Encyclopedia Entry: Atheism

And here is the other project that I've been working on. This is a draft of an encyclopedia entry on atheism in the philosophical literature. I've tried to give the broadest and most complete overview of the issues, concepts, and debates without writing a whole book. As it is, it is quite long, but there is a lot of important material here. The references are all to the list of works in the bibliography of the previous post.


Atheism

What is atheism?

The term “atheist” describes a person who does not believe that God or a divine being exists. Worldwide there may be as many as a billion atheists, although social stigma, political pressure, and intolerance make accurate polling difficult.

Unless otherwise noted, we will use the term “God” to describe the divine entity that is a central tenet of the major monotheistic religious traditions--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. At a minimum, this being is usually understood as having all power, all knowledge, and being infinitely good or morally perfect. We can identify the particular traits that the divine being in different religious traditions have in addition to these three omni- properties. The Christian God, it is thought, also sent Jesus to be sacrificed for the salvation of human kind; he rewards belief and piety with eternity in heaven, punishes sinners, and so on. When necessary, we will use the term “gods” to describe all other lesser or different characterizations of divine beings, that is, beings that lack some, one, or all of the omni- traits.

The God concept is the central focus of philosophical arguments for atheism for several reasons. First, that being is the essential, common thread in the western monotheistic traditions, as mentioned above. More than 3 billion people now can be said to subscribe to the view that God exists, and countless more in the past have agreed. Furthermore, the existence of such a being, more so than any other characterization, would have profound metaphysical, personal, moral, social, and historical implications. Without exaggeration, the existence of such a being would be the single most important fact ever acknowledged by human beings. Another motivation for focusing atheistic arguments on the notion of a divine being that embodies conceptual absolutes as the omni-God does, is that by implication many of the conclusions we can draw about that being will apply a fortiori to other, lesser beings. Furthermore, a being that is not the positive culmination of all possible power, knowledge, and goodness, it has been argued, would not be worthy of the title “God” and would not be worthy of our attention in the same way. Many atheists and theists have agreed on at least this much.

We can make two useful pairs of distinctions concerning the term “atheism.” It has come to be widely accepted that, at a minimum, to be an atheist is to lack a belief that a God or gods exist. We can follow Antony Flew (1984) and label this inclusive sense of the term as negative atheism. Parallels for this use of the term would be terms such as “amoral,” “atypical,” or “asymmetrical.” So negative atheism would includes someone who has never reflected on the question of whether or not God exists and has no opinion about the matter and someone who had thought about the matter a great deal and has concluded either that she has insufficient evidence to decide the question, or that the question cannot be resolved in principle. Both people lack a belief in God, but in importantly different ways. So the position traditionally characterized as agnostic—neither believing that God does exist nor believing that God does not exist, is included in negative atheism.

A positive atheist is someone who believes that God does not exist; she affirms that no such being exists. So positive atheists are negative atheists, but negative atheists need not be positive atheists. An analogy is useful. If a person believes that there is no such thing as unicorns, then she is a positive atheist concerning unicorns. Someone who has never heard of them would be a negative atheist with respect to unicorns. So would a person who has thought about the question, and is not sure whether they exist or not. (Martin 1990)

Atheism can be narrow or wide in scope. The narrow atheist does not believe in the existence of God (an omni- being). A wide atheist does not believe that any gods exist, including but not limited to the traditional omni-God. The wide positive atheist denies that God exists, and also deny that Zeus, Gefjun, Thor, Sobek, Bakunawa and others exist. The narrow atheist does not believe that God exists, but may not taking a stronger view about the existence or non-existence of other supernatural beings. One could be a narrow atheist about God, but still believe in the existence of some other supernatural entities. (This is one of the reasons that it is a mistake to identify atheism with materialism or naturalism.)
Separating these different senses of the term allows us to better understand the different sorts of justification that can be given for varieties of atheism with different scopes. An argument may serve to justify one form of atheism and not another—alleged contradictions within a Christian conception of god, by themselves, for instance, do not serve as evidence for wide atheism. But presumably, reasons that are adequate to show that there is no omni-God would be sufficient to show that there is no Islamic God.

Epistemological Approaches to Atheism

Justifications for atheism have taken forms that can be usefully divided into several categories. For the most part, atheists have taken an evidentialist approach to the question of God’s existence. That is, atheists have taken the view that whether or not a person is justified in having an attitude of belief towards the proposition “God exists,” is a function of that person’s evidence. “Evidence” here is understood broadly to include a priori arguments, arguments to the best explanation, inductive and empirical reasons, as well as deductive and conceptual premises. An asymmetry exists between theism and atheism in that atheists have not offered faith as a justification for non-belief. That is, atheists have not presented non-evidentialist defenses for believing that there is no God.

Not all theists appeal to faith, however. Many are evidentialist theists. The evidentialist theist and the evidentialist atheist may have a number of general epistemological principles concerning evidence, arguments, and implication in common, but then disagree about what the evidence is, how it should be understood, and what it implies. They may disagree, for instance, about whether the values of the physical constants and laws in nature constitute evidence for intentional fine tuning, but agree at least that whether God exists is a matter that can be explored empirically or with reason.

Many non-evidentialist theists may deny in one way or another that the acceptability of God belief depends upon evidence, reasons, or arguments as they have been classically understood. Faith or prudential based beliefs in God, for example, will fall into this category. The evidentialist atheist and the non-evidentialist theist, therefore, may have a number of more fundamental disagreements about the acceptability of believing despite inadequate or contrary evidence, the epistemological status of prudential grounds for believing, or the nature of God belief. Their disagreement may not be so much about the evidence, or even about God, but about the legitimate roles that evidence, reason, and faith should play in human belief structures.

It is not clear that arguments against atheism that appeal to faith have any prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general evidentialist view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation on her to accept the conclusion. Insofar as having faith amounts to believing contrary to or despite a lack of evidence, one person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective, epistemological implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable.

Justifying atheism, then, can entail several different projects. There are the evidential disputes over what information we have available to us, how it should be interpreted, and what it implies. There are also broader meta-epistemological concerns about the roles of argument, reasoning, belief, and religiousness in human life. The atheist can find herself not just arguing that the evidence indicates that there is no God, but defending science, the role of reason, and the necessity of basing beliefs on evidence more generally.

Friendly atheism. William Rowe has introduced an important distinction to modern discussions of atheism. If someone has arrived at what they take to be a reasonable and well-justified conclusion that there is no God, then what attitude should she take about another person’s persistence in believing in God, particularly when that other person appears to be thoughtful and at least prima facie reasonable? It seems that the atheist could take one of several views. The theist’s belief, as the atheist sees it, could be rational or irrational, justified or unjustified. Must the atheist who believes that the evidence indicates that there is no God conclude that the theist’s believing in God is irrational or unjustified? Rowe’s answer is no. (Rowe 1979, 2006)

Rowe and most modern epistemologists have said that whether a conclusion C is justified for S will be a function of the information (correct or incorrect) that S possesses and the principles of inference that S employs in arriving at C. But whether or not C is justified is not directly tied to its truth, or even to the truth of the evidence concerning C. That is, a person can have a justified, but false belief. She could arrive at a conclusion through an epistemically inculpable process and yet get it wrong. Ptolemy, for example, the greatest astronomer of his day, who had mastered all of the available information and conducted exhaustive research into the question, was justified in concluding that the Sun orbits the Earth. A medieval physician in the 1200s who guesses (correctly) that the bubonic plague was caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis would not have been reasonable or justified given his background information and given that the bacterium would not even be discovered for 600 years.
We can call the view that rational, justified beliefs can be false, as it applies to atheism, friendly or fallibilist atheism. The friendly atheist can grant that a theist may be justified or reasonable in believing in God, even though the atheist takes the theist’s conclusion to be false. What could explain their divergence to the atheist? The believer may not be in possession of all of the relevant information. The believer may be basing her conclusion on a false premise or premises. The believer may be implicitly or explicitly employing inference rules that themselves are not reliable or truth preserving, but the background information she has leads her, reasonably, to trust the inference rule. The same points can be made for the friendly theist and the view that he may take about the reasonableness of the atheist’s conclusion. It is also possible, of course, for both sides to be unfriendly and conclude that anyone who disagrees with what they take to be justified is being irrational. Given developments in modern epistemology and Rowe’s argument, however, the unfriendly view is neither correct, nor conducive to a constructive and informed analysis of the question of God.

