Are We Proving the Negative Yet?

Let’s consider a line dividing the natural and supernatural worlds. We can leave some of the details of what this line is, exactly, open for now.  The natural world is where we live.  That’s where our brains are, science is here, Lady GaGa, down quarks, and bacteria live here.  And all of our tools for empirically  investigating reality reside here.  Science operates here with particle accelerators, telescopes, biology labs, and so on.  So provisionally the line between worlds is the line between those things that we can investigate with scientific methods—spatial-temporal entities, forces, and phenomena, broadly considered. 

What’s on the other side?  Well, there have been many proposals.  Ghosts, if they were real, would be there.  The souls of dead people who psychics talk to would be there.  Our prayers are alleged to cross the line.  Angels, demons, saints, and all the other things that have been alleged to be real, but not part of the natural world.  And of course, God, by most descriptions, if he was real would be there.

Our challenge, then, is to use the tools we have—our empirical and not so empirical methods—to do our best to figure out what’s real over there.   We know that people have always eagerly proposed many inhabitants for that world.  Over the millennia the number of supernatural hypotheses that have been put forward is staggering.  But lots of them, it turns out, are bogus.  Demons aren’t real.  Ghosts aren’t real.  Paluga, Odin, Oprah’s favorite mystical force The Secret, aren’t real.

Everyone, including enthusiastic supporters of Odin and ghosts, has to acknowledge that there must be some criteria of reasonableness that we can employ to sift the real from the imaginary when we consider various proposals for supernatural beings.  We’ve at least got to try to use the resources at our disposal to figure out which of those we should believe in and which we should be doubtful of.  The alternative would be to simply accept all of them, I suppose.  But no one actually does that, nor do they think that’s reasonable.  And we can’t accept all of them as real because many of them are mutually exclusive:  if the Muslim Allah is real, then the existence of Catholic saints in the afterlife presents a problem; if Paluga created the universe, then a number of other views about the origins of the world must be ruled out. 

So what tools do we have?  We can gather as much empirical information as we can and try to construct the best, most comprehensive, most logically and probabilistically consistent model of reality on the basis of it.  We infer the existence of unobservable (but natural) entities on the basis of observables all the time.  The data from bubble chambers in a particle accelerator are explained by the presence or muons, or a readout on a mass spectrometer leads us to postulate the presence of a chemical compound in a sample.  It may be that the best explanation of some particular set of empirical observations is that there is a supernatural being on the other side—that’s what “irreducible complexity” and intelligent design arguments allege to show.

Alternately, we can employ more conceptual methods.  We can just ask ourselves if the supernatural proposal even makes internal, logical sense.  Are the various claims about this supernatural entity consistent with each other?  If they are not, then at the very least, that should raise a red flag about the plausibility or viability of the proposal.  (I dealt with the possibility of acquiring private knowledge of God through your own thoughts here:  Vetting Supernatural Knowledge Claims)

When we have a proposal for an inhabitant of the supernatural realm, then, first we need to get clear on exactly what sort of thing it is alleged to be and what sorts of properties it has.  Then we need to see, to the best of our abilities, whether what that thing is alleged to be fits with two things.  First, does it fit with  our empirical observations of the world and the scientific model of reality that we have developed to explain them.   If it doesn’t, then either there is something wrong with the model, or there is something wrong with the supernatural hypothesis.  Which one we should prefer in this case will depend on the strength of the evidence we have for the empirical model of the world against the strength of the evidence we have for the supernatural entity  A concrete example:  consider the fundamentalist Christian God who, among other things, is alleged to have created the entire universe, the Earth, and all life in its current state of development in just seven days approximately 6,000-10,000 years ago.  This is a supernatural being that might be real, and whose existence would have some observable implication in the natural world where we live.  So in principle, this is a supernatural being that we can investigate empirically. 

It would be a gross understatement to say that our investigations have not favored this proposal.  The hypotheses that 1) our universe began approximately 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang, 2) that life on Earth began in its most primordial forms about 3 billion years ago, and 3) that humans evolved gradually from these lower life forms billions of years later, have become some of the most thoroughly confirmed and justified conclusions in the entire scientific enterprise.  To put it very mildly,  if we were to accept God_FC (fundamentalist Christian), there are too many other well justified beliefs that we would have to reject.  And to make things worse, the evidence in favor of the existence of God_FC is remarkably sketchy.  There is very little to recommend it, besides prejudice, ignorance, and delusional ideology.  Scratch one more supernatural being off of the list.

And while we are at it, let’s scratch demons, ghosts, sprites, elves, Santa, chi, etc. off the list too.  Those are  all supernatural hypotheses that can’t be reconciled with the rest of what we know (and have better evidence for).  And fundamentalist Jews and Muslims also subscribe to young Earth, creationist views, so there’s two more down:

What about other supernatural hypotheses.  We can proceed according to plan.  And we can use both approaches.  For centuries, philosophers have been considering the viability of abstract characterizations of God as a singular, personal, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being.  Call this God_B5, for the big 5 properties listed.  Does a being  a being like this make sense? 

