Evil Isn't the Problem, the Concept of God Is.

For years, I have been arguing that the evil atheist—someone who thinks that the existence of suffering in the world makes atheism reasonable—must be prepared to give a hypothetical outline of the sorts of evidence that they would find to be consistent with God’s existence. That is, unless they are just being dogmatic, the evil atheist needs to say what the world would look like if an omni-God exists. This is only fair since they are arguing that the existence of suffering, or the state of the world that we inhabit, is inconsistent with the existence of God. If it looks like there is no God here, then what would it look like if there were a God? A sudden cessation of the some evil like the genocides in the Sudan or Rwanda, or a miraculous cancelling of a tsunami wouldn’t do it. If a tsunami was suddenly, miraculously stopped, we’d have to wonder: “Well, where the hell was God when all of that other nasty stuff was happening? If he saw fit to do something here, then why not the bubonic plague, the Holocaust, or cancer? An omni-God would have done something about all of those, so there is no omni-God.” Suppose the evil atheist insists that there never would have been any suffering in the world from the start. Is that a satisfying answer? Not really. Hick and others have plausibly argued that real moral growth in free, finite creatures like us requires a challenging world that is not a hedonistic paradise. We need to see and learn from the consequences of our actions, and there need to be challenges in the world that we must meet in order for us to acquire certain kinds of moral and intellectual growth. Hick and this variety of theodicist need to argue that not even an omnipotent God could have achieve the same sort of moral growth in us by any other less painful method, and I haven’t seen a convincing argument to this effect. But the plausibility of the theodicy is at least great enough to raise doubts that the evil atheist should insist that a good God would make our world a paradise. It’s also possible that no matter how little suffering there was, and no matter how optimized an omnipotent God made the world with regard to suffering, the evil atheists would still be complaining. The worst of the suffering might only amount to an occasional paper cut, but they’d still be insisting that that shows there cannot be a loving and powerful God watching over us.

So roughly, the suggestion is that evil atheists are often being dogmatic. No state of affairs would really satisfy them with regard to suffering. They cannot outline empirically manifest circumstances that would convince them that God is real. So there’s something amiss deep in their argument.

But here’s another possibility. If God is an impossible being, then there could be no empirical circumstances that are consistent with his existence. That is, if the concept of God just doesn’t make sense itself, then no amount of theorizing about hypothetical worlds will give us a picture that reconciles God with reality. God’s existence isn’t going to fit into any of those descriptions of states of affairs because the very notion of God itself is rationally corrupt. God doesn’t fit with suffering or anything else because God just doesn’t make sense.

What does that mean? Deductive atheology has taken a couple of approaches. First, it has been argued that a single, essential property that is attributed to God is incoherent. Omnipotence or omniscience is impossible, for instance. And since God wouldn’t be God without omnipotence, then God is impossible. In a related set of arguments, logicians and philosophers have begun to suspect that since after centuries of effort we cannot devise an account of what omnipotence and omniscience are, the right conclusion to draw is that there really can be no such thing. This is not a deductive argument that they are impossible, as such. It’s more of a throwing up of the hands—nobody has been able to give a sensible account of the properties so it’s time to move on. It doesn’t make sense, after a point, to keep trying to sustain our concept of the aether, phlogiston, or caloric. At the very least, these arguments shift the burden on proof heavily onto the theist. If you think there is a God, you really owe us an account of what that being is that makes some basic sense. We’ve seen countless descriptions crash and burn now, so you’re really not entitled to move forward or have us take you seriously until you addressed some absolutely fundamental issues. See several of my earlier posts about omnipotence, omniscience, and deductive atheology for details.

The other approach that the evil atheist can take here is to say that the reason we can’t describe a world consistently with God and suffering in it is because the properties that are attributed to God are inconsistent with each other. God is alleged to be free and all just, or all merciful and all just, or transcendent and physical, or immaterial and the cause of the universe, for instance. But these pairs of attributes produce hopeless contradictions. (On a side note, the history of theology has produced countless tomes that engage in bizarre and baroque gymnastics to reconcile these sorts of problems in describing God. I recommend you only read enough of these to get the general sense of what they are doing. Any more will make you chew your own leg off like an animal stuck in a trap.) So God(MJ)—a God who is all merciful and all just—is impossible. And since no being who lacks M or lacks J is worthy of the name, there is no God.

When we understand the arguments for evil atheism in this framework, we can see that the evil atheist’s case is really pointing to a much deeper, more serious problem that has nothing to do directly with suffering. We can’t reconcile God’s existence with the problem of evil in the world because the notion of God itself is incoherent. And until the theist can provide a description of God that makes some sort of provisional sense in the light of these widely argument problems, their position can’t even get off the ground.

IQ and the Origins of Religions

Richard Nisbett makes a compelling case in Intelligence and How to Get It that IQ is much less heritable than we once thought and that environmental factors like culture and schooling play a much larger role in making people smart. He estimates that the effects of family, nutrition, schooling, home environment, and surrounding culture could be as large as 18 points of IQ. The Flynn effect is another important recent IQ phenomena. IQ tests are regularly renormalized to keep the average IQ score at 100. Flynn has demonstrated that over that period IQs have been increasing by about 3 points a decade. That is all to say that we are getting smarter, and it's not because humans are changing that much. It's because our environments are changing. We have access to huge amounts of sophisticated information now, we have better nutrition, we have better healthcare, affluence has increased, education has improved and so on. But we are getting smarter in two ways: we have more information and better access to it now than we once did—high school kids are doing experiments with recombinant DNA in class. But the environment is actually raising our intelligence independent of increased informational knowledge. The IQ increases show that we can solve problems, reason critically, and employ better cognitive strategies now than we used to. Nisbett quotes Linda Gottfredson’s definition of intelligence: “a very general mental capacity that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.”

What are the implications of the rise in IQs if we project it backwards in time? It means that the average person plucked off of the street 300 or 500 or 1,000 years ago would be what would be considered developmentally disabled today. Their average IQ would have been a 75 or 65 or worse. The reason is that culture, education and other external factors play such a large role, it turns out, in making it possible for people to actualize the potential they have for being smart. And only in the last 50-100 years have we brought the level of education and affluence up high enough for enough people to really start seeing the effects.

These points raise serious issues for all of the historically based religions. The people who founded the world’s religions, on average, would have had distinctly worse reasoning abilities, less ability to comprehend complex ideas, and worse comprehension of their surroundings. There would have been outliers, of course. Newton, Copernicus, Aristotle, and Kant would have stood out intellectually from their peers, and they would most likely still stand out among the modern elevated standards. But what about average people? The people who became believers in the major religious movements? If there were people 2,000 years ago who thought they saw a ghost, or thought they saw miraculous, supernatural events, we might not blame them for their conclusions. They can't be faulted for not knowing what we know and not having the IQ that we have. But an assumption in our religious culture seems to be that if those people were satisfied that Jesus was resurrected or that Mohamed was Allah's prophet, then we should be satisfied too. The original believers would have been sufficiently thoughtful, reflective, objective, critical, and smart to figure out the truth, so we can trust their conclusions. But as soon as we bring the assumption out that way, it is obvious what a mistake it is. Would you accept the conclusions about the most important questions facing humanity without questions from someone today with an IQ of 60? Do you think they would be the most reliable, thoughtful, objective source of information you could find? Compared to you, they lacked an enormous amount of relevant information and they were equipped with reasoning skills that were far worse.

The suggestion here is outrageous and offensive, I know. But what other conclusion can we see? If we know that IQ is highly responsive to environmental factors and that those factors were worse in previous eras of history, then we know that IQs were lower--significantly lower--in those eras. And if we are getting our information about alleged supernatural events like miracles, invisible gods with magical powers, people coming back from the dead, and so on from these same people, then surely the fact about their mental capacities is relevant to our assessment of their reliability. We've got to consider the source, and we shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that they were just like us in all of the epistemically relevant ways. What would you think if you found out that your doctor or someone else entrusted with very important matters in your life had a 60 IQ? So why would you be willing to entrust the 1st century believers to provide you with answers to the ultimate questions about God, reality, and the place of humanity in the cosmos?

Ghosts, Resurrections, and Bereavement Hallucinations

When people undergo an emotionally traumatic event, it has dramatic effects on the brain. When people lose someone they love, it is quite common for them to have hallucinations of the person (or pet!) shortly after the loss. The phenomena is now well documented and is known as bereavement hallucinations. In one study, an amazing 80% of elderly widows report having hallucinations—either full visual or auditory—up to a month after the spouse has died. It appears that the neurochemistry of grief is playing an active role on systems in the brain that contribute to visual representation. People report seeing or hearing the lost person in some familiar environment, being visited in their dreams, or having conversations with them while being completely awake.

