Faith, reason, religion

So I'm sitting in on Pat Cronin's "Artistic Experience" class (which, btw, is pretty awesome.) It's been really great to just sit in the back and experience the course--to hear the students, to see their reactions, and to just soak it all in. But I also feel a bit like a free-rider, since my contributions are minimal to non-existent. Rather than take up class time with my two cents, I'm going to post here.

The discussion on Tuesday centered on faith, reason, and religion. While I have a lot to say about such things (and do say a lot about them when I teach Philosophy as Conversation), I also feel like a bit of an outsider to the conversations. I'm not a religious person. This is not a matter of losing my faith at some point. I never had any faith to lose. My parents were nominally Christian, but we didn't even make it to church on Easter. So despite growing up in Alabama, I managed to have a childhood in which religion was almost entirely absent.

At some point, religion became a kind of fun intellectual exercise. I can argue with walls all day long, though I discovered in high school that arguing with Christians was more fun. In hindsight, it was all largely a game for me. I was interested in the arguments and the way they worked, and not so much in what possibly hung in the balance. I can't say I'm proud of that, though it was mildly satisfying to stump the Young Life leaders who always seemed to make their way to my lunch table. All good people, though, and I probably should've been more respectful.

In college, the intellectual game continued as I majored in philosophy. The department was full of pretty typical atheist philosophers. Religious belief wasn't scorned, necessarily, but atheism seemed to have an air of superiority. My more immature self latched onto this.

Then in graduate school I was in a less typical philosophy department in which a lot of the philosophers were Christian. It turns out there was a whole world of Christian philosophers that I had largely ignored. And they are good philosophers. They're smart, serious, rigorous, etc. That's when I realized this was all much more complicated than I had ever appreciated. That's where I am now. It's complicated. In good Socratic fashion, I embrace my ignorance. I know that I don't know (though I'm still inclined to think that in the absence of evidence, atheism is the more reasonable position, so despite the agnostic undertones, I'd likely identify as atheist, maybe a doubting atheist.)

With needless throat-clearing out of the way, I was interested in some of the discussion about faith in particular. Pat seems to be drawn to Kierkegaard's view of faith--that faith involves embracing the absurd. 3 is 1, 1 is 3. That's absurd. Believe it anyway. That's faith. Meh. Perhaps this is just my brain, but I'm not sure it's even possible to do that. And even if it's possible, I can't see how it's advisable. So if faith boils down to that, I'm probably never going to have it.

In part, I doubt that the seeming absurdities are as absurd as they seem. Trenton Merricks, for example, argues that split-brain cases give us a model of how to view two spheres of consciousness in one body. Maybe, as he suggests, we can extrapolate from that and make sense of the Godhead. I don't know, but he's not crazy (well, not in that particular way.) And so on for other religious beliefs. There are at least plausible sounding arguments for a lot of things that, on their face, look absurd.

So maybe we can beat down the absurdity some. Still I suspect that reason isn't going to get us all the way there (though I have moments where I think Plantinga's ontological argument might get us there.) If reason won't get us there, what then? I have a hard time believing things that I don't have good reason to believe. Actually, I probably do this all the time, but I have hard time thinking I should do this. When I find unsupported beliefs, I think I ought to find support or withhold assent. That's what reason seems to demand. And faith seems to suggest we do the opposite. Believe anyway, even if reason falls short of getting you to that conclusion. I'm not sure I like that.

But what if faith isn't a species of belief? What if you could have faith without believing in God? I kind of like the sound of that. This is what Howard-Snyder argues for here. I think about my attitude towards Auburn football, which is probably the closest thing to religion I have (I'm pretty sure it would take at least seven years of therapy for me to get past my indoctrination.) I am going to the LSU game this weekend. I don't believe Auburn will win. I don't have any good reason to believe that. They've looked terrible for the better part of two years, and for two-thirds of the games so far this season. So I don't believe they'll win. By the time the game rolls around, though, I'm pretty sure I'll have faith that they'll win. I'll be excited walking into the stadium. I'll cheer. I'll be hopeful. I'll act as if Auburn has a real chance to win, even though I don't believe they do. I think this might qualify as faith, and that's a faith I can get on board with. It's a faith that allows doubt, and allows us to withhold belief when reason doesn't get us there. I don't know if that works, and I haven't thought about the arguments in any great detail, but I like the idea. It seems to me an improvement over faith being tied to believing things you don't have reason to believe.

In an ideal world, I would somehow tie all of this to the plays we read. Alas, this world is not ideal. I do think these things are important and worth thinking about. I no longer feel (or I try not to feel) any smugness about my lack of belief. Religious belief and faith are clearly important aspects of the human experience, and they are ones I have largely missed out on. In my more humble moments, I regret that. I think doubt is also part of being human. And struggling with those two things are as well. At the moment, I think I have faith that we can somehow figure all of this out. I at least act as if that is true.    

Podcasting for poor, impatient beginners

When I had the idea to do a podcast for Collo, it seemed like it would be simple enough to execute. It turns out that podcasting is more complicated than I thought, and the advice that is out there is not always helpful. I'm not sure if this will be any more helpful, but here is a rundown of how I produced the first Collo podcast.

***Disclaimer***
If you download soundboard shows of your favorite artists in lossless formats, or only listen to music on 180 gram vinyl, this information is not for you.

Equipment

I thought I had struck gold with the equipment. The Honors College has two nice Shure XLR mics and a FireStudio audio interface. By all accounts, this should be fairly decent equipment with which to start a podcast. This first take with this equipment was, um, bad. Because the interface required a firewire connection, I was limited in where I could record. I think this was the biggest problem. The room was far less than ideal. It was open, had hardwood floors, and an angled ceiling. The mics just didn't generate good quality on the voices.

On take two, I used a Logitech video conferencing webcam. Most advice out there says to stay away from USB mics. In my case, this mic produced a much better sound than the original setup, and I was able to record multiple people with one mic. So this gets high marks for simplicity. The sound is not particularly good, but it is serviceable. It really was just plug and record.

I also had access to a a Blue Snowball Mic. I would say this produced the best sound of the mics and setups I tried. It is also USB and really easy to use. If you're doing a one-person podcast, I'd recommend this. It's ambient setting does not do a good job of picking up multiple voices.

My takeaway is that recording a podcast with multiple hosts or guests makes things more complicated. The original setup with two mics and audio interface seems like it should be the best, but other factors made this more complicated and, at least right now, not viable. The Logitech mic ended up being the easiest way to get decent sound with multiple people.

Software

On take one, I used Adobe Audition. In theory this should be a step up from free software that is out there. In reality, it was not. I thought the interface was unintuitive and it has a lot more bells and whistles than I needed. On take two, I used the free recording software Audacity. I don't have any complaints. It was easy to use and had all the tools I needed. And it's free.

Post Production

The Logitech mic required more post-production tweaking. The main problem was the different volume of the two voices. I mainly used the compressor effect to even this out. The results were pretty good. I used the normalization effect to eliminate clipping. Again, the results were pretty good. I also used audacity to create the intro, which is a combination of effects and creative commons licensed music. Overall, Audacity was straightforward, intuitive, and did what I needed it to do.

Overall

For the cost of a decent USB mic, you can produce a non-terrible sounding (IYAM) podcast. This is not up to the standards of the professionals, but you also don't need a course in audio engineering to produce it, and you don't have to invest a small fortune to make it happen. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to record multiple voices into Audacity. My simple solution was the Logitech mic. In more ideal conditions, I think the Shure mics with the audio interface would be the way to go. In less ideal conditions, the Logitech produced better sound.

Here is the first episode, so you can judge for yourself on the overall sound quality.