018 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 018

Air Date: August 16, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Masters of Science Fiction – Superstition to Fanaticism):

Speaker 1: So, you’re an astrophysicist?

Speaker 2: Amongst other things. I also work for SETI.

Speaker 1: You’re a believer?

Speaker 2: I think that it’s narrow-minded to discount the possibility of life outside of this solar system, yes.

Speaker 1: So you’ve decided?

Speaker 2: It’s hard to ignore the laws of probability.

Speaker 1: Except, with no evidence, all you’re left with is your faith and the idea.

Speaker 2: Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science.

Speaker 1: Thorough. But when superstitions become convictions, that only leads to fanaticism.

Bob Metz: Good morning London.

It is Thursday, August 16. I’m Bob Metz. And this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now until noon. No, no, not right wing. Just right.

Welcome to the show today. Very hot and humid Thursday for us. You can call, if you’d like to call in on the show today, 519-661-3600, if you want to join in on the conversation, or email us at justrightchrw.com if you are listening to us online or hearing us on another medium. By all means, we like to hear from you and hear what you have to say.

Today, a little bit something different. I have a guest, close friend of mine, and a political compatriot, no doubt. And that is Paul McKeever, who happens to be the leader of the Freedom Party of Ontario.

The same party you hear me talking about. Good morning Paul, how are you?

Paul McKeever: Good morning Bob, how are you?

Bob Metz: Not too bad. Paul, I know you’re not a stranger to London. On your way here, you said you felt very much at home.

Paul McKeever: Yes, indeed. I, in fact, lived right in the area having attended UWO from about 1989 to 95.

Bob Metz: That’s true. I’m looking at your outline here, and I’m going, you have not just one university degree, not two, but three.

Paul McKeever: Almost four, actually. I did, after spending some time in Peterborough doing my undergrad, I came here and did a master’s in psychology and did a year of PhD before switching to law. So, yeah.

Bob Metz: Well, I guess, so you had your honors bachelor’s science at Trent University, I understand, is that correct?

Paul McKeever: That’s right.

Bob Metz: And then here at the University of Western Ontario, that’s where you got your master’s degree in psychology and your law degree at Western Law School. Well, I think with those things in mind, perhaps I can pick at your mind for some of that expertise in those areas for the subject matter we’re going to go out on today if we’re going out on a limb here. We could have talked about a number of issues.

You might think we’re going to talk about the usual political stuff you’ve heard all the time, but we’re actually going in a slightly different direction. I gave Paul sort of an option almost of what he wanted to talk about today. And, no, he didn’t want to talk about specific issues here and there or even the provincial election, which is just coming up and around the corner. But what seems to be on top of his mind these days seems to be how should political and public issues be decided or resolved? And as I put the question last week, it was a matter of, I guess, faith, consensus or reason or a combination or is it pragmatism? Is it something else? And why would these things be so foremost in your mind? Well, because I know you deal with these issues all the time.

Paul McKeever: Yeah, that’s it.

I mean, obviously, since 9-11, there’s been a lot of focus on the role of religion and its relation to government, both because of various communities in Canada and the United States who are concerned that because some terrorists share their religion that they might be targeted here at home. Having had the same religion, they might be treated as though they’re terrorists. At the same time, we have, especially in the United States, a president who’s openly identified very strongly with a faith in particular Christianity.

And some would say that some of his policies and laws that he’d like to introduce are inspired by that faith rather than inspired by things like the needs of science and etc.

Bob Metz: Now, is this a problem? Does this create a problem? Like, why would it even be a consideration? Aren’t we a tolerant society? Don’t we believe in all faiths and all beliefs and all sorts of things like that? Isn’t that really what Western society is all about?

Paul McKeever: Yeah, I think it’s true that the hallmark of the West is its ability to allow people to live side by side in peace, believing whatever they want to believe. But the way we’ve achieved that has not been by taking religious belief and basing laws upon it. Rather, what we’ve done is very carefully in the West tried to make sure that religious beliefs, beliefs based on faith but not on observable fact, don’t enter into the process of lawmaking. So in other words, lawmaking is a very earthly affair.

Religion is a very, if you want to call it heavenly affair, I don’t personally believe in a heaven, but if you want to think of it as an otherworldly affair. And I think that really relates back to the comment even by Jesus at one point was, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar, render unto God that which is God. And I think it was Lord Acton who said, well, by saying that Jesus had effectively drawn the line between state and church, and that’s what allowed the West really to thrive when other countries in the world were suffering under religious rule.

Bob Metz: I’m reminded back when I was doing left, right and center with Jim Chapman way back when he once asked me on the air, he said, how do I feel about the word God being in the preamble to the Constitution, right? And I never brought up anything about my personal beliefs because my idea of God is not a literal one, but I don’t object to the concept in a more of an abstract symbolic way. And my answer to Jim at the time, and tell me what you think of this, I said that I don’t object to the word being there because to me implied in that is that our God-given rights are not derived from the permission or substance of other people.

I thought that was sort of symbolically what that meant. And of course, I’m also a little naive in my beliefs in religion. I was indoctrinated in the Catholic Church. I grew up with not a literal belief in a lot of things.

I’m only beginning to realize, I guess since 9-11, that some people take it quite literally. Is my viewpoint on that wrong? Am I taking the wrong point of view?

Should I stop thinking about it that way, do you think? Or is there a danger in that? Or is it okay as long as we put religion in its place, where it belongs and put reason in its place, or the two even in any way. And religion, by the way, is a much broader concept. We’re not just talking about religion. I know we’re going to get into other issues from global warming on down, but how would you approach that with the God?