This phenomena suggest several interesting points about religious beliefs. First, consider the resurrection stories about Jesus. If Jesus was a real person and he was executed in the public and dramatic fashion that is alleged, then the emotional impact on his devoted followers would have been staggering. Suppose there were 20 people in Jesus’ immediate circle of committed followers. If the studies above can be taken as an indicator of the likelihood of some sort of post death hallucination in which Jesus would revisit the followers, we can actually generate some probabilities. If there is a .5 probability for each person that they will experience a hallucination of Jesus after his death, then we would expect half of them to have one. The odds that none of the followers would have a hallucination are vanishingly small. What are the odds that you could flip a coin 20 times and get all heads? That is to say, knowing that bereavement hallucinations are so common, we would predict with a high degree of certainty that Jesus’ followers, like any other normal human beings, would have them. It would be far more surprising and unlikely for them not to report having seen Jesus returned from the dead.

So some or many of his followers most certainly would have had these hallucinations, and they would have talked with each other, encouraged each other, adjusted their stories, filled in or altered the details just as normal people do when they give testimony about important events. The question then is not so much whether or not they reported having such experiences—most people do. The question will be given that so many normal people have such experiences and they are the product of neurobiological functions in the brain and nothing more, what reasons do we have to think that the experiences the followers of Jesus had are not the ordinary, common hallucinations, but actually of something real? As I have argued in several previous posts, we have ample reason for not leaping to that extraordinary conclusion when such an obvious, common, and well documented natural explanation is available.

But what would an ordinary person in the first century be led to think if they had such an experience? The data I cited above wouldn’t have been available to them. They scarcely had any conception of what a brain is or what role it plays in fabricating, falsifying, or altering experience in special circumstances. Such an experience would have been utterly mystifying. We can imagine that it would have seemed to them that the only obvious and reasonable explanation of what they saw was that they were being visited by a ghost or the resurrected person they love. A failure to appreciate the capacities of the human brain have no doubt played a huge role in the fact that 70-80% of modern Americans believe in ghosts, afterall. If modern humans are having these experiences and concluding that they are ghosts, then surely the 1st century religious zealots following Jesus would have been no more insightful or informed. It may have been reasonable for them to think that Jesus was resurrected given that they just wouldn’t have known any better. But we have substantial reasons to think they were wrong. Clearly, what might be reasonable for someone 2,000 years without the benefits of science and the vast body of knowledge that we have should not be accepted as reasonable for us. What remains the baffling puzzle is why so many people are willing to simply accept what the early believers claimed without question while being so much better informed about so many things. Modern Christians will employ the highest levels of critical scrutiny to carefully dismantle the evidence for global warming while accepting the under reported claim from a small group of 1st century Iron Age religious zealots that their leader was magically resurrected from the dead.

Background articles on bereavement hallucinations:

Visits from the Deceased

Bereavement Hallucinations

Widows and Hallucinations

The Case Against Christ

Here's the text of a presentation I just did for a student group at UC Davis. The Powerpoint slides are linked here.

Preliminaries:
• You shouldn’t be here.
• What I’m going to say is just going to ruin everything.
• You should be in church.
• Seriously, some of you really should go to church instead.
• Ok, I warned you.

What you believe:
 The chances are very good that you consider yourself to be a Christian.
 If you are a Christian, then you believe that Jesus was a real person.
 So you probably also believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.
 That is, Jesus was a supernatural being of some sort and the most important event concerning him was his execution then his magical revival from the dead.
 But believing that Jesus was resurrected is irrational for you.

Believing in Jesus’ Resurrection is Irrational for You:
 The body of evidence is small, weak, and riddled with unanswered questions.
 There are other alleged supernatural events about which you have far more substantial evidence, yet you reject those beliefs on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence.
 So by rejecting those better supported claims and accepting the magical claims about Jesus, you are employing a grossly inconsistent epistemic standard.
 You engage in an ad hoc lowering of the bar about Jesus, yet in other comparable cases you sustain a higher level of proof that would lead you reject Jesus.
 My goal: to get you to acknowledge that your continued believing in the resurrection of Jesus is unreasonable and inconsistent with your epistemic policies.
 What’s the evidence we have concerning the resurrection?

The Gospels: some history
 Jesus is thought to have been executed about 35 A.D.
 The first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are our only source of information about the events.
 Mark was written around 65 A.D.
 Matthew was written between 70-100 A.D. and Luke was written around 70 A.D. The agreement is that they were based largely on Mark and another source, now lost, called the Q source.
 John was written around 90-100 A.D.
 None of these works were written by eyewitnesses, and none of them were written by the disciples Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
 The authors of the books heard the stories from others. We do not know how many people the stories passed through from the events to their being recorded. It could have been 2, 20, or 200.

Problem #1: The Paucity of Evidence
 So if we are being careful about what we know and what we don’t, this is what we have:
 3 hearsay sources (Mark, Q, and John) written 30-90 years after the fact with an unknown number of transmissions before.
 This picture is brief and rough; the discussion of the details is vast.

#2: The 3 Stories are Surprisingly Contradictory:
 Luke: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary (James’ mother) and other women go to the tomb, find it open, talk to two men in shining garments, and then go tell what they saw to the other disciples.
 Mark: Mary Magdalene, Mary (James’ mother), and Salome go to the tomb, find it open, and find one man sitting there in white inside. They talk to him, then they run away in fear and they do not say “any thing to any man; for they were afraid.”
 Matthew: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb. A great earthquake opens it by rolling the stone away. They go inside and find an angel of the Lord in white. Then they leave with fear and joy and run to bring the disciples word.
 John: Mary Magdalene (by herself) finds the tomb open. She goes and gets Simon Peter and the other disciple “that Jesus loved.” The two of them go to the tomb and find it empty. They leave, but Mary stays crying. Then two angels appear to her. Then Jesus himself appears to her. She talks to him and then goes to tell the rest of the disciples.

#3: Probability, Reliability and Transmission:
 Suppose the police must escort $10,000 in drug money across the country from New York to Los Angeles.
 The money will be in police custody for the whole trip, but it will change hands between three different cops for different legs of the journey.
 There is corruption in their police departments so that the general likelihood that a given cop is honest is .8.
 If a corrupt cop gets custody of the drug money, he or she will take some.
 If an honest cop gets custody, he or she will deliver it to the next leg of the trip without taking any of it.

Question: What are the odds of all the money arriving in Los Angeles?
 Answer: .51. (.8 x .8 x .8)
 If you add two more cops at the .8 honesty rate it goes down to .32 (And that’s despite the fact that majority of cops in each department are honest.)
 That is, even if the links in the transmission chain are individually probably reliable, the cumulative effect quickly undermines the result.
 The cops here represent the people who transmitted the Jesus story from the alleged eyewitnesses to the authors of the Gospels.

How Reliable are Eyewitnesses to Miracles?
 What about the original reports of Jesus’ resurrection? (Do we have $10,000?)
 Can we determine the reliability of eyewitness miracle testimony?
 We can.
 Lourdes, France: 80,000 pilgrims a year for over a century= more than 8 million people.
 Suppose, charitably, that half experienced something they took to be supernatural.
 66 miracles have been declared to be real by the official investigating body of the Catholic church.
 Miracle testimony reliability= 66/4,000,000 or .0000165
 (A probability needs to be greater than .5 to be reasonable.)

Odds on the Jesus Story?
 Now we can improve our account:
 .0000165 x .8 x .8 x .8= .000008
 That’s about 8 in 1 million.
 If we reduce the number of “real” miracles at Lourdes, as we should, to a still generous 5, and lower the reliability of the transmitters or add a few more links, then the result is
 .000000021 or about 1 in 5 million.
 The point: our confidence in the Jesus story is orders of magnitude smaller than it needs to be for us to take it seriously. Given what we know about the original reporting and the transmission of these stories it is exceedingly unlikely that they are true.

It Gets Worse
 Question: Would the early followers of Jesus have been more or less reliable about reporting miraculous events than the people at Lourdes?
 Answer: Much less reliable.

#4: You reject supernatural claims with more evidence:
 We have even more reasons to doubt the reliability of the original believers because of who they were and when they lived.
 Several important differences between them and us undermine their reliability even more:

Supernatural Belief Threshold
 How disposed is a person, in general, to accept or reject claims about supernatural entities, forces, or events?
 Low SBT = they are more readily disposed to believe that supernatural claims are true. Their error rate with regard to supernatural claims would be high: they would conclude that miracles were more common than they really are, for example.
 If there were supernatural ideas circulating about that were false or unfounded, this person would be more likely to believe them and repeat them.
 The person with a low SBT would mislead you in the direction of accepting more of those claims than are true and well-supported.

Ignorance
 If someone is largely ignorant of the important background information concerning a topic, then their lack of information reduces their reliability.
 So my ignorance about it should diminish the confidence you have about one of those claims being true, all other things being equal.
 That’s why you shouldn’t believe me when I insist that the Detroit Lions will win the Superbowl.
 And that’s why you shouldn’t get your political views from Lindsay Lohan.

