Motivated Religious Reasoning

This is rough, but here's a first pass at something:  Let us consider some features of the human cognitive system that have emerged in our empirical investigations in recent decades. 

First, humans possess cognitive systems that are profligate with regard to religious, supernatural or spiritual beliefs.  That is, given the two systematic errors that a doxastic system might fall into, erring on the side of false positives or erring towards false negatives, humans are prone to believe more supernatural, religious, or spiritual claims than are true or well justified.  We are not, by contrast, the sorts of beings that systematically err because we are too reluctant, too skeptical, or too stingy with our assent when it comes to these sorts of beliefs.  The near universal subscription to religious beliefs now and in human history, and the abundance and variety of those beliefs show that, if nothing else, we are too eager to believe in such matters.  Too many of those beliefs are incompatible with each other, and too many of them have long since been shown to be false.  Even the ardent religious believer, such as someone who endorses the central theses of Christianity, will have have to concur that the vast majority of other religious beliefs in history which are incompatible with Christianity, have been mistaken.  If Jesus is the Son of God and the only path to salvation, then Allah cannot be the one true God.  If the resurrection of Jesus provides us with spiritual salvation, then the ancient Egyptian believers in Anubis must have been mistaken.  Therefore, given the abundance of religious beliefs, and their incompatibility with the facts (the world was not created, as the ancient Egyptians thought, by Atum out of the swirling chaotic waters of Nu), and their incompatibilities  with each other, we must conclude that the human religious error rate is very high.  And it is very high on the side of believing too much instead of believing too little. 

Second, the human cognitive system has a powerful tendency towards motivated reasoning.  What is motivated reasoning?  We can think of two models of reasoning.  First, a person might have a prefered belief already in mind and then go find some post hoc reasoning, evidence, or justification that would appear to support it.  Here, the reasoning is being steered by the goal:  defending the belief, and believing the conclusion that is best supported by an objective assessment of the evidence whatever that may be has been eclipsed by the concern for truth.  Second, a person might strive to conduct a broad, unbiased search for evidence that is open to all outcomes, and then engage in an evaluation of that evidence that is not driven towards any particular outcome.  Motivated reasoning is the first model. 

Here’s Dan Kahan’s summary: 

Motivated reasoning refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to process information in a manner that suits some end or goal extrinsic to the formation of accurate beliefs.  “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,”  Ziva Kunda.  Psychological Bulletin 1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498.  They Saw a Game,  a classic psychology article from the  1950s, illustrates the dynamic.  Experimental subjects, students from two Ivy League colleges, were instructed to watch a  film that featured a set of controversial officiating calls made during a football game between teams from their respective schools.  Albert H. Hastorf & Hadley Cantril, They Saw a Game: A Case Study, 49 J. ABNORMAL & SOC. PSYCHOL. 129 (1954).   What best predicted the students’ agreement or disagreement with a disputed call, the researchers found, was whether it favored or disfavored their school’s team.  The researchers attributed this result to motivated reasoning: the students’ emotional stake in affirming their commitments to their respective institutions shaped what they saw on the tape.

Kahan, Dan.  “Foreward:  Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law,”

And here, Mercier and Sperber summarize some of the research on motivated reasoning: 

A series of experiments by Ditto and his colleagues, involving reasoning in the context of a fake medical result, illustrate the notion of motivated reasoning (Ditto & Lopez 1992; Ditto et al. 1998; 2003). Participants had to put some saliva on a strip of paper and were told that, if the strip changed color or did not change color, depending on the condition, this would be an indication of an unhealthy enzyme deficiency.  Participants, being motivated to believe they were healthy, tried to garner arguments for this belief. In one version of the experiment, participants were told the rate of false positives, which varied across conditions. The use they made of this information reflects motivated reasoning. When the rate of false positives was high, participants who were motivated to reject the conclusion used it to undermine the validity of the test. This same high rate of false positives was discounted by participants who were motivated to accept the conclusion. In another version of the experiment participants were asked to mention events in their medical history that could have affected the results of the test, which gave them an opportunity to discount these results. Participants motivated to reject the conclusion listed more such events, and the number of events listed was negatively correlated with the evaluation of the test. In these experiments, the very fact that the participant’s health is being tested indicates that it cannot be taken for granted. The reliability of the test itself is being discussed. This experiment, and many others to be reviewed in this article, demonstrate also that motivated reasoning is not mere wishful thinking (a form of thinking that, if it were common, would in any case be quite deleterious to fitness and would not be coherent with the present theory). If desires did directly affect beliefs in this way, then participants would simply ignore or dismiss the test. Instead, what they do is look for evidence and arguments to show that they are healthy or at least for reasons to question the value of the test.

Other studies have demonstrated the use of motivated reasoning to support various beliefs that others might challenge. Participants dig in and occasionally alter their memories to preserve a positive view of themselves (Dunning et al. 1989; Ross et al. 1981; Sanitioso et al. 1990). They modify their causal theories to defend some favored belief (Kunda 1987). When they are told the outcome of a game on which they had made a bet, they use events in the game to explain why they should have won when they lost (Gilovich 1983). Political experts use similar strategies to explain away their failed predictions and bolster their theories (Tetlock 1998). Reviewers fall prey to motivated reasoning and look for flaws in a paper in order to justify its rejection when they don’t agree with its conclusions (Koehler 1993; Mahoney 1977). In economic settings, people use information flexibly so as to be able to justify their preferred conclusions or arrive at the decision they favor (Boiney et al. 1997; Hsee 1995; 1996a; Schweitzer & Hsee 2002).

All these experiments demonstrate that people sometimes look for reasons to justify an opinion they are eager to uphold. From an argumentative perspective, they do this not to convince themselves of the truth of their opinion but to be ready to meet the challenges of others. If they find themselves unprepared to meet such challenges, they may become reluctant to express an opinion they are unable to defend and less favorable to the opinion itself, but this is an indirect individual effect of an effort that is aimed at others. In a classical framework, where reasoning is seen as geared to  achieving epistemic benefits, the fact that it may be used to justify an opinion already held is hard to explain, especially since, as we will now show, motivated reasoning can have dire epistemic consequences. Why do humans reason?