Bob Metz: Well, taking that idea that there’s a sphere that’s for the state and a sphere that’s for religion, it’s clearly the case that you should be able to believe whatever you want to believe. I mean, if you want to believe that leprechauns control Earth from the planet Pluto, you should be free to do so, to say that’s what you believe, to advocate it, to try and encourage other people to believe the same thing.

But the line is where that kind of belief inspires lawmaking. So if you believed it was a leprechaun on Saturn controlling things on Earth, you certainly wouldn’t want the government to be making laws in accordance with what was allegedly the commandments of a leprechaun sitting on Saturn, because there are lots of people. I mean, when you start to make laws based on the needs of the leprechaunians, if you want to call it that, at the same time, you’re most likely going to lead into violations of everyone else’s religious beliefs. You cannot help but trod upon other people’s religious beliefs as soon as you start making religious belief a part of government lawmaking. So your question, though, was about the use of God in relation to the Constitution.

And there, I think, that was actually added later on. I remember there was a comment, and I don’t recall who he was responding to, but the Prime Minister at the time, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, didn’t see any need to say anything about God in the Constitution, figuring, I think, that God really didn’t care if he was mentioned or not. I mean, he was a Catholic, I think, but he didn’t see any point in mixing religion with law. And it was because of the insistence of some in the Parliament that that had to be introduced to the Canada Act in particular. I think it was the Charter.

Bob Metz: So would you say that in many ways, many of our laws today have been made by the leprechaunians, if you want to put it that way?

Paul McKeever: Well, there’s certainly a tendency, especially since the religious right organized itself as such. In other words, as soon as religious people realized that they could vote as a block, that they could influence one party’s policies greatly, I think that example from the U.S. has been mimicked elsewhere, in particular in Canada. And so we’re seeing right now, for example, a Conservative Party of Canada that is more religious than any that’s ever preceded it, at least more openly religious. I understand that they’ve been trying to silence those within the party who are most vocal about religion.

The Scott Reids, and there was another person from Eastern Ontario. But I think the fact of the matter is that faith guides the decision making of a lot of people who especially on the Conservative Party…

Bob Metz: If that’s true, then why silence it? If the public has such a religious bent, is it not an asset to a party to be seen as having some religious background?

Paul McKeever: I think certainly as an electoral thing, it’s useful to that party to openly advocate itself as being religious. I think that’s what the Conservative Party largely is, and I think it would be disingenuous to suggest it isn’t, that it’s somehow a secular party.

It’s not. It’s doing its best to remain secular in terms of how it governs Canada. But I think the fact of the matter is that the party itself is made up of people of varying faiths. Not all of them. I think some of them are not.

Bob Metz: Well, we could say that about Freedom Party too, couldn’t we?

Paul McKeever: Absolutely.

Bob Metz: There are people in this party that are varying faiths. We’ve had candidates of varying faiths. So how are those things reconciled? What’s the common ground?

Paul McKeever: I think the common ground is, as I say, a recognition that whatever your beliefs are, that’s fine. But that government decision making should not be based on obedience to an alleged commandment by somebody’s God. Because at that point freedoms get trod upon, and even freedom of religion gets trod upon.

Bob Metz: I’m going to get back to some more specific terms. We’re going to come actually to like hardcore definitions shortly, but I don’t want to get to that quite yet. When I sort of really started getting into studying religion as a consequence of 9-11, because stuff like that starts happening. You better start understanding what the driving forces are behind it. And it was really then that I started looking at it in the sense of how literally some people take a lot of their beliefs. But as I studied it through history, a historical view of religion rather than a faith-based view, or a religious view from one religious denomination’s point of view.

And tell me if you think this is way off target or way off the center base. But I’ve kind of been led to one broad conclusion about religion, and that is that religion and politics are almost one and the same thing historically, and come from the same seed, if you will. I was raised, for example, I say indoctrinated in the Roman Catholic faith, and of course Roman Catholic, if you look at even the definition of the word, what does it mean? It has nothing to do with Christianity per se.

It’s about, Catholic means universal, and we’re talking about Romans, so we’re really talking about Roman Catholic equals universal Roman law, like the basics of Roman law, as it was laid down back at the time of Constantine in the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, when the actual Emperor of Rome, that was where they decided and created the Holy Roman Empire, where Christ was declared divine and that there would only be one God rather than many. And it seems to me that in light of this, and it’s in exquisitely and meticulously documented event, like many people, historians will tell you this thing is like they had CNN cameras there, that’s how detailed it was. And yet, despite that historical accuracy of that event and the fact that I don’t see anybody denying it, you still, I mean, there it is, it’s invented, and yet people take it literally today. Now, am I looking at that wrong? Am I missing some key point about…

Paul McKeever: Well, I think you’re correct in saying that, certainly until I would say the 1600s, religion and state was largely a situation of synonymous terms, but with the French Enlightenment, which was, the central figures in the French Enlightenment were actually atheistic. They didn’t believe in a supernatural intelligent being that controls the world.

They believed in a more materialistic scenario. In other words, there wasn’t a dualist view of the universe. There wasn’t two realities, one sort of an afterlife and one an earthly one.