Religiousness and supernaturalism are inversely related to education:
 We have good empirical evidence that as a person’s education level increases, their belief in survival of the soul, miracles, heaven, the resurrection, the virgin birth, hell, the devil, ghosts, astrology, and reincarnation drop off dramatically. (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?pid=359)
 Gallup Polls have consistently found similar results. (http://www.gallup.com/poll/109108/Belief-God-Far-Lower-Western-US.aspx)
 Religiousness, superstition, and supernaturalism are positively correlated with ignorance. When people have more education, they are less likely to believe.

We can make the same sort of projection back across time:
 Consider the difference between your education level, or the general level of knowledge that the average American with a K-12 education has and the level of ignorance of a simple fisherman or a beggar living in the first century in Palestine.
 Almost all of the information that you take for granted, the technology, and the methods for acquiring information were unavailable to them.
 A tiny fraction of the population would have been literate.
 Their mathematical abilities would have been worse than today’s average 3rd grader.
 They did not know that the Earth moves, or what the Sun was.
 They did not know what electricity, hydrogen are.
 They did not know what caused disease, or pregnancy, or death.
 If religiousness, superstition, and supernaturalism rise as education goes down, then they must have been rampant among the people who had contact with Jesus (if he was real at all.)

Were they skeptical?
 How much skepticism, doubtfulness, or disposition towards critical scrutiny does a person have?
 If a person habitually reflects on the evidence carefully, makes a conscious and careful effort to gather the broadest body of relevant evidence, and actively seeks out disconfirming grounds for a claim, that, all other things being equal, is favorable with regard to their trustworthiness as a source of information.
 If a person whose skepticism is high becomes satisfied that X is true, then you could be more confident that it is true, all other things being equal, than you would be if your source for the same claim was someone who is generally gullible, uncritical, and who does not reflect or seek out disconfirming evidence.

The Point
 The early believers would have had a low Supernatural Belief Threshold, a high level of Ignorance, and a low level of Skepticism.
 SBT: For Iron Age people 2,000 years ago, the world would have been full of mysterious forces, magical events, spiritual entities, stories about supernatural happenings. Hundreds of the events that you observe every day and know the causes of would have been complete mysteries to them. For all they knew, headaches were caused by magic. The possibility that someone could come back from the dead would have seemed like common sense to them. (Bereavement hallucinations)
 Ignorance: They were ignorant of the information that we have concerning religious tendencies, religious group dynamics, psychology, alternative explanations for paranormal beliefs.
 They were ignorant of the 2,000 years of examples of allegedly supernatural events that turned out to be easily explainable in natural terms.
 In that 2,000 years, we have learned a staggering amount about how human psychology works, errors in reasoning, problems in eye-witness reports, gullibility, mistakes, social-religious phenomena, and so on.
 Skepticism: They would have been much less skeptical overall than many people who are good sources of information now are.
 They would not have been trained or practiced or even familiar with the notions of disconfirming evidence, alternative explanations, bias, and justification.
 They were deeply committed religious converts.

#5: You already reject supernatural claims with more evidence
 The early Christian stories are often defended as reliable on the grounds that:
 there were multiple eyewitness accounts,
 the story would have been too difficult to fake given the public nature of Jesus’ execution,
 the witnesses would not have had any ulterior motives about reporting something that would get them persecuted,
 the followers were so convinced that they gave up their jobs and their possessions,
 many of the events of the New Testament have been historically corroborated: the reign of Herod, the destruction of the temple, the growth of the early church.
 and so on

The Salem Witch Trials
 Between 1692 and 1693, dozens of people were accused, arrested, stood trial, and were tortured or hanged for “Sundry acts of Witchcraft,” possession by devils, and other supernatural ill deeds.
 Strange behavior in some little girls fed suspicions. They would dash about, freeze in grotesque postures, complain about biting and pinching sensations, and have violent seizures.
 Ultimately over 150 people were accused.
 William Phips, the governor of Massachusetts got involved. A court was established.
 Thorough investigations were conducted. Witnesses were carefully cross-examined.
 Evidence was gathered. Many people confessed.
 The entire proceedings were carefully documented with thousands of sworn affidavits, court documents, interviews, and related papers.
 In the end, 19 people, including Sarah Goode, and Rebekah Nurse had been sentenced and executed.
 Today, the Salem Witch Trials are a frightening example of how enthusiasm, hysteria, social pressure, anxiety, and religious fervor can be powerful enough to lead ordinary people to do such extraordinary and mistaken things. “Witch hunt” has come to be synonymous with an irrational and emotionally heated persecution.

What evidence do we have that the women in Salem were really witches?
 First, hundreds of people were involved in concluding that the accused were witches.
 They testified in court, signed sworn affidavits, and demonstrated their utter conviction that the accused were witches.
 Furthermore, they came from diverse backgrounds and social strata.
 They included magistrates, judges, the governor of Massachusetts, respected members of the community, husbands of the accused, and so on.
 These people had a great deal to lose by being correct—men would lose their wives, children would lose their mothers, community members would lose friends they cared about. It seems very unlikely that they could have had ulterior motives.
 The trials were thorough, careful, exhaustive investigations. They deliberately gathered evidence, and made a substantial attempt to objectively sort out truth from falsity. In the court trials, they attempted to carefully discern the facts.
 That there were witch trials in Salem and that many people were put to death has been thoroughly corroborated with a range of historical sources.

We have a great deal of historical evidence about Salem
 The trials were a mere 300 years ago, not 2,000.
 We have the actual documents; we do not have any of the original Gospels, only copies from centuries later.
 We have the actual, sworn testimony of people claiming to have seen the magic performed; the Gospel stories are retellings of stories that were passed by word of mouth through an unknown number of people.
 For the Salem witch trials, we have enough evidence to fill a truck. Some of the original documents: http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/texts/transcripts.html

Evidence for Magic in Salem >> than Evidence for Magic in Jerusalem
 By any reasonable measure of quantity and quality, the evidence we have for concluding that there were real witches in Salem is vastly better than the evidence we have for concluding that Jesus was magical.
 Yet it is simply not reasonable to believe that the women in Salem really were witches or really performed magic.
 It is obvious to any reasonable person that even though they were tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft, they were not witches and they did not perform any magical acts. You don’t think they were witches.
 Nor do I need to defend any particular alternative explanation, such as the rotten rye grain/hallucination theory, in order to reasonably conclude that they weren’t witches. I can be sure that they weren’t witches even if I don’t know all of what really happened.
 The Salem Witch Trials show that it is possible to meet an even heavier burden of proof than what we have for the resurrection of Jesus, and it remains unreasonable to believe that anything magical happened.
 No clear headed person should accept the claim that the historical evidence makes it reasonable to believe that Jesus came back from the dead.

Conclusion: Believing in Jesus’ Resurrection is Irrational for You
 The evidence you have smaller, weaker, and too riddled with unanswered questions.
 We have good reasons to think that the people who originally told the stories were not reliable. 1/ 5 million.
 If you think it is reasonable to believe that Jesus came back from the dead, you’re employing a grossly inconsistent double standard: There are many other alleged supernatural events that you have better evidence for, yet you adopt a high level of skepticism and proof and reject them. (Salem Witch Trials)
 It is unreasonable to engage in an ad hoc lowering of the bar about Jesus, and accept a tiny, tenuous group of hearsay stories from a group of Iron Age religious converts about outrageous magical events.

The Problems:
 Problem 1: Only three hearsay sources.
 Problem 2: The stories about the resurrection are contradictory.
 Problem 3: The probability of a claim equals the factorial of the reliability of all points of its transmission
 Problem 4: The early believers would have been highly receptive to supernatural claims, their ignorance of relevant alternative explanations would have been high, and they would have had a low level of skepticism.
 Religiousness and supernaturalism are inversely related to education.
 We can make the same sort of projection back across time.
 Problem 5: Your evidence for magic in Salem (and other supernatural events) is better than your evidence for magic in Jerusalem. (Reject them both!)
 Amen.

Putting Odds On Jesus

Suppose several police departments are transferring $10,000 of drug money across country from New York to Los Angeles. Along the way, the money will change hands three times. We have independent evidence that there is corruption in the three police departments that the cops are from. On the whole, the likelihood that a cop from any of those departments is honest is .8. If a corrupt cop gets custody of the money, then he or she will take some. If an honest cop gets custody, they will deliver it to the next leg of the journey without taking any.

Question: What are the odds of all of the money arriving in Los Angeles?

Probability theory says that the answer is .51. Or .8 x .8 x .8. If we add two more cops at the .8 honesty rate it goes down to .32. And that’s despite the fact that majority of cops in each department are honest.