Atheists have offered a wide range of arguments and justifications for non-belief. A notable modern view is Antony Flew’s presumption of atheism (1984). Flew argues that the default position for any rational believer should be neutral with regard to the existence of God, and to be neutral is to not have a belief regarding its existence. "The onus of proof lies on the man who affirms, not on the man who denies. . . on the proposition, not on the opposition,” Flew argues. Beyond that, coming to believe that such a thing does or does not exist will require justification, much as a jury presumes innocence concerning the accused and requires evidence in order to conclude that he is guilty. Flew’s negative atheist will presume nothing at the outset, not even the logical coherence of the notion of God, but her presumption will be defeasible, or revisable in the light of evidence. We shall call this view atheism by default.

The atheism by default position contrasts with a more permissive attitude that some people take regarding religious belief. The notions of religious tolerance and freedom are sometimes taken to indicate the epistemic permissibility of believing despite a lack of evidence in favor or even despite evidence to the contrary. One is in violation of no epistemic duty by believing, according to the common view, even if one lacks conclusive evidence in favor, or even if one has evidence that is on the whole against. In contrast to Flew’s jury model, we can think of this view as treating religious beliefs as permissible until proven incorrect. This sort of epistemic policy about God or any other matter has been controversial, and a major point of contention between atheists and theists. Atheists have argued that we typically do not take it to be epistemically inculpable or reasonable for a person to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or some other supernatural being merely because they do not possess evidence to the contrary. Nor would we consider it reasonable for a person to begin believing that they have cancer because they do not have proof to the contrary. The atheist by default argues that it would be appropriate to not believe in such circumstances. The epistemic policy here takes its inspiration from an influential piece by W.K. Clifford (1999) in which he argues that it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything for which there is insufficient reason.

There are several other approaches to the justification of atheism that we will consider below. There is a family of arguments, sometimes known as exercises in deductive atheology, for the conclusion that the existence of God is impossible. Another large group of important and influential arguments can be gathered under the heading inductive atheology. These probabilistic arguments invoke considerations about the natural world such as widespread suffering, nonbelief, or findings from biology or cosmology. Another approach, atheistic noncognitivism, denies that God talk is even meaningful or has any propositional content that can be evaluated in terms of truth or falsity. Rather, religious speech acts are better viewed as a complicated sort of emoting or expression of spiritual passion. Inductive and deductive approaches are cognitivistic in that they accept that claims about God have meaningful content and can be determined to be true or false.

Deductive Atheology

Many discussions about the nature and existence of God have either implicitly or explicitly accepted that the concept of God is logically coherent. That is, for many believers and non-believers the assumption has been that such a being as God could possibly exist, but they have disagreed about whether there actually is one. Atheists within the deductive atheology tradition, however, have not even granted that God, as he is typically described, is possible. The first question we should ask, argues the deductive atheist, is whether the description or the concept is logically consistent. If it is not, then no such being could possibly exist. The deductive atheist argues that some, one, or all of God’s essential properties are logically contradictory. Since logical impossibilities are not and cannot be real, God does not and cannot exist. Consider a putative description of an object as a four-sided triangle, a married bachelor, or prime number with more than 2 factors. We can be certain that no such thing fitting that description exists because what they describe is demonstrably impossible.

If deductive atheological proofs are successful, the results will be epistemically significant. Many people have doubts that the view that there is no God can be rationally justified. But if deductive disproofs show that there can exist no being with a certain property or properties and those properties figure essentially in the characterization of God, then we will have the strongest possible justification for concluding that there is no being fitting any of those characterizations. If God is impossible, then God does not exist.

It may be possible at this point to re-engineer the description so that it avoids the difficulties, but now the theist faces several challenges according to the deductive atheologist. First, if the traditional description of God is logically incoherent, then what is the relationship between a theist’s belief and some revised, more sophisticated account that allegedly does not suffer from those problems? Is that the being that she believed in all along? Now? What were the reasons that led her prior to considering the atheological arguments to believe in that conception of God? Secondly, if the classical characterizations of God are shown to be logically impossible, then there is a legitimate question as whether any new description that avoids those problems describes a being that is worthy of the label. It will not do, in the eyes of many theists and atheists, to retreat to the view that God is merely a somewhat powerful, partially-knowing, and partly-good being, for example. Thirdly, the atheist will still want to know on the basis of what evidence or arguments should we conclude that a being as described by this modified account exists? Fourthly, there is no question that there exist less than omni-beings in the world. We possess less than infinite power, knowledge and goodness, as do many other creatures and objects in our experience. What is the philosophical importance or metaphysical significance of arguing for the existence of those sorts of beings, and advocating belief in them? Fifthly, and most importantly, if it has been argued that God’s essential properties are impossible, then any move to another description seems to be a concession that positive atheism about God is justified.
Another possible response that the theist may take in response to deductive atheological arguments is to assert that God is something beyond proper description with any of the concepts or properties that we can or do employ. So complications from incompatibilities among properties of God indicate problems for our descriptions, not the impossibility of a divine being worthy of the label. Many atheists have not been satisfied with this response. The theist has now asserted the existence of and attempted to argue in favor of believing in a being that is, by their own admission, something that we cannot form a proper idea of, one that does not have properties that we can acknowledge; it is a being that defies comprehension. It is not clear how we could have reasons or justifications for believing in the existence of such a thing. It is not clear how it could be an existing thing in any familiar sense of the term in that it lacks comprehensible properties. Or put another way, as Patrick Grim notes, “If a believer’s notion of God remains so vague as to escape all impossibility arguments, it can be argued, it cannot be clear to even him what he believes—or whether what he takes for pious belief has any content at all.” (2007). It is not clear how it could be reasonable to believe in such a thing, and it is even more doubtful that it is epistemically unjustified or irresponsible to deny that such a thing is exists. It is clear, however, that the deductive atheologist must acknowledge the growth and development of our concepts and descriptions of reality over time, and she must take a reasonable view about the relationship of those attempts and revisions in our ideas about what may turns out to be real.

Single Property Disproofs

Deductive disproofs have typically focused on logical inconsistencies to be found either within a single property or between multiple properties. Philosophers have struggled to work out the details of what it would be to be omnipotent, for instance. It has come to be widely accepted that a being cannot be omnipotent where omnipotence simply means to power to do anything. This definition of the term suffers from the stone paradox. An omnipotent being would either be capable of creating a rock that he cannot lift, or he is incapable. If he is incapable, then there is something he cannot do, and therefore he does not have the power to do anything. If he can create such a rock, then again there is something that he cannot do, namely lift the rock he just created. So paradoxically, having the ability to do anything entails being unable to do some things. As a result, many theists and atheists have agreed that a being could not have that property. A number of attempts to work out an account of omnipotence have ensued. (Cowan 2003, Flint and Freddoso 1983, Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1988 and 2006, Mavrodes 1977, Ramsey 1956, Sobel 2004, Savage 1967, and Wierenga 1989 for examples). See the entry on Omnipotence for details.

