We're all promiscuous teleologists, it appears, but scientists less than others fortunately. (And I love Epiphenom, BTW.)
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
Saturday, January 5, 2013
The Gap for God
Suppose that members of a
religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some
powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their
prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is
available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special
revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of
producing. That is, suppose that Christians
maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s
existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity
of the Koran. Could God, the almighty
creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of
the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find
it? I take it that the answer is
obviously yes. Even if you think there
is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person
must also acknowledge that it could have been better. And there’s the problem.
If the capacity of that
god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets,
or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. “We
know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.”
Or, “The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the
god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us
greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.”
Given the disparity
between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered
to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the
sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our
believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not
resemble the one we are in. The story doesn’t
make internal sense. A far better
explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate
what the evidence shows. And that same
enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would
have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable. Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t
possibly be faulted for failing to believe.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Some Varieties of Disproof
Sometimes, we reject a claim about reality because it doesn’t
fit with other claims about which we have better evidence overall. Your aunt, who has smoked 2 packs of
cigarettes a day for 20 years, is diagnosed with lung cancer. She has a job working in a building where
there has been construction that has created a lot of dust over the last
several weeks and she insists that it is the dust, not the smoking, that is the
cause of the cancer. Or perhaps she,
like millions of Americans, believes in hexes.
And she’s suspicious that her neighbor across the street, with whom she
has had a lot of personal friction over many years, has something to do with
the cancer. The hateful thoughts
radiating from the house across the street have made her sick, she thinks. In either case, the evidence we have for the
smoking being the cause of her cancer is better, and with some thought and
investigation, we could conclude with confidence that the smoking hypothesis is
proven, and the other theories are disproven.
Let’s call this Inductive Disproof.
A brief note about proof:
Many people who haven’t reflected on the topic much have the sense that
we should reserve the term “proof” only for those cases where we have the most
substantial level of deductive certainty.
We can prove, for instance, that 2 + 2 = 4, or that bachelors are
unmarried. But we shouldn’t use the term
proof for other matters of less confidence.
Furthermore, their sense is that we should only use “proof” about
indefeasible conclusions, claims that we would not change our minds about under
any circumstances. For other matters,
like smoking and cancer, the connection between a high calorie diet and
obesity, and who won last year’s Superbowl, we should describe the status of
our beliefs in some other way. And many of the same people who feel this way
about proof have the same impulse about “knowledge.” We only know those things, they say, that we
can prove. No other less certain matters
should be called knowledge.
For a number of reasons, I think it is a mistake to reserve “proof”
for only indefeasibly certain matters. First,
if we raise the bar on “proof” this high, then there remains little or nothing
that we know. On this view, we don’t
know that smoking causes cancer, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the sun
rose yesterday, that Obama is the President, that violent crime is on the
decline in the United States, that people who have a low fat, high fiber diet
with lots of exercise tend to live longer than those without, and so on. Too many things that we comfortably and
normally claim to know must now be described in some other artificial manner. Second, we can have our cake and eat it too;
we can readily acknowledge that there are things we know and that we have
proven, but our conclusion is defeasible.
We can say that even though the evidence supports the conclusion
overall, we are prepared, under the right circumstances, to change our minds in
the light of new information. We know
that the force of gravity, for instance, on the surface of the Earth is 9.8
meters/sec2. (The extreme
proof/knowledge advocate must insist awkwardly and artificially, “No, we don’t
really know that, we only have a massive amount of evidence and justification
for it.”) A more natural way to proceed
here is to say that we know, and have proven, many things beyond the
deductively certain. But we are always
ready to incorporate new evidence into our theories about what is true and
change our minds if that becomes warranted.
Third, people who press for the extreme proof/knowledge view are quite
vulnerable to the Going Nuclear problem. Fourth, the extreme proof/knowledge view often fall into the Sliding Scale Fallacy. And fifthly, to make the extreme proof/knowledge advocate
happy, we can easily make a distinction that is widely accepted and
acknowledged in the sciences between inductive and deductive
proof/justification.