The majority of Americans consider themselves to be Christians. And if you consider yourself to be a Christian, then you believe that Jesus was a real person and he was resurrected from the dead.

Your only source of information about this event is the first four books of the Christian New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus is alleged to have come back from the grave around 35 AD. Mark was written about 30 years later at 65 AD. The consensus seems to be that Matthew and Luke were written between 70-100 A.D. John was written around 90-100. How many links in the chain of transmission are there between the events in question and when the authors of these books wrote down the story? We don’t know. They were not eyewitnesses; they heard the stories by word of mouth, most scholars believe, and there could have 2, 20, or 200 links between them and the original events. How reliable was each one of those links? We do not know.

We do know this. Eye witnesses are quite poor, especially when they are extraordinary events.
They mix the orders up, the miss important details, they revise, they augment, they embellish, and so on. Even moments after an event, they make serious mistakes.

What do we know about testimony? We know that when a person testifies that some claim is true and all we have to evaluate is the testimony, we can attach a value to the probability that what they are saying is true. In general, when people assert that x is true, and they mean it, we can and should ask, what is the probability that it is true, given that Smith, for instance, asserts that it is. For most of us, it would mean something for Smith to say it earnestly. And if Smith says he is utterly convinced of its truth—he says he’s 100% certain that it is true—then that should count for a lot in my assessment of whether or not x actually is true.

What do we know about people’s confidence levels and the real accuracy of their claims? In general, people are over-confident. They will claim to be accurate and certain more often than they are. In one study, subjects were asked to spell a word and then indicate how confident they were that they had spelled it correctly. When they were “100% certain” in fact they only spelled the word correctly 80% of the time. You’ve had this feeling of certainty many times about a spelled word. When you have it, it would be very hard to dissuade you without substantial proof, that you were wrong. But there are the real rates. (Adams and Adams, “Confidence in the recognition and reproduction of words difficult to spell,” American Journal of Psychology, 73, 544-552)

Other recent work has shown a remarkable level of change and choice blindness in test subjects. Have subjects pick the most attractive person from a group of pictures of people, surreptitiously switch the picture on them, and then ask them to explain why they think the switched picture is of the most attractive person, and they don’t miss a beat. They start explaining why without even noticing the switch. Have shoppers taste a range of tea samples and have them pick their favorite. Then switch it without their knowing and ask them to taste it again and explain why they think it is the best. Even when you replace their favorite, say apple cinamon, with a completely different flavor, 2/3 of the subjects don’t notice the change and the confabulate a justification for why that’s their favorite.

The data in change blindness cases is even more remarkable. Here’s a video of two teams of people passing a basketball, one group in white shirts and one group in black shirts. Watch the video carefully and try to count the number of times that the white team passes the ball. http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php

A surprising number of subjects do not notice what should be obvious. In some of these studies, 75% of the subjects do not notice. (Change Blindness)
So robust empirical evidence shows us that change and choice blindness, and overconfidence cast substantial doubt on the reliability of eye witness testimony. Volumes of other studies document the problems with eye witness accounts.

Do we have any way to attach a reliability estimate to the first person in the chain, the individuals who are alleged to have witnessed the resurrected Jesus himself? We do. Every year at the shrine at Lourdes, France, more than 80,000 pilgrims visit. The spring waters there are alleged to have healing powers, after a woman claims to have seen the Virgin Mary. Over the course of a century, then, that is more than 8 million visitors.

The official representatives of the Catholic church have been conservative about the real occurrence of miracles there. They have officially recognized 66. Let’s be generous and grant that 66 real miracles have actually occurred there.

Let’s also be conservative and suppose that of the 8 million visitors, half of them felt that they had observed or felt a real supernatural or spiritual event. This number is conservative because the vast majority of people going there do so with the strong expectation that miracles have occurred there in the past, and that they will be miraculously healed as well.

So for the visitors at Lourdes, what is their reliability for reporting miraculous events? 66/4,000,000 or .0000165. That is, even setting the number of felt miracles low and agreeing with the church about the number of real miracles, the probability that the miracle claim from any given pilgrim is true is .0000165.

Should we think that the general reliability of the early Christians who spread the Jesus story was greater or less than the pilgrims at Lourdes? I should think it would be much lower. The pilgrims are modern, educated, scientific era people. Many of them are doctors, lawyers, and scientists, people who are trained in making good decisions and being skeptical. They have the benefit of 2,000 years of investigations into the natural causes of allegedly supernatural events. The early Christians, by contrast, would have been largely illiterate, poor, uneducated. They would not have the benefit of the huge body of scientific and empirical knowledge that we take for granted.

But let’s be exceedingly charitable and grant that the early Christians were 10 times more reliable about reporting miraculous events than the modern visitors to Lourdes. And let’s suppose that there are only 3 steps of transmission between the events in 35 A.D. across 30 years to when Mark first wrote the story down. And let’s suppose that those three links were much more reliable than the cops in the story above. What are the odds that the resurrection story is true:

.00165 x .9 x .9 x .9 = .00012

That is, on a vastly charitable estimate, there is a one in ten thousand chance that the story is true.

Should we be that charitable? No. We should not be generous about the 66 miracles at Lourdes. Many of the cases in support would crumble under any serious, objective scrutiny. I would be surprised if 5 of them didn’t have an obvious natural explanation. And I suspect that many more people than 4,000,000 thought they felt or saw something spiritually significant there. If there have been 6 million of them, and 5 real miracles, then the reliability rating of Lourdes pilgrims is 0.00000083333. And the reliability rating for early Christians should be much lower given that they did not have the advantage of 2,000 years of science and a modern education to augment their analysis of miracles. Nor should we grant that all of the tranmission links in the story to Mark would have a .9 reliability. There are too many unanswered questions, too many doubts, and the human propensities to embellish, omit, revise, and confabulate are too great.

Still granting only 3 steps, a more reasonable estimate is:

.000000833 x .7 x .7 x .7 = 0.0000002858

or about 1 in 5 million. According to the U.S. National Weather Service, the odds of your being struck by lightning in your lifetime are 1 in 5,000.

When people take the Jesus stories seriously and make comments like, “Why would the early Christians lie?” or “what incentive could that have for making it all up?” or “how could they have perpetrated such a deception?” they are simply ignoring the strength of the tendency in the human mind to see miracles or events of spiritual or supernatural origin at every turn. We don’t need to have a better, alternative explanation to be quite sure that Jesus was not resurrected from the dead. The reliability of the information transmitted in those stories to us is just too low.

Dead as a Doornail

Here are the slides for a presentation at CSUS this week. I argue that the prospects for using out of body or near death experiences as evidence for the existence of some transcendental realm are very dim. People often have OBEs when they are clinically dead (18%!), but brain activity can continued then since "clinical death" only means that heartrate and respiration have stopped. If someone had an OBE during complete brain death, it would be important, but no one comes back from complete brain death, and even if they did we would have a Timing Problem.

Dead as a Doornail

UCDavis presentation

The God Projector

At this point in the many decades that I have been contemplating the question, the non-existence of God or any other gods is quite clear to me. I’m as confident about that conclusion as I am about any philosophical, abstract, or non-observable matter. God’s non-existence seems as sure as oxygen’s existence. Perhaps that is the result of my being too impressed with the power of my own logic. But there are some other powerful indicators that I take as corroboration. In the last 50 years, serious theistically minded philosophers, for the most part, have abandoned evidential or “natural” approaches to the problem. The emergence of alternative characterizations of religious belief like process theology, existential theology, fideism, reformed epistemology, mystical and religious experience accounts, Wittgensteinian accounts, and others all implicitly or explicitly concede the point that attempting to gather evidence or produce arguments that are sufficient to render belief in God reasonable is doomed to fail. It is also clear that neither arguments nor evidence were the source of it in the first place. They never led people to love, tithe, build cathedrals, sacrifice themselves, strap on suicide bombs, go to war, or embrace cults. Religious beliefs do, however. That is to say that whatever is going on in the vast majority of people who are religious, it is not a matter of thoughtful reflection on the evidence. They became religious without that, and the sustain a high level of belief withou it. I also take the widespread consensus among my philosophy of religion students over the years to be significant: in their view, the whole philosophical project of inquiring into the evidence that could provide epistemic justification for the existence of God is perverse and alien. Many of them were 22 or 25 or older before they had ever heard someone even pose the question, “What is the evidence that we have that would make believing in God reasonable?” That strikes them as odd because that never had anything to do with God beliefs that they knew of.

So to sum up, these reasons lead me to think that belief in God for most people is not a matter of accepting a reasonable conclusion based on an evaluation of the evidence: first, there are lots of powerful arguments for thinking that there is no God that I have detailed in scores of blog posts; second, even the theologians and philosophers have abandoned evidential or natural approaches to belief in God; third, the level of devotion (and insanity) that is common among religious believers suggests that something more passional or psychological is going on; and fourth, most people, including believers, seem to think that religious belief is a matter of faith, or personal preference, or disposition, but not reasoning.

