Agnostics are Atheists Too!

ag.nos.tic - n. - One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.

a.the.ist - n. - One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

-- agnostic, atheist. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.classic.reference.com/browse/atheist, agnostic (accessed: May 28, 2009).

I've never liked the way people separate the terms "atheist" and "agnostic." Most of the time, people seem to do it as a way to denigrate atheism as somehow more closed-minded than agnosticism. As we can see by the above definitions, however, agnosticism is merely a form of atheism, and in my experience, the most common form. Consider these people:

A: "There is no god."
B: "It is impossible to know if there is a god."
C: "There is a god."

To the question "do you believe there is a god?" only C would answer "yes." A & B would both answer "no," which makes them both atheists. To see it another way:




The most common (and most rational) type of atheist is the one who admits that it is impossible to make any factual claims about the existence of god. While there are those who will positively insist that god does not exist, most atheists will simply say that they have never encountered evidence of god's existence. This could properly be called agnosticism or atheism. In that context, there is really no difference.

"Atheists are Arrogant"

Today's post is less of an exposition on atheist thought than it is an open question. A question for which I don't have the answer.

How can atheists ever overcome the accusation of arrogance made by the faithful?

If you've spent any time debating or even talking to people of faith about atheism, you've probably been called arrogant. It goes something like, "How can you not accept that there might be something bigger than yourself?" The implication being that not believing in a deity is prideful or arrogant because it is asserting yourself as the supreme intelligence in your life.

The problem here is that the atheist and the believer are playing by different rules. To the faithful, the idea that god exists is fundamental. It makes perfect sense within that framework to accuse anyone defying the omniscient of arrogance.

The atheist, on the other hand, sees no reason to believe that there is a god, and so it is only reasonable to believe himself to be the final arbiter of his existence. This isn't an act of pride, but of necessity. All philosophy is an internal pursuit if you hold that only shared experience has meaning.

That's the impasse. A faithful person will never see humility in an atheist, because faith is about humbling yourself before a god. I am personally frustrated by this on a regular basis, because I consider my philosophy to be about nothing other than humility.

The important idea here is that I'm not an atheist because I believe there is no god. I'm an atheist because I see no reason to believe that there is one.

Do you see why I would consider that to be "humble"? I've yet to convince a person of faith that it is, but I'll try to state the idea as best I can.

My atheism is an outgrowth of my skepticism (not cynicism, and I'm tired of them being conflated), and my skepticism is rooted in three very key ideas:

1.) Anything I believe or think I know may be wrong.
2.) It is impossible to ever know the full truth of anything.
3.) My senses and cognition are, at best, imperfect.

If you look at those tenets, it's hard to see any arrogance in them. If anything, the opposite is true. What's more humble than accepting that you are flawed, that it is your responsibility to seek what truth you can, and that you ought never accept your own ideas as perfect? To me, that's true humility.

It's claiming that you know the one true answer to everything that's arrogant, and when that one true answer tells you that it's actually humility, then we reach a point where we simply can't debate. The faithful are playing checkers and the atheists are playing Boggle. The same rules just don't apply.

Should Atheism be Mainstreamed?

I find myself conflicted about the idea of making atheism into a political movement. Richard Dawkins, through his Out Campaign, is attempting to do just that. Dawkins:

To be effective, all we have to be is recognizable to legislators as a big enough minority. Atheists are more numerous than religious Jews, yet they wield a tiny fraction of the political power, apparently because they have never got their act together in the way the Jewish lobby so brilliantly has[.]

On one hand, I think it's a good idea for atheists to "come out," as he puts it. Too many people, I fear, see atheists as a sort of immoral demons, as if fear of god is the only thing keeping society from descent into anarchy. The parallel to the gay rights movement is a good one, I think, because this is the same way many ignorant people see gays. I think coming into contact with people who make their atheism public knowledge will help break a few of these stereotypes.

At the same time, I disagree with Dawkins about the number of people who are actually atheists. Surveys consistently put this number at under 2% of the population, and my anecdotal experiences back that up. I know a lot of people who reject mainstream religions. I know very few atheists. Most people I know disregard rationality, and invent their own belief system based on what feels good. And it makes most people feel good to think that there is a loving god watching over them, or that their dead loved ones still exist, or that everything is connected by a magical force.

