RT#13 Atheism and Arrogance

Though I don't call myself religious or fanatical about belief in 'God', I find something distasteful about atheists, especially the new breed like Richard Dawkins. What bothers me is the lack of intellectual honesty, an arrogance, in a certain way, that limits a person's receptiveness to the possibility of something beyond. From a purely knowledge acquisition standpoint too, this is suicidal. This topic, I learned, is discussed by philosophers under the label of 'epistemic arrogance'. Whenever I am confronted with an atheist, I want to ask them "How to do you know there is nothing?", "How can you be sure?" I think people's beliefs are often (or at least sometimes) based on their experiences. And while one can say for sure that they have had no out-of-ordinary experience, they cannot deny that someone else might have had it. I give people the benefit of the doubt. I keep all my channels of understanding the world, both the intellectual and the intuitive channels open to reception. And I think honesty and curiosity demand this of us.

Recently my sister forwarded me a research paper by a philosopher, which was a great read. It turns out this is all studied under the field of Virtue Epistemology, and they define epistemic virtues and epistemic vices, qualities that help and hinder, respectively, the process of knowledge acquisition.

This is a related article: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/03/stuart-firestein-ted/

And here's the TED talk  the article references:

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This humility and acceptance of ignorance is important in all departments. In the talk the speaker refers to it in the context of Science.