That all leaves us facing an incredible question: why then do so many people believe, and believe and act they way they do about God? Our inquiry into possible rational grounds has not produced any results that can reflect the passionate commitment, or the consuming power of religious belief in the human psyche. So we are left with trying to suss out the non-rational causes of belief, the psychological, sociological, neurobiological, and evolutionary forces that have shaped this monster in the human mind. Many of my recents posts have pursued these hypotheses. Here’s an interesting possibility.

The human visual system is constructed to produce a stunning illusion when it is confronted with a rotating mask of a face. As the mask rotates and the back, concave side comes into view, it will appear at first that the inside of the mask curves out away from you. But as it continues to rotate, the inner surface that should be curved away suddenly pops forward so that it looks like the face is bulging out normally towards you. What should be the inside looks like a normal face looking at you. Look at this example: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/fcs_hollow-face/index.html

The cognitive dissonance of the effect is striking because you know that the inner surface is curving away and that the nose should be in reverse image, but it looks just like a normal convex face. And no matter what cognitive effort you exert, you can’t not see the face sticking out. You are unable to look at the inside of a mask and see it as the inside.

Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Explaining Consciousness, Sweet Dreams) has argued that evolution has equipped the human mind with an intentionality projector, a mind endower, or a self broadcaster. We are highly prone to endow other entities, particularly ones with complex and difficult to predict behavior, with a mind. We don’t just see another organism as an object that moves, we see a self there, a being with a perspective. There is some way that the world appears to it and it has plans, desires, knowledge, and beliefs. Modeling other entities behavior in terms of its possessing intentionalilty has enormous predictive value. If I can think about what the wolf wants, what it knows, what plans it has, and what it will do next then I have a much better chance of thwarting those plans. (That’s good if it wants to eat me.) I don’t recall Dennett putting the point this way, but isn’t this propensity to endow certain kinds of entities with an intentional mind very difficult to supress? Isn’t it very hard to us to not see certain kinds of beings as possessing a mind? It would be very hard, for example, to see another human being who is talking to me and acting normally the way I would see a tree blowing in the wind, or a rock sitting on the path. I can’t help but see you as a self—a center of consciousness that is navigating the same world I inhabit but by a different path and set of experiences.

What if believing in God, feeling God, or experiencing God in the world and in our lives is a forced cognitive illusion that is a product of our wiring the way the rotating mask illusion is? What if we can’t help but believe, or experience God or some near analog?

Many people find this new agey idea quite charming—there’s the same element of the divine in everyone. We should see all different religions and spirituals experiences as manifestations of the same divine inspiration in all of us. All different spiritualities are accessing the same fundamental force or energy. Of course, when the point is put this way, it is celebratory. Religious feelings are a good thing to be encouraged in all, and the common thread to them all is a confirmation that there is something larger and more powerful than all of us.

I am suggesting a darker analysis. The God Illusion (yes, that’s very close to Dawkins’ The God Delusion) is a cognitive error, a throw back, side effect, or kludgey by product of our believing and perceptual systems. We are naturally endowed with propensity to project God out into the world as one of the things we experience, or an answer to our questions, or the cause of some events. We’re like a cavefish that dangles a glowing light in front of its own face, but has no clue that its coming from its own head. Everywhere we go, we keep seeing or feeling God, or arriving at God as the underlying cause or explanation of it all. “Surely God is great, powerful, and omnipresent!” Every time something tragic happens, our thoughts turn to God. And when something great befalls, then God must be praised and thanked. “God is infinitely wise and has a plan for me. And God is unimaginably good too. We should praise him!”

But those feelings and beliefs are illusions. He’s not really there. There is no face pointing out at you, but you just can’t help but think that there is. You can’t not think God is real.

The Forbidden Conclusion

Human beings are psychologically incapable of simultaneously holding two contradictory propositions in mind at once and having an attitude of assent or belief towards both of them. That is, we can't believe an outright contradiction. Nor do we have much voluntary control over which claims we believe. We can't, through the force of our will, start believing something new or stop believing something that we previously assented to. Try it. Get yourself to actually believe that Barack Obama is not the president of the United States, 2 + 2 = 5, or that Matthew McConaghey is not the sexiest man alive. Ok, just kidding on the last one.

"But people believe contradictory, irrational things all the time!" will be the objection. Here's what's really going on. An occurrent belief is one that is in conscious awareness now. In many cases, we have an occurrent belief that contradicts with some other claim that we believe or believed, but it is not occurrent. There are all sorts of things buried in my mind that I am not currently thinking about that could conflict with something that I am thinking about, but I just haven't made the connection and seen the problem. In other cases, a pair of beliefs we have are only implicitly contradictory. The two claims are not an outright contradiction, but were we to supply some other beliefs and draw out some of the logical implications of them, a genuine contradiction would emerge. But again, if I haven't thought it all out, I won't have an occurrent contradictory belief pair.

There are other sources of cognitive tension. Some groups of propositions are probabilistically contradictory--one asserts what another declares to be exceedingly improbable. If I won the lottery three days in a row, it would strike me as exceedingly improbable that the lottery was really a fair, million to one game.

Now some relevant points from neuroscience and philosophy of mind. The current picture of the world that occupies consciousness from moment to moment is a construction where what I am seeing, hearing, feeling, or thinking now is threaded together with my memories of the recent and not so recent past. What I am sensing now with the keyboard under my fingers is not the same as what I was feeling 10 minutes ago, but consciousness builds a continuous narrative that bridges those sensations and makes causal and psychological sense of the transitions. There was an entity, the I, who was in the kitchen then, and after that, I walked up the stairs and sat down at the computer. A world of continuous, causally regular objects that is also inhabited by the continuous subject is constructed (unbeknownst to me) out of the meaningless raw feels of thought and sensation.

This fleeting, perpetually forward rolling window of consciousness is discontent, as we have seen, with a picture of the world and the self that doesn't make sense. It abhors contradictions in the story of the world and the self that it creates. Concerning the world, this disposition manifests as a set of expectations that events and objects are regular, predictable, and sensible. The aversion to contradiction creates a forbidden conclusion about the self. It is profoundly disturbing for us to think of our selves as irrational. Seeing contradictions in the words and actions of others comes easy--consider how starkly some conflict between two claims from your husband or girlfriend leapt out at you the last time you were in an argument. Now consider how it felt when she accused you of first saying X was true and then contradicting yourself 5 minutes later by saying not-X. When you heard those two claims put together, your mind scrambled for an account that would diminish the seeming conflict. You quickly found an explanation whereby saying both of those things makes perfect sense. See? It is profoundly difficult, if not impossible to acknowledge about oneself that your own beliefs are at deep logical odds with each other. "I am irrational," is the forbidden conclusion that we cannot face, even when it is plainly obvious.

Experimentally, the refusal to accept it displays itself in revisions, confabulations, memory editing, and misrepresentations. In one study, subjects were asked to pick the most attractive person from a stack of pictures. Then the subject's choice was swapped for another picture without their knowledge. The researchers then asked the subjects why they picked that picture instead of the others. Without missing a step, and without even knowing they did so, subjects promptly confabulated a justification for why the new picture was of their most attractive original pick. The fact they cannot accept: I made a mistake--the picture I picked is not the most attractive one in the stack. Goethals, G. R., & Reckman, R. F. (1973). The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 9(6), 491-501.

In another study, high school students were tested to determine their attitude about a topic. Then a confederate in the study discussed the topic with them and subtley affected an attitude change in them. The subjects were assessed again and it was found that as a result of the confederate, they had a different view about the topic. But when asked to recall their view from before, they recounted their original position to make it consistent with their new one. Unknowingly, they made recall errors that rendered the new views as the one that they had believed all along. The perception of consistency in attitudes, George R. Goethals and Richard F. Reckman

In a now famous study by Nisbett and Wilson, shoppers were asked to evaluate various clothing items for quality. Multiple trials and randomization revealed that no matter what the arrangement of the articles of clothing, the subjects had a bias for the right hand items. When they were asked to justify their choice, however, they would construct an explanation on the basis of various features of the item. That is, subjects tended to pick the right item no matter which one was put there, and then they would make up a story about why it was the best one. Nisbett, R.E. and Wilson, T.D. "Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes".Psychological Review, Vol 84 pp 231-259.

Other studies show that when people have a strong conviction that a claim is true, they will heavily filter the evidence to make it fit. They will accept evidence that appears to confirm their view readily and with little scrutiny, but they will subject disconfirming evidence to high levels of criticism and analysis. So when they encounter contrary evidence to what they believe, it tends to actually reinforce their view and polarize them further into it. Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence, Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1979, Vol. 37, No. 11, 2098-2109

Ziva Kunda, a psychologist from Princeton, describes two impulses that are at odds in us. We have a motivation to be accurate--to form correct views about the world. But we also possess substantial motivation to arrive at particular favored conclusions. She says, "There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions." The Case for Motivated Reasoning, Psychological Bulletin 1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498.