It has also been argued that omniscience is impossible, and that the most knowledge that can possibly be had is not enough to be fitting of God. One of the central problems has been that God cannot have knowledge of indexical claims such as, “I am here now.” It has also been argued that God can’t know future free choices, or God cannot know future contingent propositions, or that Cantor’s and Gödel proofs imply that the notion of a set of all truths cannot be made coherent. (Everitt 2004, Grim 1985, 1988, 1984, Pucetti 1963, and Sobel 2004). See the entry on Omniscience for more details.

The logical coherence of eternality, personhood, moral perfection, causal agency, and many others have been challenged in the deductive atheology literature. See bibliography.

Multiple Property Disproofs

Another form of deductive atheological argument attempts to show the logical incompatibility of two or more properties that God is thought to possess. A long list of properties have been the subject of multiple property disproofs: transcendence and personhood, justice and mercy, immutability and omniscience, immutability and infinitely love, omnipresence and agency, perfection and love, eternality and omniscience, eternality and creator of the universe, omnipresence and consciousness. (Blumenfeld 2003, Drange 1998b, Flew 1955, Grim 2007, Kretzmann 1966, and McCormick 2000 and 2003)

The combination of omnipotence and omniscience have received a great deal of attention. To possess all knowledge, for instance, would include knowing all of the particular ways in which one will exercise one’s power, or all of the decisions that one will make, or all of the decisions that one has made in the past. But knowing any of those entails that the known proposition is true. So can God have the power to act in some fashion that he has not foreseen, or differently than he already has without compromising his omniscience? It has also been argued that God cannot be both unsurpassably good and free. (Rowe 2004).

Failure of Proof Disproof

When attempts to provide evidence or arguments in favor of the existence of something fail, a legitimate and important question is whether anything except the failure of those arguments can be inferred. That is, does positive atheism follow from the failure of arguments for theism? A number of authors have concluded that it does. They taken the view that unless some case for the existence of God succeeds, we should believe that there is no God.

Many have taken an argument J.M. Findlay (1948) to be pivotal. Findlay, like many others, argues that in order to be worthy of the label “God,” and in order to be worthy of a worshipful attitude of reverence, emulation, and abandoned admiration, the being that is the object of that attitude must be inescapable, necessary, and unsurpassably supreme. (Martin 1990, Sobel 2004). God would not be the sort of being that we would merely infer inductively from evidence left behind in the universe. Such a being wouldn’t be contingent and the proof of its existence would not arise from contingency. That is to say that of all the approaches to God’s existence, the ontological argument is the strategy that we would expect to be successful were there a God, and if they do not succeed, then we can conclude that there is no God, Findlay argues.
Ontological arguments have attempted to show God’s existence on entirely a priori grounds from an analysis of the concept of the greatest logically possible being. But these attempts to prove God have not met with success, as most see it. Findlay says, “the general philosophical verdict is that none of these 'proofs' is truly compelling.” John Hick (1977), the well-known philosopher and theist, “we have in each case concluded, in agreement with the majority of contemporary philosophers, that these arguments fail to do what they profess to do.” And Alvin Plantinga says, “To show that these models are true, therefore, would also be to show that theism and Christianity are true; and I don’t know how to do something one could sensibly call ‘showing’ that either of these is true. I believe that there are a large number (at least a couple dozen) good arguments for the existence of God; none, however, can really be thought of as a showing or demonstration. As for classical Christianity, there is even less prospect for demonstrating its truth.” (Plantinga 2000) See the entry on the Ontological Argument.

The implications of Findlay’s argument for deductive atheology here is that Findlay makes a case that not just any being will be adequate to fill God’s shoes, as it were. God, in order to be God, must be a conceptually maximal being. And if the project to derive God’s existence through ontological arguments fail, then we can take that as indicator of more than merely the failure of those arguments. We should conclude that there is no such being. The Ontological Argument has all or nothing consequences for God’s existence.

Inductive Atheology

The view that there is no God or gods has been criticized on the grounds that it is not possible to prove a negative. No matter how exhaustive and careful our analysis, there could always be some proof, some piece of evidence, or some consideration that we have not considered. God could be something that we have not conceived, or God exists in some form or fashion that has escaped our investigation. Positive atheism draws a stronger conclusion than any of the problems with arguments for God’s existence alone could justify. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Findlay and the deductive atheological arguments attempt to address these concerns. But the question of inductive or probabilistic justifications for negative existential claims has figured centrally in modern atheism. The response to the “You cannot prove a negative” criticism has been that it invokes an artificially high epistemological standard of justification that creates a much broader set of problems not confined to atheism.
The general principle seems to be that one is not epistemically entitled to believe a proposition unless you have exhausted all of the possibilities and proven beyond any doubt that a claim is true. Or put negatively, one is not justified in disbelieving unless you have proven with absolute certainty that the thing in question does not exist. The problem is that we do not have a priori disproof that many things do not exist, yet it is reasonable and justified to believe that they do not: the Dodo bird is extinct, unicorns are not real, there is no teapot orbiting the Earth on the opposite side of the Sun, there is no Santa Claus, ghosts are not real, a defendant is not guilty, a patient does not have a particular disease, so on. There are a wide range of other circumstances under which we take it that believing that X does not exist is reasonable even though no logical impossibility is manifest. None of these achieve the level of deductive, a priori or conceptual proof. The objection to inductive atheism undermines itself in that it generates a broad, pernicious skepticism against far more than religious or irreligious beliefs. Mackie (1982) says, “It will not be sufficient to criticize each argument on its own by saying that it does not prove the intended conclusion, that is, does not put it beyond all doubt. That follows at once from the admission that the argument is non-deductive, and it is absurd to try to confine our knowledge and belief to matters which are conclusively established by sound deductive arguments. The demand for certainty will inevitably be disappointed, leaving skepticism in command of almost every issue.” (p. 7) If the atheist is unjustified for lacking deductive proof, then it is argued, then it would appear that so are the beliefs that planes fly, fish swim, or that there exists a mind-independent world.

The atheist can also wonder what the point of the objection is. When we lack deductive disproof that X exists, should we be agnostic about it? Is it permissible to believe that it does exist? Clearly, that would not be appropriate. Gravity may be the work of invisible, undetectable elves with sticky shoes. We don’t have any certain disproof of the elves—physicists are still struggling with an explanation of gravity. But surely someone who accepts the sticky-shoed elves view until they have deductive disproof is being unreasonable. It is also clear that if you are a positive atheist about the gravity elves, you would not be unreasonable. You would not be overstepping your epistemic entitlement by believing that no such things exist. On the contrary, believing that they exist or even being agnostic about their existence on the basis of their mere possibility would not be justified. So there appear to be a number of precedents and epistemic principles at work in our belief structures that provide room for inductive atheism. But these issues in the epistemology of atheism and recent work by Graham Oppy (2006) suggest that more attention must be paid to the principles that describe epistemic permissibility, culpability, reasonableness, and justification with regard to the theist, atheist, and agnostic categories.

