What I believe

Two surprisingly unpalatable remarks in the space of a single evening set off the train of thought which eventually prompted me to write this rather pretentious piece.

The first remark was from a friend of mine, a religious chap with whom I’d previously had several animated discussions about philosophical theology. His remark was: “Toby, we’ll make a theist of you yet”.

The second remark was from another friend whose religious outlook might be not unfairly described as ‘waffly agnostic’. Having read some of my earlier writing and sat patiently through several antisocial restaurant debates about religion, his observation was: “You’re very staunch in your opinions”.

Now, both these remarks were from people whose views I respected, and whose previous disagreements with my own views had sometimes changed my mind (not as often as either of them might have liked, sadly, but isn’t that always the way?). Both remarks surprised me because they suggested that some of those people who knew my thinking best regarded it quite differently from how I regarded it. The first remark suggested that my religious views weren’t quite as settled as I thought. I’m not sure whether my friend was joking or half-joking (or just being rather optimistic), but he clearly seemed to have more faith in the possibility of my conversion than I did. And the second remark suggested exactly the opposite, of course – that the idea of Toby changing his mind was implausible, regardless of the arguments put his way. As someone who’s given the whole question quite a lot of thought, I didn’t find either of those observations particularly palatable.

So this article is the result of the train of thought. I simply want to explain as best I can what I believe about God and to suggest why. I have no intention of discussing the actual philosophical arguments for and against God in this paper; rather, I want to describe my attitude towards those arguments and how they bear on my beliefs. By the end, hopefully, I’ll have not so much an antidote to my friends’ unpalatable remarks but a kind of sweetener – whether I’m a staunch atheist or an imminent convert, at least there’s some justification, right or wrong, to back up my position.

More specifically, I want to reassure myself (if nobody else) that my opinions may be firm, but not without reason; and equally, despite that firmness, I’m quite open to being corrected, even radically if necessary. My basic message to both my friends will be this: although I do firmly believe that my position is justified, please don’t give up on me.

I’m not religious, but there’s a sense in which I’d like to be.

I don’t believe in God, but I often wonder why not. I seem to have all the right ingredients: a church-oriented upbringing, many theistic friends, a generally reflective outlook, and a genuine affection for all things religious. I’ve no problem with the usual things that are blamed these days for causing spiritual people to drift away from the Church; in fact, I quite like many of them. Of the various elements of religious faith, the only part I seem to have a problem with is actually accepting the propositions that Christianity requires believers to accept.

I can also honestly say that I’d quite like to believe. Not only am I interested, but also (like Pascal) I have nothing to lose and plenty to gain. That might seem like a mercenary approach, but from the standpoint of someone who doesn’t yet believe, I can’t see how any other approach is possible. It might be argued that one should come to faith through a desire for healing or repentance or a desire to be close to God, but these are self-interested reasons too; and anyway, of course, it’s impossible for someone who doesn’t already believe to see it that way. From my perspective as an unbeliever, it would be inconsistent for me to say, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I want to believe so that I can be close to Him’.

So, when I say ‘I’d quite like to believe in God’, I just mean ‘I’d be pleased if something happened to change my existing beliefs such that the existence of God became something I could accept’. This is different from saying ‘I’d like to believe in God because I think His existence is true’, which is absurd.

Also, saying that I’d like to believe is not the same as saying that I’m going to do my best to convert myself. Each of us should (and, indeed, can) only accept beliefs that we think are true, and therefore we shouldn’t make efforts to convince ourselves of beliefs that we already think are false. This principle is so obvious as to be almost analytic, and it’s based on a simple pragmatic fact: holding false beliefs is dangerous because it can lead to ill-advised actions.

That’s why it’s consistent for me to say, on the one hand, I would like to be converted, but on the other hand, I’m not going to go all-out to get converted. (I’ll have more to say about conversion and the desire to be converted later.)

I also think that we all should keep open minds. By this, I mean simply that we should be conscious that people are fallible, and even people’s most honestly and securely held beliefs can sometimes turn out to be false. It’s not inconsistent to hold a belief strongly – such as my belief that God doesn’t exist, or a theist’s belief that He does – while admitting the possibility that the belief may just be wrong, and being willing to consider potential reasons against one’s belief. (Again, I’ll have more to say about open-mindedness later.)

