Yesterday we saw that atheists (if they are being honest)
hold their beliefs by faith just as much as believers in a deity. The catch here for both atheists and theists,
and the cause of much of the acrimony today over many things, not just
religion, is that opinion may or may
not be true, whereas knowledge is
certainly true.
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| Mortimer J. Adler, cir. 1910. |
This is not surprising.
Mortimer Adler identified the confusion over the difference between
knowledge and opinion as one of the most damaging, even dangerous
“philosophical mistakes” of the modern age.
(Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes. New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985, 83-107.)
The problem with religious believers is that some of them
tend to base matters that properly belong to reason, on faith. The intellectually flabby attacks on
non-believers (or, especially, other believers who don’t appear to believe exactly as the believer thinks they
ought) that consist of quoting Biblical passages or papal encyclicals as if
that proved something other than a lack of rigor or even honesty on the part of
the believer are a case in point.
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| First Vatican Council defined infallibility |
One egregious example is Catholics who insist that something
is true because the pope said so. They
ignore the fact that “infallibility” doesn’t mean that something is true
because the pope said so, but that the pope said so because Catholics believe
it to be true.
You may have to do a lot of digging to identify the specific
error of such believers (particularly because it is easy to agree with them in
many cases), but it always comes down to a private interpretation of something
they have decided to accept as God’s personal revelation to them, without
reference to facts or logic. This leads
to an inevitable parting of the ways, usually with cries of outrage and various
accusations by the “betrayed” believer, who doesn’t realize (or doesn’t want to
realize) that the betrayal — of reason, faith, and common sense — was his.