Below we will consider several groups of influential inductive atheological arguments

The Santa Claus Argument for Atheism

Martin (1990) offers this general principle to describe the criteria that render the belief “X does not exist” justified:

A person is justified in believing that X does not exist if
(1) all the available evidence used to support the view that X exists is shown to be inadequate; and
(2) X is the sort of entity that, if X exists, then there is a presumption that would be evidence adequate to support the view that X exists; and
(3) this presumption has not been defeated although serious efforts have been made to do so; and
(4) the area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively examined; and
(5) there are no acceptable beneficial reasons to believe that X exists. (pg. 283)

Many of the major works in philosophical atheism that address the full range of recent arguments for God’s existence (Gale 1991, Mackie 1982, Martin 1990, Sobel 2004, Everitt 2004, and Weisberger 1999) can be seen as providing evidence to satisfy the first, fourth and fifth conditions. A substantial body of articles with narrower scope (see bibliography) can also be understood to play this role in justifying atheism. And a large group of discussions of Pascal’s Wager and related prudential justifications in the literature can also be seen as relevant to the satisfaction of the fifth condition.
One of the interesting and important questions in the epistemology of philosophy of religion has been whether the second and third conditions are satisfied concerning God. If there were a God, how and in what ways would we expect him to show in the world? Empirically? Conceptually? Would he be hidden? Martin argues, and many others have accepted implicitly or explicitly, that God is the sort of thing that would manifest in some discernible fashion to our inquiries. Martin concludes, therefore, that God satisfied all of the conditions, so, positive narrow atheism is justified.

Problem of Evil

At least since Epicurus said, “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" the problem of evil has been one of the most compelling arguments in favor of positive atheism. Both deductive and inductive forms of the argument are included here under inductive arguments for atheism for clarity.

It is useful to distinguish between different kinds of evil and different problems. Moral evil is apparently pointless suffering or death that is inflicted by humans on other sentient creatures. We say “apparently” because few will deny that there are many instances of suffering that appear to be pointless, hence the conflict with the existence of a being who would and could prevent them, but the issue under contention between many theists and atheists has been whether those instances of apparently pointless evil really are pointless. If in fact they are not pointless, as many theists argue is possible, the problem of evil may not be as big a problem for theism as alleged. Moral evil can be divided into suffering that is inflicted by humans on other humans (HH), or by humans on non-human animals (HA). Natural evil is apparently pointless suffering and death that is the result of natural forces such as hurricanes, plagues, and droughts. Nature inflicts suffering on humans (NH) and on non-human animals (NA)

The strongest form of the argument, if successful, is often characterized as the deductive or logical problem of evil. The existence of the suffering and the existence of God are logically incompatible. It is not possible for both claims: “God exists” where it is understood that God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good and “Evil exists” to both be true. But we know that there is evil, therefore it is not true that there is a being that is God. (Mackie 1955,1982, and Sobel 2004).

Inductive forms of the argument can allow that God could possibly coexist with evil in the world, but they argue that it would not be reasonable to think that he in fact does. The most famous and influential version of this argument is William Rowe’s:

1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
3. Therefore, there does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being. (Rowe 1979)
The deductive and inductive arguments and the kinds of evil can be represented this way:

Deductive Problem of Moral Evil: The existence of God is not logically compatible with the existence of all instances of HH and HA.
Deductive Problem of Natural Evil: The existence of God is not logically compatible with all instances of NH and NA.
Inductive Problem of Moral Evil: The existence of instances of HH and/or HA makes existence of God improbable.
Inductive Problem of Natural Evil: The existence of instances of NH and/or NA makes the existence of God improbable.


Theistic Rejoinders to the Deductive Argument.

Since it aims to make the strongest possible case against God, the deductive problem is most vulnerable to rebuttals. What would it take to refute the logical problem argument? If the charge is that it is not possible for God to coexist with evil, then the critic need only show that it is possible; responding to the logical problem of evil alone does not require arguing for the truth of any particular justification of evil that God has.
Freedom, it has been frequently argued, could be a sufficient good in itself to justify moral evil. And since God (whose power is confined at least to that which is logically possible) cannot bring it about that we are both free and that we choose good, our free evil choices produce HH and HA suffering, but that suffering is our responsibility, not God’s. The suffering serves a greater good and it is at least possible that there is no other way for God to achieve that good, so it is possible that he has a morally defensible reason for allowing it.

The soul-building defense alleges that by creating a world with free beings who can experience the good and evil results of their actions, it is possible for them to grow intellectually and morally and achieve virtue in ways that not even an omnipotent God could accomplish through direct creation. It is possible that creating a world where there are instances of HH, HA, NH and even NA is God’s best means of achieving moral virtue. And that moral virtue or its possibility is sufficiently valuable to justify their existence. Even the inflexibility of natural laws that sometimes produce disasters and profound suffering catalyzes the expansion of human knowledge, power, and moral responsibility.

Theodicies such these are thought by many to establish that it is at least possible that some forms of suffering are not pointless. That would indicate that the deductive problem of evil for positive atheism for that form of suffering fails.

The discussion about the logical incompatibility of God and evil is far from settled. A number of philosophers in recent years have persisted with arguments that the existence of evil precludes the possibility of God’s existence. (Gale 1991, Sobel 2004, Martin 1990, Smith 1997 for instance) See the entries on the Problem of Evil, the Freewill Defense, and Soul-Building for more.

Theistic Rejoinders to the Inductive Argument

Much recent work has been done on the inductive argument, and not surprisingly, attention has focused largely on Rowe’s first premise. Rowe’s example of a fawn that is horribly burned in a forest fire started by lightening away from any human contact has come to serve as a watershed case for theists and atheists. In the history of all sentient beings, human and animal, and among all of the cases where they have suffered, if there is a single case of suffering that serves no greater good, or that does not serve to avoid some equal or greater evil, then it would seem reasonable to conclude there is no God. Surely it is reasonable to think that there are many of those cases, argues Rowe (1979, 1984, 2006).
Rather than arguing that there are no such cases, an influential set of theistic responses under the heading skeptical theism have given arguments that we are not in a position to know whether or not there are or have been such cases. We have a limited capacity to grasp the total cosmic picture from God’s perspective. There could be long term effects that we do not see or appreciate, or the alternatives may be worse. So skeptical theists have suspended judgment about premise 1.

Atheists for the most part have found these rejoinders implausible and inconsistent with what they take to be obvious instances of evil that can and should be prevented, but aren’t. The debate has shifted to other epistemological issues surrounding the conditions under which appearances of pointless evil warrant the inference to the existence of pointless evil. (Rowe 1979, 1984, 2006, Wykstra 1984, Alston 1996, van Inwagen 1996) See the entry on the Problem of Evil.

God, Atheism and Cosmology

Questions about the origins of the universe and cosmology have been the focus for many inductive atheism arguments. We can distinguish four recent views about God and the cosmos. Naturalism: On naturalistic view, the Big Bang occurred approximately 13.7 billion years ago, the Earth formed out of cosmic matter about 4.6 billion years ago, and life forms on Earth, unaided by any supernatural forces about 4 billion years ago. Various physical (non-God) hypotheses are currently being explored about the cause or explanation of the Big Bang such as the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary condition model, brane cosmology models, string theoretic models, ekpyrotic models, cyclic models, chaotic inflation, and so on. Big Bang Theism: We can call the view that God caused about the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago Big Bang Theism. Intelligent Design Theism: There are many variations, but most often the view is that God created the universe, perhaps with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and then beginning with the appearance of life 4 billion years ago, God supernaturally guided the formation and development of life into the forms we see today. Creationism: Finally, there is a group of people who for the most part denies the occurrence of the Big Bang and of evolution altogether; God created the universe, the Earth, and all of the life on Earth in its more or less present form 6,000-10,000 years ago.

Taking a broad view, many atheists have concluded that neither Big Bang theism, Intelligent Design Theism, nor Creationism is the most reasonable description of the history of the universe. Before the theory of evolution and recent developments in modern astronomy, a view wherein God did not play a large role in the creation and unfolding of the cosmos would have been hard to justify. But now, internal problems with those views and the evidence from cosmology and biology, indicate that naturalism is the best explanation.

Justifications for Big Bang Theism have focused on modern versions of the Cosmological and Kalaam arguments. Since everything that comes into being must have a cause, including the universe, then God was the cause of the Big Bang. (Craig 1995) See the entries on Cosmological

Arguments and the Kalaam argument.