They said, no, it’s just an earthly one. And that they published volumes and volumes. They published the most influential encyclopedia in human history. And I think as a result of that, though, with the likes of Rousseau, there was some pushback from people who said, well, wait a minute, okay, we’ll make some room for scientific belief. We’ll make some room for scientific discovery. Sure, maybe the church was wrong to interfere with assertions about how the planets orbit the sun and etc. But that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of God altogether. And so Rousseau, who was a very religious man and those who followed him and formalized his political beliefs in terms of a more thorough philosophy like Kant in particular, have, I think, given some pushback to the whole thing. So now we’ve got not a society that’s as secular as, say, the French Enlightenment theorists would like it to be, but rather one that I would say increasingly in, especially in the last six years, has been guided by faith. And I think there is reason to have concern about that, not simply because I would prefer government to keep its break with religion. But that also is going to lead to religious persecution of religious people.

Bob Metz: We certainly see a lot of evidence of that in the world today. Listen, we’re going to take a quick little break here right now. And when we come back, I think we’ll expand the conversation a little bit into other areas besides strictly religion and see how the ideas of, let’s say, non-rational, non-objective evidence are applied to politics. We’ll be back right after this break.

Clip (Green Acres – Superstitious Crop Planting):

Speaker 1: I say corn.

Speaker 2: I say soybeans.

Speaker 1: Can I get waited on.

Speaker 2: Corn.

Speaker 1: Soybeans.

Speaker 2: Corn.

Speaker 1: Can I get waited on.

Speaker: Joe, would you stop interrupting? Now this is important. Fellas, you better make up your minds. Otherwise I can’t guarantee to deliver your seed on time.

Speaker: Sam, you can put me down for soybeans.

Speaker: 75 bushels of corn.

Speaker: Fred, you’re making a mistake.

Speaker: Ben, when Doris and lumbago starts acting up, it’s a sure sign to plant corn.

Speaker: Well, when Emily gets her cranky spells, you better be out there planting soybeans.

Speaker: Well, Doris and lumbago’s been right more times than Emily’s cranky spells.

Speaker: Oh, I don’t agree with you.

Speaker: Well, now you remember what happened back in 48.

Speaker: There’s only one way to settle this. Boys, we’ve got to approach this planting problem scientifically. Just how bad is Doris’ lumbago?

Speaker: The worst she’s ever had. I have to push her out of bed every morning to get her to feed the pigs.

Speaker: How cranky is Emily, Ben?

Speaker: Well, she’s been yammering at me for two weeks now.

Speaker: Every day?

Speaker: No, it’s been more like every other day.

Fred: Fred, I’ll have to go along with Doris’ lumbago.

Speaker: Me too, Ben. Doris has ached up some of the best corn crops we’ve ever had in the valley.

Speaker: Well, I gotta admit, Emily ain’t been real soybean cranky. Better put me down for corn too.

Bob Metz: That almost sounds like how a lot of people vote in the voting booth, doesn’t it?

Paul McKeever: It certainly does.

Bob Metz: Welcome back to the show. If you’d like to join the conversation, it’s 519-661-3600. Some of the symptoms, people make all sorts of decisions not based on, shall we say, evidence. Okay? On rational evidence and on their feelings and on Doris’ lumbago.

Whatever, right? Isn’t that create a great frustration for someone trying to push reason and say, look, and especially in the scientific world, it’s almost hard to believe that here we are in the scientific world and there is actually less understanding of science and of the principles that make things actually go, if you would. Is that a trend because people are looking for it? Because it’s being taught in our schools. What’s your observation?

Paul McKeever: Well, my observation is that when people limit their beliefs to ones that they can, for which there’s actual physical evidence, they find that there are fewer outs. In other words, you can’t cheat Mother Nature and when the only thing you’re looking at is Mother Nature, as opposed to a supreme being who says, don’t worry, magically food will appear, magically you’ll have a house over your head, everything will be okay. And even if you live a bad life as long as you say you’re sorry at the end, you’ll live forever in bliss. We want to believe these things often as a matter of controlling stress. And so it’s intoxicating really to say, you don’t have to worry, everything’s not as it seems.

Bob Metz: Well, if it’s just to control stress, is it a bad thing then?

Paul McKeever: No, it’s not. If that’s all you’re doing with it? I mean, no, not at all. Not as a personal matter. I think, at least in terms of a legal, if you’re asking me from a legal perspective or from a governmental perspective, I think people should be free to do any number of things based on whatever beliefs they want to have. If you’re asking me morally or epistemologically or metaphysically, I think, yeah, there is a problem. But that’s more a question of guiding your own life than of government. Government, when beliefs about the lumbago.

When those things start getting into governance, that’s when you’re in trouble. And I see that already. I think we’ve all seen it with, for example, the belief that there’s this widely held belief that CO2 levels are correlated strongly with temperature. And that’s because there is a correlation, absolutely.

And they most, for the most part, people got that correlation out of that movie by a former vice president, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. But the thing is that he’s showing us a graph across hundreds of thousands of years, and it turns out that if you actually look at the smaller period of time, so you can actually see how the lines line up, the reverse holds true. In other words, it’s actually the case that temperature precedes the CO2 levels with which they are correlated by about 800 years. And that the real mechanism is inspired by the sun that causes heating of the oceans, which over a course of 800 years leads to the release of more CO2.

Which makes sense, because CO2 is the product of burning, actually, even in our bodies. When we burn our fuel and we exhale, we’re exhaling CO2.