But, more importantly, atheists don't agree... on anything. 21% of "atheists" say they believe in god. Of course, you can say they're not real atheists, but they're going to be wearing the scarlet "A" with the rest of us. Do I want to associate myself with these people? Or really, do I want to associate myself with anyone? Atheists by definition have non-mainstream views. Some of them are probably pretty horrible. Who is to say what they goals of an atheist political movement would be? Atheists disagree on religion in the public square, abortion, gay marriage, war, and every other political concern. What could this movement actually do?

As I attempted to show previously, there is a difference between religion and faith. Labeling yourself an "atheist" is a declaration of your religion. Plenty of atheists have faith, just not in god (leaving aside, for the moment, that pesky 21%). Their faith is incompatible with my views.

The danger of mainstreaming atheism is that the same thing happens that happened to mainstream religion: it becomes corrupted. It starts having rules, and tenets, and membership dues.

Atheism is not a belief system. It is the rejection of one factual proposition. There is too much variety among atheists to have a viable political movement. In order to have a movement, that variety will need to be extinguished for the "greater good." I don't think it's worth it.

Confirmation Bias, or Peter Popoff Picked a Peck of Pious Patsies

In his excellent post on cognitive dissonance, Wes discussed one of the ways in which faith -- in anything -- is inherently dangerous. Today I'd like to discuss the other great danger that faces anyone who abandons reason.

If cognitive dissonance is the tendency to hold onto beliefs past their usefulness, then confirmation bias is its perfect counterpart. Confirmation bias is the idea that people will more readily believe new ideas that fit their existing beliefs than those that don't. This makes sense. If I told you that yesterday I fell upward, you would be much, much more skeptical than if I told you the opposite. In this case, your skepticism would be well placed. You have a wealth of experience to suggest that gravity does not behave that way.

Unfortunately, confirmation bias is an overarching process of consciousness, and is not limited only to rational propositions, or those areas where we have real experience to draw from. In short, you are always more likely to see what you were expecting to. This holds even truer for beliefs based in faith, as those ideas are not challenged rationally at all.

The danger, then, lies in the fact that any person with irrational beliefs is more likely to accept additional beliefs that fit his existing worldview, regardless of any reason to do so, and to reject outright those which do not conform.

I would like to illustrate this point with an example. In the late eighties, an itinerant preacher, evangelist, and faith healer named Peter Popoff rose to prominence in the American christian community. Like many before him and since, he traveled the country preaching at open air and tent revivals, holding healing services in Ramada ball rooms, and preaching his interpretation of the Christian faith to anyone who would listen. Like his contemporaries Benny Hinn and Creflo Dollar, he was a deeply charismatic speaker and led a successful ministry.

Unlike other similar ministers, though, Popoff was truly remarkable. He was known for his connection to a higher power that no one else could match. Standing in front of thousands of people, he would receive divine information in spasms of rapture. He would call out the names of sick people in the audience, then rattle off the afflictions they suffered, their home towns, even the names of loved ones who were praying for them. Where others laid hands on the sick and prayed, Popoff got immediate, incredible results. He would raise the crippled from wheelchairs. He instantly healed incurable ailments like Alzheimer's and rheumatoid arthritis.

Here was the closest thing to a true prophet that modern America had ever seen. He attracted followers in the millions, and moneys in the hundreds of millions. The few inquiries into his abilities seemed to back his incredible gifts: none of the people healed or called upon at his services had any existing relationship with him.

Now take a guess as to what's going on here. Here was a man who was literally doing the impossible, and was being taken at his word. It seems almost unbelievable. Peter Popoff was accepted, almost without challenge, simply because his ideas fit a larger, existing framework.

Of course, Popoff had no special abilities. I say "of course," but it was not until more than two decades of his chicanery had passed before anyone looked closely enough to figure it out. James Randi*, a stage magician and skeptic, unmasked the truth:

1.) Popoff's wife and assistants worked the crowd beforehand, passing out "Prayer Cards" on which supplicants were asked to write down specifically what they were praying for.
2.) This info was relayed to Popoff by a radio earpiece.
3.) Anyone attending a service who had a slight difficulty walking was offered a "courtesy" wheelchair.
4.) Only those in Popoff's own chairs were ever raised from one.
5.) There was no backing at all to his claims to have ever cured anyone from cancer, Alzheimers, diabetes, etc.