Kahan also offers these ideas about how motivated reasoning occurs: 

The mechanisms are also diverse. They include dynamics such as biased information search, which involves seeking out (or disproportionally attending to) evidence that is congruent rather than incongruent with the motivating goal; biased assimilation, which refers to the tendency to credit and discredit evidence selectively in patterns that promote rather than frustrate the goal; and identity-protective cognition, which reflects the tendency of people to react dismissively to information when accepting it would cause them to experience dissonance or anxiety.  “What is motivatedreasoning and how does it work?”  Science and Religion Today, May 4, 2011. 

 

Ziva Kunda suggests that the mental route whereby motivated reasoning occurs can be even more subtle: 

  

I have proposed that when one wants to draw a particular conclusion, one feels obligated to construct a justification for that conclusion that would be plausible to a dispassionate observer. In doing so, one accesses only a biased subset of the relevant beliefs and rules. The notion that motivated reasoning is mediated by biased memory search and belief construction can account for all of the phenomena reviewed earlier, but the evidence for this process is mostly indirect. The most prevalent form of indirect evidence lies in the constraints that prior knowledge imposes on motivational biases, a pervasive finding obtained in several paradigms. Kunda, Ziva.  “TheCase for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin  1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498

So we’ve got cognitive and doxastic systems in humans that 1) have a high error rate with regard to religious beliefs, 2) are highly disposed to produce and believe religious claims, and 3) are also strongly motivated to construct reasoning towards those conclusions or beliefs that they favor through a variety of subtle and elusive biases.  These dispositions should give us pause about religious claims coming from humans.  Considering the source, we should have a high prima facie level of skepticism about religious claims coming from humans.  Most of those claims are mistaken, people readily and easily produce religious beliefs, and they will resort to a variety of reasoning gymnastics to construct reasonings that appear to substantiate them. 

The question of how best to address motivated reasoning is one that I will have to investigate over several posts in the future.  For now, we can consider one popular answer that comes up when the believer is confronted with the motivated reasoning problem.  It’s common for the advocate of a religious claim to defend the integrity of his reasoning by some appeal to his sense of how careful he has been in thinking about the question:  “I used to be an atheist, but then I became convinced that God was real by reading the Bible,” “I am a very skeptical person and I am not easily duped into believing something that isn’t justified,” and so on.  That is, I am a reliable judge of my own errors, and I am a reliable detector of the presence of motivated reasoning in my own judgments about religious beliefs.  If it feels to me that my religious beliefs are legitimately justified and as if they arise as the product of dispassionate reasoning, then they are. 

Once we make these assertions explicit, it is clear how suspect they are.  Since Descartes, the view that I am a reliable source of information about what I believe and  why I believe it has persisted, as have the views that I am know when I change my mind, I know why I changed it, and I am aware of those causal factors in my environment that influenced those changes.  This optimism about introspectionism has been thoroughly undermined by recent psychological studies.  See Nisbett and Wilson’s frequently cited survey:  Telling More Than We Know:  Verbal Reports on Mental Processes 

We cannot trust the religious believer to be a trustworthy judge of the reliability of his own cognitive processes; his subjective feelings that he is not guilty of motivated reasoning are no more reliable than his subjective feelings that God is real.  The religious urge is too powerful for us to simply take him at his word that he has been sufficiently skeptical.  See my recent lecture here for details about the anti-introspectionism research:  http://www.csus.edu/cppe/symposium/nammour_2011_beingwrong.html

Peter van Inwagen is one of the most widely respected philosophers of religion today.  In the light of what we’ve seen about motivated reasoning and the powerful drive to be religious, consider this passage where van Inwagen constructs a story about human pre-history that favors the story of Genesis by creating a sort of Genesis God of the gaps. 

“The following story is consistent with what we know of human pre-history.  Our current knowledge of human evolution, in fact, presents with no particular reason to believe that this story is false: 

For millions of years, perhaps for thousands of millions of years, God guided the course of evolution so as eventually to produce certain very clever primates, the immediate predecessors of Homo sapiens.  At some time in the last few thousand years, the whole population of our pre-human ancestors formed as a small breeding community—a few thousand or a few hundred or even a few score.  . . . In the fullness of time, God took the members of this breeding group and miraculously raised them to rationality.  That is, he gave them the gifts of language, abstract thought, and disinterested love—and, of course, the gift of free will. . . God not only raised these primates to rationality—not only made them what we call human beings—but also took them into a kind of mystical union with himself, the sort of union that Christians hope for in Heaven and call the Beautific vision.  Being in union with God, these new human beings, these primates who had become human beings at a certain piont in their lives, lived together in the harmony of perfect love and also possessed what theologians used to call preternatural powers—something like what people who believe in them today call “paranormal abilities.”  Because they lived in the harmony of perfect love, none of them did any harm to the others.  Because of their preternatural powers, they were able to somehow protect themselves from wild beasts (which they were able to tame with a look), from disease (which they were able to cure with a touch), and from random, destructive natural events (like earthquakes), which they knew about in advance and were able to escape.  There was thus no evil in their world.  And it was God’s intention that they should never become decrepit with age or die, as their primate forebears had.  But, somehow, in some way that must be mysterious to us, they were not content with this paradisal state.  They abused the gift of free will and separated themselves from their union with God.  Van Inwagen, Peter.  The Problem of Evil, Gifford lectures.  “The Global Argument Continued. 

 

We do not, as far as I know, have any substantial evidence to think of any of this story about miraculous primates being given magical powers is true.  Motivated reasoning is the best explanation that I can see for why van Inwagen or anyone else who struggles through such contortions and logical gymnastics to devise a way to make implausible Biblical stories cohere with our knowledge of human evolutionary history or cosmology.  Van Inwagen is correct; for all we know, something like this did happen in human evolution.  There are also an indefinitely long list of other mythologies that could be rendered similarly “compatible” with our current anthropological evidence with enough ingenuity and determination.  In every case, there are simpler natural explanations for why ancient people believed such stories that are much simpler and better justified than the suggestion that what Genesis describes actually happened.  Van Inwagen’s story is an illustration of just how far motivated reasoning can propel otherwise thoughtful and reasonable people out the spiral of silliness. 

Conclusion:

So, humans have a high error rate with regard to religious beliefs.  They are profligate producers of religious claims, making them highly suspect sources of reliable information about God.  Furthermore, their cognitive systems are strongly disposed to engage in motivated reasoning in favor of their prior held religious beliefs.  The mechanisms whereby motivated reasoning are subtle and difficult to detect.  The believers own assertions that he is not guilty of committing it with regard to his cherished religious views are not reliable.  We should be highly suspect of religious claims and the ostensive justifications that are offered for them unless we have substantial reason to think that motivated reasoning is not at work.  We’ve also seen that even some of the best philosophers of religion, like van Inwagen, can be swept up by the religious urge.  The results are silly and elaborate rationalizations.

