In 2013, Peter Boghossian published A Manual for Creating Atheists, which he coauthored with Michael Shermer, founder and editor of Skeptic magazine. At the time, Boghossian was a professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon, and the book lays out his methodology for what he calls “Street Epistemology.”
The book is a training manual for talking people who profess a religious faith, mostly Christian students on college campuses, out of their faith. Borrowing from the vocabularies of epidemiology, addiction treatment, and criminology, it instructs Street Epistemologists (Boghossian capitalizes the words) in serving as “clinicians” who stage “interventions” and administer “treatments” to cure people of the “virus” or “mental illness” of faith. The method follows the pattern of Socratic inquiry, which poses questions to expose flaws in reasoning. “It’s important we believe things that are true,” he writes. And, of course, he is right about that.
But Street Epistemology was flawed, in that Boghossian made up his own definition of “faith.” Faith, he said, is (1) Belief without evidence, and (2) Pretending to know things you don’t know — definitions at odds with a veritable avalanche of Judeo-Christian scholarship. Nonetheless, it was quite successful in causing students to abandon their faith, as many were ill-equipped to think of their metaphysical beliefs apart from the context of prepackaged doctrines.
A Clearer Picture of the Argument for Design
In a somewhat analogous way, The Story of Everything invites viewers to examine questions about metaphysical reality apart from prepackaged, establishment science-textbook dogma. It’s causing some people’s heads to explode, because, as The Story of Everything explains, over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, “science” became conflated with philosophical materialism. There is no reason that these should be necessarily intertwined, but they have become so in the institutions of Western science, as well as in the popular mind.
But as the film also explains — and in stunning cinematography — three groundbreaking discoveries of the 20th century have rendered the materialistic paradigm profoundly inadequate to explain certain verified realities. In unexpected developments, the most up-to-date science points instead to the prior existence of a designing intelligence.
An Existential Question
Philosopher Timothy McGrew articulates the existential question the film poses for the viewer to consider:
Sometimes the path toward the truth leads through beauty. And that is an important window. We need to be willing to open that….
One of the most important questions any of us can ask [is], “When should I change my mind?” Or, to put it a little bit differently, “If I am wrong, how am I going to find out?”
Indeed. How would we find out? In order to move toward truth, we must be willing to examine (or reexamine) our prior philosophical commitments. This goes for all of us, because ultimately, everyone places a measure of faith in one philosophical proposition or another.
Who Believes Without Evidence?
Returning to Boghossian and Street Epistemology, ironically, atheism is an evidentially unsupported belief. So is philosophical materialism. In a sense, then, unless the professor has changed his mind, he, too, exercises a measure of “belief without evidence.” The same goes for anyone, scientist or not, who allows his mind to be constrained by materialism.
On a positive note, while the inference to design will likely confound an avowed materialist, it’s causing more open-minded viewers to at least consider the case for design on its own terms. See for example, this review by Tony Bradley, an atheist and the editor at TechSpective, who writes that he “came away with a much clearer picture of the actual argument [for design] — not a strawman version of it — and a better understanding of why serious, intelligent people find it compelling.” In his mind, that’s “enough of a reason” to see it. Kneejerk ID critics would do well to follow his example.
Dr. Boghossian was 100 percent right about at least one thing: it is crucially important to believe what is true. Let us hope for more open-mindedness among scientists and on campus. To examine the evidence for yourself, make plans to see The Story of Everything before it leaves theaters. See here for locations and showtimes.