This should have been obvious. Here was a man who claimed ability that could not exist within our understanding of the world. By that reasoning, an enormous amount of proof should have been required to accept his claim. This was not the case.

Popoff's followers already had a belief in his abilities, through the stories of Christ, the apostles, endless saints and relics, etc. They were primed and ready to believe anyone who showed them what they already believed. They were so comfortable with this outrageous lie that they risked their own health and made a scam artist a billionaire.

So take care with your beliefs. There's a pervasive argument for faith that usually starts out, "But if it's not hurting anyone...". It is. It is hurting your ability to accurately and adequately judge new ideas, and it is prejudicing you to all new experience. Watch out for confirmation bias.

Be well.


* James Randi is a personal hero of mine when it comes to skepticism and rational thought. Please visit his site at Randi.org for lots of useful information. And please support the tough old guy, he's been fighting the good fight since before a lot of us were born.

Wow... Just Wow...

This could be the stupidest thing I've ever read. The best part - after an entire article about how all atheists are a bunch of assholes, he comes up with this:

So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?

And he wonders why so many atheists gets frustrated with the hypocrisy of the faithful...

Faith vs. Religion, or Why "Hitler was an atheist" is not an Argument in Favor of Religion

Faith - n. - belief that is not based on proof

Re.li.gion - n. -
a. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
b. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.

- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved May 14, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary1.classic.reference.com/browse/religion


Faith and religion are not the same thing. This is an important point, because people tend to talk about them in the same way. As you can see by reading the definitions above, faith is a lot broader than religion. An easy way to lose an argument is to argue against religion without arguing against faith.

If you try, you will not only be ideologically incoherent, but you will kneecap one of your most effective arguments. Namely, that faith leads to undesireable outcomes such as the subjugation of women, crusades, torture, terrorism, and all sorts of horrible things. The problem is that, while faith is the main source of these outcomes, religion is not. Some of the most horrible movements on Earth were secular. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and a number of other despotic leaders led secular movements. Religion didn't enable these movements; faith did.

Despotic, hateful movements are at their core unreasonable. They generally rely on the proposition that Group A is superior to Group B, and therefor should kill/enslave/rob/hate them. If the populous was using logic and reason, these movements would never take off, because nobody would accept the proposition that one group of people can be objectively superior to another, especially if it's based on something arbitrary like ancestry, geographic location, or skin color. These movements succeed from time to time because they offer the same thing religion offers: comfort. People are comforted by believing that they are better than everyone else, that their society is superior, or that others are to blame for all of their problems. Leaders often must only offer the tiniest shred of unreliable evidence for these propositions, because it's what people want to believe. If people demanded credible evidence, these leaders would never convince anyone. Instead, people believe based on something other than evidence (emotion, desire, effortlessness, etc.), which is the very definition of faith.

Religion is only the problem so far as it integrates and promotes faith. This applies on a much smaller scale as well. For example, Billy might hate gays because the bible says so, while Jimmy might be an atheist, and just hate gays because he gets disgusted when he thinks about them. Both Billy and Jimmy think that being gay is a bad thing without any credible evidence. They simply have faith in the proposition, Billy because he trusts the bible, Jimmy because he trusts his feelings. In terms of their value for discovering objective truth, these approaches are both equally worthless. It makes no sense to distinguish between them because one uses the word "god" and the other doesn't. Irrationality is irrationality, no matter how it's dressed up. And irrationality is the problem.

Religion is clearly an obstacle to understanding the world, and admitting the limits of our knowledge. It is the most visible obstacle because of its nature as a group activity (and these days, a political force). But it does us no good to abandon religion and replace it with an equally irrational way of looking at the world. Faith is what we must avoid.

-------------
Tangential point: if you'll forgive the incestuous quotation, Chris make a point yesterday with which I'd like to associate myself:

I don't hold that everything can be dealt with rationally, because I've been in a relationship. Nor is pure reason an intelligent pursuit. Love and laughter matter, even if they aren't always reasonable. It's just a good idea to recognize those parts of yourself that aren't rational for what they are, rather than believing them to be a valid way to find new knowledge or explain your world.

I advocate logic & reason as the exclusive method to arrive at beliefs which have any chance of being objectively correct. Love & laughter are not beliefs; they are experiences. They should be enjoyed without worrying if such enjoyment is rational, like you would enjoy a good steak, or a piece of art. What makes you happy is a personal choice. We must simply recognize that it is not a way to discover objective truths.