Paul McKeever: Yeah, well, I won’t claim to be a scientist with specific detailed knowledge of that field. But I can say that it’s widely understood now. Anybody who’s seen, for example, The Great Global Warming Swindle, for example, will see a wide number of scientists explaining the data in detail, and explaining how, in fact, Al Gore’s, interestingly, he never says, when he shows this huge peak of CO2, he never says, and by the way, that means temperatures are going to spike up equally. You’ll notice in the movie, he never graphs the temperature, and that’s because he knows that the relationship is the reverse, that in fact, temperature causes the CO2, not CO2 causing the temperature. And so when we see that kind of dishonesty, and he said he’s…

Bob Metz: Well, that movie’s part and parcel full of it, because I picked on a number of inconsistencies in that movie.

Paul McKeever: Sure, and when people knowingly, and I’ll give them the benefit of saying that he just didn’t know, but I mean, he studied this stuff, he says, for many years, and how closely could he have looked at the data? I mean, my goodness, this is basic stuff, and he’s got the relationship in the reverse on the very data he’s talking about. So when I see that kind of irrationality, that’s no longer a matter of science. At that point, it’s a matter of politics, it’s a matter of wishful thinking, it’s a matter of, in fact, being dishonest in the sense that you’re telling people falsehoods about nature so that they’ll support you in a political cause, and that is the same kind of thing that any irrationality will do.

Bob Metz: Now, of course, that’s… I’m looking at that from the point of view of the leadership, in this case being Al Gore, what he wants followers to believe. But from the followers point of view, some of them become true believers. And even when confronted with evidence opposite of what would be knowledge or understanding, and it’s not always, I think, a matter of faith, it could be, as you said, consensus.

Paul McKeever: Sure.

Bob Metz: A lot of people just go with the crowd, so to speak. And how much reason is employed in that?

For example, other issues that I would quickly identify that might be driven by forces other than knowledge or understanding, let us say, of course, environmentalism is just brought up. And I think in that case, you see global warming as the symbol of their apocalypse. It’s almost like that’s a universal pattern to religious thinking, you have to have that apocalypse. Of course, there’s terrorism and so many religious wars around the world when you think, well, religions are supposed to be philosophies of peace, and it seems to be they’re more like philosophies of pieces.

And I just thought of that on the spot. And of course, we see things like pending electoral reform in Ontario, which is more based on a rule of consensus. Absolutely.

We can come back to any of these in a moment. We see what I think is almost a religion of universality in healthcare and education. For example, even this morning, I just heard John Tory insist that, yeah, he’s going to privatize private clinics, but not allow people to pay with cash or credit cards, which to me is like, wait a minute, that’s no change at all.

We’re still on the public system. Of course, there’s the religion of socialism from each according to his ability to each according to his need, which I understand is not the original phrase, but that’s how it has been interpreted today. That’s another thing about beliefs of that nature. Even they seldom bear any resemblance to the source and have evolved over time into what people want to believe. There’s faith-based education funding coming again, although we have already had it to some degree with Roman Catholic funding. And I got to tell you, even from my own point of view, having gone to both public and the Catholic school system, except for maybe three religion classes a week, there wasn’t much difference between the two. Not that I perceived in terms of what was being expressed. And of course, we still have in Canada, believe it or not, censorship both through blasphemy laws and I suppose, which would be direct, right? And there’s even an indirect censorship like being labeled a denier, for example, if you don’t believe in the religion of global warming. So I don’t know which of those are the biggest issues to you or which among them would require some further…

Paul McKeever: Well, yeah, I mean, I think the main point that you sort of draw out of that, and one thing I’d like to comment on, it’s sort of a shorthand to call them faiths or religions because that’s how we sort of think of them. Faith is belief in the absence of physical evidence. And so when someone believes anything in the absence of physical evidence, that does qualify as faith.

Bob Metz: I’ll challenge you on that momentarily, but go for it.

Paul McKeever: Sure, but that’s not the only way in which to come up with a decision that is non-rational or irrational. The other way to do it is to say, well, look, I’m not going to think, I’m just going to either listen to what some so-called authority tells me because he’s done the work and I don’t want to do the work and I’m just going to rely on him, which is the way that most government works. And even the IPCC report, that was the technique they used.

Look at these people are all experts in their field. And then the other route is just plain old consensus. So in other words, well, look, the herd’s going this way, there’s strength in numbers, there’s security in numbers.

I haven’t thought this through, so I’m just going to follow the crowd. How wrong can they be? And although it might work from time to time, but the problem is it’s a process that takes your mind out of the equation, your independent thought out of the equation. And as soon as you take independent thought out of the equation, you may be marching off the edge of a cliff. Whereas just simply looking at a map and reading the relief marks on the map might tell you that, oh, well, that’s the wrong way to march. So, as I see it, you have the category of rational thought, which is logic applied to observable physical evidence. And then you have the other kinds of decision making, which are the non-rational or, and this isn’t meant as an impolite term, but irrational forms, which usually are belief in the absence of evidence, which is faith or belief based on consensus.

Bob Metz: What do you think about the comment made in the very opening clip of the show where the female speaker says something to the effect that many early beliefs and superstitions have some basis in truth or sometimes we get a sense of something that’s real before we actually, and maybe even discover that it is so before we actually knew according to physical evidence, to give you a personal example.

Okay, when I started studying science and a bit of astronomy, I had no physical proof, for example, that planets revolved around other stars. But I knew implicitly from just understanding what I had in front of me that that had to be the case. And now, of course, my faith has proven to be an actuality. Is that something different from the kind of faith we talk about?

Paul McKeever: No, I think that qualifies. Keep in mind faith doesn’t necessarily imply religion.

