the beginning of existence etc)
• Explore understanding of Knowledge and Belief
• Realized it's sometimes the most intellectually honest to say 'i don't know' and to not pretend we do even if we'd really like an answer
• I live my life as if a god doesn't exist because I haven't been given strong reasons to. The claim of a catholic god existing with all of the religious dogma that comes with it is an extremely high bar to set and requires a lot of justification to get there

How I Think

Here's a short list of things that I feel like best describe how I think about things. I don't claim its an entirely internally consistent model, but I'm certainly interested in finding that consistency if its possible. Additionally, I recognize and accept that these models of thought are limited and likely have rebuttals to parts of them. I'm generally OK with that as I simply can't expend the time and resources necessary to create the depth of knowledge necessary for me to engage at an experts level of understanding and still live a life that includes other things I want to do.

What is Knowledge?

There are three components to the traditional (“tripartite”) analysis of knowledge. According to this analysis, justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge.

The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge: ^[1:1]
S knows that p iff

1. p is true;
2. S believes that p;
3. S is justified in believing that p.

Truth

Something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. Not all truths are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. Truth is a metaphysical, as opposed to epistemological, notion: truth is a matter of how things are, not how they can be shown to be

Belief

The general idea behind the belief condition is that you can only know what you believe. Failing to believe something precludes knowing it. “Belief” in the context of the JTB theory means full belief, or outright belief.

Justification

The standard answer is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief might be true even though it is formed improperly. Suppose that William flips a coin, and confidently believes—on no particular basis—that it will land tails. If by chance the coin does land tails, then William’s belief was true; but a lucky guess such as this one is no knowledge.

How Can I Know Things

I'm generally in the camp of Methodological Naturalism. I don't say that the supernatural doesn't exist, but rather because of the nature of the supernatural, it doesn't seem like we're able to do any investigation of it. As far as I can tell, the supernatural is outside nature meaning it's beyond our inspection. If something is beyond our ability to inspect it, I'm not sure how we're able to learn about it and otherwise make statements about its properties.

I generally think that the scientific method, though not perfect, is our best way to work to understand the nature of the world. There's a good book called Understanding Philosophy of Science that I enjoyed that talks about how we come to learn things via science and it's limitations.

How Do I Determine My Skepticism

I wish I could say there's a hard and fast calculation I can put on determining the tipping point where I go from skeptic to believer, but there really isn't. It's all couched in what experiences I've had and have not had. It's based on what research I've done and haven't done and often times is based on the expertise of the person I'm talking to. Whether we like it or not, much of the things we believe come from authorities (real or not). This is simply because it's impossible for a single person to be able to independently validate every statement they come across.

Generally I would say the heuristic for how do start believing something is true is several fold:

Does it already comport with other things I believe to be true or have experienced?

If I've already learned 2+2=4, then it's probably not hard for me to extrapolate that 2+3=5. I don't necessarily need to independently validate by pulling 3 pens out and 2 pens and then counting the pile together.

If I've already learned that people keep dogs as pets, and a friend had mentioned they had finally picked up a dog that they're keeping at their house, I would very likely believe them without much further investigation.

If my friend had told me instead that he'd decided to get a purple zebra from the planet Jupiter instead, there's a lot of things that don't comport with my experience, ie purple zebras, my friend having one as a pet, them coming from Jupiter.

What is the significance of accepting the statement as true?

In the above examples, the significance of accepting the first 2 are trivial. I would not have world shattering change in my perception of what is true to accept those first 2 things.

However, in the third example there's significant impact to how I view the world, and is far flung from what I'd expect. This would lead me to not believe, at first anyways, until I was able to investigate further.

How closely related is the statement being assessed to the person reporting it?

When it comes to knowledge that I simply cannot spend the time to validate myself, either because the barrier to entry is too high due to its specialization, the statement being assessed was temporal in itself and otherwise unable for me to investigate independently, or other reasons why I might need to rely on others, I'll likely defer to an expert and tentatively accept their answer even if I may not repeat it as true.

An 'expert' is someone who has spent the time in the specialization to understand it to a depth I can't reach and has the general backing of the field in which the statement is being made from. Alternatively you might also describe someone who has first hand account of the situation as an expert on the situation they found themselves in.

While I think this is a decent heuristic for helping to understand how others view certain things as true, and can inform you on what you might believe, this is to not be done in independence of the first 2 heuristics.

I'm simply more likely to believe a quantum physicist when it comes to them talking about their latest research paper as opposed to say Joe down the street telling me about space aliens.

When we apply those first 2 heuristics, we can see, again, why we might believe one but not the other.

References