For those unfamiliar, street epistemology is a conversational method of calmly examining an interlocutor’s claims through the socratic method as opposed to contesting the evidence. Practitioners, called street epistemologists, take care to avoid being argumentative, insulting or condescending in any way. The goal is to make people think. This method originated in a book by grievance study hoaxer and former Portland State professor Peter Boghossian's book A Manual For Creating Atheists. Alongside fellow hoaxer James Lindsay, Boghossian later wrote another book entitled How to Have Impossible Conversations which expanded the idea to non-religious topics.
In practice, street epistemologists seek interlocutors in public to have discussions which are often religious or spiritual in nature, but include topics like politics and culture war issues. An early practitioner was Anthony Magnabosco, who filmed his interactions for YouTube and garnered a decent sized following of 70K+ YouTube subscriptions, establishing himself as an authority on the subject. One of my other favorite practitioners is street epistemology international president Reid Nicewonder, who makes videos as Cordial Curiosity.
If you are hungry for high energy debate and conflict, street epistemology is not for you. The conversations are generally very pleasant and calm. The interlocutor often doesn’t have any idea what the SE practitioner’s opinion is on the matter and yet, the practitioner can effectively challenge their views by probing their thinking. A street epistemologist may ask questions such as: “How confident are you of this claim?”; “What method did you use to reach that conclusion?”; “How do you know your method is reliable?”; “If your method can be used by different people to reach different conclusions, is your method still reliable?”
Street epistemologists usually put themselves in public places. If a person approaches a street epistemologist and is curious about what they’re doing, they will say something like “I am interested in examining your beliefs.” Which is true, but we could say that at the meta-level the goal of street epistemology is to plant seeds of doubt in people’s minds. There has been scrutiny about the ethics of this practice and although I really enjoy street epistemology, I think it is easy to understand why.
When I was in college, I was in line to get free tea at an event for students. The woman behind me began asking me questions and being friendly. I could tell that she wanted to chat to me about her religion. I said something that made it apparent that I was on to her but not in a rude way. She came clean and began asking me if I was a spiritual person. We talked for a bit and then she invited me back to her group table. I joined the table of several friendly faces.
They asked me some questions, which I can’t recall right now. After not too long, this group invited me to play frisbee golf with them. I asked what the group was and they said they were not a group, just some people hanging out. But I knew that they were a religious group and so I told them I felt uncomfortable with just hanging out with a bunch of strangers. They understood. This wasn’t adversarial. I was pleasant with them and they were pleasant with me.
I could imagine atheists being bothered by these sorts of tactics. People offering to chat with me only to want to convert me or offering to hang out with me because they want to expose me to Christianity. I imagine that they also have tactics about how to approach people and build rapport. If they said initially “we want to hang out with you and hopefully convert you to our religion,” I would’ve appreciated the honesty. However, I figure many people might be dissuaded. Similarly, if a street epistemologist said “I may be planting seeds of doubt which cause you to question your beliefs,” then they would probably scare people off. I do think that some sort of disclaimer is appropriate.
For issues like astrology, I don’t think it’s a huge deal to not have a disclaimer. If someone reduces their probability of astrological signs having predictive validity, I don't imagine it having a profound psychological effect. However, I think we should potentially tread carefully when discussing someone’s God belief.
Imagine that there are two ends of a spectrum of priority. On one end of the spectrum, it would be okay to try to deconvert someone from Christianity and on the other it would be immoral or at least inappropriate. I think it would be a good service to try to get a fundamentalist gay person immensely afraid of hell to consider the idea that there is no God and is no hell. In doing so, you may greatly improve the quality of their life.
On the other end, imagine someone who is happily within a moderate Christian community, with a Christian spouse and with Christian children attending a private Christian school. The moderate recently had her mother pass away and she is taking solace in the fact that her mother has been saved because she was a Christian too. The moderate knows that some people are not Christian, but she doesn’t believe in a literal Hell and she doesn’t think that God cares about a person’s sexuality. This sort of liberal Christianity is increasingly popular.
I’ve constructed a bit of an extreme dichotomy to make a point. I think that in this situation, it would be much better to focus on the depressed fundamentalist than the moderate Christian. Turning the moderate into an atheist probably doesn’t really help anyone, and probably makes her life worse. It could even make her life profoundly worse. While turning the fundamentalist into an atheist might improve his life immensely.
I think that we should want to believe true things and that there is an inherently good thing about believing the truth, but sometimes it is not worthwhile to persuade someone of a belief. Anthony Magnabosco believes there are ethical limits to street epistemolgy; in the video, he recounts a story in which he speaks with a woman that would likely become suicidal if she lost her religion again. After learning this, he ceased doing SE with her. I think that was the correct choice.