It doesn’t imply God either. It just implies belief in the absence of physical evidence. But I think it was going to make another point that you got me off track. It was such an interesting example.

But I think that the fact that some beliefs end up being true does not mean that you should make decisions for your life on that basis. I mean, you can certainly ponder, maybe there’s life on another planet. Maybe there’s life on Saturn. Maybe there’s life on…

Maybe there are UFOs flying around. Maybe if I dig deep enough, I’ll find gold ore in my backyard. Those are all maybes and possibilities that someone would call possibilities. But rational conduct, rational decision making means that you treat everything as false, all propositions as false, until proven to be true with physical evidence analyzed with a strictly logical process of thought.

Bob Metz: Is that strictly rational or would that be more called scientific?

Paul McKeever: I don’t think there’s necessarily a difference there, although the scientific method implies certain procedures. But rational thought is certainly implied in scientific thought.

Bob Metz: Well, after this next break, we’ll come back and I’ll get into some of the specific definitions. I actually went to a dictionary and an encyclopedia dealing with issues or definitions of faith and reason and consensus. And we’ll discuss where we might agree and disagree on those issues. And we’ll be back right after this continuing break.

Clip (Green Acres – Superstitious Crop Planting):

Speaker: I want to order my seed.

Speaker: Mr. Douglas, I was just taking Fred’s and Ben’s order for seed. Now, how much corn can I put you down for?

Speaker: Corn?

Speaker: I’m planting wheat.

Speaker: Wheat?

Speaker: Yes?

Speaker: Your wife got any wheat bumps?

Speaker: What are wheat bumps?

Speaker: Oh, they’re a little knob some folks get on my head this time of year. It’s a good sign for planting wheat.

Speaker: Well, her bumps wouldn’t really count anyway. She’s a city girl.

Speaker: You might be bumping onions for all these years.

Speaker: My wife is not bumping anything.

Speaker: I told Mr. Douglas I didn’t even know what you’re talking about.

Speaker: No, no, I’m sorry. Now, about my seed.

Speaker: Mr. Douglas, take the advice of a man that’s been farming for 40 years. Don’t fly in the face of Doris’s lumbago.

Speaker: Your wife has lumbago? Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Speaker: Don’t knock it, it’s money in the bank.

Mr. Douglas, you see, the kind of weather that brings on Doris’s lumbago seems to be the best for growing corn.

Speaker: Oh.

Speaker: Emily gets cranky spells.

Speaker: For corn?

Speaker: Soybeans.

Speaker: Ain’t met anybody with swole ankles, have you?

Speaker: No.

Speaker: Well, carrots ain’t a very good crop around here anyway.

Mr. Douglas: Gentlemen, I know you’re all successful farmers, but there are better scientific methods of farming than basing your crops on aches and pains.

Speaker: What do you base yours on?

Mr. Douglas: The Department of Agriculture.

Speaker: Who?

Mr. Douglas: The United States Department of Agriculture.

Speaker: Didn’t know they had one.

Speaker: Course, in Washington.

Speaker: They tell you what to plant, huh?

Mr. Douglas: No, no, they don’t do that.

Speaker: What do they plant?

Mr. Douglas: Oh, they’re not planting anything.

Speaker: Ain’t got any faith in their own judgment, huh?

Mr. Douglas: Gentlemen, since the day the Department of Agriculture was founded, the farmer has access to the finest scientific brains in America. He’s no longer alone in his fields. He knows it, back there in Washington, there’s an army of agriculturists, agronomists, chemists, bacteriologists, meteorologists, peering into microscopes, heating up test tubes, releasing balloons, culling information, gathering data, sorting, broken shifting, with but one thought in mind, what crops are good for America? Now, microscopes are dark. Test tubes are cooled off and the balloons are all recovered. And the answer is wheat. Gentlemen, I am planting wheat.

Speaker: That sure convinces me.

Speaker: Me too.

Speaker: I think I’ll double my order of corn.

Bob Metz: Oh, it’s so true. It’s just so true. It’s really funny because so often when you look at books and publications about motivation and they tell you, reason is really not the motivating force. One of the things too that comes out even in those clips and what we’ve been discussing is I think a confusion of the word faith with confidence and trust and hope and I often when I hear people use the word faith, those are the three things they really mean and they seem to not be aware that faith is a means of acquiring knowledge. And this is what really stood out in my dictionary definitions, which I thought we should take the time to go over and see exactly what a dictionary is say about this.

By the way, if you’d like to join in on the conversation, it’s 519-661-3600. Now here’s my definition of faith from one of the dictionaries I looked at. I looked at a couple actually, so I’m not going to worry about the source, but there are of course more than a single definition to each of these and some of them are applicable within one context and others are applicable in another. For example, faith. Confidence in or dependence on a person, statement, or thing as trustworthy. Now there again, that’s an example of trust. I have faith in you that you would show up for the show today.

And I think that is trust. And of course there’s nothing irrational about that kind of faith. Now the second one is belief without need of certain proof.

Now that’s a little bit like what I was talking about earlier. I didn’t have certain proof that there were planets around other stars, but I kind of believed it. And now we know that that is true. I don’t have to believe it anymore. I now can know it, which is maybe a little different.