  

More on Motivated Reasoning

Mercier and Sperber give an impressive argument here:  Why Do Humans Reason?  Arguments for an argumentative theory  The standard view of reasoning is that its primary function is correct cognitive functions and find the truth.  They argue that it is better understood as facilitating persuasion in social or communication contexts.  Their thesis, they maintain, better explains the available evidence that shows how bad humans are at reasoning.

Their section on Motivated Reasoning contains this nice summary of some of the literature.  The applications to the sorts of reasoning we frequently see coming from religious believers seeking to defend the God/Jesus conclusion at all costs are striking.  For now, all I have time to do is offer a long quote:

A series of experiments by Ditto and his colleagues, involving reasoning in the context of a fake medical result, illustrate the notion of motivated reasoning (Ditto & Lopez 1992; Ditto et al. 1998; 2003). Participants had to put some saliva on a strip of paper and were told that, if the strip changed color or did not change color, depending on the condition, this would be an indication of an unhealthy enzyme deficiency.  Participants, being motivated to believe they were healthy, tried to garner arguments for this belief. In one version of the experiment, participants were told the rate of false positives, which varied across conditions. The use they made of this information reflects motivated reasoning. When the rate of false positives was high, participants who were motivated to reject the conclusion used it to undermine the validity of the test. This same high rate of false positives was discounted by participants who were motivated to accept the conclusion. In another version of the experiment participants were asked to mention events in their medical history that could have affected the results of the test, which gave them an opportunity to discount these results. Participants motivated to reject the conclusion listed more such events, and the number of events listed was negatively correlated with the evaluation of the test. In these experiments, the very fact that the participant’s health is being tested indicates that it cannot be taken for granted. The reliability of the test itself is being discussed. This experiment, and many others to be reviewed in this article, demonstrate also that motivated reasoning is not mere wishful thinking (a form of thinking that, if it were common, would in any case be quite deleterious to fitness and would not be coherent with the present theory). If desires did directly affect beliefs in this way, then participants would simply ignore or dismiss the test. Instead, what they do is look for evidence and arguments to show that they are healthy or at least for reasons to question the value of the test.

Other studies have demonstrated the use of motivated reasoning to support various beliefs that others might challenge. Participants dig in and occasionally alter their memories to preserve a positive view of themselves (Dunning et al. 1989; Ross et al. 1981; Sanitioso et al. 1990). They modify their causal theories to defend some favored belief (Kunda 1987). When they are told the outcome of a game on which they had made a bet, they use events in the game to explain why they should have won when they lost (Gilovich 1983). Political experts use similar strategies to explain away their failed predictions and bolster their theories (Tetlock 1998). Reviewers fall prey to motivated reasoning and look for flaws in a paper in order to justify its rejection when they don’t agree with its conclusions (Koehler 1993; Mahoney 1977). In economic settings, people use information flexibly so as to be able to justify their preferred conclusions or arrive at the decision they favor (Boiney et al. 1997; Hsee 1995; 1996a; Schweitzer & Hsee 2002).

All these experiments demonstrate that people sometimes look for reasons to justify an opinion they are eager to uphold. From an argumentative perspective, they do this not to convince themselves of the truth of their opinion but to be ready to meet the challenges of others. If they find themselves unprepared to meet such challenges, they may become reluctant to express an opinion they are unable to defend and less favorable to the opinion itself, but this is an indirect individual effect of an effort that is aimed at others. In a classical framework, where reasoning is seen as geared to  achieving epistemic benefits, the fact that it may be used to justify an opinion already held is hard to explain, especially since, as we will now show, motivated reasoning can have dire epistemic consequences.

Motivated Reasoning

One of my students (Thanks Kate!) found this article.  They are arguing for a thesis quite consistent with what I've been pressing in several recent posts:  

Boudry, Maarten and Johan Braeckman.  "How Convenient!  The Epistemic Rationale of Self-Validating Beliefs Systems.  forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology.  

https://sites.google.com/site/maartenboudry/teksten-1/how-convenient

One passage is particularly relevant to the resurrection discussions I've been in recently:  

According to cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, Schachter, & Riecken, 1964; Aronson, 1992; Tavris & Aronson, 2008), when people are presented with new evidence that conflicts with their previously held beliefs, this results in a form of cognitive tension called “dissonance”. Importantly, the strength of this uncomfortable tension depends on the degree to which people have invested in their beliefs, for example by way of public commitment, or by the time and effort spent acting in accordance with these beliefs (Batson, 1975). If the psychological investment in a belief is high, people are more motivated to reduce dissonance by rationalizing away disconfirming data. In the refined version of dissonance theory, dissonance arises not so much because of two conflicting cognitions, but because adverse evidence conflicts with one’s self-esteem as a competent and reasonable person[1]. This accords with our earlier observation that, when people explain away unwelcome evidence, they do so in a way that allows them to uphold an illusion of objectivity. For example, if a psychic has publicly professed his powers and risks losing his credibility, he is unlikely to be put off his balance by blatant failure. Or if a believer has spent a substantial amount of time and money on astrology consults, typically no amount of rational argumentation and debunking efforts will make him renounce his beliefs. As Nicholas Humphrey noted: “psychic phenomena can, it seems, survive almost any amount of subsequent disgrace” (Humphrey, 1996, p. 150). By contrast, if the psychological stakes are low, as in the everyday situations we mentioned above, the motivation for belief perseverance will be greatly reduced. Consider another example related to paranormal beliefs: suppose that Anna and Paul both start to suspect that they have psychic powers, but their level of confidence is not very high. While Paul hastens to tell his friends that he may be psychic and even performs some psychic readings, Anna decides to conduct an experiment on herself at an early point, when her beliefs are still privately held. All other things being equal, it is much more likely that Anna will abandon her beliefs silently when she discovers that they do not pan out (Humphrey, 1996, p. 105), while Paul will rationalize his failures because he has already made a public commitment. Thus, we would predict that people with an inquisitive and cautious mindset are more likely to put their hunches to the test early on, and are less likely to be sucked into commitment to wrong beliefs like these. By contrast, people who rush to conclusions and start spreading the news right away will more often find themselves in a situation where they obstinately refuse to abandon a false belief.[2]

A classic illustration of cognitive dissonance can be found in the landmark study by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who infiltrated a doomsday cult and observed the behavior of the followers when the prophesized end of the world failed to come true(Festinger, et al., 1964). The followers who had resigned from their jobs, given away their material belongings and were present at the arranged place and time with full conviction in their imminent salvation, became even more ardent believers after the prophecy failed, and started to proselytize even more actively for the cult. However, those for whom the cognitive stakes were lower (e.g. those who kept their belongings and stayed home in fearful expectation of what was supposedly to come), were more likely to abandon their beliefs afterwards.