I’m either an agnostic or an atheist, depending how the terms are being used.

Am I an agnostic or an atheist? These two umbrella terms range over a large number of possibilities, and it doesn’t help that they’ve been used variously – almost interchangeably – by different people at different times. There are atheists who are certain that God doesn’t exist, and atheists who would tentatively reject belief on the basis of reasons against it. There are agnostics who think there are no reasons to believe either way, agnostics who think we can never know, agnostics who incline one way or the other but not strongly enough to plant themselves firmly in either camp, and agnostics who just can’t decide. (And then, of course, there are people who will never give the question a second thought. I envy them.)

I believe that there’s no God, but I don’t claim to know that. This is stronger than absolute neutrality, because I think there are some good reasons not to believe in God, and I know of no good reasons in His favour. But it’s weaker than the strongest possible atheism, because I don’t know of any absolutely decisive reasons against Him either.2 In this respect, I agree with Thomas Huxley, who identified “open-minded skepticism as the only rational position because, truly, one cannot know” . Huxley called that brand of skepticism ‘agnosticism’, which is a bit different from how the word’s currently used, but Huxley invented it so perhaps he ought to have some say. Under his definition, I’m an agnostic, because I wouldn’t claim to “know” either way.3

I want to labour this point slightly, just for emphasis. Agnosticism in Huxley’s sense means “open-minded skepticism” . That is, if you ask a Huxleyan agnostic, ‘Do you believe that God exists?’, the response will be, ‘No, but I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong’ – which is exactly the sentiment that Huxley expressed in explicit detail, and exactly my own sentiment.

The term ‘agnostic’ has more recently been used differently, to mean someone whose response would instead be, ‘I don’t know – I’ve not formed an opinion’. I’m not an agnostic in this more modern sense, since I have formed an opinion. In the modern sense, I suppose I’m an atheist.

So, depending on your terminology, I’m either a Huxleyan agnostic or a ‘soft’ atheist. I add ‘soft’ to distinguish my beliefs from the more decisive sort of atheism which says that there’s definitely no God, end of story. Yes, I do believe that God doesn’t exist, but with the following qualifications: (1) I don’t think His existence is thoroughly impossible; (2) I think there are good reasons not to believe in Him, but none of them seem to me decisive as yet; and (3) I can see no adequately good reasons in His favour yet.

Skepticism is defensible, even with no evidence either way.

Some people have argued that my kind of Huxleyan agnosticism (soft atheism) is indefensible. If there’s no evidence either way, the argument goes, I ought to be neutral, not skeptical.

Admittedly, there’s an aphoristic ring to the phrase, ‘Believe if there are reasons in favour, disbelieve if there are reasons against, and stay neutral if there are no reasons either way’. But this is just plain wrong. When it comes to believing or disbelieving in the existence of things, that would be a crazy principle, one which nobody would ever dream of using.

This point has been made again and again, by both theists and non-theists, but people do still sometimes get lured by the misplaced aphorism. Traditionally, the mistake has been shown up with various analogies, usually involving tooth fairies or Santa Claus (‘So do you believe in Father Christmas? No? Then why should you believe in God?’). Understandably, this tends to put religious people on the defensive somewhat, since nobody likes their deepest and most securely held beliefs to be equated with trivial elements of folk fiction.

Nevertheless, the underlying point is a valid one. If there’s no reason to believe that something exists, the correct response isn’t neutrality, it’s skepticism (soft atheism, or Huxleyan agnosticism). Therefore, if it turns out that there are no good reasons to believe in God, then we should disbelieve, not withhold judgement.

Consider the theory that aeroplanes can fly because they are borne through the air by plane pixies, a particular species of winged magical creature. Plane pixies, the theory goes, are invisible and undetectable, but very strong: it only takes four of them to lift the average-sized plane, and eight can manage a fully-loaded jumbo jet. As for the traditional scientific understanding of how planes fly, take your pick – you can either believe that the science is wrong, or that it’s accurate as far as it goes but nevertheless doesn’t provide a full explanation of how planes fly.

Now, I’m aware of no good reasons in favour of the theory that plane pixies exist, but also no good reasons against that theory. So should I believe, disbelieve or stay neutral?