Now back to varieties of disproof. Sometimes we reject a claim because it is
internally inconsistent or logically contradictory. We know that Smith is not a married bachelor
for instance, or that a three sided figure labeled ABC is not a square, because
married bachelors and three sided squares are logically impossible. Deductive disproofs of the existence of God
in this category have either argued that a single attribute that is typically
given to God like omnipotence is impossible, or that some combination of
properties like infinitely just and infinitely merciful are mutually
inconsistent. Let’s call these Single
Property Deductive Disproof and Multiple Property Deductive Disproof. There is an an extensive philosophical literature stretching
across centuries offering these sorts of disproofs for God. See:
Sometimes we reject a claim because the concepts that it employs
and the model of reality that is embedded in the concepts has become
impoverished, bankrupt, useless, or inapt at describing reality. Consider three theories about a sick person
who is exhibiting swollen lymph nodes, gangrene, fever, malaise, and seizures.
He might be possessed by evil demons, he
might have an imbalance in his four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and
blood—that could be rectified with leeches, or he might have a bacterial
infection of yersenia pestis—Bubonic Plague.
The Bubonic Plague theory along with modern virology in which it is
embedded turns out to be far better at recognizing the ailment, treating it,
curing it, preventing it, making predicitions, and so on. If we successfully cure the patient by means
of virology and the Bubonic Plague hypothesis, it’s not so much that we have
disproven the evil demon possession claim in any deductive or logical
sense. It’s still logically possible
that there could be evil demons disguised at the yersenia pestis bacteria in
his blood. But holding onto the evil
demon claim and the baggage that comes with it just becomes increasingly
useless, and extraneous in our model of reality.
At some point we leave some ideas behind
because they just don’t fit with the rest of what we know about reality. It strikes me as natural and sensible to say
that we know that those symptoms are
caused by yersenia pestis now. We have
proven that the illness is caused by the bacteria, and not by evil demons. Let’s
call this sort of case Theoretical Disproof.
So on this way
of carving things up, we have at least fours kinds of disproof: Inductive Disproof, Single Property
Deductive Disproof, Multiple Property Deductive Disproof, and Theoretical
Disproof. There are others, and there
are different ways of mapping out the epistemological landscape. But this will suffice for now.
As I see it,
the God hypothesis, where God is described in the ways that the vast majority
of modern believers describe him, fails because of arguments of all four
types. More details about can be found
in the over 300 posts on this blog written over the years, in my recent book
Atheism and the Case Against Christ, and in the book I’m now working on
Atheism: Proving the Negative. There are some other accounts of God that
escape those four varieties of Atheological Disproof, but those, as far as I
can tell, just end up being vaccuous, trivial, or unmotivated—God is love, God
is the development of human self-awareness, God is energy, God is reality.
So the
challenge for the theist, as I see it, is to first come up with a description
of God that is internally, logicall coherent.
It must attribute properties to God that are individually coherent, and
that are logically consistent with each other.
And this description must navigate around the broad set of Deductive
Atheological arguments that have undermined the God concept. Furthermore, the description needs to it
needs to be sufficiently superlative to warrant the "God"
label," and, one would hope, it would have some semblance to the
supernatural being that billions of traditional believers have advocated for
centuries. Then the theist reconcile the
claim that this being is real with the a posteriori facts as we know them—the theist
must deal with the Inductive Disproofs for God.
The theist needs to address the problem of evil, the problem of divine
hiddenness, and a host of other serious inductive challenges that have come up
over the centuries.
But even all of
that wouldn’t be sufficient to justify theism, as I see it. We could construct some account of evil
demons that is internally logically consistent.
And we could add enough provisos, tweaks, and emendations to the story
to accommodate all of the details of modern virology. Evil demons are clever and sinister, you see,
and part of their malevolent deception of us is that they are disguising their
activities to look like bacterial infections, cancer, and so on. How do you know, afterall, that viruses and
bacterial infection aren’t just the way that evil demons do us harm? Like evil
demonology, theology has been rendered superfluous and vacuous by the rest of
what we have learned about biology, geology, history, psychology, anthropology,
astronomy, and cosmology.
The theist, as I see it, has to
do more than sketch out some scheme whereby it might be possible that God
employed evolution to create us, for example.
The theist needs to give us some substantial positive evidence for
thinking that it is true. Possible, as I have argued many times, it not probable or reasonable or justified.
Are we proving the negative yet?
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