What's the relevance of all of this to religious beliefs? Nowhere in our lives is the powerful conflict between a set of desires or psychological needs on one side and the goal of having an accurate, coherent, justified description of the world on the other more evident than it is about God. We want God to exist. We want the religious doctrine of our childhood to be the correct picture of reality. From the numbers, it is nearly impossible for us to shake off the transcendental temptation. But we can't accept about ourselves that this belief is the product of some invisible forces in our nature, or that it is driven more by desire than by reason. So we go through logical gymnastics and contortions of reason to fabricate "seemingly reasonable justifications." If we find ourselves believing it, we can't help but construct a back story that render that belief a reasonable one. If we didn't, we'd have to face the forbidden conclusion. (Thanks to Randy Mayes for the idea and the title.)

Employee of the Month: God

We have a more comprehensive empirical picture of how humans form beliefs now than we have ever had in history. There are countless pitfalls and errors that we fall into, and detecting them can be very difficult, particularly since we are using our cognitive faculties to evaluate the reliability of our faculties. Despite the difficulties, there are a number of procedural questions that we can ask about a particular case where we search for evidence, evaluate it, and draw a conclusion about it. Considering these questions as part of the evidence gathering and evaluation procedure can dramatically improve the accuracy of the resulting conclusion. Habitually considering these issues can develop the epistemic virtues that will make a person a far better thinker and decision maker. Here are the questions, in no particular order.

Is there any data?
What exactly is the data?
Have I conducted an exhaustive search?
If there were significant counter evidence, would my search have found it?
What else could it be?
What would disprove the hypothesis?
Has my enthusiasm for any particular hypothesis affected the evidence I have searched for or emphasized?
Have I adequately considered other alternatives?
Has search satisfaction led me to stop looking prematurely?
Have I thought about it long enough?
Has my enthusiasm for a hypothesis led me to relax evidential standards for it or increase them for competing hypotheses?
Am I prepared to change my mind in light of new or different evidence?
If there are personal, psychological, or social factors that tilt my evaluation of the evidence, would I be aware of it?
Have I given more or less important pieces of information their appropriate amount of weight?
Has the order of my consideration of the evidence affected my evaluation when it shouldn’t have?
Has the recency or remoteness of some evidence in time affected my evaluation when it shouldn’t have?
Is my memory supplying me with a representative picture of the relevant experiences?
Are there external factors that may be giving me a tilted picture of the facts?
Am I applying principles of justification here that are consistent with the ones I use normally?
Did I sustain a high level of open-mindedness during the search and evaluation phase?
Are the estimates of likelihoods or probabilities that I am employing accurate or realistic?
Would the conclusion drawn withstand a reasonable level of skepticism?

There is no question that the systematic application of these standards of evidence and inference will produce better justifications and better conclusions. Consider ten types of belief formation that would benefit:

A doctor gathers and evaluates diagnostic evidence in order to identify and treat a life threatening disease.
A jury member tries to decide whether or not a defendant is guilty of a capital offense.
A mechanic considers a potentially costly problem in the engine of a car.
A student reflects on which college to attend.
An investor decides how best to spend investment capitol on the stock market.
A couple tries to buy a house that best suits their various needs.
A wife considers what appears to be evidence that her husband is cheating.
A historian attempts to determine the sequence of events surrounding an important battle in an ancient war.
A journalist gathers evidence about a corporation’s involvement in bribery of a corrupt politician.
A plumber tries to figure out what’s wrong with the sink.

This all appears to be belaboring the obvious, but there’s a larger point here concerning religious belief. In every ordinary circumstance, it is trivially obvious that the questions concerning evidence gathering and belief formation from above make the difference between a good and bad decision, or a rational or irrational belief formation. It is also trivially obvious that in the vast majority of cases, a person’s belief in God would fail horribly by the same measures. That is, for most people who believe in God, that belief and the procedure that produced it would not pass muster for the minimally acceptable standards that we employ everywhere else in our lives. The anomaly is even more conspicuous when we consider that the God belief is, arguably, the single most important decision that a person can make in their life. For the most profound question, we employ the worst procedure for finding an answer. If your doctor, mechanic, investment broker, or plumber drew conclusions in the fashion that you drew your religions conclusions, you’d fire them without hesitation. If a jury member, wife, or journalist made decisions that way, they would do irreparable harm.

At a minimum, the believer needs to close the gross double standard gap here. At a minimum, if the believer wants the rest of us to take them seriously, he needs to subject his belief to the same general standards of justification that are vital everywhere else. Suppose the boss is romantically involved with a woman in the office who is, by most accounts, one of the worst employees. And it appears that as a result of her special relationship, she gets raises, special benefits, time-off, and lowered performance expectations. Then the boss announces that she has earned the Employee of the Month award, and he expects the rest of us to acknowledge her worthiness for the honor. Imagine how much worse it would be if there were no grounds at all for the award, but he insisted that we should all take it on faith that she is truly the most outstanding employee.

The hanky panky between you and your God is obvious to the rest of us, but you haven’t been able to get your head clear and see the situation with sufficient objectivity.

"I was raised religious," . . . .

Many people present and justify their religious views by appealing to their backgrounds, the way they were raised, or by their religious affiliation. "Well, I'm a Catholic, and we believe." or "I was raised Lutheran, and we believe....." or "My family has been Buddhist for centuries, and the views we hold are . . . . . "

There's a mistake lurking here. Imagine if someone said, "Well, I was raised as a serial killer, and we believe that more pain is better." "I come from a long line of pedophiles, and we have always done . . . . " and so on. My point is that merely pointing out that one was raised in some fashion doesn't give you any justification whatsoever for its being a reasonable, just, sensible, or moral thing to do. Whether or not the belief is reasonable is an entirely separate question from how you were raised. The comment stems from a fundamental confusion between the causes of belief and the justifications of belief. Analyzing your own belief as an effect of some external causes makes you a helpless machine--you can no more help what you are, in this sense, than a dog can change its breed.

The dangerous side, of course, is that many people feel that appealing to their family or cultural background like this is all the justification they could ever need for believing whatever they believe. It's as if the fact that you were raised that way effectively eliminates any further discussion of whether one should actually believe it. Even if you were caused to believe by your environment, finding that belief in yourself as a result doesn't entitle you to say or think that the claim is true. Only epistemic justification will do that for you.

I think part of this trend arises from our reluctance to criticize religious beliefs and practices and from our concerns to be respectful and honor the rights of individuals. That's fair. But in fact, we'll all benefit more and a person will be respected more if you take the belief seriously and try to understand why it is true (or false) or reasonable (or unreasonable), and not be satisfied merely with "I was just raised that way. . . ." We shouldn't let that go in ourselves or in others. These matters are too important.

Belief Persistence Despite Discredited Evidence

Humans have a pronounced tendency to believe when they shouldn't, disbelieve despite counter-evidence, and sustain beliefs that are unreasonable. One of the ways that this is manifest is as belief persistence. A number of studies, including this one:

Anderson, Lepper, and Ross, “Perseverance of Social Theories: The Role of Explanation in the Persistence of Discredited Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980, Vol. 39, No.6, 1037-1049

have shown that people will go on believing something even after their reasons have been shown to be faulty.

Anderson, Lepper, and Ross presented subjects with some evidence and asked them to theorize about it. Then they told the subjects that the evidence they had been given was completely fabricated and false. But when tested afterwards about the truth of their theory based on that evidence, the subjects still tended to believe. In philosopher speak: For any S who forms belief P on the basis of evidence E, belief in P will tend to persist even after evidence E has been completely discredited to S.

The implications here for religious belief are obvious. Spend a lot of time entertaining fairy tales about Adam and Eve, Noah, and people rising from the dead in Sunday school, and even if you discover that the evidence for those beliefs is suspect, the belief has a way of persisting. Once it's in there, it's very hard to get it out. There's a copy of the study here:

Persistence of Belief After Discredited Evidence

Proving Atheism and Bayes’ Theorem

There’s a significant difference between the actual probability that some event will or has occurred and an individual’s subjective assessment its probability. People frequently assign high probabilities, for example, to events that are exceedingly unlikely. As a person ages, for instance, she will estimate the likelihood that she will be the victim of crime as steadily higher even though the real odds of being a victim of crime are inversely correlated with age. The demographic that is at the highest risk, young men, estimates their risk as the lower than other groups. Bayesian’s have given us a way to treat these subjective estimates. They are a person’s prior probabilities, because they are the person’s estimates of probabilities prior to any real objective testing.

