no stretching necessary

I'm often miffed at the suggestion that my stance is particularly extremist. According to some critics, materialistic naturalism is an excessive interpretation of reality. It's a stretch. They submit that its overall judgment is reaching far beyond the tally of what's known and what isn't. It's displaying its own type of dogmatism: clinging too rigidly to stark principles. It's declaring a larger pattern that isn't really present.

This disagreement about who's stretching further is a useful clue about fundamental differences. It highlights the split in our assumptions about the proper neutral starting point of belief. When two stances have little overlap, the temptation is to hold up a weak mixture of the two as the obvious default, i.e. the most minimal and impartial position. Like in two-party politics, the midpoint between the two poles receives the label of "moderate center". As the poles change, the center becomes something else. I gladly admit that according to their perceived continuum of beliefs about the supernatural domain's level of activity and importance, mine lies closer to one of the clear-headed ends than to something mushier.

From my standpoint, their first mistake is imposing the wrong continuum. Applying it to me is like saying that the length of my fingernails is minuscule next to a meter stick. Although a continuum can be drawn to categorize me as having an extreme stance, the attempt doesn't deserve attention until the continuum itself is defended. It's not enough to decree that people more or less radical depending on how much their stance differs from yours. For a subjective estimation to be worth hearing, the relative basis for the estimation needs to be laid out fairly. Part of that is acknowledging the large role played by culture. Rarities in one culture might be commonplace in a second. Many times, perhaps most of the time, the customary continuum of "normal" belief isn't universal but a reflection of the setting.

The good news is that the preferable alternative isn't strange or complicated: it's the same kind of continuum of belief that works so wonderfully in myriad contexts besides this one. This kind begins with the stance that people have before they've heard of the belief. This beginning stance is perfect uncertainty about the belief's accuracy. It's at 0, neither positive nor negative.

Yet until the scales are tipped for high-quality reasons, the advisable approach is to continue thinking and acting on the likely guess that the belief isn't to be trusted. This is a superb tactic simply because unreliable beliefs are vastly cheaper to develop than reliable beliefs—the unreliable should be expected to outnumber the reliable. In the very beginning, before more is known, to make an unjustified leap to a strongly supportive stance about the belief...would be a stretch.

That's only one point of the continuum. But the rule for the rest is no more exotic: the intensity of belief corresponds to the intensity of validation. Information raises or lowers the willingness to "bet" on the belief to serve some purpose. The information accumulates, which implies that new information doesn't necessarily replace older information. Each time, it's important to ask whether the belief is significantly better at explaining information than mere statistical coincidence.

A popular term for this kind of continuum is Bayesian. Or, to borrow a favorite turn of phrase, it could be called the kind that's focused on fooling ourselves less. It's a contrast to the myth-making kind of continuum of belief in which stances are chosen based on the familiar belief's inherent appeal or its cultural dominance to each individual believer. At the core, Bayesian continua are built around the ideal of studiously not overdoing acceptance of a belief. This is why it's a futile taunt to characterize a Bayesian continuum stance as a fanatical overreach. The continuum of how alien a stance feels to someone is entirely separate. For that matter, when the stance is more unsettling largely as a result of staying strictly in line with the genuinely verified details, the reaction it provokes might be an encouraging sign that pleasing the crowd isn't its primary goal. If someone is already frequently looking down to check that they're on solid ground, they won't be disturbed by the toothless charge that they've stepped onto someone else's definition of thin ice.

The accusation has another self-defeating problem: the absolutist closed-mindedness that it's attacking isn't applicable to most people of my stance. All that's needed is to actually listen to what we say when we're politely asked. Generally we're more than willing to admit the distinction between impossible and improbable beliefs. We endorse and follow materialistic naturalism, but we simultaneously allow that it could be missing something frustratingly elusive. We could be shown that it needs to be supplemented by a secondary stance.

But by now, after a one-sided history of countless missed opportunities for supernatural stuff to make itself plain, and steadily shrinking gaps for it to be hiding in, the rationale would need to be stunningly dramatic. It would need to be something that hasn't come along yet, such as a god finally speaking distinctly to the masses of planet Earth. Corrupted texts, personal intuitions, and glory-seeking prophets don't suffice. The common caricatures of us are off-target. We aren't unmovable. We'd simply need a lot more convincing to prod us along our Bayesian continua. (The debatable exceptions are hypothetical beings defined by mutually contradictory combinations of characteristics; logic fights against the existence of these beings.)

There is a last amusing aspect of the squabble over the notion that materialistic naturalism stretches too far to obtain its conclusions. Regardless of my emphatic feelings that intermediate stances aren't the closest match to the hard-earned knowledge that's available, I'm sure that I'm not alone in preferring that more people followed these in place of some others. While I disagree that their beliefs are more plausible than mine, deists/pantheists/something-ists upset me less than the groups whose gods are said to be obsessed with interfering in human lives. I wouldn't be crushed if the single consequence of losing were more people drifting to the supposed "middle ground" of inoffensive and mostly empty supernatural concepts.

Because outside of staged two-person philosophical dialogues, it's a short-sighted strategy to argue that my stance presumes too much. It'd only succeed in flipping people from mine to the arguer's stance after they added the laughable claims that theirs somehow presumes less than mine, and that it presumes less than deism/pantheism/something-ism...