Before the theist’s hackles start to rise, I’ve got to emphasise that, like the equivalent tooth fairy or Santa Claus analogies, this story about plane pixies isn’t meant to suggest that belief in God is equivalent to belief in some ridiculous fantasy creature invented on the spur of the moment.4 The only point of the analogy is to invent a situation where there is (unambiguously) no reason to either believe or disbelieve in a particular entity, and then show that in that situation nobody would dream of remaining neutral – everybody would be highly skeptical.5

The moral to be drawn is not that we’ve got no more reason to believe in God than we have to believe in plane pixies (or tooth fairies, or Santa Claus). The moral is just that, if someone is aware of no good reasons either way, then they should be skeptical, not neutral. If you’re not convinced, take a moment to reflect. Denying this simple principle would open the floodgates to an infinity of absolute drivel – plane pixies, bicycle gremlins, balloon imps, monsters under the bed, skeletons in the closet… you name it.

Now, when it comes to the different question of open-mindedness, I freely admit that there’s a key difference between deciding whether to believe in God and deciding whether to believe in plane pixies and the like. I’m aware of absolutely no reason why I should be open-minded about plane pixies – after all, they’re silly and I just made them up. But I can think of two very good reasons why I should be open-minded about God: (1) many intelligent and reflective people believe that He exists, and I might be wrong; and (2) the question is of very great practical importance. So the sensible position for me is open-minded skepticism (Huxleyan agnosticism, soft atheism).6

Nobody is infallible about anything.

There’s a world of difference between being sure of something and being right about it. The hardened atheist is sure that God doesn’t exist; the hardened theist is sure that He does. No matter how strongly they believe in the rightness of their reasons, neither side can claim that their beliefs are completely beyond dispute. Apart from anything else, if they both claim infallibility, at least one of them must be mistaken.

Surety arises from judgement based on good reasons, whether those reasons come from experience, revelation, testimony, logical argument, physical evidence or whatever. It’s fine to believe that you’re right, and to be as sure about your rightness as your reasons justify. What you can never do – what none of us can ever do – is claim infallibility, because surety is not a guarantee of correctness.

Sometimes, theists – often the more evangelical types – say that they ‘just know’ that God exists, that a given experience is genuinely of God, that a given testimony is true, or whatever. If they mean by this simply that they’re very sure, then this is defensible as far as the reasons justify it. But if they mean to suggest that their belief is literally incorrigible, then this must be rejected. Nobody would tolerate such an arrogant attitude from anybody on any other subject. You can’t ever absolutely know that you’re right about anything, full stop. To claim otherwise is unjustifiable, arrogant and false.

Contra Keith Ward, this is most emphatically not to say that theists must “continually seek to test their faith until it collapses”. Of course a theist is perfectly entitled to be free from doubt if he believes that his reasons are strong enough. The only thing he must not do is deny the possibility that he might be mistaken.

The success of a rational argument would convince me of God’s existence.

This isn’t the place to discuss philosophical arguments for God’s existence in any detail. For now, let me just say that I’m not aware of any successful rational arguments for belief in God, but if I were, I’d accept their conclusion and convert to theism; specifically, to whichever particular religion seemed to me most justified.

Of course, it would be inconsistent of me to say anything else. We must all accept the conclusions of valid arguments with true premises. Of the traditional reason-based arguments that I've studied, the only one that seems to have any serious mileage in it is the neo-Paley ‘fine-tuning’ argument, which survives many common and apparently obvious objections but also has a number of less obvious weaknesses. Ultimately, I think it fails for a couple of reasons, but primarily because the conclusion contradicts a premise.

Is my ‘rational argument’ requirement too stringent? I don’t think it is. Firstly, religious faith is rational (as I’ve argued elsewhere) and experience is a kind of reason, so every religious person already has a rational argument, be it valid or flawed, underpinning their faith. If that argument were to be undermined, faith would evaporate. So I’m only asking for the same level of support that theists already have – that’s not too much to ask, is it?

Secondly, it would be disingenuous, not to mention very unwise, to demand a lower level of rational support for something as vastly important as religious beliefs than that which we routinely demand for even the most mundane scientific claims. This is an important question – perhaps the most important there is – and it requires very careful weighing. Knowing my own fallibility, I’d hate to put all my spiritual eggs in a single untested and suspiciously frail epistemological basket.

Afterthought I: Conversion and Pascal’s wager

I said that nobody can just decide to believe something; people can only believe things that they think are true.