Of course there’s belief in God or in the scriptures or other religious writings, a system of religious belief, or anything given adherence or credence. Now I just want to contrast that. I looked up in my universal world reference encyclopedia, which goes a little more into depth than just a dictionary. And I found this very interesting because it maybe helps us clear up some of the issues. And it says that faith is that assent or credence, which we give to the declaration or promise of another on the authority of the person who makes it. The greater part of our knowledge, says the encyclopedia, is derived from the information of others. And depends upon the credence which we give to their testimony. Hence, to believe and to know are sometimes used indiscriminately. Faith is the means by which we obtain a knowledge of things which do not come under our own observation. Things not seen. And in this way, faith is distinguished from sight.

In other words, the direct first hand observation. Faith is also distinguished from reason. Insofar as it deals with matters that we cannot comprehend by our reason.

Now, that’s a challenging statement, is there such a matter. But the term faith is used in theology for the assent of the mind to the truth of what has been revealed in the Holy Scriptures. To have faith in a person is defined as accepting that person for what he claims to be and to stand for and act accordingly.

Now, those are some of the issues of faith. Now, a little bit different is the term superstition. And that’s defined as, one, a belief founded on irrational feelings, especially based on fear, which is an interesting thing, and marked by a trust in charms, omens, the supernatural, etc. Also, any rite or practice inspired by such belief or any unreasonable belief.

Now, it’s interesting. I have actually heard religious people arguing about superstition invading the sphere of religion, which they see as separate things. Would you agree that superstitions and religions equivalent, or are they two different things?

Paul McKeever: I think when a religious person says that superstition is invading their religion, I think what it means is that another religion is invading their religion. In other words, beliefs that are equally based on faith rather than on rational observation are trying to make their way into that religion. And the person who is more of a purist about the religion says, hey, look, we don’t tap our shoes three times with the bat before knocking a ball, or why are you introducing that into our religion? That’s superstition.

Bob Metz: I agree. That’s one application of it. But I have read, and I’m actually a fan of a couple of religious writers, even though I don’t share their religion, per se, but their view of religion and of faith is not like that. They actually have a very reasonable view of what their definition of God is. Everyone has a different definition of God, of course. So that, for example, one of my favorite writers, he believes that God is essentially, if you’re searching for God, you’re searching for truth. And of course, if God is real, whatever concept of God you have has to apply to reality, thus placing reality as the arbiter.

I don’t even know if that’s acceptable in some religions or some views of faith. But that’s certainly one. Now, of course, that’s not the only way by means by which people arrive at decisions and conclusions.

We were looking at a few of the others. Consensus, of course, is another one. And consensus seems pretty straightforward. A collective opinion, according to the dictionary, general agreement, which is a little different from consent, which I checked out, and that’s to give assent agree or acquiesce.

And it’s more of a voluntary yielding. Now, in contrast, of course, reason, okay, and this would be, to most people, the opposite of faith, is a motive or cause for an action, belief or thought, an explanation for or a defense of an action, belief, et cetera, like a justification. The faculty of thinking logically, good judgment, common sense, a normal state of mind. So would you agree with that definition to begin with?

Paul McKeever: Well, there’s a few things that, you asked at one point, just backing up a little bit, is there anything wrong with trust? Well, it can lead to problems. It’s not necessarily rational to trust everything. I mean, for example, don’t trust that I know about planting corn just because I have lots of letters after my name. People might say, well, Paul McKeever knows, he’s a smart guy. He’s got a bachelor of this and a master’s of that and a law degree. And well, we should trust him. He’s an authority we should rely on.

Bob Metz: Well, a lot of people think that way.

Paul McKeever: Oh, yes. And appeal to authority is one of the main ways that people stop others from using their rational faculty. Don’t think, just trust the letters after my name. And so that’s the one thing. That kind of trust, I would say, is not good. It’s not rational.

But trust that, for example, that your $10 bill will be accepted as payment at the corner store based on experience, and I don’t see any problem with that. The other thing is that there are these definitions, whether it was faith or consensus that said a way of obtaining knowledge. And I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. I would say, at least as a person who doesn’t use faith and consensus as a means of making decisions, I would say that knowledge is that which is the result of logical thought about that for which there’s actual physical evidence, but that belief is broader than that. So all knowledge is belief, but not all belief is knowledge. And so if you have come to a belief not based on any evidence, but based on faith or consensus or appeal to authority, that is belief, but it’s not knowledge. And to use the word knowledge in that context, I think, is technically incorrect, although as you said in one of these definitions, frequently used interchangeably.

I would say that it is dangerous to use it interchangeably. And again, because of this importance of doing things like maintaining a separation of, I would say broadly speaking, irrational forms of thought, irrational forms of decision making, and the function of the government. As soon as we start considering beliefs that aren’t based on reason to be knowledge, then government can start going around saying, well, it doesn’t matter, we’re basing our decisions on knowledge, and clearly they’re not.

Bob Metz: Don’t we run into a problem there when you’re talking about government because government by necessity in a democracy operates on some level of consensus. And if you want to get elected by a bunch of people that say believe that the earth is flat, and you go around telling them that the earth is round, and they don’t want to know that, you’re not going to get in, even though you might be on the side of reality and reason, and they’re on the side of faith and irrationality. Is that part of the problem we’re facing in politics today? For example, why John Tory would promise faith-based funding is because he’s dealing with an electorate that wants it.

Paul McKeever: I think that there is an overestimation of the number of people that make their decisions on the basis of faith or consensus or appeal to authority. I think there are a great number of people out there who are rational in the sense that they only use reason if they cannot at all maintain it in a disciplined way.