The incredible thing about Bayes’ theorem is that it allows us to account for the two different starting points in probabilistic terms and it has the facility for us to engage in an analysis that can resolve the issue. Two people can start with very different prior probabilities, but as long as they are committed to revising those estimates in the light of all the relevant information, they will converge on the correct answer. If we make enough observations or figure in enough of the right consideration that are relevant to the prior estimate of probability an answer about the real probability of x will become clear.

“You can’t prove it!” is the sneering response that I get from many believers who hear or read my arguments. The root of the criticism, I take it, is that they will reject my conclusions until I can produce some sort of exhaustive, deductive proof that provides perfect certainty. Perhaps then and only then would the critic be willing to take the argument seriously. But somehow I doubt it. For the dedicated believer, there is nothing, even in principle that could actually serve as counter evidence. No proof, no matter how compelling would be accepted. Perhaps sensing this, they feel confident in saying, “You can’t prove it.” because that is more of an avowal of their dedication to their view, than a broad epistemological analysis of the nature of proof in this realm.

We’ve known since Quine’s famous arguments concerning a priori knowledge, and other developments in the 20th century, however, that there’s really nothing that can be proven in the sense that is being asked for. What counts as a successful proof always depends upon other principles, and which principles are the most reasonable to adopt overall is a complicated, global affair. Ultimately, the theoretical descriptions we give to the world, including our standards of deductive and inductive proof are justified by their capacity to address our epistemological needs. And proving one claim always relies upon other claims that can, with some ingenuity, be called into question. Very little seems to be beyond some form of doubt, so for the determined skeptic, some sort of worries can always be engineered. Of course, that skeptic has much worse problems to deal with than the mere fact that we cannot prove God’s existence or non-existence to his satisfaction. His worries cut equally across all putative knowledge claims, whether they are trivial or momentous. So the atheist need not respond to the skeptic as if the skeptic’s challenges are the atheist’s alone to bear.

The pragmatist and naturalist who appreciates the state of play post-Quine should adopt some interesting and broad epistemological principles. The scientific method wherein we propose hypotheses and then actively seek out disconfirming evidence to test them is the best game in town for pressing forward with the knowledge project. It works. And we just don’t have anything that’s any better. We can’t trust the magical books from antiquity, we can’t trust superstition, or religious intuitions, and we can’t trust tradition or authoritative institutions to be reliable guides to the truth. The only thing we can do is adopt hypotheses that have been submitted to the tribunal of aggressive scientific testing as provisionally justified and true, and keep plugging away. That approach has, by far, been the most successful, and fruitful in the past. Indeed, only that approach has succeeded. And the success has been amazing.

In the big picture, then, all justifications are in a word inductive. The best we can ever do is acquire probabilistic conclusions about the world. How should we understand the various arguments that I have made here in those terms? If one is serious about attending to the evidence at all, then as we saw with Bayes’ Theorem, whatever prior probabilities you have concerning some issue, you should continuously fold new information into those considerations and revise those prior probabilities to achieve the most inclusive and well-justified synthesis you can. We can understand why a child believe in Santa for a time, and the prospect of flying reindeer might not seem that outrageous to them considering the wide range of magical things that inhabit the rest of their world. But at some point when enough information is available to them various parts of the story shouldn’t add up anymore. It should get increasingly difficult to reconcile the Santa view with the rest of what a child learns about the world. The probability that the Santa story is true should diminish to the point of being unreasonable.

Something similar has happened over time with Christianity’s magical claims from the Iron Age and their lack of fit with the modern world. Of course there are still those that believe. But as scientific literacy spreads and as the scientific enterprise penetrates deeper into the mysteries of the world, the cognitive dissonance grows. It becomes necessary for belief to retreat into a more and more apologetically complicated labyrinth. Alvin Plantinga has argued that no findings in evolutionary biology can be at all logically incompatible with theism. But one wonders what sort of theism is left from the one’s that started the movements that have such a stranglehold on the consciousness of their followers today. Could the first believers of Christianity have possibly imagined that quarks exist, or that the life had been evolving for billions of years on Earth? If they were being candid and honest, would they have insisted that none of what we have discovered in science casts any doubt on their God stories? If science’s story about the history of life is true, and we have every reason to think that it is, then what work exactly is there left for God to do? What need do we still have for the notion of God?

So what I am arguing here and in many of the previous posts is that when we take all of the various relevant considerations into account—the chain of custody (see Resurrection? Probably Not), religious zealots controlling the story for centuries (See The Fox Guarding the Henhouse), the Mark Bottleneck, the 500 Dead Gods, The Perfect Word of God, Abducted by Aliens, the 300 Year Gap, Grave robbers or Magic?, You Don’t Really Expect Us To Believe That, Do You?, and so on—it is not reasonable to believe that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the information that we have. In Bayesian terms, whatever sort of prior probabilities you may have attached to events like resurrections, miraculously written books, and visits to Earth by divine beings, the arguments that I have given should give you reasons to revise those probabilities unless those arguments are unconvincing for some good reason, or you simply refuse to align your beliefs with the evidence. Of course, I could be wrong too. And if I’m going to be reasonable and consistent about this Bayesian approach, then I would need to revise my prior estimates in the light of compelling new evidence. If I am wrong, then I need you to show me exactly where in the arguments that happens and why. I want to know if I’ve got it wrong.

If I’m not, then even if your prior probabilities had led you to think that God’s existence was a virtual certainty, at some point after folding in enough of the relevant information and revising accordingly, you’ll reach the tipping point and what you used to believe will cease to be plausible in the light of current considerations. And that’s as good a proof of anything that anybody ever gets.

Disbelieving the Believers

By and large, belief in God is a socially transmitted phenomena. People today believe because their parents, family, and friends believe. A believer’s source of information about God is acquired through other people. In the larger picture, Christians, Muslims, and Jews who believe now had their doctrines communicated to them from other believers. A belief of a Christian today is built upon the belief of Christians 2,000 years ago who first began to propagate the stories of Jesus. Some of these stories were later codified in a collection that was deemed to be canonical in the Bible, with the stories that weren’t approved being rejected and even destroyed. Nevertheless, believers today take the beliefs of some of the original followers as evidence.

The reasonableness of a person’s belief today, therefore, will be dependent upon the reasonableness of the earlier followers’ beliefs, at least to the extent to which the modern believer bases their belief on the early believers. Modern Christians base their belief heavily on the authenticity and reliability of the early followers’ beliefs. The Gospels, as well as the rest of the Bible, are the primary source of information that the modern Christian has concerning the reality of Jesus, the resurrection, God, and so on. If Jones’ belief depends upon Smith’s, then there are number of important questions that Jones’ must address if she hopes to be reasonable and justified. “I believe it because Smith said that it is true, and Smith is a reliable source of information,” would be a perfectly common and reasonable inference. That is, Jones shouldn’t accept the claim unless she is satisfied that Smith’s belief is reasonable, and that Smith’s standards of justification meet certain minimal standards.

That means the real question about the origin of the modern Christians’ belief is about the reliability of the first Christians’ beliefs.

Consider important epistemic differences between us and them, and their impact on the question of their reliability.

How disposed is a person, in general, to accept or reject claims about supernatural entities, forces, or events? Let’s call this their Supernatural Belief Threshold (SBT). If they have a low SBT, then they are more readily disposed to believe that supernatural claims are true. If their SBT is high, then they do not have a high receptivity to supernatural claims. Of course, many people will accept one supernatural claim but not another. And many supernatural claims are exclusive because accepting one requires or is associated with rejecting some others. Nevertheless, we can roughly separate people into those who would be more or less willing to accept the general notion that there are forces, events, or agents that exist and that occur that are beyond the mere physical world. A person who accepts that Jesus is the son of God, that God exists, and that the influence of the Holy Spirit is present in the lives of many people finds more supernatural propositions to be plausible than someone is an atheist or who denies those claims and claims like them. Even today, there are many people who have a low SBT and as a result accept claims that most of us would reject. Devout believers routinely go to faith healing revival meetings and witness what appear to be miraculous healings. They leave convinced that a real supernatural event has occurred. But a few questions and some simple investigation reveals that the cases are most likely the result of enthusiasm, mistakes, or, lamentably, outright fraud. Faith healers often provide complimentary wheelchairs to people coming to the meeting who are able to walk, and then in front of thousands they magically command that the person’s ability to walk be restored. When that person gets up and walks away from the wheelchair, thousands of people who don’t know about the deceit are suitably impressed.

