Life Without God : An Interview with Tim Prowse. Tim Prowse was a United Methodist pastor for almost 20 years, serving churches in Missouri and Indiana.
Tim earned a B.A. from East Texas Baptist University, a Master of Divinity (M.Div) from Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, and a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min) from Chicago Theological Seminary. Acknowledging his unbelief, Tim left his faith and career in 2011. He currently lives in Indiana. He was kind enough to discuss his experience of leaving the ministry with me by email. Can you describe the process by which you lost your belief in the teachings of your Church?
An interesting thing happened while I was studying at East Texas Baptist University: I was told not to read Rudolf Bultmann. Ironically, it was seminary that inaugurated my leap of unfaith. It sounds like you lost your faith in the process of becoming a minister—or did you go back and forth for some years? The Fireplace Delusion. It seems to me that many nonbelievers have forgotten—or never knew—what it is like to suffer an unhappy collision with scientific rationality.
We are open to good evidence and sound argument as a matter of principle, and are generally willing to follow wherever they may lead. Certain of us have made careers out of bemoaning the failure of religious people to adopt this same attitude. However, I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about.
We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.” Thinking about Thinking : An Interview with Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman is an extraordinarily interesting thinker.
As a psychologist, he received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. Here is what Steven Pinker, my previous interview subject, recently wrote about him: Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind, many of which have become textbook classics and part of the conventional wisdom. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics, a field that he and his collaborator Amos Tversky helped to launch. Kahneman was kind enough to take time out of a very busy book tour to answer a few of my questions. Much of your work focuses on the limitations of human intuition. When the stakes are high. Isn’t the remembering self just the experiencing self in one of its modes? The Mystery of Consciousness. (Photo by AlicePopkorn) You are not aware of the electrochemical events occurring at each of the trillion synapses in your brain at this moment.
But you are aware, however dimly, of sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and moods. At the level of your experience, you are not a body of cells, organelles, and atoms; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents, passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep, and from cradle to grave. The term “consciousness” is notoriously difficult to define. Consequently, many a debate about its character has been waged without the participants’ finding even a common topic as common ground.
To say that a creature is conscious, therefore, is not to say anything about its behavior; no screams need be heard, or wincing seen, for a person to be in pain. Is It Wrong to Lie? As an undergraduate at Stanford I took a course called “The Ethical Analyst” that profoundly changed my life.
It was taught by an extraordinarily gifted professor, Ronald A. Howard, and focused on a single question of practical ethics: Is it wrong to lie? At first glance, this may seem a scant foundation for an entire college course. After all, most people already know that lying is generally wrong—and they also know that some situations seem to warrant it. One of the most fascinating things about this course, however, was how difficult it was to find examples of virtuous lies that could withstand Professor Howard’s scrutiny. I do not remember what I thought about lying before I took “The Ethical Analyst,” but the course accomplished as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced.
It would be hard to exaggerate what a relief it was to realize this. Will This Post Make Sam Harris Change His Mind About Free Will? I spent this morning pondering whether I should attack neuroscientist Sam Harris for attacking free will.
I thought, haven’t I spent enough time hassling Harris? I already knocked him, twice, for arguing in The Moral Landscape (Free Press, 2010) that science can help us discover moral principles as true—True with a capital T! —as heliocentrism or Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean theorem. In fact, I have complained about Harris’s disparagement of free will in Landscape. Do I really need to revisit the topic?