News and Lots of Interesting Research on Reasoning

I haven't written here in a while, but lots going on.

I just spoke to the San Francisco Atheists on Saturday.  And I'll be talking to the SacFAN group on Thursday this week at the Carmichael Library, 6:30:  Is Atheism A Religion?

My publication date for Atheism and the Case Against Christ is July.

And I'll be speaking at a big event at Sacramento City College on Thursday, Nov. 10 from 2-4.  Details to follow.

Been thinking a lot about this study:  Motivated Sensitivity to Preference Inconsistent Information and other related research.  In a nutshell, testing shows how strong the tendency is to excessively critique new information that is inconsistent with preferences and to let preference consistent info slide by easy.  I can't imagine that this bias is more pronounced anywhere than with religious beliefs.  I'm looking for related research that focuses on the tendency with religious beliefs.

I am still thinking about this piece from Jonathan Baron:  Actively Open Minded Thinking and the arguments/points I made here:  The Defeasibility Test  and here:  Defense Lawyers for Jesus

Mercier and Sperber have published an important new argument here:  Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory  They maintain that reasoning did not develop primarily in order to improve knowledge and make better decisions, rather it is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade where social considerations between trustworthy and untrustworthy informers are important.

Nature has a related study this week:  The Evolution of Overconfidence where the authors argue that being more confident than your information or skills warrant was favored by evolution.  This thesis fits well with another important recent summary on misbelief:  The Evolution of Misbelief--Dennett and McKay  see esp. the section on religious belief and HADD.

It seems to me that all of these pieces help fill in some of the outline a good description of much of recent religious debate, and a plan for how to best to analyze much religious belief.

Defense Lawyers for Jesus

There is a mode of reasoning about Jesus and other religious matters that is a seductive mistake.  Our inquiries into some matter can be oriented towards defending a belief, or they can be evidence driven by and receptive to whatever conclusion is best justified.  The difference is that we often approach the world with pre-formed conclusion or preference already in mind and that guides our investigation.  Then as we consider new information that is relevant to that cherished doctrine, we are receptive to the arguments, evidence, and reasoning that corroborate it and we are hostile to arguments that run counter to it.  The exercise of our reason is separated from truth as the goal, and it is co-opted in the service of some particular belief that might be deeply mistaken.  Consider a lawyer with great rhetorical and analytical skill whose sole purpose is to defend a mob client, without any real concern for truth or justice.  The lawyer’s intellectual powers for reasoning, constructing arguments, and answering objections have been detached from the goal of drawing the correct or true conclusion.  But the defense of the client, or the skeptical analysis of the evidence against the client, can be complex, carefully reasoned, penetrating, and seductive.  Here the conclusion or goal-- get the client off—constrains the reasoning.  Reasoning is subjugated to a particular end result.  Its critical function is confined to constructing rationales for rejecting any considerations that might show the defendant’s guilt. 

By contrast, we can attempt to make an objective, balanced, and non-prejudicial approach to the relevant body of information, keeping the truth as our goal.  Ideally, we do not let our preference for one outcome or some priori prejudice skew our gathering and evaluation of the evidence.  And we are resolved to accept whatever outcome that evaluation supports.  The conclusion is open during the search and evaluation phase.  And the investigation determines the conclusion at the end instead of the prior belief constructing the investigation from the start.  Here it is the evidence that directs us to the resulting conclusion and we are prepared and committed to accepting whatever result that is.  The inquiry determines the belief, not the other way around. 

We are all guilty of lapsing into rationalizing some preferred conclusion instead of pursuing the second model.  With God beliefs, the problem is much more pronounced.  People often acquire their religious beliefs when they are young and receptive to supernatural thinking.  Some people are among the part of the population with strong or hyper-religious tendencies.  The beliefs hold deep emotional, social, and psychological appeal.  For many people, the promise of eternal life hangs in the balance.  To make matters more difficult, there is a growing scientific consensus that evolution has wired us to be religious.  Religious beliefs are at the center of a perfect storm of neurobiological, evolutionary, emotional, social, and psychological forces that make them some of the hardest matters in our lives for us to reason clearly about. 

Some believers dedicate themselves to constructing rationalistic defenses of their doctrine.  The doctrine itself is the unquestionable starting point, or the presupposition.  The purpose of the apologetic or polemic exercise is to then expose flaws, or generate objections to any world view that differs from that doctrine.  Reasoning has been subordinated to religious belief; its use is confined to constructing defenses and corroborations of the belief.  But the acceptability of the belief itself is not responsive to reasoning.  No reasoning is permitted to raise legitimate doubts about its fundamental legitimacy.  The domain of reasoning is restricted just as the lawyer’s application of her rhetorical and argumentative skills have been wholly subordinated to getting her client off the hook.  The question of guilt is left aside.   Nicholas Wolterstorff says,

The religious beliefs of the Christian scholar ought to function as control beliefs within his devising and weighing of theories. . . Since his fundamental commitment to following Christ ought to be decisively ultimate in his life, the rest of his life ought to be brought into harmony with it.  As control, the belief-content of his authentic commitment ought to function both negatively and positively.  Negatively, the Christian scholar ought to reject certain theories on the ground that they conflict or do not comport well with the belief content of his authentic commitment.  (Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 72)

In this light, Wolterstorff and William Lane Craig are defense attorneys for Jesus.  Their explicit goal is to evaluate everything with regard to whether it supports their beliefs about Jesus.   Reason must be subordinated to faith.  Here is Craig in making some candid remarks about his focused pursuit of belief in Jesus at all costs. 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4538185102301600532&q=william+lane+craig#

He has a “self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit” in his heart in which he knows that “Christianity is true “wholly apart from the evidence.”  With enough diligence and time, any new information can be made to conform to that which cannot and should not be doubted. 