They try at all times to be rational. And I think that they are the silent, if not a majority, there’s certainly a significant minority that no one believes exists. But I think the popularity of books about atheism, for example, most of the time I would say that if you’re a person who requires physical evidence to believe anything, you’re a person who doesn’t believe in a supreme being that’s supernatural in nature. So those atheistic books, the popularity of them suggests to me that there’s a large population of people who aren’t particularly big on making decisions based on faith, who aren’t interested in religion or God, and who want a government that sticks to the business of governing Earth in accordance with the facts of nature rather than in accordance with someone’s asserted belief founded on faith or consensus or unsubstantiated appeals to authority.

Bob Metz: Now, I recall…

Paul McKeever: I should just add, this religion thing, it’s rounding out to be probably the biggest issue, the religious schools issue in Ontario. It’s probably the biggest issue facing the voter in October.

I think this is not just a small mistake, but it could be a horrendous mistake. John Tory were to be elected, I think we would find a great amount of religious indoctrination resulting from the fact that he’s suddenly going to be putting taxpayer dollars into religious schools. And at the same time that he’ll be doing that, he’ll be afraid of discriminating against any one religion. So we could actually be financing schools that teach some pretty antisocial stuff, including some of the schools we see operating in Europe and the Middle East.

So I don’t… I think that’s a horrific suggestion to fund schools, especially religious schools with taxes, but I don’t take the opposite opinion, which is that, well, the solution to that is for the government just to run all the schools and to make none of them religious. No, the solution is to let parents put their own money into the school they want to put them into, and at least that way, people who want to teach their children to live in accordance with the facts of reality as dictated by science and rationality. Those people won’t have to pay for a system that’s teaching irrationality or that’s teaching religion or that’s teaching tolerance of irrationality, that kind of thing. I really think the solution here is to take education out of the tax realm and put the power back in parents’ hands. Sorry, I got a little off there.

Bob Metz: No, that’s on target, but even there, even if you put it back in the parents’ hands and say most of them are religious, you’re still going to get that religious schooling, but out of the purview of government, I’ve heard some people comment that maybe Tory’s coming in through the back door because this funding doesn’t come without strings attached.

Paul McKeever: Of course, and that’s the other thing. I mean, imagine this situation. We have a video online on the Freedom Party website.

Paul McKeever: Yeah, number 13.

Bob Metz: Creating a few waves on YouTube, right?

Paul McKeever: Well, we were pretty blunt in it. And the fact of the matter is, John Tory is going to have to deal with, if he were successful, and frankly, I think his campaign is going down the chute, I don’t think he has any chance in hell of, excuse my language, of forming a government this time round, but were he successful and were this policy put in place? Consider what would happen the first day he extended funding, taxpayer money, to a school that it was later discovered, through information act requests or through other investigation. The press discovered that in that school, they were teaching that gays are evil or that abortion is so evil that if a person has one, they should be stoned or murdered. Or that, if word got out that a school was teaching that kind of stuff,

John Tory would immediately be hauled up on the carpet and they’d say, hey, you’re funding this stuff. And at that point, there would be probably a royal commission and all kinds of backpedaling and then there would be strict new regulations that tell religious schools that, guess what, now everything you have to, everything you teach has to get government approval and that’s going to mean largely a watering down or even an elimination of many key religious beliefs.

Bob Metz: Wouldn’t some people regard that as good, as a good thing to do? Isn’t that a way to get back at the religions to get them all more equivalent?

Paul McKeever: Well, just as there’s a separation between church and state, that goes two ways. The role of government is not to force people not to have faith. It’s not to force people not to base their decisions on consensus. It’s not to force people not to rely on authority.

If you want to make your decisions on the basis of faith or consensus. Those are all personal matters. Those are personal matters and the state has no right to tell you, no, you must be rational. No, you must not tell people that faith is a way of obtaining knowledge or belief.

You must, that’s not the role of government. People have a right to be as faith-based or as consensus-based or just as irrational as they want to be, as long as they’re not violating anyone else’s life, liberty or property.

Bob Metz: When I hear the term faith-based funding, just as it is, it’s almost a bit contradictory. Because if one defines faith as belief without certain need of proof of any sort, what is being taught in terms of education, if you don’t need any reference to reality, you can teach anything. You can teach that this guy is polka-dotted or something like that and get government money for that. Or it doesn’t have to be a religious faith as such.

I don’t know if that’s actually would be in any sort of legislation. It could be faith-based on something completely non-religious, wouldn’t it? Isn’t it odd though that they didn’t say anything about science schools or schools based on reason?

They just pick out the faith.

Paul McKeever: It’s astonishing to me and it’s absolutely revolting to me actually that the one type of school that John Tory would not extend funding to are those that teach that rationality is the way to obtain knowledge and only rationality is. He’s not saying he’s going to fund secular private schools.

He’s saying he will not do so. And so, by the way, by bringing schools under the umbrella of public funding, the other possibility here is, you were talking about how this may backfire and in fact religious schools will cease to be religious because of government regulation. They’ll gain power through the power of the purse. This could happen to the Catholic School Board too. And if you look at a lot of what’s going on in the newspapers right now, there are a lot of people saying, those Catholics have it special.

Why do they have it so special? Nobody should have funding for religious education. This may just be a revisitation of the old Progressive Conservative Party policy of saying, you know what, no funding for Catholic schools and that everybody has to be taught under a public system. So, for those Catholics in particular who think this is going to be a good policy, whoa, I think that that’s the chief religion that’s at risk here. And not that I’m defending funding of religious schools.