How to Argue: Pascal's Wager

Hello again. Today is the first in a series of posts that I am choosing to call the How to Argue entries. These are intended as a guide to debating people of faith (an all too common situation for those of us without it) in a manner that won't create enemies, and that will hopefully help you make your point clearly.

More importantly, I will be using these discussions of common arguments to illustrate the principles of critical reasoning that will help you in all areas of your rational life.

Before we begin, note one important fact. You will almost never win a rational argument with a person of faith. Faith is by definition irrational. Expecting a person who whole-heartedly believes something without proof to change their mind is ridiculous. Instead, try to settle for pointing out that the "rebuttals" often offered to your heresy are intellectually and philosophically bankrupt. If you are calm and kind, you may even have some impact.

Today we will be discussing a classic argument for faith first posed by the mathematician and physical scientist Blaise Pascal. I've chosen this particular argument for three reasons. First, you will hear it constantly. Pascal's Wager, as it's known, is a classic last-ditch argument for faith in the face of reason. Second, the faithful tend to like it for these debates because it sounds scientific and reasonable. Lastly, it is a particularly easy argument to rebut, and so makes for a good example of today's topic. So let's start there:

An argument is only as sound as the assumptions upon which it is based.

Repeat that to yourself a few times, and keep it firmly in mind as we discuss today's argument. At first blush you might be tempted to ask, "Assumptions? I thought we were talking about reason and empiricism and rational skepticism and.... shouldn't we not have any assumptions at all?" Disabuse yourself of this idea. All philosophy is based on assumption. It's not like maths, where axiomatic truth (and therefore rigid proof) is possible. In order for reason to exist at all, a few basic assumptions have to be made.

Just consider: you must assume yourself to exist. This seems obvious, but it can not be proved, Voltaire be damned. There is no way to assert that you're not the "dream of a butterfly who thought himself a man," to borrow a classic. You can not say with certainty that you are not part of a larger consciousness, a computer simulation, or a mass hallucination. I won't belabor this point, and you can read up on David Hume's notion of self for further reading.

Likewise, you must assume a number of other things for reason to be worthwhile. You must assume that the universe has substance outside of your own perception. You must assume that your senses, while imperfect, are not farcical. You must assume that inference itself is possible.

This is a much, much larger topic than I care to devote this post to. The idea I'm trying to get across here is that all philosophical arguments are based on assumptions at some level. This does not mean, however, that all assumptions are equally valid (when you think about it, "valid" in this context actually means "useful"). The idea "Objects continue to exist even when I can not see them." is useful because it leads to further useful ideas. Without this assumption I would have a hard time finding my keys. "There are no purple apples." is a much less useful assumption. For one, there is no need to make it, as there either are or aren't purple apples (within the framework of assumptions like "the physical world exists"). More importantly, it precludes a conclusion that could be made from simpler, more direct propositions. Confused yet? Let's get to the meat of this post.

Pascal's Wager states that it must be more reasonable to believe in god than not to, as the reward if right is infinitely good, while the outcome of all other scenarios ranges from negligible to infinitely bad.

You might think that sounds a bit like a Decision Theory proposition, and you'd be right. Pascal himself actually expressed it as an outcome matrix:

	God Exists	God does not Exist
Faith	Eternal Salvation (infinite reward)	Nothing
Doubt	Eternal Damnation (infinite loss)	Nothing

You're more likely to hear it from a person of faith in a form like this:

You can't prove that god doesn't exist, so doesn't it make sense for you to believe in him "just in case"?

The short answer is no. The long answer is, well, long.

Pascal's Wager makes at least six unjustified assumptions. I'm going to cover four in some depth; see if you can spot the others. It shouldn't be difficult. You could drive a truck through the holes in this argument.

Take a look at the table of outcomes above. One thing should be readily apparent. Pascal's Wager assumes that god rewards belief. What reason is there to believe this to be true? Most faiths have belief as a central tenet, but almost none have it as the sole requirement for salvation. Catholics have the requirements of confession and penance, Hindus the notion of Satyaghara, Buddhists the search for enlightenment, Muslims the communal aspects of "right living", and on and on. So what reason is there to believe that simply believing a god exists is enough to earn his favor?