The objections to these arguments have been numerous and vigorously argued. Critics have challenged the inference to a supernatural cause to fill gaps in the natural account, as well as the inferences that the first cause must be a single, personal, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being. It is not clear that any of the properties of God as classically conceived in orthodox monotheism can be inferred from what we know about the Big Bang without first accepting a number of theistic assumptions. Infinite power and knowledge do not appear to be required to bring about a Big Bang—what if our Big Bang was the only act that a being could perform? There appears to be consensus that infinite goodness or moral perfection cannot be inferred as a necessary part of the cause of the Big Bang—theists have focused their efforts in the problem of evil discussions just attempting to prove that it is possible that God is infinitely good given the state of the world. Big Bang Theism would need to show that no other sort of cause besides a morally perfect one could explain the universe we find ourselves in. Critics have also doubted whether we can know that some supernatural force that caused the Big Bang is still in existence now or is the same entity as identified and worshipped in any particular religious tradition. Even if major concessions are granted in the cosmological argument, all that it would seem to suggest is that there was a first cause or causes, but widely accepted arguments from that first cause or causes to the fully articulated God of Christianity or Islam, for instance, have not been forthcoming.

In some cases, atheists have taken the argument a step further. They have offered cosmological arguments for the nonexistence of God on the basis of considerations from physics, astronomy, and subatomic theory. These arguments are quite technical, so these remarks will be cursory. God, if he exists, knowing all and having all power, would only employ those means to his ends that are rational, effective, efficient, and optimal. If God were the creator, then he was the cause of the Big Bang. But cosmological atheists have argued that the singularity that produced the Big Bang and events that unfold thereafter preclude a rational divine agent from achieving particular ends with the Big Bang as the means. The Big Bang would not have been the route God would have chosen to this world as a result. (Stenger 2007, Smith 1993, Everitt 2004.)

Teleological Arguments for and Against the Existence of God

We can divide modern teleological, or design, arguments for the existence of God into two groups: arguments from biological complexity that focus on organisms, and arguments from physical nature and complexity that emphasize the fundamental physical laws that apply to all matter.
Before Darwin, a design argument from biological complexity like William Paley’s famous Watch argument had some considerable force (2006). Paley’s argument proceeds by an analogy: were you to find a watch on the beach with intricate, well-adjusted parts that fit together and that all contribute to performing a larger function (telling time), you would reasonably conclude that the watch had been designed and built by a designer with a deliberate set of intentions in mind. Such a thing would not come about by the blind, mindless forces of nature. By analogy, we find similar complexity, adjustment, and form in biological organisms. The inner workings of the eye with the remarkable coordination of the retina, lens, optic nerve, cornea, iris, and other parts has been a favorite example of advocates.

Biological research into the phenomena of natural selection has shown that what Paley thought was impossible has occurred for billions of years on Earth. Adaptive variations in organisms, inherited through genetic transmission, accumulate over time and give the appearance of purposeful design in the relationship between the parts of the organism and its ability to function in its environment. Among the vast majority of those who understand the theory, there is a consensus that it is a better, non-teleological explanation of biological complexity than the Creationism hypothesis. (Dawkins 1976, 1986, 2006)

Intelligent Design Arguments: A few arguments that aspects of biological complexity are best explained by God have emerged from discussions of evolution. These arguments grant the general claim that some form of natural selection occurred in evolutionary history and that it is responsible for the most part for that appearance of biological design. But there are specific structures in some organisms or episodes in evolutionary history that cannot be completely explained by neo-Darwinian selection. Evolution occurred, but God must have periodically intervened to guide the process in order to produce life as we find it. (Behe 1996, Dembski 1998)
These arguments have been heavily criticized. In some cases, biologists have simply explained the process whereby natural selection sans God could have produced the examples of biological structures that were alleged to be impossible on evolution. Intermediate fossils have been found, and many of the gaps in our understanding of the process and history of evolution have closed. The probabilistic reasoning that sought to prove a supernatural source has been critiqued. (Sober 2002, 2003, 2007, Kitcher 1982). As the objections have mounted, many have become more convinced that there is little need for God in our account of the history of life.

Physical Design or Fine Tuning Arguments: Among philosophical theists, much attention has shifted to new teleological arguments that accept evolution, but argue for God on the basis of various parameters, laws, and constants of physics, chemistry and cosmological history that are conducive to the existence of life in our universe. According to these arguments, given all of the other configurations of a physical world that are possible, many of them non-biophilic, the hospitability of this universe to life suggests a designer with a purpose. If the cosmological constant had been even slightly greater or less, or if gravity had been slightly stronger, for instance, there would be no life and no humanity in the universe. (Leslie 1996, Swinburne 1979)

Problems with Arguments from Design: The general difficulty for design arguments is deriving the strong conclusion that God must have been responsible when much lesser beings or forces are sufficient to explain the evidence. Critics have argued that even if we grant the conclusion that there is evidence of purposeful design manifest in the world, powerful aliens could be responsible who are running a cosmic zoo for humans. Almost three centuries ago, Hume argued that the evidence may well point to a baby god, an idiot god, a committee of gods, a cruel or absent minded god, an absentee god, or some other possibility (Hume 1935). The evidence that design theists cite is not sufficient to motivate the conclusion that a being with infinite power, knowledge, and goodness must have been responsible. If it was designed at all, some inferior being seems to be better indicated.

Another way to understand the point is that any properties that we would find in the universe that might identify it as an artifact will be properties that we have observed in artifacts that we have created. But the properties that we find in our artifacts that indicate that they were created all directly or indirectly reveal our limitations, our inabilities, and other finite aspects of our creation. So the properties indicative of creation that we might find in the universe will also point to limitations, inabilities, and finite aspects of the creator of the universe. That is, our best examples of artifact creation are anthropomorphic—they reflect our limited natures. So if we find features in the universe that hearken to examples of known human creation, at best, they will suggest an anthropomorphic, non-divine creator. But if God really does exist, then the universe was not created by a limited, finite being, and the markers of intelligent design in it will not resemble our own. So pointing to anthropomorphic design features in the universe that we can recognize actually suggests that God, a divine being who would be capable of much more, was not responsible. And if God did not create the universe, that suggests that God does not exist

Furthermore, physicists and astronomers are actively considering a wide range of theories, some of them that can make testable predictions, about why there is something rather than nothing, why we find these lawlike regularities instead of none or some others, and why the laws we find appear to be conducive to life. Given the history of scientific inquiry, if a non-supernatural answer to a question seems to be pending, it would be premature and irresponsible to insist that only a theistic answer will suffice.
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Bayesian Arguments

Many of the modern teleological arguments for the existence of God have employed Bayesian calculations of probability. Bayes’ Theorem provides us with a way to calculate the likelihood that a hypothesis is true given some observations. (See entry on Bayes Theorem). For example, with a patient with a specific set of symptoms, we know from past experience that those symptoms are more likely to occur as a result of the patient’s having disease X than disease Y. When we are not in possession of the necessary background data, Bayes’ theorem also allows us to make a subjective calculation for an individual involving what they believe to be the likelihoods of those observations and relevant explanations. In these instances, the theorem gives us a measure of epistemic probability or the degree of surprise that S would have to make an observation given one hypothesis or another. In the case of God, Bayesian arguments for theism have attempted to show that the occurrence of our biophilic universe, for instance, would be very surprising if the atheistic hypothesis were true. But the occurrence of a universe with life would be likely, or at least less unlikely, if there were a God. Therefore, it is likely that there is a God, or at least more likely than the alternative.
The atheist’s challenge to Bayesian arguments have focused on those prior assumptions that factor into S’s subjective degree of surprise. A subject’s degree of surprise that some observations will occur very often has little to do with their actual probability. I might attach a very low value to the probability of robberies occurring in my neighborhood that does not take into account the fact, unknown to me, that my neighborhood has the highest robbery rate in the country. I might be surprised to see their of them in one week, nevertheless, their occurrence would not therefore be improbable. So while the God explanation might be tempting to explain various observations we are making about the universe, its origins, and its limits, all of the answers and information that we do not have suggests that we should not attach too much weight to our subjective sense of surprise, or unfounded prior probabilities.

