How To Actually Develop Critical Thinking | Miles Donahue
🔍 Key insights
Truth Is Worth Pursuing Only If It’s Worth Knowing — Miles makes a disarming argument: if absurdism were the ultimate truth — that existence is fundamentally without meaning or value — the rational move would be to take the blue pill and erase that knowledge entirely. The pursuit of truth is not unconditional. It is conditional on what we expect to find on the other side.
All Arguments Bottom Out in Seemings — Every philosophical argument, however rigorous, ultimately rests on something that simply seems right. Logic, mathematics, perception — all of it traces back to intellectual intuitions that cannot themselves be further justified. This doesn’t make knowledge fragile. It makes the foundation honest.
Philosophy Gives You Fog With Better Eyes — Ten years of serious philosophy has left Miles holding fewer firm convictions and far more agnosticism than when he started. He knows less than he thought he did. And yet his thinking is clearer than it has ever been. You lose certainty. You gain navigation. Those are not the same thing, and philosophy hands you one by taking away the other.
📚 Go deeper
🎧 Podcast to listen to:
Miles K. Donahue – The Uncertainty Podcast — Miles’ own channel, where he does exactly what he describes in this interview: rigorous, uncertain, honest philosophical investigation.
📖 Further reading:
Atheism and the Problem of Evil – Paul Draper — The book Miles cites as the one that would most challenge his theism. A careful, philosophically serious treatment of the argument from evil.
The Problem of Evil – Peter van Inwagen — A theist philosopher’s sustained defence against the argument that suffering is evidence against God. The other side of the same conversation.
💡 Think for Yourself
If you discovered that the deepest truth about existence was that none of it matters — would you want to know?
What belief do you hold with the most conviction? Is that conviction grounded in the arguments for it, or in something else? Would it survive the arguments failing?
☁️ Thought Experiment
Miles started this conversation having moved from a conservative Christian worldview he held with high certainty to agnosticism about almost everything. Some call it progress, while others loss. Sit with that for a moment: is it better to be confidently wrong, or uncertainly right? And which one are you currently choosing?
Cheers,
Kevin