Dr Peter Boghossian, possibly the most awesome philosopher (and IFS guest) in the world drops by to teach us how to talk people out of their faith (religious or otherwise) through creating ‘street philosophers/epistemologists’ to ask the right questions of the faithful.
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Peace and love.
Jake.
Jake is the author of ‘Letters to Christian Leaders; Hollow be thy claims’, the book which takes the specific claims that the most prominent Christian Leaders make and directly refutes them using the latest research and evidence, reason, logic, and a dash of snarky humour. Get it here for your sexy kindle. Or if you prefer the authenticity of a book (and are too cheap for a kindle) get the hardcopy here.
So where and when might we find this new book of his?
My first time listening. Excellent show. Good advice.
I don’t think ‘leave out facts, stick to epistemology’ is good advice in general. The problem is that most people don’t give a flying fuck about how they know this. You may be able to reason very well about what are good ways of knowing but generally you’ll have lost your conversation partner in less than twenty seconds. People don’t care if they believe or know things because it’s in the party program, or they read it in a book, or they’ve thought about it really hard, or because well carried out research shows it.
They only care about facts and then usually only about a very limited subset of facts. If you want to fix someone’s epistemology you’ll have to find some area of facts that lies within their scope of interest, and then talk about how you know those facts and bring in epistemology via the back door.