Secular Bible Study

The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 315th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, "Should We Challenge Our Deepest Beliefs?"

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement." – Lord Kelvin, in 1900, when physicists all thought space was filled with a substance called “the Ether,” and while Einstein was working as a patent clerk.

In the 1900s, many scientists held not only outmoded certainty about the nature of reality and of the cosmos, but also were certain of the value of selective breeding and forced sterilization of people to attain a “perfect race” through Eugenics.

Such unjustified certainty was even practiced in America in the same time frame as when slavery had finally been abolished, with the aid of anti-slavery leaders who espoused opposite justified certainty, like U.S. activists Harriet Tubman & John Brown, and U.S. political leaders like Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln. But still the civil rights of Black and Native Americans continued to be suppressed for another hundred years (and counting) in the (re-)United States, just as the German Nazi regime likewise embodied similarly long-lasting arrogant certitude that all “non-Aryan” people were inferior or subhuman, to the point of exterminating them, along with murdering Germany’s civil rights supporters like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Throughout history, people have also practiced justified or unjustified doubt to either reshape society for the better, or to shun society altogether: Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1800s justifiably doubted -- by experimentally disproving -- the medical certainty of his day that doctors’ unwashed hands were harmless to their patients. His justified doubt was initially rejected by his willfully ignorant peers, but eventually their patients’ differential survival rates became inescapable. Charles Darwin took over twenty years to question, doubt, and agonize over his theory of natural selection, and not creationism, driving species evolution, in part because he was aware of its likely effects on religious dogma -- but he eventually published his treatise, which forced the world’s creationist religions to either adapt their beliefs, or to become anti-science recidivists.
But some historical figures displayed or urged unjustified doubt to avoid conflict or societal change. Pyrrho, the early Greek Skeptic, in the 200s BC, called for people to suspend all judgment of others and to hold no certainty, to achieve personal calmness – which 22 centuries later was judged to be a form of civil cowardice that prevents one from ever fighting injustice or defending others civil rights. Nevertheless, in the mid-1900s, tobacco & oil company CEOs adopted the same stance of “willful doubt” about the harms of smoking and of fossil fuel emissions – but their profit motive for adopting it became apparent within the last 70 years, in the same time frame as the political profit motive has caused Lincoln’s party to switch from abolishing slavery and suppression of civil rights to recruiting the same voters who’ve incessantly tried to resurrect it from history’s ash heap.

Do you think all of your own fellow travelers through the time in which we live should courageously rethink their deepest doubts and certainties? Or should just some of them do so, if their doubts and certainties don’t match yours? Do you think you should do so?

And what are those deepest doubts and certainties that you possess? Have you challenged them all yet? Which ones do you dare not question? If you have challenged them, how did you do it? By vetting them factually? By reflecting on your parents’ advice, and whether it seemed sound to you, then and later? By asking your pastor, or priest, or that person in the mirror? By reading a holy text’s advice (being careful which verse you read)? By placing yourself into the role of your own worst protagonist, and trying to defend what now (and perhaps later) remains indefensible to you? By giving up entirely on deeply held beliefs and worldviews? By creating a new worldview entirely out of whole cloth, or by sewing together a quilt of conflicting mandates and desires? By dumping Pyrrho’s skepticism about certainty of knowledge as a tortured “pyrrhic victory,” and replacing it with Pan’s hedonism, where you can gladly train your dog to fetch you a beer (if not a brat)? By asking AI – the oracle of no beliefs whatsoever -- to give you advice? Okay, done:

Google’s Gemini AI voices this “consensus” refrigerator poesy from all of humanity’s past works concerning this topic: "In this meetup you shall examine the boundaries of your own intellectual discomfort. Is the unexamined belief truly not worth holding, or do some core convictions require an unshakeable foundation to give your lives meaning and structure? You shall be invited to bring your sharpest critiques and your most closely guarded axioms to the table as you debate the utility -- and the psychological toll -- of radical self-skepticism. Whether you view cognitive dissonance as a dangerous precipice, or an essential laboratory to discern truth, your voice is needed to help weigh the presumed virtuousness of certainty against the presumed cowardliness of doubt. Is your certainty a vital moral anchor, or an intellectual blind spot breeding your arrogance, tribalism, and historical atrocities? Is your chronic doubt courageous humility, or an escape hatch from ever having to make a stand? You will be asked to cross-examine your most comforting convictions and your most paralyzing skepticisms."

Not bad, Gemini. But the AI missed urging us to act on the most important fulcrum of the question, “Should we challenge our deepest beliefs?” The most important point is not what our deepest beliefs – our most terrifying doubts, our most ecstatic certainties – actually are. The most important point is whether we’ve bowed to them, or have stood and stared back at them.

At 7-9 pm CDT Mo 9/21/26 by Zoom we'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate worldviews on whether we should feel obliged to not just plumb, sonar scan, and perhaps infill our deepest doubts, but also scale, map, and perhaps chip away at our highest certainties. Meanwhile, our interbelief reasoning dialogue’s agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should help us knock the rubble off our mountain peaks, if not turn them into molehills!