In his programme attacking faith schools recently, Richard Dawkins had some fun at the expense of a Muslim girl who believed that fresh and salt water don't mix (though he didn't show us all the atheists who don't know that the earth goes round the sun once per year), and struggled with a Catholic teacher's challenge that it was the human right of parents to raise their children in knowledge of their faith. He provided a veritable cornucopia of confusion and error for one to attack - that is of course part of what is attractive about him: in the best Popperian tradition, he's not afraid to say things that actually have some significance, so he provides much more to disagree with (as everyone does who says anything worthwhile) than so much cowardly watery obfuscation out there.
What I fancied disagreeing with him about was his model for what children should be taught, provided by his touching letter to his daughter. In it, he told her of three bad bases on which to believe anything: tradition; authority; and revelation. But, in fact, these are excellent bases for belief - indeed the main bases on which all of us (including Dawkins) believe anything.
The clearest case is authority. What is the capital of Zimbabwe? Did you answer: Harare? Why? Was it because that was what you were taught at school? So you accept the authority of your teacher? Or did you look it up on Wikipedia, accepting its authority? Even if you have actually been to Harare, that still wouldn't tell you that it's the capital - to establish that you would have to observe some definitive government records, and even then you would depend on your acceptance of the authority of those showing you those documents, that these were in fact the relevant documents (e.g. that they were not forgeries).
Are you a mathematician? Have you yourself proved from first principles every theorem you ever use? Or do you ever note that such-and-such a theorem appeared in a respectable mathematical journal so it's probably valid? Are you a biologist? Have you personally observed every datapoint in every experiment you write up?
We rely upon authority - in particular, witness testimony - all the time, every day. The testimony of authoritative witnesses, well-positioned to comment and without incentives to distort, is an excellent basis for believing, and Dawkins' daughter would rapidly be consigned to a asylum as pathologically paranoid were she unable to rely upon it.
What about tradition? Dawkins belongs to a particular scientific tradition. Tradition is a collective enterprise whereby we benefit from what those that went before us have learnt. By operating within a tradition, we can build through time, stand upon the shoulders of giants, benefit from the ways those that went before tested ideas, rejected falsehoods, produced new insights and instructive speculations. Rejecting tradition would mean operating as a loner.
In mundane life we accept numberless truths on the basis of tradition - tradition services us with almost our entire framework of thought (just as witness testimony supplies with almost all specific beliefs). Even if we set aside grand ideas such as that if no-one moves anything, a room will have the same contents when we return to it as when we left, and just focus on more obviously practical (though not more actually practical) matters, tradition pops up all over the place. Why do we consider it more useful to divide the day into 24 periods than 2; why do we think it better to have one wife than five, why are yacht sails made just that shape?
Moving on from what is learnt in a tradition to what is speculated by a tradition, even in maths there are traditional speculations, such as Church's thesis, which everyone believes even though no-one has proved (indeed, Fermat's last theorem belonged to this category until very recently). Before Fermat's last theorem was solved, did Dawkins not believe it to be true? And if he did, what was he doing other than drawing on the intuition of a scientific tradition, benefitting from the insights and wisdom and effort of those that had thought about the problem before?
He also wants to reject "revelation". Taken at face value, this is a ridiculous idea - surely the fact that something has actually been revealed to you would be the very best reason imaginable for believing it! What he must mean is either that we should not depend upon experiences that have a religious quality or mystical intuitions (i.e. things that might make it seem to us that we had experienced a direct insight about the world, rather than that we had actually done so (as per my "face value" case)). Well, it's hard to see what useful there would be to believe in if experience weren't a useful basis for believing in things, and it's hard to see what philosophically defensible basis there could be for privileging the experiences he wants to favour over anyone else's, but I'm certainly prepared to accept that religious experiences (like other experiences) are subject to being tested. If you have a feeling that God wants you to murder prostitutes, I hope you will test that notion and find it wanting, just as you would if you saw a note that said "God wants you to murder prostitutes".
Even the mystical intuitions point is weaker than you might think. Suppose you had never seen a snake, then saw a brightly coloured one and were frightened of it, for no other reason than instinctive intuition. Would you think that so obviously an intuition upon which to place no weight - as Dawkins' letter (though I suspect not his personal practice) would have you do? We tend to think we have instincts of that sort "for a reason", and though imperfect guides, the instincts and intuitions of healthy, wise people are not random (are not just as likely to be false as true).
On the show, Dawkins considered studies suggesting that children begin life believing that things have a purpose. Many of us have an intuition that the whole universe has a purpose, or that this life is not all that there is, or that there is something about us that could survive our deaths. Now we should certainly test such intuitions (and for what it's worth, I consider at least one of those three intuitions false). But intuition is not the epistemologically worthless device that Dawkins' letter would have us believe - though certainly not his practice (for example, on the show, after being challenged by the Catholic teacher about whether it was a human right for parents to raise their children in their religions, he was visibly disconcerted and aware that he did not have a knock-down argument to defend his position, but nonetheless tried to appeal to an intuition he hoped we would share that children are not the property of their parents). Intuitions of this sort provide hypotheses that we later test, and we are not wrong to hang on to our intuitions even when we cannot fully support them with other evidence - they drive us on; help us to provide proofs that we might not otherwise seek.
So, far from being bad bases on which to believe things, virtually our whole framework of thought (even if we are scientists) is established by tradition; the vast majority of our valuable specific beliefs depend upon authority; and revelation, though certainly risky, provides us with intuitions that drive us, productively, to investigate (and test) them empirically and prove more than we would ever derive by pure induction.
So, I think Dawkins has that all wrong. Do I think he should be forbidden from teaching his daughter these falsehoods? No - that's one difference between me and him. Do I think he should be able to force all children in all schools to be taught the falsehoods he proffers and forbidden from learning the things their own parents believe? No - and that's another difference between us, at least as important.