What’s particularly chilling and frustrating about Craig here is the tight, and inpenetrable circle that he has constructed.  First, reason must be subordinated to faith.  Nothing can be allowed to controvert Jesus.  Suspend all questions and doubts, no matter how legitimate, until you can devise a way to engineer or rationalize them into conformity with the prior belief.  The “right” picture of the evidence is defined as the one that conforms with Christianity.  No other outcome is permitted.  If you have doubts, “cultivate your spiritual life, engaging in spiritual disciplines, like prayer, meaningful worship, Christian music, sharing your faith with other people, being involved in Christian service, so that you will foster the witness of the Holy Spirit in your life so that you will be filled with the Holy Spirit.”  Doubting is an enemy to be denied, rejected, or coerced into conformity with the “incontrovertible” belief.  Doubting is the evil work of Satan.  (Note that in a genuine intellectual investigation with truth as its goal, doubt is best and only tool we have.  Doubt is the welcome antidote.)  And finally, when you find a way to engineer an analysis of a doubt that can bring it into conformity with the Jesus belief, it “leaves you with the conviction that Christianity does indeed stand intellectually head and shoulders above every “ism” or philosophy that it might compete with.” 

See the circle?  Put Christianity first and make all of your reasoning support it.  Suspend all doubts, and then employ your reasoning where you can, only to corroborate Christianity.  Then you will find that Christianity is superior to any other “ism,” or position.  Christianity is right.  Suspend any doubts that might lead you to think that Christianity is not right.  Then only use your reasoning to defend Christianity, and then you will be satisfied that Christianity is right.      

What’s disturbing about the strategy that Craig has constructed to insure that Christian belief is always vindicated is that it can be used to defend any view.  Here’s some verbatim quotes from Craig, with only a few key terms changed:    

Question:  Some of us who wish to subscribe to a belief in unicorns have our doubts.  When we go to college, they raise issues that seem to undermine the belief that unicorns are real, magical creatures who give us delight.  What is your advice? 

Answer:  First, they need to understand the proper relationship between faith in unicorns and reason.  The way in which I know that unicorns are real is on the basis of the witness of the magical Unicorn spirit in my heart.  And this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing that unicorns are real wholly apart from the evidence. . . If I were to pursue this with due diligence and time, I would discover that the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the magical Unicorn tells me.  It’s very important to get the relationship of faith in the magical unicorn and reason right, otherwise, what that means is that our faith in the magical unicorn  is dependent upon the shifting sands of evidence and argument which change from person to person,. . . whereas the magical Unicorn and his testimony gives every generation and every person immediate access to a knowledge of him that is independent of the shifting sands of time and place and person and historical contingency. . . and finally, the secret will be to cultivate your magical unicorn spiritualism, engaging in spiritual unicorn disciplines, like praying to the magical unicorn, meaningful worship of the unicorn, magical unicorn music, sharing your faith with other unicornists, being involved in Unicornist service, so that you will foster the witness of the magical Unicorn in your life so that you will be filled with it. . . then it will leave you with the conviction that Unicornism does indeed stand head and shoulders above every “ism” or a-Unicornist philosophy. 

It is possible to implant, sustain, and foster a belief in anything with this strategy.  And since the only permitted employments of reasoning are those that support the belief, it cannot be reasoning that originally justifies the conclusion.  The strategy for deealing with doubts insures that the dogma is conserved, immune to any considerations that might lead to its reasonable rejection.  Unicorns are silly and somewhat harmless, but the framework for building a mind-consuming cult that Craig has outlined here works for UFO suicide cults, the Branch Davidian, the Jonestown suicide cult, Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo group, the Raelian UFO church, Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Falun Gong, the Church of Bible Understanding, and thousands of others. 

Here’s a kind of enslavement far more dangerous than any physical chains.  Get some young people interested in your movement.  Teach them that your central dogma must be first and central in their lives.  Tell them to suspend all of their doubts unless they can construct a rationalization that refutes the doubt and confirms the central dogma.  Urge them to surround themselves with other believers and exploit any means possible to foster positive and poignant feelings about the central dogma.  Encourage them to feel vindicated that their cult is superior in every way to all other worldviews. 

In a healthy arrangement, one’s faculties of reasoning would be engaging in evaluating competing hypotheses by their respective conformity to a broad, objective body of evidence.  That is, the vital role of reasoning is to raises doubts that undermine some conclusions, leaving those that fit the best.  But doubts that cannot be subjugated to Christianity have been excluded from play for Craig, and reasoning can only be employed with the explicit purpose of corroborating a particular, prejudicial conclusion.  Our general predicament is that with enough ingenuity, cleverness, and time, people can construct rationalizations for anything, and then raise doubts and figure out objections to any contrary view.  So when you’re deep in it with Craig, it can really feel like you’re reasoning carefully and critically from premises to conclusions.  But  9-11 conspiracy theories, global warming deniers, Holocaust deniers, Birthers about President Obama’s citizenship, Illuminati theorists, and countless other examples show how far ill-founded rationalizing can take people from the truth. 

Craig’s and Wolterstorff’s revelations here put their arguments for God in a new light.  When Craig presses the Kalam argument, or any other argument for a religious conclusion, what we see now is that he doesn’t really mean it.  He has openly resolved to reject any other argument no matter what its merits if it doesn’t have the right conclusion.  The acceptability of any argument is determined solely by whether it gives him the conclusion he already favors.  Trying to argue him out of that conclusion is doomed to fail because the only legitimate function that reasoning can be put to, as he sees it, is in support of Jesus.  There are no considerations, reasons, pieces of evidence, or arguments, even in principle that could possibly dissuade him.  That would presume that his conclusions about Jesus were arrived at on the basis of reasoning, and not the other way around. 

That means that we must attach an asterisk is any pseudo-reasoning or faux-arguments that they present for their conclusions.  Without knowing how Craig’s meta-rational convictions actually undermine any rational discourse, you might be fooled into thinking he’s engaged in authentic reasoning and evidence analysis.  We should be careful to not confuse a sophisticated rhetoric in the service of a predetermined conclusion for real critical analysis or a genuine appeal to reason to justify a claim. 

