Stephen Law

Pre-publication draft of an essay I wrote for IAI, forthcoming. I guess most people reading this think the beliefs that the Moon Landings were faked, that fairies are real, and that their dead Auntie is in the room with them, are pretty obviously unreasonable. The beliefs that the universe is billions of years old, that Japan exists, and that bacteria cause infections are, on the other hand, considered eminently reasonable. Most of us think we are pretty good at recognizing reasonable and unreasonable beliefs when we come across them. However, we can begin to struggle when it comes to pinning down exactly what makes a belief reasonable or unreasonable. I am going to outline one tell-tale sign that, while you might think your beliefs are reasonable, they’re not. I call it ‘But it fits!’   Our beliefs are often challenged. I might believe that the Matterhorn is near Chamonix. Someone points out, using a map, that I am mistaken: the Matterhorn is near Zermatt. I must have been think...

  Often, when we’re presented with strong evidence that our belief is false, we can easily change our mind. Show me I’m mistaken in believing that the Matterhorn is near Chamonix, and I’ll just drop that belief. However, abandoning a belief isn’t always so easy. That’s particularly the case for beliefs in which we have invested a great deal emotionally, socially and/or financially. When it comes to religious and political beliefs, for example, or beliefs about the character of our close relatives, we can find it extraordinarily difficult to change our minds. Psychologists refer to the discomfort we feel in such situations – when our beliefs or attitudes are in conflict – as cognitive dissonance . Perhaps the most obvious strategy we can employ when a belief in which we have invested a great deal is threatened is to start explaining away the evidence. Here’s an example. Dave believes dogs are spies from the planet Venus – that dogs are Venusian imposters on Earth sending secret rep...

I recently came across this tweeted infographic, which is used to draw a conclusion I have also come across several times. The conclusion is that in the UK a Jewish individual is nine times more likely to experience a religious hate incident than is a Muslim. This is   despite there being more hate incidents targeting Muslims.   The argument for this conclusion is that there are around 15x more Muslims than Jews, and so, when we do the math, it turns out there are 9x more anti-Jewish incidents per capita than anti-Muslim incidents per capita . There are two big problems with this argument. First problem: Dubious Stats First, the statistics on antisemitic incidents are compiled by CST, and what CST classes as antisemitic is   controversial. CST’s figures include many incidents in which it is Israel, rather than Jews, that is explicitly targeted, and will, for example, record as an antisemitic incident someone expressing the view that Israel, as an ethno-state ‘between the...

Just listened to The News Agents Investigates podcast on rise of far right, & I was not particularly surprised to find the left's (I think) very plausible explanation for the rise of the right got no mention at all , the issue being framed instead entirely around the collapse of centrism (centrism being good , obvs.!). The diagnosis offered by The News Agents  for the rise of the far right focuses on centre-right parties adopting the rhetoric/discourses of the far right. Why did the centre right do this? The core suggestion made in the podcast is (1) 9/11 (worries about Muslims and the threat of Islamism), and (2) the fact that centre-left and -right became very similar on economic policy, resulting in the centre-right shifting their focus/arguments to the social/cultural (and thus immigration, etc.) in order to get some distance from the centre-left. It's also suggested that the far right thrive in times of political turmoil, and that Covid, and now the situation in Gaza,...

Could the universe be the creation of a supremely powerful and wicked deity? Most of us will rightly dismiss that suggestion out of hand. ‘Of course not’, we’ll say ‘Look around you – at all the love, laughter, ice-cream, and rainbows! This world contains far too much good for it to be the creation of such an omnipotent and omni-malevolent deity.’ And there’s no denying that while there is suffering and misery in the world, there is also much good – good of such depth and on such a scale that it really is highly unlikely there’s some evil-God justifying reason for every last ounce of it. And the one thing we can be sure such an evil God won’t allow is  gratuitous   good  – good for which there is no evil-God-justifying reason. Now of course the objection we have just raised to the suggestion that we are the creation of an omnipotent and omni- malevolent  deity is just the mirror image of a much more familiar objection – to belief in an omnipotent and omni- benev...

According to some, questions about the meaning of life are inextricably bound up with questions about God and religion. Without God, it is suggested, humanity amounts to little more than a dirty smudge on a ball of rock lost in an incomprehensibly vast universe that will eventually bare no trace of us having ever existed, and which will itself collapse into nothingness. So why bother getting out of bed in the morning? If there is a God, on the other hand, then we inhabit a universe made for us, by a God who loves us, and who has given us a divine purpose. That fills our lives meaning. But is God, or religious belief, really a necessary condition of our leading meaningful lives? How, exactly, is the existence of God supposed to make our lives meaningful? And if meaningful lives are possible whether or not there is a God, what makes for a meaningful existence? This chapter examines these and related questions. What do we mean by a 'meaningful life'? One of the difficulties ...