Should we be skeptical of religion?
On whether good skeptics should be agnostics or reject religious claims altogether
I grew up Catholic in Rome, Italy. My apartment wasn’t too far from the Vatican, as I was reminded every Wednesday morning on my way to class at the University: the bus would invariably be slowed down to a crawl by the traffic associated with the Pope’s open audience with his flock.
By that time, however, I had already left the Church for a position that Bertrand Russell would have characterized as “agnostic with an inclination toward atheism.” A strong inclination, in fact. One of the decisive factors in my de-conversion (other than I couldn’t make heads or tails out of concepts such as the Holy Trinity and the process of transubstantiation) was reading Russell’s own Why I am Not a Christian.
Nevertheless, more than four decades later, I still occasionally read both religious apologists and philosophers of religion. At the very least it’s a good way to keep up with the competition, so to speak, and you never know, one of these days I may change my mind if faced with a sufficiently compelling argument. After all, any good Bayesian thinker knows that the door has to be left open to the possibility of adjusting one’s beliefs, on penalty of confining oneself to the class of narrow minded people who…