Ultimately, I think we must treat this sort of choice to enslave oneself to religious belief as arbitrary, groundless, and without principle.  If all reasoning is subordinated to the goal of defending the doctrine, then it cannot really be that sound reasoning supports and justifies the doctrine.  The defender has constructed a polemical castle in the sky that has no foundation.  Ultimately there can be no reasoned preference for the belief that justifies adopting some other ideology that happened to co-opt one’s thinking.  If he was motivated, a clever apologist could construct a comparable framework of justifications and rebuttals with a belief in The Great Pumpkin or fairies at the center that is just as impressive.  And when it’s UFO suicide cults, or Jim Jones, the results are disastrous.  Despite the fact that they seem to employ sophisticated and careful reasoning to defend their beliefs, we have to conclude that they have left the playing field of rationality.  If you’ve been seduced by one of these rationalizations, or by something like Christian apologetics, you’ve been sold a bill of goods.  

The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience

One of my students (Thanks Kate!) put me onto this amazing paper:

The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience by Jeffrey Saver and John Rabin in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry.  The abstract:

Religious experience is brain-based, like all human experience.  Clues to the neural substrates of religious-numinous experience may be gleaned from temporolimbic epilepsy, near-death experiences, and hallucinogen ingestion.  These brain disorders and conditions may produce depersonalization, derealization, ecstasy, a sense of timelessness and spacelessness, and other experiences that foster religious-numinous interpretation.  Religious delusions are an important subtype of delusional experience in schizophrenia, and mood-congruent religious delusions are a feature of mania and depression.  The authors suggest a limbic marker hypothesis for religious-mystical experience.  The temporolimbic system tags certain encounters with external or internal stimulie as depersonalized, derealized, crucially important, harmonious, and/or joyous, prompting comprehension of these experiences within a religious framework

Take special note of various religious figures and their likely psychiatric maladies in a chart on 501-502.

Review of the Salem Witch Trials Argument

There's a review of my chapter contribution to The End of Christianity--the Salem Witch Trials argument here:
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/review-of-chapter-8-of-the-end-of-christianity/

He argues that it is possible to consistently hold that they weren't witches at Salem, but Jesus really was resurrected.

Help: Trying to find a study

I'm going to crowd source this problem.  Recently I read a study of Americans, I think, that polled people about their attitudes on the one God/one path, many paths question.  They asked people whether they thought there were many paths to salvation or just one, more or less.  As I recall, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses turned out to be the most exclusive.  They were at the far end of the "one God/one path" scale.  I can't remember which denomination was at the other end of the scale.  I think the study came out within the last year or two, but I could be wrong about it.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?  Do you have the reference?  I need it!!

Thanks.

MM

Dead as a Doornail: Souls, Brains, and Survival

I recently submitted my contribution to an anthology on the survival of the soul, edited by Michael Martin and  Keith Augustine.  It's titled The Myth of the Afterlife:  Essays on the Case Against Life After Death, and it will be coming out on McFarland Press next year.  Here's a piece of my introductory chapter in it:

Polling shows that more than 70% of Americans believe in some form of life after death or the survival of the soul (Harris, 2009; PEW, 2008).  Many, probably most, of our depictions of the soul portray it as personally aware and with a consciousness that is essentially related to the embodied person.  Frequently, we describe the afterlife as someplace where a person, as a soul, is rewarded or punished or where their soul will serve or worship God.  Only a conscious, self-aware, thinking entity can do these things.  Furthermore, it is not merely that some consciousness or thinking entity survives the death of my body, but that my consciousness will survive.  My soul is my consciousness, so there will be continuity from my perspective between my awareness in my body and my awareness after the death of my body.  (How could the notions of reward or punishment in the afterlife make any sense without continuity?)  In our art, books, movies, mythology, and religious traditions, the transition from this life to the afterlife is often portrayed like the transition we make when we fall asleep and then wake up again.  When I wake up, I am the same person, with the same thoughts, memories, personal traits, and the same body as the person who went to sleep.  When I die, the soul leaves the body the difference is that when it wakes up, it has left the physical body behind and only the soul has survived with my thoughts, memories, and personal traits.  The common view is that something that makes me up will survive, that I will have eternal life, that I will be reincarnated, or my soul will go to heaven.   The things that are essential to me as an individual consciousness are my beliefs, my hopes, my dispositions, my emotional reactions, and my memories.  So in these popular depictions of the soul, we seem to be identifying it with what we usually call a person’s mind.   In what follows, then, we will treat “mind” and “soul” interchangeably.   

We are not here concerned with the non-personal accounts of the soul that portray it as something distinct from the physical body and that can exist autonomously from it, or that de-emphasize the conscious, personal aspects of the soul.  For example, we sometimes speak of there being an energy or life force in human beings, or that everyone possesses a part of some larger metaphysical entity or force.

The purpose of this introduction is to state the general evidence, particularly the empirical and inductive evidence, that the cessation of biological life also brings the end to a person’s mental life and hence the end of the soul.  What are the reasons we have for thinking that the experiences we associate with having a mind, thinking, remembering, or feeling stop when the life of the physical body stop? 

The competing views, therefore, are the extinction hypothesis—the view that absent some technological means of preservation or continuity that would sustain its functions, biological death marks the end of an individual’s mind.  The survival hypothesis is the view that some significant aspect of a person’s mental life—her consciousness, her thoughts, or her personality—persists beyond biological death. 

There is a strong probabilistic case for this simple argument for extinction:

1.   Human cognitive abilities, memories, personalities, thoughts, emotions, conscious awareness, and self-awareness (in short, the features we attribute to the personal soul) are dependent upon the brain to occur/exist. 

2.  The brain does not survive the death of the body.

3.  Therefore, the personal soul does not survive the death of the body.

The second premise is not controversial.  The evidence in favor of the first premise, then, is crucial to resolving the question of survival.  If the case for dependence is compelling, then we must accept the conclusion. 

II.  Neuroscientific Evidence for Dependence

Decades of evidence from stroke victims, motorcycle accidents, car wrecks, construction site accidents, fMRI scans, PET scans, brain imaging, and other medical studies have given us a detailed picture of which portions of the brain are active in conjunction with specific cognitive abilities and mental states.  What that research has shown is that minds depend upon brains.  Damaging a part of the brain destroys a part of our thoughts, eliminates a cognitive ability, or alters some personal or emotional capacity.  Restoring the electrical, chemical functions of the brain renews the mental function.    