I’m not. I think they have to be personally funded, funded by the parent and that the money we currently take out of parents’ hands through property tax and stuff should no longer be taken out of their hands.

Bob Metz: Now, that brings up another issue though. I know a lot of people who might not even be religious or faith-based, but often make arrangements to send their kids to say the Catholic School instead of to the broader public school system because whether they believe in it or not, they find that their kids come out of the school with a better set of standards. Well, I… So, there’s another dimension to perhaps not faith, but the religious belief.

Paul McKeever: I think the reality, I mean, I do that. My children attend a taxpayer-funded Catholic school. I’m not Catholic. I was born Catholic, but right now I have no belief in anything other than that which I can see hear taste smell and makes sense that it would be my own logical mind.

Hopefully it’s logical. But I think what’s happened in the public system is that by trying to accommodate everybody, all of these various moral codes that are implicit in the various religions, they’ve effectively said we’re not… Or non-religions.

Bob Metz: Right.

Paul McKeever: Or non-religions. What they’ve effectively said is that we are going to say that everything’s acceptable. We will not say anything’s lesser than anything else.

Everything’s equally good. In other words, they’re eliminating moral judgment from the curriculum.

Bob Metz: Which is complete moral equivalence.

Paul McKeever: Complete moral subjectivism. So now anybody who cannot afford to send their child to a privately funded school has a choice. You either go to the moral relativist school, which is the public school, or you go to a school that at least believes that an absolute code of morality is possible and legitimate. And that would be the separate school system. Now I don’t found my own absolute code of morality on religion. I found it on science.

But I do believe that there’s an absolute right and an absolute wrong and that it’s easily observable in the world based on what we know about the nature of the needs of a human being. A human being needs to think in order to live. If he sits on a beach and prays for food, it won’t come. He has to go look, hunt, get the food through his own efforts, his own rational efforts.

If he makes mistakes, he may err and if he errs, he may not eat and he may die. So survival, human survival dictates that you have to have a rational way of thinking. And to my mind, that dictates a set of conditions. That is, that it’s right to live, that it’s right to pursue your own life and happiness. And that the way you pursue that happiness is through rational conduct because praying for food won’t work. And so the only way to be fed and to be happy is to apply your rational faculty. And that tells me that nature demands itself, specifies for man because of man’s nature, a particular moral code and that if you violate that moral code, if you say, it doesn’t matter whether I think or whether I hunt, if I just sit here on the beach, food will magically arrive. Nature will punish you, you will die.

Bob Metz: It’s an interesting, using the word morality in a way I don’t usually hear other people use it. I almost hear… I was up at Upper Canada College, is that the name of it in Toronto? I was up there giving several talks to them at one time and one of them was about, actually we’re talking about foreign aid and morality and helping others. And it’s amazing how the kids are, their idea of morality doesn’t extend beyond what you do for others. It’s all about altruism.

It’s the idea of what you just expressed, that a moral code is about surviving in this earth, that you would need one even if you were a man alone on an island.

Paul McKeever: And even if you believed in a supernatural being, you’d still find yourself having to get off your bum, find ways to catch or harvest food. There’s no getting away from the fact that you need to act rationally to survive, even if you pepper up your thoughts with beliefs that are based on faith or consensus.

Bob Metz: That’s why so many philosophers equate rationality with morality, basically, that in order to be moral, that is rationality to the extent that someone’s irrational, that’s immorality because you’re acting irrationally. Of course, assuming that you’re capable in other ways, we’re not talking about people.

Paul McKeever: In particular, I think author, philosopher, Ayn Rand equated rational conduct with virtuous conduct. She equated the good with that which allowed you to live, and the evil was that which caused you to die or suffer. I think that is actually the code that underlies a lot of commandments.

If you think about commandments, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill. Those conclusions, although based on faith, are similar to the ones that a rational person living this life on this earth would have come to anyway. I tend to wonder whether those who crafted our religions were actually strictly rational, scientific types, who thought that, not everybody has the brains I do, or not everybody’s willing to think. I need to boil this down to a few simple rules so that we can all just live together and out comes dogma.

Bob Metz: We’re almost running out of time here, so it’s kind of difficult to get into this right now, but you just hit upon a point I would have, maybe I should have started the show with this, but we do live in this supposedly Judeo-Christian society, right? And again, based upon some of the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. Things that I agree with, okay, they’re very rational. Yet our governments do exactly that. They rob Peter to pay Paul. They have…

Paul McKeever: And they do it precisely because they’re saying that, who am I to judge? That there’s nothing right, nothing wrong. It’s all based on perspective and subjective situations. And they’re basically saying, I’m not necessarily wrong. You can’t judge me to be evil. It’s different. I’m wearing a crown on my head and you’re not.

Bob Metz: It’s almost too as if the government’s saying, thou shalt steal, as long as you’re doing good for other people, which is what actually we had a clip last week by Walter Williams that illustrated that very fact. Paul, I can’t believe it. Our time is running right out. We’re already out of time.

I haven’t even got to half of the subjects. We’ll have to have you back again sometime in the near future.

Paul McKeever: Well, it’s been a pleasure.

Bob Metz: And of course, there’s an election coming up, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing from you.

And again, I guess that’s it for today, folks. We’re going to be wrapping her up.

Clip Speaker: Is today the 13th?

Bob Metz: Hey, take it easy, Ira. We’re not in that big hurry. Okay. We’ll see you next week, folks. Until then… Be right, think right, stay right, do right, and act right. And vote right.