In this vein, many of the modern arguments from design are probabilistic; it is exceedingly improbable that just this set of natural laws would occur, or that all of the matter in the universe would behave according to the same natural laws. But the probability judgments here are not based upon some larger set of base rate data about the frequency of lawful and unlawful universes and their being conjoined with a God or no God. We can have no such data with only one universe. Natural laws in the universe are what make probability judgments possible, so these arguments seem to be claiming that probability itself is improbable. On what grounds would we base that claim? All that we seem to have is our subjective sense of surprise, which as we have seen, can be a highly unreliable indicator of what is actually likely or unlikely. These appeals to probabilities to prove God appear to be either ill-formed, subjective in a fashion that undermines their rational force, or they rest upon claims whose prior probabilities the atheist contests.

The Argument Against Design

In William Paley’s famous analysis, he argues by analogy that the presence of order in the universe, like the features we find in a watch, are indicative of the existence of a designer who is responsible for the artifact. Many authors—David Hume (1935), Wesley Salmon (1978), Michael Martin (1990)—have argued that a better case can be made for the nonexistence of God from the evidence.

Salmon, giving a modern Bayesian version of an argument that begins with Hume, argues that the likelihood that the ordered universe was created by intelligence is very low. In general, instances of biologically or mechanically caused generation without intelligence are far more common than instances of creation from intelligence. Furthermore, the probability that something that is generated by a biological or mechanical cause will exhibit order is quite high. Among those things that are designed, the probability that they exhibit order may be quite high. But that is not the same as asserting that among the things that exhibit order, the probability that they were designed is high. Among dogs, the incidence of fur may be high, but it is not true that among furred things, the incidence of dogs is high. Furthermore, intelligent design and careful planning very frequently produces disorder—war, industrial pollution, insecticides, and so on.

So we can conclude that the probability that an unspecified entity (like the universe), which came into being and exhibits order, was produced by intelligent design is very low.

Arguments from Nonbelief

Another recent group of inductive atheistic arguments has focused on widespread nonbelief itself as evidence that atheism is justified. The common thread in these arguments is that something as significant in the universe as God could hardly be overlooked. The ultimate creator of the universe and a being with infinite knowledge, power, and love would not escape our attention, particularly since humans have devoted such staggering amounts of energy to the question for so many centuries. Perhaps more importantly, a being such as God, if he chose, could certainly make his existence manifest to us. Creating a state of affairs where his existence would be obvious, justified, or reasonable to us, or at least more obvious to more of us than it is currently, would be a trivial matter for an all-powerful being. So since our efforts have not yielded what we would expect to find if there were a God, then the most plausible explanation is that there is no God.

One might complain that we should not assume that God’s existence would be evident to us. There may be reasons, some of which we can describe, others that we do not understand, that God could have for remaining out of sight: revealing himself is not something he desires, remaining hidden enables people to freely love, trust and obey him, remaining hidden prevents humans from reacting from improper motives like fear of punishment. Remaining hidden preserves human freewill
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The non-belief atheist does not find these speculations convincing for several reasons. In religious history, God’s revealing himself to Moses, Muhammad, Jesus’ disciples, and even Satan himself did not compromise their cognitive freedom in any significant way. Furthermore, attempts to explain why a universe where God exists would look just as we would expect a universe with no God have seemed ad hoc. Some of the logical positivists’ and non-cognitivists’ concerns surface here. If the believer maintains that a universe inhabited by God will look exactly like one without, then we must wonder what sort of counter-evidence would be allowed, even in principle, against the theist’s claim. If no state of affairs could be construed as evidence against God’s existence, then what does the claim “God exists,” mean and what are its real implications? Alternately, how can it be unreasonable to not believe in the existence of something that defies all of our attempts to corroborate or discover?
Theodore Drange (2006) has developed an argument that if God were the sort of being that wanted humans to come to believe that he exists, then he could bring it about that far more of them would believe than currently do. God would be able, he would want humans to believe, there is nothing that he would want more, and God would not be irrational. So God would bring it about that people would believe. In general, he could have brought it about that the evidence that people have is far more convincing than what they have. He could have miraculously appeared to everyone in a fashion that was far more compelling than the miracles stories that we have. But it is not the case that all, nearly all, or even a majority of people believe, so there must not be a God of that sort.

J.L. Schellenberg (1993) has developed an argument based upon a number of considerations that lead us to think that if there were a loving God, then we would expect to find some manifestations of him in the world. If God is all powerful, then there would be nothing restraining him from making his presence known. And if he is omniscient, then surely he would know how to reveal himself. And perhaps most importantly if God is good and if God possesses an unsurpassable love for us, then God would consider each human’s requests as important and seek to respond quickly. He would wish to spare those that he loves needless trauma. He would not want to give those that he loves false or misleading thoughts about his relationship to them. He would want as much personal interaction with them as possible. But of course, these conditions are not satisfied. So it is strongly indicated that there is no such God.

Schellenberg gives this telling parable:

You’re still a small child, and an amnesiac, but this time you’re in the middle of a vast rain forest, dripping with dangers of various kinds. You’ve been stuck there for days, trying to figure out who you are and where you came from. You don’t remember having a mother who accompanied you into this jungle, but in your moments of deepest pain and misery you call for her anyway: “Mooooommmmmmm!” Over and over again. For days and days. . . the last time when a jaguar comes at you out of nowhere. . . but with no response. What should you think in this situation? In your dying moments, what should cross your mind? Would the thought that you have a mother who cares about you and hears your cry and could come to you but chooses not to even make it onto the list? (2006, pg. 31)

Like Drange, Schellenberg argues that there are many people who are epistemically inculpable in believing that there is no God. That is, many people have carefully considered the evidence available to them, and have actively sought out more in order to determine what is reasonable concerning God. They have fulfilled all relevant epistemic duties they might have in their inquiry into the question. And they have arrived at a justified belief that there is no God. If there were a God, however, evidence sufficient to form a reasonable belief in his existence would be available. So the occurrence of widespread epistemically inculpable nonbelief itself shows that there is no God.

Atheistic Naturalism

The final family of inductive arguments we will consider involves drawing a positive atheistic conclusion from broad, naturalized grounds.
Methodological naturalism can be understood as the view that the best or the only way to acquire knowledge within science is by adopting the assumption that all physical phenomena have physical causes. This presumption by itself does not commit one to the view that only physical entities and causes exist, or that all knowledge must be acquired through scientific methods. Methodological naturalism, therefore, is typically not seen as being in direct conflict with theism or having any particular implications for the existence or non-existence of God.
Ontological naturalism, however, is usually seen as taking a stronger view about the existence of God. Ontological naturalism is the additional view that all and only physical entities and causes exist.

Among its theistic critics, there has been a tendency to portray ontological naturalism as a dogmatic ideological commitment that is more the product of a recent intellectual fashion than science or reasoned argument. But two developments have contributed to a broad argument in favor of ontological naturalism as the correct description of what sorts of things exist and are causally efficacious. First, there is a substantial history of the exploration and rejection of a variety of non-physical causal hypotheses in the history of science. Over the centuries, the possibility that some class of physical events could be caused by a supernatural source, a spiritual source, psychic energy, mental forces, or vital causes have been entertained and found wanting. Second, evidence for the law of the conservation of energy has provided significant support to physical closure, or the view that the natural world is a complete closed system in which physical events have physical causes. At the very least, atheists have argued, the ruins of so many supernatural explanations that have been found wanting in the history of science has created an enormous burden of proof that must be met before any claim about the existence of another worldly spiritual being can have credence. Ontological naturalism should not be seen as a dogmatic commitment, its defenders have insisted, but rather as a defeasible hypothesis that is supported by centuries of inquiry into the supernatural.