While most of us would acknowledge some connection between mental function and the brain, we may have failed to see just how deep the connection runs.  Even the most abstract mental faculties and the most specific features and contents of our private, mental states can be mapped directly onto brain functions.  Some unusual brain disorders and the mental disruptions they cause illustrate the point.  People who suffer from Anton-Babinski syndrome are cortically blind, but they don’t believe or feel blind from their conscious perspective.  They will adamantly insist that they can see even in the face of clear evidence of their blindness.  They dismiss their inability to perform visual tasks by confabulating explanations.  Subjects with blind sight have the reverse problem; testing reveals that they can see, but they report no awareness of any visual stimuli.  They insist that they are blind even though they are not.  The syndrome results from a specific sort of damage to the occipital lobe of the brain.   

Capgras syndrome results from occipital temporal and frontal region lesions in the brain.   These patients have the powerful sense that someone they know, particularly a loved one, has been replaced by an imposter.  Vilayanur Ramachandran has postulated that the problem arises from a failure of the temporal cortex regions of the brain responsible for face recognition to communicate with limbic system regions responsible for emotional responses (1998).  Fregoli Delusion comes from a related form of brain damage that leads the patient to believe that many different people are actually one person with multiple disguises.  Cotard’s syndrome, or the delusional belief that you are dead, you don’t exist, or that you have lost your organs or blood results from damage to the interactions between the fusiform face area and the limbic system.  Patients with mirror prosopagnosia have difficulty processing the spatial relations of objects in a mirror with other objects in the area, and they often feel convinced that they are being followed.  Brain damage or congenital problems with the fusiform gyrus is responsible. 

What is important with these brain disorders is that we have mapped their specific locations or functional pathologies in the brain, sometimes down to the millimeter.  And the clear physical origin of the problem demonstrates the dependence of the mental capacity upon the brain.  The physical structures of the brain are causally responsible for consciousness and its capacities.  A neuroscientist examining scans of a stroke victim’s brain can now predict, sometimes with remarkable accuracy, exactly what sorts of cognitive, conceptual, emotional, or psychological problems with patient will experience as a result of their brain damage.  The connection is too direct, too pervasive, too immediate, and too strong to be ignored.  The physical foundation of mental functions shows that the alleged separation of mind from brain posited by the survival thesis cannot occur.  If a region of the brain is damaged or removed, then the correlated mental capacity goes, memory is lost, emotional affects are abbreviated, conceptual abilities disappear, or recognitional capacity will cease. 

In a remarkable study in 2005, neuroscientists reported the discovery of what they deemed the Halle Berry neuron.  In order to isolate the location of the electrical chaos that induced their epilepsy,  patients brains were implanted with electrodes.  Then the patient was shown a variety of pictures while the activity of the neurons in the vicinity of the probes was recorded.  In several instances, single neurons could be singled out whose activity spiked in response to specific images such as Halle Berry, Bill Clinton, or the Eiffel Tower.  One neuron fired when the subject looked at a picture of Halle Berry in an evening gown, in a cat woman suit, as a cartoon, and even the words “Halle Berry,” suggesting that the neuron played an integral role in a large web of neurons who were responsible for a variety of abstract and high level representations of Halle Berry rather than some simpler function such as edge discrimination.  This neuron did not respond comparably to the hundreds of other images used in the study (Quiroga, et al., 2005).  Again, the evidence is against the survival hypothesis; every aspect of a person’s mental function is produced by brain function. 

Research shows remarkable relationships between brain tumors and brain chemistry and bizarre thoughts or behaviors.  In one case, the onset of a patient’s hyper sexuality, obsession with porn, and pedophilia parallel’s the growth of a tumor in his right, orbitofrontal lobe.  When they removed the tumor, his urges lapsed.  A year later, when the tumor grew back, his pedophilia returned (Burns, Swerdlow, 2003)  The use of the Parkinson’s drug, pramipexole, has been shown to induce the sudden onset of compulsive behaviors like gambling, hyper sexuality, and overeating (Driver-Dunckley, et al., 2003).  Patients with no gambling history are overwhelmed with the urge to gamble when their dosages cross a particular threshold, and they gamble away their life savings.  Then when the dosage is reduced, the urge vanishes. 

The evidence from neuroscience shows that it is the proper functioning of the brain that makes even the most abstract cognitive abilities possible.  Stephen Pinker says,

If you send an electric current through the brain, you cause the person to have a vivid experience. If a part of the brain dies because of a blood clot or a burst artery or a bullet wound, a part of the person is gone -- the person may lose an ability to see, think, or feel in a certain way, and the entire personality may change. The same thing happens gradually when the brain accumulates a protein called beta-amyloid in the tragic disease known as Alzheimer's. The person -- the soul, if you want -- gradually disappears as the brain decays from this physical process  (2011)

When our brains are intact and healthy, we experience the full range of conscious and mental abilities that are attributed to the soul.  But when electrical, chemical, or structural functions of those regions of the brain are compromised, there is a direct, commensurate loss of those abilities. 

            To a less extreme degree, we can also see the physical foundations of the soul in our everyday lives without brain damage or electrical probes.  The physical dependence of mental states is evident when alterations of the chemistry of the brain with drugs, food, sleep-deprivation, fasting, or coffee change the way we think.  Brain chemistry affects the prevalence of positive or negative thoughts in our minds, our being irritable or happy, or our being cognitively impaired from too much alcohol to drink.  Too little to eat or drink and our thoughts grow slow and negative, too much caffeine and our thoughts race.  Even the weather seems to have a pronounced affect on the character and direction of our thoughts.   Hallucinogenic drugs induce visions in the mind of a different reality.  People on PCP often envision spiders and have a powerful belief that they can fly.  Millions of people take anti-depression drugs every day—chemical compounds that alter the chemical events in the brain—that produce a change in their beliefs, feelings, dispositions, and other mental states.  The causal dependence in these cases is clear; the mind depends upon specific chemical and electrical reactions in the nervous system.  Modify those reactions even slightly and there is a corresponding change in the mind and its contents.   Even something as common as a cup of espresso shows that those elements of consciousness that are alleged to survive biological death and depend directly upon the brain. 