I would go even farther, though. Most religions recognize "faithful" behavior done only for self-interest as hypocrisy. This is exactly what Pascal proposed. The whole crux of his wager is to adopt a belief solely in the hope of gaining personally from it, an idea that most faithful people, regardless of religion, would find sinful. So do we have reason to believe that god rewards belief, and that he rewards belief based only in self-interest?

Pascal's next failure is that his idea presents a False Dichotomy. In this argument, there are only two possible outcomes: god exists or does not. But what's the assumption behind that? The assumption that Pascal made invisible to his argument was that there was only one possible god, the Christian one (this is born out in his other writings). What if we account for other possibilities, though? How do the permutations change if suddenly there could be multiple warring gods? What if there were a non-specific, non-sentient creative force? What if we only added rows for the gods that others already believe in? Mustn't we then have outcomes mapped for Yahweh and Krishna and Aphrodite and Osiris and a multitude of others? Most of these faiths are exclusionary, meaning that faith in any other is a sin or heresy. What follows from this is that the number of possible outcomes is huge, and in most of them the best you could hope for is for nothing to happen. Most of the time (in this probability matrix) the outcome is eternal damnation or some sort of other punishment.

The third faulty assumption I'll touch on is similar to Pascal's assumption that only one god was possible. Pascal assumed that god's existence necessitated an afterlife, and likely a split one (heaven / hell) at that. This again came from him only considering a single faith as the possibility. In fact, he had already made up his mind, and was only justifying his conclusion.

I will be repeating this over and over as I keep posting, but starting with a conclusion is the most dangerous thing you can do, intellectually.

The idea that there must be an afterlife is not a reasonable one. For one, we have no evidence for it, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. Assuming that there are a heaven and a hell is exactly as reasonable as believing, like the Jews do, that there is only a heaven. It is the same as the Hindu notion that life after death continues on the mortal plane. Even the Catholics have a third option in purgatory. When you start adding these options to the matrix, it becomes apparent that the number of possible outcomes is far too large for any approach to make sense without some additional knowledge. i.e. "Just in case" no longer makes sense, as you are overwhelmingly more likely to make the wrong choice.

Lastly: Pascal's greatest failure. He makes the assumption that living with faith, even if it is misplaced, does not do any harm. You need only read Wes's last post ("Cognitive Dissonance") for an excellent example of why this is not true. Faith means abandoning reason, it means changing your identity, and it means creating an area of yourself that is immune to criticism and debate. The first two are not always bad*, but the third is. We can only learn when our ideas are challenged. Accepting that any part of our conception of the world is inviolate is the height of arrogance, and a sure-fire way to miss a lot of really important things.

When you have knocked the legs out from Pascal's Wager, it becomes clear what it really is. It is not a logical proposition, it's a cheap dodge to make an irrational belief appear reasonable.

This is what you should try to do with any argument that you are presented with, regardless of whether you agree with it or not (I would even say particularly when you agree with it). Look for the assumptions. What isn't being said in the argument itself? What's being taken for granted, that if untrue, would completely reframe the argument? Is this castle just built on a swamp?

Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Be well, and come back soon for more really, really long posts.

-Chris



* I don't hold that everything can be dealt with rationally, because I've been in a relationship. Nor is pure reason an intelligent pursuit. Love and laughter matter, even if they aren't always reasonable. It's just a good idea to recognize those parts of yourself that aren't rational for what they are, rather than believing them to be a valid way to find new knowledge or explain your world. More on this later, I promise.

Cognitive Dissonance

Ryan Sager, in his excellent blog, Neuroworld, explains how a belief unsupported by any credible evidence (in this case, the belief that vaccines cause autism) forms and perpetuates despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I encourage you to read the whole thing. Here he is explaining why people won't give up their previously held beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence:

When the evidence comes in, though, shouldn’t these folks change their minds?

...Unfortunately, that’s not how humans work. I explained in another post the story of Marian Keech and the Seekers. In short, Keech headed up a UFO cult in the 1950s. Earth was supposed to be destroyed, and she and her followers were supposed to be rescued by a flying saucer on December 21. The day came and went, but no destruction, no UFO. Instead of giving up their beliefs, however, most of the Seekers glommed onto a new narrative — that the Seekers’ belief had saved the Earth — and began to try to win converts.