As scientific explanations have expanded to include more details about the workings of natural objects and laws, there has been less and less room or need for invoking God as an explanation. It is not clear that expansion of scientific knowledge disproves the existence of God in any formal sense any more than it has disproven the existence of fairies, the atheistic naturalist argues. But physical explanations have increasingly rendered God explanations extraneous and anomalous. When Laplace, the famous 18th century French mathematician and astronomer, presented his work on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the Emperor asked him about the role of a divine creator in his system, for instance, Laplace is reported to have said, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”

In many cases, science has shown that particular ancillary theses of traditional religious doctrine are mistaken. Blind, petitionary prayer has been investigated and found to have no effect on the health of its recipients, although praying itself may have some positive effects on the person who prayers. Geology, biology, and cosmology have discovered that the Earth formed approximately 3 billion years ago out of cosmic dust, and life evolved gradually over billions of years; the Earth, humans, and other life forms were not created in their present form some 6,000-10,000 years ago. Many alleged miraculous events have been investigated and debunked.

Wide, positive atheism, the view that there are no gods whatsoever, might appear to be the most difficult atheistic thesis to defend, but ontological naturalists have responded that the case for no gods is parallel to the case for no elves, pixies, dwarves, fairies, goblins, or other creates. A decisive proof against every possible supernatural being is not necessary for the conclusion that none of them are real to be justified. The ontological naturalist atheist believes that once we have devoted sufficient investigation into enough particular cases and the general considerations about natural laws, magic, and supernatural entities, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the whole enterprise is an explanatory dead end for figuring out what sort of things there are in the world. Consider that the U.S. and British patent offices have instituted policies refusing to consider any more patent applications for perpetual motion machines.

The disagreement between atheists and theists continues on two fronts. Within the arena of science and the natural world, some believers have persisted in arguing that material explanations are inadequate to explain all of the particular events and phenomena that we observe. Some philosophers and scientists have argued that for phenomena like consciousness, human morality, and some instances of biological complexity, explanations in terms of natural or evolutionary theses have not and will not be able to provide us with a complete picture. Therefore, the inference to some supernatural force is warranted. While some of these attempts have received social and political support, within the scientific community the arguments that causal closure is false and that God as a cause is a superior scientific hypothesis to naturalistic explanations have not received significant support. Science can cite a history of replacing spiritual, supernatural, or divine explanations of phenomena with natural ones from bad weather as the wrath of angry gods to disease as demon possession. The assumption for many is that there are no substantial reasons to doubt that those areas of the natural world that have not been adequately explained scientifically will be given enough time. ( Madden and Hare 1968, Papineau, Manson, Nielsen 2001, and Stenger)

Increasingly, with what they perceive as the failure of attempts to justify theism, atheists have moved towards naturalized accounts of religious belief that give causal and evolutionary explanations of the prevalence of belief. (See Atrans, Boyer, Dennett 2006)

Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism

In 20th century moral theory, a view about the nature of moral value claims arose that has an analogue in discussions of atheism. Moral non-cognitivists have denied that moral utterances should be treated as ordinary propositions that are either true or false and subject to evidential analysis. On their view, when someone makes a moral claim like, “cheating is wrong,” what they are doing is more akin to saying something like, “I have negative feelings about cheating. I want you to share those negative feelings. Cheating. Bad.”

A non-cognitivist atheist denies that religious utterances are propositions. They are not the sort of speech act that have a truth value. They are more like emoting, singing, poetry, or cheering. They express personal desires, feelings of subjugation, admiration, humility, and love. As such, they cannot and should not be dealt with by denials or arguments any more than I can argue with you over whether or not a poem moves you. There is an appeal to this approach when we consider common religious utterances such as, “Jesus loves you.” “Jesus died for your sins.” “God be with you.” What these mean, according to the non-cognitivist, is something like, “I have sympathy for your plight, we are all in a similar situation and in need of paternalistic comforting, you can have it if you perform certain kinds of behaviors and adopt a certain kind of personal posture with regard to your place in the world. When I do these things I feel joyful, I want you to feel joyful too.”

So the non-cognitivist atheist does not claim that the sentence “God exists” is false, as such. Rather, when people makes these sorts of claims, their behavior is best understood as a complicated publicizing of a particular sort of subjective sensations. Strictly speaking, the claims do not mean anything in terms of assertions about what sorts of entities do or do not exist in the world independent of human cognitive and emotional states. The non-cognitivist characterization of many religious speech acts and behaviors has seemed to some to be the most accurate description. But for the most part, atheists appear to be cognitivist atheists. They assume that religious utterances do express propositions that are either true or false. Positive atheists will argue that there are compelling reasons or evidence for concluding that in fact those claims are false. (Drange 2006, Diamond and Lizenbury 1975, Nielsen 1985)

It would appear that the non-cognitivists are at least partially correct. Many religious utterances are non-cognitive. Religious ceremonies, rituals, and liturgies tend away from assertions that are true or false and more towards some kind of religious expressionism. Recognizing the extent to which religious behaviors are non-cognitive can clarify the disagreement between theists and atheists. If our speech acts or behaviors shift from cognitive to non-cognitive and back, we would do well to be aware of it. But many religious utterances are clearly treated as cognitive by their speakers—they are meant to be treated as true or false claims, they are treated as making a difference, and they clearly have an impact on people’s lives and beliefs beyond the mere expression of a special category of emotions. So non-cognitivism does not appear to completely address belief in God.

Future Prospects for Atheism

20th century developments in epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and philosophy of language indicate that many of the presumptions that supported old fashioned natural theology and atheology are mistaken. It appears that even our most abstract, a priori, and deductively certain methods for determining truth are subject to revision in the light of empirical discoveries and theoretical analyses of the principles that underlie those methods. Certainty, reasoning, and theology, after Bayes, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Kripke are not what they used to be. The prospects for a simple, confined argument for atheism (or theism) that achieves widespread support or that settles the question are dim. That is because, in part, the prospects for any argument that decisively settles a philosophical question where a great deal seems to be at stake are dim. The existence or non-existence of any non-observable entity in the world is not settled by any single argument or consideration. Every premise will be based upon other concepts and principles that themselves must be justified. So ultimately, the adequacy of atheism as an explanatory hypothesis about what is real will depend upon the overall coherence, internal consistency, empirical confirmation, and explanatory success of a whole worldview within which atheism is only one small part. The question of whether or not there is a God sprawls onto related issues and positions about biology, physics, metaphysics, explanation, philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of language, and epistemology. The reasonableness of atheism depends upon the overall adequacy of a whole conceptual and explanatory description of the world.

Philosophical Atheism Bibliography

Despite the lack of activity recently here on the blog, I have been quite busy with atheism projects. One of them is compiling an up to date, comprehensive bibliography of the most important works on atheism in philosophy in the last 50 years for Oxford Univ. Press. Here's a draft of my list of a hundred or so sources. If you want to understand the state of the discussion in the 21st century, you need to know these works.


Adams, Marilyn McCord and Adams, Robert Merrihew, eds.,1990. The Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1972. “Must God Create the Best?” Philosophical Review, 81: 3, pp. 317-32.

Alston, William, 1991. "The Inductive Problem of Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition." Philosophical Perspectives 5: 29-67.