What effect would it have for a person to have a low SBT? Their error rate with regard to supernatural claims would be higher than it would be otherwise. They would conclude that miracles were more common than they really are, for example. Suppose there were some supernatural propositions that were true and that were well supported by the available evidence. A person with a low SBT would be quite likely, we will assume, to accept and believe those claims. And if they did and then communicated those claims to you, they would be communicating something true to you. But if there were supernatural ideas circulating about that were false or unfounded, this same person would be more likely to believe them too, so he would be more likely to communicate those mistaken ideas to you too. A person with a high SBT would be the opposite sort of source. Presumably, she would find fewer false or unfounded supernatural claims to be reasonable. And if there were true and reasonable ones available, she would be less likely to believe those and to become a reliable source to you about them. She will mislead you in some cases, but in the direction of having fewer supernatural beliefs than are well-supported. The person with a low SBT would mislead you also, but in the direction of accepting more of those claims than are true and well-supported. The former is too reluctant about such claims, the latter is too promiscuous.

We can also think about the level of ignorance (I) that a person have regarding the issues surrounding x. If someone is largely ignorant of the important background information concerning profession football, for instance, like I am, then that ignorance should be factored into whether or not you should accept the claims that I make about it. If my ignorance about some topic is high, then my authority and my believability or my reliability about it is low. So my ignorance about it should diminish the confidence you have about one of those claims being true, all other things being equal.

We have independent evidence that there is a close connection between belief in God and education level. Numerous studies have demonstrated that as education level increases, belief in God drops off. (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?pid=359) This study also shows that as a person’s education level increases, their belief in survival of the soul, miracles, heaven, the resurrection, the virgin birth, hell, the devil, ghosts, astrology, and reincarnation drop off dramatically. Gallup Polls have consistently found similar results: http://www.gallup.com/poll/109108/Belief-God-Far-Lower-Western-US.aspx

We can see an important parallel here. These studies show that currently across different levels of education, religiousness, superstition, and supernaturalism are positively correlated with ignorance. When people have more education, they are less likely to believe. Now consider the difference between your education level, and the general level of knowledge that the average American with a K-12 education has and the level of ignorance of a simple fisherman or a beggar living in the first century in Palestine. Almost all of the information that you take for granted, the technology, and the methods for acquiring information were unavailable to them. A tiny fraction of the population would have been literate. Their mathematical abilities would have been worse than today’s average 3rd grader. They did not know that the Earth moves, or what the Sun was. They did not know that the Earth was a sphere. They did not know what caused disease, or pregnancy, or death. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent of the difference between the things that you know as a matter of obvious common sense and what they knew about the world. If religiousness, superstition, and supernaturalism rise as education goes down, then they must have been rampant among the people who had contact with Jesus (if he was real at all.)

Let’s consider one more epistemic variable that affects the reliability of a source. Abstractly, we could think of the general level of skepticism, doubtfulness, or disposition towards critical scrutiny that a person has. If a person habitually reflects on the evidence carefully, makes a conscious and careful effort to gather the broadest body of relevant evidence, and actively seeks out disconfirming grounds for a claim, that, all other things being equal, is favorable with regard to their trustworthiness as a source of information. If a person whose skepticism (S) is high becomes satisfied that X is true, then you could be more confident that it is true, all other things being equal, than you would be if your source for the same claim was someone who is generally gullible, uncritical, and who does not reflect or seek out disconfirming evidence.

The people who are the sources of information about Jesus and his alleged resurrection--the authors of the Gospels, the people who told them the stories, the people who originally heard these stories and then propagated them--would have had a low supernatural belief threshold, at least concerning Jesus stories. They were also ignorant of the broad body of information that we have today concerning religious tendencies, religious group dynamics, psychology, alternative explanations for paranormal beliefs. They were also ignorant of the 2,000 years of examples of allegedly supernatural events that turned out to be easily explainable in natural terms. In that 2,000 years, we have learned a staggering amount about how human psychology works, errors in reasoning, problems in eye-witness reports, gullibility, mistakes, social-religious phenomena, and so on.

The people who were sources of information about Jesus and his alleged resurrection would have been much less skeptical overall than many people who are good sources of information now are. They would not have been trained or practiced or even familiar with the notions of disconfirming evidence, alternative explanations, bias, and justification. Many of these concepts as we are familiar with them in modern scientific contexts are only a few centuries or a few decades old. The multiplication rule in probability was not understood until the 1800s. The scientific principles of seeking out evidence that could disconfirm a hypothesis, or of double-blind, objective investigation protocols have only recently begun to be understood. People relaying stories about the resurrection of Jesus in 35 AD would not have known, or employed these methods.

Again the implication of lacking skepticism is that such a person would be an unreliable source of information. Failing to invoke doubt or to seek out alternative, natural explanations for allegedly supernatural events would result in their accepting and relaying more of those stories than are true or well-supported. These sources of information will be prone to mislead us towards gullibility. If we were to accept their claims, we might acquire some true, well-justified views, but we are also more likely to end up believing more that are not. Someone who is highly skeptical, however, will be a better source in that she will be less likely to accept claims that are false or unjustified, all other things being equal. The downside will be that she will also be less likely to communicate true claims to you.

So the people who would have relayed stories about Jesus’ resurrection in the early years would have been prone to accept supernatural beliefs, they would have been quite ignorant of many of the relevant facts, and they would have lacked the skepticism. These three traits would have contributed to high error rates in their communicating information about important religious matters like the resurrection of Jesus. In general, they would have been highly prone to accept such claims even when they were not true or supported by the evidence. How unreliable? Consider the problem this way: knowing what you know now, would have trusted them for medical advice? information about nature? guidance about how to grow plants? information about the weather? Are there any topics except the most obvious and rudimentary where you would accept them as authoritative sources?

The Romans who were contemporaries to Jesus would have had a wide range of religious and supernatural views. They believed in a wide range of omens, and spiritual phenomena. They accepted the existence of a number of gods. Why wouldn’t you accept their claims about those matters? Probably because their SBT was low, their ignorance was high, and their skepticism was low. You don’t deem them to be good sources of information about such matters. There are countless people today who are much better educated and who have a much better body of background information who make supernatural, miracle, and magical claims on a regular basis, yet you do not believe them. We are surrounded by smart and skeptical people making supernatural claims that we reject as suspicious, yet we accept the most outrageous claims from utterly unreliable people in the first century.

Here is the irony of the problem here. Suppose that Jesus really was a divine being and he really was resurrected from the dead. And suppose that the people who alleged to witness the events surrounding that resurrection did see them and it happened more or less as it has been relayed to us. Even if it all happened and they got it right, their overall unreliability about such matters is so high, you shouldn’t accept what they claim is true simply because it is coming from them. Since they are the only source of information that we have, and since they would have been such untrustworthy sources, we have no choice except to suspend judgment about what they say. Imagine that a NASA astronomer with a Ph.D. from MIT tells me that Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. And suppose that an illiterate tribesman from an isolated village in the jungles of Borneo were to tell me the same thing. And suppose that I didn’t have any other information about the matter that would allow me to corroborate their claims independently. The astronomer would be a reliable source of information who would justify me, but the tribesmen would not, even though what he is saying is true. We must, especially in matters where testimony is the main or only source of information, consider the source before we accept what he or she says. A group of illiterate, uneducated Iron Age religious zealots who had become deeply engrossed and invested in a religious movement are not reliable sources of information about extraordinary, miraculous events that are alleged to have happened to their religious leader. They are the people who you should trust the least for information of this sort. As a result, it is unreasonable to believe that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the information that you have. And if that’s unreasonable, then it’s a mistake to be a Christian, particularly when you are aware of the poor state of its epistemic foundations.

The common error when modern Christians think about the early Christians, I think, is to assume to a large extent that they were like us concerning relevant epistemic criteria. If you are going to believe because they believe, then you have to adopt this stance. You can’t take their word for it, and simultaneously acknowledge that they were irrational, unjustified, or uninformed about the matter. If I think of them as being more or less like me with regard to skepticism, rationality, and information, then it would make sense for me to believe what they believe. But this projecting ignores the facts: the early Christians were from a radically different, ancient culture that did not have any of the scientific, educational, or historical advantages that we take for granted. Their background, their propensity toward supernaturalism, and their ignorance would have made them radically different, and radically worse, epistemic agents than us. And those differences make them utterly unreliable as sources of information about Jesus.

In 1911, some Californians discovered a man name Ishi who was the last living member of an isolated tribe of Yana indians who lived in the hills near Lassen. Anthropologists were fascinated with the case because he was one of the closest examples ever found of contact between a group of people who were virtually living in the stone age with people living in the modern era. Ishi achieved some level of assimilation and enjoyed some celebrity until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. Ishi was an expert archer, and he was accomplished making stone arrowheads and shooting a simple bow. But Ishi also believed a mystical Land of the Dead where the souls of the Yana had a shadowy existence. Link You might plausibly accept Ishi as a reliable source of information about making and shooting a bow and arrow, but no reasonable person would accept his views about the Land of the Dead merely on the grounds that he said that it was real. To accept the early Christians claims about Jesus, God, and the afterlife would be a comparable mistake.