I think that people engage in a lot of motivated reasoning and people believe things that they want to believe very often. People will bend and reinterpret evidence to fit their narrative. People will seek out evidence to confirm their previous views. If you’re not the type of person to do this, you have to understand that you are very atypical. Intentionally being critical of one’s own views is unpleasant and thus, many people do this almost never.
Thanks to the internet, there are few people who want to stop believing in Christianity, but cannot find critiques of it. People can purchase books from the New Atheists, listen to debates between atheists and religious scholars, listen to podcasts like The Atheist Experience, watch street epistemology videos, read critical philosophy, and so forth. If someone wants to challenge their own views, then they can find a means of doing so.
Losing a religion is a serious event in a person’s life sometimes and it can be a traumatic experience. It’s obvious why people avoid doing this. It can isolate people from friends and family, as well as lead to them losing a sense of purpose in life or losing contact with church friends. If SE practitioners could change people’s minds instantly, it could be damaging to a person’s mental health.
Of course, there will be objections from people reading this who like street epistemology and are in the atheist community. A lot of people lose their religion and move on, but some people become very interested in converting others. I think the type of person interested in converting other’s is more likely to be someone who is very happy that they are no longer religious. They may bring up the fact that they were living in a fundamentalist family and they were very sad, until they lost their religion and felt free. People totally uninterested or saddened by this fact probably don’t hang around as much on atheist forums or watching atheist YouTube videos. I think that atheists who dedicate their time to deconverting Christians likely overestimate the disutility of Christianity.
When a street epistemologist goes around possibly planting seeds of doubt, they could potentially be causing a lot of emotional strife in someone’s life. This might be acceptable if the street epistemologist was getting people off of drugs and alcohol but they are de-converting people from religion. While not necessarily completely causal, actively religious people tend to be happier. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was partially causal.
There are certain topics which are of importance. Examples would be anything someone could change in their life immediately for the better or anything that is very harmful to society generally. For example, if someone thinks hitting children is morally okay, then it would be very good to get someone to stop believing that. I would rather 1 person cease believing hitting their child is ethical, than convert 1000 people away from astrology.
I don’t think that religious people pose such a harm to society—in fact, it may actually be a positive force. However, typically atheists are liberals, but I don’t think they should be so concerned about the conservatism of Christianity for political reasons. I don’t think gay marriage will be made illegal again. Even many Christian’s attitudes have changed. I also don’t know if the correct approach to stopping opposition to abortion is through deconversion from religion. It would probably be significantly more effective to do street epistemology on the belief that we should restrict access to abortion or on the idea that it is immoral to be gay.
I don’t think we always have to do the most ethical behavior, but I think it’s worth considering spending our time wisely to effectively bring about change. I think that a major issue in our culture is the proliferation of critical social justice, also called wokeness. The critical social justice advocates have radical beliefs, are often openly hostile to objective reasoning and exert a lot of political and social influence. Street epistemologists, a group who cares about open inquiry and investigation into difficult issues, should recognize the worst element of CSJ—they are huge fans of censorship and suppression of their opposition.
We are experiencing a proliferation of anti-liberal, pro-censorship, radical, anti-empirical and anti-reason beliefs. CSJ advocates are often critical of the idea of objective knowledge, objective morality and free inquiry at all. This is a major threat to society’s wellbeing. Not only are they socially influential, they are politically influential as well. People who are not truth seeking critical thinkers fall out of beliefs and into others. Deconverting Christians might have the unintended effect of creating more CSJ advocates. People who believe in Christianity are actually less receptive to the ideas of CSJ—the more serious threat to our liberal society. For these reasons, I think street epistemologists should focus on critical social justice advocates instead of Christians.
Street Epistemologists Should Focus On Critical Social Justice Instead of Christianity
You're in luck. Starting next week, Nathan (Abstract Activist) and I will be on Peter Boghossian's Reverse Q&A tour where we'll be visiting eight universities in a month to ask students how Critical Social Justice has affected their education. Mark Solomon (Being Reasonable) will also join for two events. So stay tuned. 👍
https://youtu.be/OPf9YgFXvQc
This article starts well describing the issues that should be weighted when deciding the pros and cons of Street Epistemology. But it has been proven to be way off when analyzing the actual context today that serves as input to these calculations. Abortion rights, gay rights are being forcefully attacked by religious people and given the current context we should be pushing back hard against all kinds of religious views.