Anselm, 2007. Anselm: Basic Writings. Thomas Williams, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007.

Aquinas, Thomas, 1963. Summa Theologiae, London: Blackfriars and Eyre and Spottiswoode.

Atran, Scott, 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barrow, J., and F. Tipler, 1986. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Blackwell.

Behe, Michael, 1996. Darwin’s Black Box, New York: Touchstone.

Blumenfeld, David, 2003. “On the Compossibility of the Divine Attributes,” In The Impossibility of God. eds, Martin and Monnier. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

Boyer, Pascal 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Clifford, W.K., 1999, “The Ethics of Belief,” in The Ethics of Belief and other Essays. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Cowan, J. L., 2003. “The Paradox of Omnipotence,” In The Impossibility of God. eds, Martin and Monnier. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

Craig, William L. and Quentin Smith 1995. Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Darwin, Charles, 1871. The Descent of Man, and the Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.

--------, 1859. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray.

Dawkins, Richard, 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

--------, 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman.

--------, 2006. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Dembski, William, 1998. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Dennett, Daniel, 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking Penguin.

Diamond, Malcolm L. and Lizenbury, Thomas V. Jr. (eds) The Logic of God, Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.

Drange, Theodore, 1998a. Nonbelief and Evil. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

---------------,” 1998b. “Incompatible Properties Arguments: A Survey.” Philo 1: 2. pp. 49-60.

--------------, 2006. “Is “God Exists” Cognitive?” Philo 8:2.

Draper, Paul, 1989. “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists.” Nous 23. pp. 331-50.

Everitt, Nicholas, 2004. The Non-Existence of God. London: Routledge.

Findlay, J.N., 1948. “Can God’s Existence be Disproved?” Mind 54, pp. 176-83.

Flew, A. and MacIntyre, A. eds., 1955, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, London: S.C.M. Press.

Flew, Anthony. 1955. "Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom." in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, Anthony

Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds.). New York: Macmillan.

--------, 1984. “The Presumption of Atheism.” in God, Freedom, and Immortality. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, pp. 13-30.

Flint and Freddoso, 1983. “Maximal Power.” in The Existence and Nature of God, Alfred J. Freddoso, ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Gale, Richard and Pruss, A. 1999. “A New Cosmological Argument,” Religious Studies 35: 461-76.

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Three Important Arguments for Atheism: Everitt, Gale, and Martin

Nicholas Everitt—The Nonexistence of God

Considered by themselves, Everitt contends, the arguments for theism all suffer from serious deficiencies. But maybe if they are taken collectively, the non-ontological arguments for theism make it more probable than not. If a defendant has a motive, is implicated by eye-witness reports, left the country immediately after the crime, and so on, all of these factors might indicate his guilt, even if one of them by itself would not be sufficient.

But there are three problems. First, these arguments give only weak support for their conclusions. The teleological argument, at most, might weakly indicate some designing force, the cosmological argument might suggest a first cause, and so on. Second, there is no reason to think they refer to the same being or force. And third, there is no reason to think that the arguments collectively indicate the same singular, omni-being, that is, God.

Does Occam’s Razor suggest that we should prefer one God here? But this is a misuse of Occam’s Razor. If the phone rings on Monday, there is a letter in the mail on Tuesday, and a knock on the door on Wednesday, Occam’s razor doesn’t suggest that they must all be the same person.

What about the ontological argument? No current version of the ontological argument is sound, Everitt argues (as have many others.) And Frege’s analysis of existential statements shows that there is no prospect for any future version of it succeeding if we take “exists” to be a defining predicate of God. So theism is not currently rational on the basis of the ontological argument.

Furthermore, there are substantial logical objections to theism: We have no plausible account of omnipotence. Being eternal is incompatible with omniscience, personahood, and creatorship.
There are substantial empirical objections to theism: The scale of the universe is vastly larger than what we would expect to find from a God with anthropocentric goals. And science has established that nothing has infinite duration. The existence of so much suffering isn’t reconciled with God; incompatibilist freedom is mistaken, it is unclear why freedom is valuable enough to justify it, and a huge amount of animal suffering remains unaccounted for.

So Everitt concludes that atheism is justified because the empirical evidence tells against theism, and theism is a self-contradictory doctrine.

Richard Gale: On the Nature and Existence of God

Gales says that he cannot answer the general question of whether there are any good arguments for or against believing in God because he is not addressing inductive arguments such as those based on design, beauty, or evil.

Atheological arguments have probed “the internal consistency of the theist’s conception of God, often with the result that the theist msut go back to the drawing board and redesign the particular divine attribute(s) that is the focus of the argument.” (3) As a result the idea of God has undergone a dialectical unfolding over time. But the challenge has been to preserve some semblance of the ordinary, personal and religious concept with the highly metaphysical and technical account of God that has come out of the philosophical discussion between theists and atheists. The goal will be to sketchout how we can redesign out concept of God without changing reference. This will open the way for the development of new atheological arguments.

There are a few interesting developments along these lines:

“My two arguments against the possibility of 51 [“There exists a necessary being, N, who determines that the universe or the infinite succession of dependent beings exists.”] constitute ontological disproofs of the existence of the very sort of being whose existence is asserted in the conclusion of every version of the cosmological argument, thereby showing that these arguments are radically defective.” (284)

Gale is negative about the prospect for religious experience: “It will be argued that religious experiences, although possibly veridical, could not be cognitive. Even if it were possible that their apparent object exist and be the right sort of cause of the experience, we could never know on the basis of these experiences either that this object exists or that the experience is caused in the “right way” by it. I shall go on to argue that a religious experience also could not qualify as a veridical perception of an objective reality, even if its apparent object were to exist and be the cause of the experience.” (287)

He is inconclusive about moral and prudential arguments for believing.

Since he does not address inductive arguments, “only the hypothetical conclusion can be drawn that if the only available arguments were the epistemological and pragmatic arguments examined before, faith would lack any rational justification.”


Martin—Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. The Santa Principle

In general, you can’t be justified in thinking that some X doesn’t exist unless you have looked. If you haven’t considered the available evidence and reflected on the sources or areas where evidence for the thing’s existence would occur if it was real, then it would be premature to conclude that there isn’t one.

Of course, once you have looked in all the likely places, or explored the relevant concepts, principles, and ideas, if you find evidence in favor of X’s existence, then you should accept that it is real, all other things being equal. So in order to conclude that there is no X the available evidence has to be inadequate in support of it.

But what if the X that we are seeking isn’t the sort of thing that would be manifest by evidence? If it is not the sort of thing that shows itself, then searching in all the right places and then not finding anything wouldn’t be sufficient to justify concluding that it isn’t real.

Roughly, Martin’s principle is:

A person is justified in believing that X does not exist if
(1) all the available evidence used to support the view that X exists is shown to be inadequate; and
(2) X is the sort of entity that, if X exists, then there is a presumption that would be evidence adequate to support the view that X exists; and
(3) this presumption has not been defeated although serious efforts have been made to do so; and
(4) the area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively examined; and
(5) there are no acceptable beneficial reasons to believe that X exists.

There’s no question that the concept of God has been exhaustively investigated for centuries. So the fourth condition is met. Martin then engages in a broad, and careful analysis of the putative evidence, empirical, logical, and conceptual, that God exists. He finds those arguments, the ontological, cosmological, teleological, experiential, and prudential to failures in one form or another. So condition 1) is satisfied. Furthermore, arguments to the effect that we should not expect God to manifest himself in some comprehensible fashion are inadequate. We should expect to find evidence for God, so condition 2 and 3 are met. And Martin argues that the pragmatic arguments alleged to justify belief are unacceptable. Therefore, it is reasonable on the basis of the principle to conclude that God does not exist.

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.