The ones who redoubled their commitment were the ones who’d invested the most in the theory — quitting their jobs, selling their houses. The UFO not showing up created a feeling of what’s been termed “cognitive dissonance.” How could I have given up my job if there’s really no UFO? The answer their brains came up with: Because what I did saved the world!

Cialdini calls this phenomenon "consistency drive." The idea is that humans are really bad at admitting when they are wrong, so the more they invest in a belief, the greater than belief will be. If one has invested a lot in a belief, the consequences of being wrong are so bad that people will willfully blind themselves to the truth. They teach you about "sunk cost" in business school to fight against this impulse. When people have contradictory beliefs, Instead of abandoning one of them, people will come up with ridiculous explanations for how the beliefs are not actually contradictory, and then try not to think about it too hard.

In fact, thinking about it too hard can restart the process all over, and lead one to continue manufacturing ridiculous explanations, until one abandons the need for explanations altogether. Almost every conversation I have with a person of faith ends in some variation of "reason isn't everything." This is just a nicer-sounding way of saying "I don't have a good reason to believe what I believe." In a rational world, saying that sort of thing would be equivalent to conceding the point. If a person doesn't have a good reason to believe something, s/he should stop believing it. But people have invested so much in their beliefs that they can't do that. Instead, they convince themselves that reasons aren't neccessary. And thus begins the total abandonment of rationality.

The Happy Atheist

This is my first post as a Doubting Thomas, and it seems wise to start on a happy note. As Wes and I write out this blog, there will probably be a lot of heated debate. A lot of opinions expressed that are guaranteed to be unpopular. A lot of words like "cynic" and "credulous" hurled around.

But those things aren't what this blog is about to me. This blog is about expressing how much I feel that I benefit from atheism (actually humanist logical positivism, but we can get to my being a pompous nerd later), and why I think that other people can too. It's me responding to every person who's ever told me that I was missing something because I didn't have god or faith.

This blog represents a chance to preach a way to a joyful and reasonable life, while being less annoying than the Jehovah's witnesses.

I want to point out the mystics who've kept the card up their sleeve and tell you to keep your money. I want to shout that not knowing what the universe is all about makes it so much more exciting. I want to show you how it's possible to see a lot more when you're not looking up. I want you to know that awe and wonder are not only for the religious.

I want you to be happy, I am.

So, hi. I'm Chris. I hope you read The Doubting Thomases and let us know what you think.

Faith and Star Trek

**Spoiler Alert**
This post discusses the plot of the new Star Trek movie.

I don't think it's any secret that American culture aggrandizes faith at the expense of reason, but I saw a particularly noteworthy example recently in the new Star Trek movie. First off, the movie was great! I encourage everyone to go see it. This is in no way meant to denigrate the movie. But it occurred to me that the message of the movie is the perfect example of the typical American attitude toward faith and reason.

Star Trek sets up its two chief characters as perfect foils. On one hand, you have Kirk. He is rash, impulsive, and defined by his emotions. His entire backstory is the scene from the previews where he, as a tween, steals his stepfather's car and drives it off a cliff. Clearly, this is not a guy who wastes a lot of time thinking. On the other hand, you have Spock. Cold, calculating, and supposedly free from emotions. His highest principal is logic.

Predictably, Kirk and Spock come to a disagreement, with the fate of Earth at stake. Kirk wants to rush headlong into battle without thinking about it, and Spock wants to contact the rest of the fleet to coordinate. All parties acknowledge that Kirk's plan has little chance of success, is entirely illogical, and will probably kill them all. But Kirk has faith (clearly not based on rationality) that his plan will work. And what do you know?! It works, Kirk is vindicated, and Spock is properly shamed into acknowledging that you have to trust your feelings sometimes. This is all done with a minimum of subtlety, even going so far as to have future-Spock advise his younger self to stop being so logical, and to have more faith, or something ridiculous like that.

This certainly makes for a compelling story. The problem is that most of America seems to think the world actually works that way. We all want to be Kirk, not Spock. We trust our emotions. We don't bother stopping to think about anything. And we don't recognize this as a bad thing. Instead, we see it as a virtue.

The problem is that trusting our feelings is probably the worst way that we can go about making decisions. Our feelings lie to us. They tell us what we want to hear. They incorporate all of our bias and prejudice.

Sadly for all the wanna-be Kirks out there, cold logic is really the best way that the human species has to make decisions. Isn't it? Is there any other reliable way?