But Blaise Pascal pointed out that it is possible to take deliberate steps to bring yourself to believe something to be true which you currently believe to be false, motivated by self-interest. Pascal’s idea was that, if we can find no rational grounds for deciding whether or not to believe in God – if, for instance, we find that the evidence for and against roughly balances – then we should believe.

The basis for this decision is a simple matter of self-interest. If God exists, the reward for believers will be great (eternal life) at minimal cost (an earthly life of devout worship) and the punishment for unbelievers will also be great (eternal damnation). If God doesn’t exist, the reward for unbelievers will be small (a slightly more liberal earthly life), and the reward for believers will be zero.

In summary:

	If God exists	If God doesn't exist
If you believe	BIG heavenly reward; SMALL earthly loss	NO heavenly reward; SMALL earthly loss
If you don't believe	SMALL earthly reward; BIG heavenly loss	SMALL earthly reward; NO heavenly loss

So, if you’re an unbeliever who wants to acquire a belief in God because you think that belief will benefit you, you can try any or all of the following: go to church; spend time in the company of educated evangelical believers; pray; meditate; discuss theology; read the Bible. At first, this will obviously just be ‘going through the motions’, an act that’s not underpinned by any genuine belief. But, after a while, you may come to believe in the world you’ve become immersed in – either gradually and subconsciously, or at one specific moment for a specific reason. If this happens, you’ve then been converted, and your beliefs have changed.

I’ll come onto whether Pascal was right or wrong in a moment. Before I do, there’s an important point about this process which I want to bring out. It’s this: Someone who goes down Pascal’s route must reject the logic which set him off down that route in the first place before he can actually be converted!

Remember that the reason for wanting to believe in God was that belief in God would probably bring benefits, and the method identified for bringing about the desired beliefs was to try and inculcate those beliefs in oneself through exposure to the kinds of circumstances which tend to generate those beliefs. By definition, the subject started with no belief that God really existed, or else conversion would be unnecessary. And that implies that the subject started with a belief that there was probably no adequate reason to accept God’s existence; for if he believed that there probably was an adequate reason to accept God’s existence, that would be equivalent to belief in God already, so, again, conversion would be unnecessary.

This means that Pascal’s route is a kind of deliberate, self-interested self-deception. As an unbeliever, I make a conscious decision to try and trick my future self into accepting beliefs which (I presently believe) there are probably no adequate reasons to accept. I want those beliefs to be generated not by rational considerations (because there are none, or so I presently believe) but instead by causal processes capable of generating useful beliefs independently of their truth. But, somewhere along the way, I must abandon that argument. I must cease to believe that I’m being cajoled by my past self into accepting useful beliefs that are rationally indefensible, and I must start to believe that there really are good reasons for me to accept the beliefs. Consciously or unconsciously, I must change my perspective, from ‘These beliefs are useful so I want to accept them, regardless of whether they’re true’ to ‘These beliefs are true so I accept them, regardless of whether they’re useful’.

After I’ve been converted, I’ll probably realise that my perspective has changed since I was an unbeliever, because I’ll remember that my original intention was to trick myself. But, if I do remember this, my viewpoint must now be something like this: ‘Yes, I remember that, in my unbelieving days, I intended to trick myself into accepting what I then thought were false beliefs because I thought that it would bring me benefits if I accepted them. But I see now that I was mistaken. My experiences since then have led me to realise that those beliefs are actually true, and I now have good reasons to accept them, regardless of whether this brings me benefits. In my misguided attempt to convince myself that these beliefs are true, I’ve come to see that they really are true’.

What’s interesting about this case is that the unbeliever who’s preparing to undertake Pascal’s process of conversion may well anticipate his future perspective change and look forward to it! While still an unbeliever, I might have said: ‘I realise that, if my attempts to trick myself into accepting false beliefs pay off, I will look back and think that those attempts were misguided. I expect that my future experiences will lead me to think that the false beliefs are actually true, and that I have acquired them by a rationally acceptable route – but this will be the result of my own successful self-deception.'

In other words, the attitude of the pre-conversion subject is exactly symmetric with the attitude of the post-conversion subject. And who’s to say which is right?

