Fundamentalist? Moi?

Atheists are often accused – falsely – of being fundamentalists. Atheists usually hold their views strongly and do not easily change them, so you might well think them fundamentalist, but this would be an unfair assumption. A well made argument based on solid evidence would surely change an atheist's mind. The real reason atheists believe so strongly that they are right is that the arguments against them fall apart under scrutiny. It has nothing to do with dogma.

That said, surely everyone must hold some things to be fundamentally true. I started to think about what my fundamental truths would be.

We can rely on reality

We can pick apart, if you like, the nature of reality and the fact that our experience of the world is entirely subjective; the fact that we can never know the true, underlying nature of things. Bit of a waste of time, in my opinion.

For all practical purposes, we should assume that the things we know now are true, whilst keeping an open mind that we might know better later. If a thing is genuinely unknowable, genuinely beyond the reaches of scientific detection, then it is irrelevant to our lives and there is no point playing guessing games about it.

I confess, I am a fundamentalist about this point. If you start to base your judgements on things no-one can possibly know, or to claim nothing can ever truly be proven, I'll ask you to walk through the wall, claiming there is an undetectable door and that you cannot prove the wall is real in any case.

The simplest explanation is the most likely

Occam's razor is a beautiful principle. It basically says, when trying to explain something, the less you have to make up, the more likely you are right.

Note, this is not to say the simplest explanation is the right one. The distinction between right and most likely is very important. In fact, this is a key difference between a fundamentalist view and a rational one.

Nevertheless, I must accept that I hold the validity of Occam's razor as a fundamental truth. I don't think there is any way to prove a maxim like this. It is, like relying on reality, a thing which I accept without proof, for practical purposes.

More?...

I am sure there must be more things I am genuinely fundamentalist about, but it is hard to know what they are, as fundamentals are the things we take for granted, things we accept without thinking.

I think thinking is important. We should all have a good hard think, about the things we never think about.