If there was empirical evidence for survival, that is, if consciousness persists without the brain, then we would expect to find some exceptions to the close, direct correlations between the electro-chemical events in the brain and mental states, cognitive capacities, and conscious experience.  If there were cases where we could establish that some or all of the mind functions that we attribute to the soul occur in the absence of brain processes altogether, or in the absence of the particular brain processes that have been most closely correlated with those functions in other cases, then we would have some striking evidence for survival and against the first premise in our argument.  Suppose that we found cognitive abilities and consciousness to be present or absent with no apparent relation to the state of the human brain.  If brain damage of various sorts left cognitive functions unscathed, or if consciousness persisted despite alterations in brain chemistry and structure, then we might have some evidence to doubt the correlation and the causal connection.  Likewise, if some mental function lapsed while the brain was completely intact and functioning, we might have an empirical indicator of mind/brain autonomy.  But we find no such violations in either direction.

The End of Christianity--now available

The End of Christianity, a new anthology edited by John Loftus from Prometheus Press is out now.  It includes my chapter presenting the Salem Witch Trials argument against the resurrection of Jesus, and a long list of other interesting articles.

It's on Amazon here:  The End of Christianity

Here's the Table of Contents:


I. Why 2000 Years is Enough

1. Christianity Evolving: On the Origin of Christian Species, by Dr. David Eller
2. Christianity's Success Was Not Incredible, by Dr. Richard Carrier
3. Christianity is Wildly Improbable, by John W. Loftus

II. Putting an Ancient Myth to Rest  

4. Why Biblical Studies Must End, by Dr. Hector Avalos
5. Can God Exist if Yahweh Doesn’t?, by Dr. Jaco Geicke
6. God’s Emotions: Why the Biblical God is Hopelessly Human, by Dr. Valerie Tarico

III. Living on Borrowed Time

7. The Absurdity of the Atonement, by Dr. Ken Pulliam
8. The Salem Witch Trials and the Evidence for the Resurrection, by Dr. Matt McCormick
9. Explaining the Resurrection Without Recourse to Miracle, by Dr. Robert Price
10. Hell: Christianity’s Most Damnable Doctrine, by Dr. Keith Parsons

IV. Science Puts An End to Christianity 

11. Is Religion Compatible with Science?, Dr. David Eller
12. Neither Life nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed, by Dr. Richard Carrier
13. Life After Death: A Scientist Looks at the Evidence, by Dr. Victor Stenger
14. Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them), by Dr. Richard Carrier


And abstracts of the chapters.

Get it.  It'll be good for you.  

A Monument to Vanity and Self Promotion

I've been compiling stuff for an author bio and promotional form and I've got this partial list of videos, debates, podcasts, and interviews.  

Wrongology:  Knowing My Own Mind:  http://www.csus.edu/cppe/symposium/nammour_2011_beingwrong.html

“Did Jesus Return from the Dead?”  Debate with Prof. Russell DiSilvestro, Bridgeway Christian Church, Sacramento.  May 2010.  Video:http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6B3DA67A7E8D1104&annotation_id=annotation_234124&feature=iv

The Resurrection:  Jesus and the Salem Witch Trials, Sept. 20, Hinde Auditorium, CSUS.

Video:  http://vimeo.com/15351235

Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus,  Sept. 21, Hinde Auditorium, CSUS.

Video:  http://vimeo.com/15338250

Does God Want Us to Believe in Miracles?  Sept. 20, 21, 22.  Hinde Auditorium, CSUS. 

Video:  http://vimeo.com/15339056

Capitol Public Radio Interview:  Matt McCormick and Russell DiSilvestro, Did Jesus Return from the Dead?  http://www.capradio.org/news/insight/2010/09/20/insight-debating-miracles--tracy-nelson--science-comedian--freebadge-serenaders

Podcast: (interview)  http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/05/18/episode-45-an-impending-rapture-revisionist-history-interview-with-matt-mccormick/

Podcast:  (interview)  Thinking Critically about God and the Philosophy of Religion.  Think Atheist, May 8, 2011.  http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thinkatheist/2011/05/09/think-atheist-radio-show-episode-7-dr-matt-mccormick-may-8-2011

Podcast:  (interview)  Theism and Double Standards, Common Sense Atheism, Feb. 11, 2010.  http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=6461

Video Interview:  The Case Against Christ and the Salem Witch Trials, Atheist Church with Keith Lowell Jensen,  Part 1:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrsBMrJ-_OY&feature=channel,  Part 2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gprRjMgzowY

Interview:  Morality, Yes.  God, no.  Sacramento News and Review,  Nov. 11, 2008.  Online here:  http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/morality-yes-god-no/content?oid=878785

Interview:  Personnel Profile, Dr. Matt McCormick, Capitol Weekly.  1-03-2008.  Online here: 

http://www.capitolweekly.net/article.php?xid=wswrc75j9qo9u3

Interview at An American Atheist

I was interviewed for a podcast for the blog An American Atheist recently about philosophical atheism:  It's here:

http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/05/18/episode-45-an-impending-rapture-revisionist-history-interview-with-matt-mccormick/

Thinking Clearly About Freedom

Sam Harris has (another) great post on the muddled notion of "freewill" that obscures so much of our thinking about religion and morality here: Morality Without "Freewill". Much of this is agreeable although I find something elusively off the mark about the way he's framing the discussion.

Two brief ideas. First, the native conception of freedom that many non-philosophers seem to be operating with is of some inexplicable force, originating with us, that defies the ordinary physical, naturally lawful order of events. Free acts are little miracles, as it were; violations of the causal closure of the physical world. This view is completely at odds with what we know about the physical world and how brains operate.

Second, people's motivations are frequently backwards on the topic. If some argument or piece of evidence suggests that we don't have freedom in this wrongheaded sense, then that is typically taken as an irrevocable reductio of that argument. If the implication of argument x is that we don't have freewill, then x is immediately objected because we have an incorrigible intuition of our own freewill, or, at least, we dislike that implication intensely enough to be motivated to reject the argument.

Part of what Harris is struggling with in the book (The Moral Landscape) is providing a clear conceptual scaffolding that can serve as an alternative to the old one. People's inability to extricate their thinking from the hopeless mess of religious moral notions is also the source of a lot of the resistance he's getting, even from people who aren't overtly religious.

Contemporary Philosophy of Religion and Atheism

The guys at The Think Atheist Show interviewed me a couple of weeks ago.  We talked about the case for atheism in philosophy of religion, my book, and proving the negative.  The podcast is here.