This all comes back to the same old point about only accepting beliefs that we think were reliably acquired. As sane individuals, we hold only those beliefs that we think are true, and we only think something is true if, on balance, rational considerations seem to point in that direction. We would reject any belief which we thought had been caused in us by a psychological process and was unsupported by rational justification, because the effectiveness of beliefcausing psychological processes is independent of the truth of the beliefs in question. That’s why, for Pascal’s self-deception to work, we must convince ourselves that the beliefs weren’t causally generated in us by a psychological process (an unreliable source of truth), but rather by our appreciation of good reasons (a reliable source of truth).

It’s very interesting that most people, including both theists and atheists, reject Pascal’s wager. Sometimes this is because they reject the premise that we have no rational grounds for deciding whether or not to believe in God (for instance, many atheists think we have rational grounds for rejecting that belief, while many theists think we have rational grounds for accepting it).

Many other objections have been raised against Pascal’s argument, and a fair slice of the philosophical literature is devoted to discussing them. Even if I was familiar enough with the details of the debate, this wouldn’t be the place to go into it. What I do want to do, however, is consider one very common objection raised against Pascal’s wager. The complaint, which is raised by both believers and non-believers, is simply that Pascal’s route is an inappropriate route to belief in God. According to this objection, belief derived from rational self-interest is somehow not valid. I think it was John Smart who joked that, if he were God, he’d take great delight in withholding eternal life from those people who believed in him on such an inappropriate, self-servient basis.

The problem with this complaint is that I can’t see what kind of conversion would be considered appropriate, if not Pascal’s kind. Put yourself in the honest unbeliever’s shoes. You want to believe in God, but you don’t. Now, why do you want to? Because you think there’s a good enough reason to? No – or else you would already believe. Because you want salvation? No – as an unbeliever, you currently don’t think that salvation can be attained through belief in God. Because you want the possibility of salvation? Perhaps – but then that’s Pascal’s route again.

I said at the start of this article that I’d quite like to believe in God. I believe that he doesn’t exist, but I’m quite open to correction. Given that position, my challenge to anyone who objects to Pascal’s wager is simple: what non-selfinterested reason can you suggest for me to convert to Christianity (or any other religion) that doesn’t presuppose a prior belief? I bet you won’t be able to come up with one, and I think that’s because, logically, there can’t be one. Either Pascal was on the right lines after all, or you’d better give up any hope of ever converting anyone.

Afterthought II: The blind man

On hearing that I don’t believe in God because I’ve seen no reason to, a friend quoted a famous ‘slam-dunk’ counterexample: if I were a blind man, would I reject the existence of the sun? Presumably, the point is that the sun really does exist, even though some people can’t see it; why not think the same about God? Despite all my rationalisations, am I not really like the blind man, rejecting something real on the basis of my flawed perceptions?

Maybe, but I don’t think so. The analogy has a plausible ‘folk logic’ ring to it, but unfortunately this unreflective plausibility evaporates as soon once you begin to think more carefully about the assumptions underlying it. First, we need to clear up some obvious disanalogies between the case of the blind man and the case of the intelligent unbeliever, problems which make it difficult to draw any kind of moral from one to the other.

For a start, the blind man is blind. It’s not like he can see most things and just can’t make out the sun; rather, he can’t see anything at all, and he knows it. Now, it would obviously be silly for him to reject the existence of everything just because he can’t see anything. After all, sight isn’t the only sense. Even congenitally blind people can deduce the existence of, say, other people from what they hear and feel. Furthermore, once they come to learn that other people can see things that they can’t see, they can be told about the existence of all kinds of other things, including the sun. They can also come to conclusions about things through abstract reasoning. In other words, there are many more routes to knowledge than just visual perception, and a blind man who accepts his blindness will recognise that his inability to see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps, by analogy, the unbeliever can also be told about the spiritual reality that he finds himself unable to see. But the disanalogy here is that the blind man has every reason to think that other people have a sense he lacks; using this extra sense, they can predict things that he can’t predict, they can guide him, they can help him. But the unbeliever doesn’t have an analogous reason to think that other religious people have some kind of spiritual sense that he lacks; no such evidence exists. He hasn’t encountered any mysterious abilities or otherwise inexplicable phenomena among other people which can only be attributed to their perception of something that he can’t ‘see’.

