Jan 28 JDN 2460339
Here are a couple of pithy quotes that go around rationalist circles from time to time:
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, […] is like administering medicine to the dead[…].”
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
You usually hear that abridged version, but Thomas Paine’s full quotation is actually rather interesting:
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
It is indeed quite ineffective to convert an atheist by scripture (though that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying). Yet this quotation seems to claim that the opposite should be equally ineffective: It should be impossible to convert a theist by reason.
Well, then, how else are we supposed to do it!?
Indeed, how did we become atheists in the first place!?
You were born an atheist? No, you were born having absolutely no opinion about God whatsoever. (You were born not realizing that objects don’t fade from existence when you stop seeing them! In a sense, we were all born believing ourselves to be God.)
Maybe you were raised by atheists, and religion never tempted you at all. Lucky you. I guess you didn’t have to be reasoned into atheism.
Well, most of us weren’t. Most of us were raised into religion, and told that it held all the most important truths of morality and the universe, and that believing anything else was horrible and evil and would result in us being punished eternally.
And yet, somehow, somewhere along the way, we realized that wasn’t true. And we were able to realize that because people made rational arguments.
Maybe we heard those arguments in person. Maybe we read them online. Maybe we read them in books that were written by people who died long before we were born. But somehow, somewhere people actually presented the evidence for atheism, and convinced us.
That is, they reasoned us out of something that we were not reasoned into.
I know it can happen. I have seen it happen. It has happened to me.
And it was one of the most important events in my entire life. More than almost anything else, it made me who I am today.
I’m scared that if you keep saying it’s impossible, people will stop trying to do it—and then it will stop happening to people like me.
So please, please stop telling people it’s impossible!
Quotes like these encourage you to simply write off entire swaths of humanity—most of humanity, in fact—judging them as worthless, insane, impossible to reach. When you should be reaching out and trying to convince people of the truth, quotes like these instead tell you to give up and consider anyone who doesn’t already agree with you as your enemy.
Indeed, it seems to me that the only logical conclusion of quotes like these is violence. If it’s impossible to reason with people who oppose us, then what choice do we have, but to fight them?
Violence is a weapon anyone can use.
Reason is the one weapon in the universe that works better when you’re right.
Reason is the sword that only the righteous can wield. Reason is the shield that only protects the truth. Reason is the only way we can ever be sure that the right people win—instead of just whoever happens to be strongest.
Yes, it’s true: reason isn’t always effective, and probably isn’t as effective as it should be. Convincing people to change their minds through rational argument is difficult and frustrating and often painful for both you and them—but it absolutely does happen, and our civilization would have long ago collapsed if it didn’t.
Even people who claim to have renounced all reason really haven’t: they still know 2+2=4 and they still look both ways when they cross the street. Whatever they’ve renounced, it isn’t reason; and maybe, with enough effort, we can help them see that—by reason, of course.
In fact, maybe even literally administering medicine to the dead isn’t such a terrible idea.
There are degrees of death, after all: Someone whose heart has stopped is in a different state than someone whose cerebral activity has ceased, and both of them clearly stand a better chance of being resuscitated than someone who has been vaporized by an explosion.
As our technology improves, more and more states that were previously considered irretrievably dead will instead be considered severe states of illness or injury from which it is possible to recover. We can now restart many stopped hearts; we are working on restarting stopped brains. (Of course we’ll probably never be able to restore someone who got vaporized—unless we figure out how to make backup copies of people?)
Most of the people who now live in the world’s hundreds of thousands of ICU beds would have been considered dead even just 100 years ago. But many of them will recover, because we didn’t give up on them.
So don’t give up on people with crazy beliefs either.
They may seem like they are too far gone, like nothing in the world could ever bring them back to the light of reason. But you don’t actually know that for sure, and the only way to find out is to try.
Of course, you won’t convince everyone of everything immediately. No matter how good your evidence is, that’s just not how this works. But you probably will convince someone of something eventually, and that is still well worthwhile.
You may not even see the effects yourself—people are often loathe to admit when they’ve been persuaded. But others will see them. And you will see the effects of other people’s persuasion.
And in the end, reason is really all we have. It’s the only way to know that what we’re trying to make people believe is the truth.
Don’t give up on reason.
And don’t give up on other people, whatever they might believe.
Human Economics 