Anyway, this isn’t the point of the original analogy, which can be modified to make it more appropriate. Bear with me for a moment, and consider now the situation of a man who’s not only congenitally blind but also congenitally deaf, and with no sense of touch, smell or taste. What ought he to think of the sun’s existence? (It seems unlikely that the thought will ever occur to him, of course, but suppose the idea of it was planted telepathically in his mind or something.) The answer is easy. With absolutely no reason to believe in the sun at all, he would reject it utterly – and quite rightly. After all, the reasons for him to believe in the existence of the sun are exactly equivalent to the reasons for him to believe that the sky is purple (or even that there is such a thing as the sky), that the world is inhabited exclusively by giant squid (or even that there are such things as squid), and that aeroplanes are powered by mischievous plane pixies (or even that there are such things as aeroplanes).

I’m not suggesting for a minute that an atheist’s position with regard to knowledge of God is necessarily analogous to the perceptionless man’s position with regard to knowledge of the sun. After all, we’ve all heard about God, know about the Bible, heard the testimony of believers, and so on. The only point I’m making is that, if we’re unlucky enough to find ourselves in a situation where the evidence presented to us is absent, misleading or weak, we can quite legitimately come to false conclusions. The perceptionless man’s conclusion that there’s no such thing as the sun is false, of course, but it’s the right conclusion to come to given his unfortunate situation. It would be positively irrational for him to conclude that the sun exists; he hasn’t got any support at all for that hypothesis. The same goes for us.

The moral we’re supposed to draw from the blind man analogy is this: ‘Just because you haven’t seen any reason to believe in something doesn’t mean you should reject its existence’. But the example of the perceptionless man pulls the carpet out from under the theist’s feet somewhat. The perceptionless man is right to reject the existence of a purple sky, giant squid, plane pixies, and yes, even the sun, because he’s got no reason to believe in any of them.

A more accurate aphorism would be: ‘Just because you haven’t seen any reason to believe in something doesn’t mean you can be sure that it doesn’t exist’. After all, the sun does exist, even though we can imagine a person who’d be unable to find any reason to accept that fact.

Now, this is true, but who ever disputed it? Not I, as a Huxleyan agnostic or soft atheist. I say only that nothing I’ve seen has given me any reason to believe in God. I happily concede that I can’t therefore say God definitely doesn’t exist, only that I ought not to believe in Him. In other words, I have a definite belief that there is no God, but that belief is open to correction in the light of possible future developments in my situation. My attitude towards God is exactly the same attitude as the perceptionless man’s towards the sun: Huxleyan agnosticism.

Notes

1 By the way, the title of this piece is borrowed rather pretentiously from a paper by Bertrand Russell, who in turn (I think) borrowed it from E M Forster. Unfortunately for me, the similarity between this piece and the other two papers starts and ends there.

2 Notwithstanding the problem of evil. My hunch is that the problem of evil is decisive against God at the end of the day, but at this stage that’s not my secure judgement.

3 I’d take issue with Huxley’s claim that it’s impossible to know; I see no reason in principle why we mightn’t be as sure about God’s existence or non-existence as about any other empirical fact, given enough justification for belief one way or the other. (I often use an example that I think I first read in the work of John Leslie: if we were to discover one day that the stars as seen from Earth spell out the first chapter of Genesis in ancient Hebrew, it would be a hard-nosed agnostic indeed who could stick to his guns without flinching.) That said, many philosophers will tell you that we can’t truly know anything empirical, and I don’t want to get into that debate, so let me just say this: I think that the question of God’s existence is one that can, in principle, be settled just as thoroughly as any other empirical proposition. Orthodox religious believers would agree with me, of course, and presumably they’d go one step further: for them, not only is it possible for us to settle the question, but it actually is settled, because God exists.

4 Far from it. If it was, I’d be spending my time writing articles about why exactly I don’t believe in the tooth fairy (and I haven’t been doing that since university).

5 Oh, so you think you really are neutral about plane pixies? Really? Someone puts a gun to your head and says that they’ll pull the trigger if you answer a factual question incorrectly. Their question is: ‘Do plane pixies exist, yes or no?’. Now, can you cross your heart and honestly tell me that you’d be agonising over the answer, or reduced to coin-tossing as the only way to break your epistemic deadlock? Naaah.

6 By the way, these same two reasons show why even the most devout religious people should be open-minded too. Closed-mindedness on either side of the debate is unjustifiably arrogant.

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