Deductive atheologists argue that it does not (see Drange, Martin, Mackie, McCormick, Grim, Everitt, and others).  First, there have been many attempts to work out the details of what it  would be for God to have these various properties and in a number of ways it has been argued that one property is incompatible with another.  See Drange for a quick overview.  These incompatible property arguments suggest, but do not deductively demonstrate, that no such being with these particular properties can exist.  Why do they only suggest it? It remains too be seen whether there can be  no reasonable account of what it would be for God to be omnipotent, for example, and also omniscient that is logically  and conceptually consistent whatsoever.  Maybe there  could be a characterization of these properties that is both reasonable (no special pleading or ad hoc revisions are allowed) that we just haven’t come up with yet. 

Maybe.  But at what point do we shift over from “probably,” to “we’re not sure,” to “probably not,” or it is “beyond a reasonable doubt?”  To date, among the greatest philosophical minds that have worked on the problem over the course of 2,000 years, we do not have a satisfactory account of omnipotence.  (Nor are there any arguments for the existence of God that have achieved any widespread consensus support.)  The paradox of the stone, which you may heard of, is just the start of it.  In recent decades, philosophers, including many theists, have employed the latest greatest and most sophisticated advances in logic, conceptual analysis, set theory, and even math to try to spell out what omnipotence could be to no avail.  We haven’t been able to define it in a way that has sufficient scope to be appropriate for a divine being on the one hand without running afoul of logical paradoxes, and being puny but relatively free of abstract conceptual problems on the other.  So the prospects for omnipotence are dim, and they don’t seem to be brightening.  And omnipotence doesn’t appear to be a viable property, then the prospects for their being a God who is essentially omnipotent are poor.   

I won’t summarize the full set of discussions in the literature here.  But a large set of arguments within the deductive atheology tradition (and in the philosophical theism tradition too!), presents us with serious conflicts either in the account of a single property like omnipotence, or between two or more properties.  And those conflicts are the strongest indicators that we could have that God, as traditionally conceived, is not even a possible being, much less an actual one.  And if we can’t make rational sense of the classical account, then it undermines a number of other proposals:  If there’s no God_B5, then there’s no Christian, Muslim, or Jewish God. 

The problems pile up.  Many people have also concluded (and it would be difficult to insist that they are being unreasonable) that the quantity and quality of suffering in the natural world make the God_B5 hypothesis implausible.  There is a very large literature in the background here, but I’m going to stick to the big picture.  The problem of evil gives us grounds to put yet another scratch through the God_B5.  Put a scratch through it for every compelling argument we have—empirical or conceptual—against the existence of God_B5.  With so many stakes in his heart, it will be hard to resurrect this one from this side of the divide. 

And so on.  For every supernatural hypothesis that has fallen to good sense, evidence, empirical investigation, and careful thought, we can propose it and then cross it out. 

See my post on 500 dead gods for several hundred more that I couldn’t squeeze onto the slide.  See 2,500 more at CommonSenseAtheism.com. 

So . . . . 


Are we proving the negative yet? 

That is, what about wide positive atheism?  That depends on what sort of standard of proof we are adopting.  If we artificially elevate the bar so that it is only reasonable to believe those negative existential claims (“X does not exist”) where we have deductive certainty, then the answer is no.  "You can't prove a negative," we hear again and again.  But atheism is being held to a false standard of proof.   That’s a standard that no one meets for any of their beliefs.  Descartes took it seriously in the Enlightenment, but notice that he didn't get far after that.  Then, after a number of developments in math and logic in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the Euclidean and Aristotelian notions of certainty that used to give us so much security are anachronistic.  (See Godel, Cantor, Russell, Reimann, Lakatos, Carnap, Putnam, and Wittgenstein, to name a few.) 

Even mathematicians now acknowledge that if we adopt a different set of axioms at the outset, we will be able to  “prove,” different conclusions.  Furthermore, the arguments in favor of one set of axioms over another themselves do not provide us with perfect deductive certainty.  If the wide positive atheist isn’t justified because he lacks this sort of proof, then the problem isn’t just his—that means that we all have to face the consequences of a devastating global skepticism.  Put another way, the epistemological challenge of skepticism is not uniquely the atheist’s to solve.  In rejecting atheism on these grounds, the skeptic has robbed himself and everyone else of everything.  If there are no rationally justified beliefs, then it’s true that wide, positive atheism is not a rationally justified belief.  But consider the cost.  As many see it, the absolute certainty demand is not an indicator that we don’t have any knowledge, it’s a reason to reevaluate the epistemic principles that produced the demand.  (See G.E. Moore.)  I will take the existence of many rationally justified beliefs that are justified in the absence of perfect deductive certainty as the reductio argument against skepticism and leave it at that for now.  The critic of atheism cannot artificially raise the standard of proof against atheism to levels that no beliefs can fulfill, and then pronounce only atheism dead. He's got much more serious problems.

Can we draw some conclusions or make some projections from the long list of dead gods that are moldering on the other side of the line?  Do they prove the negative?  They prove the negative as well as it can ever be proven.  


For decades, the patent offices in the U.S. and Britain were deluged with submissions for patents on perpetual motion machines—contraptions that would produce more energy than was put into them, and thus solve all of humanity’s energy needs forever.  Such a device is highly dubious, if not impossible, given what we know about the laws of nature.  After wasting countless frustrating hours reviewing these proposals only to reject them, the patent offices adopted a new policy.  They ruled that no more patents applications for pepetual motion machines would be accepted. 

We should draw the same lesson about God.  The failure of so many attempts to 1) devise  a conceptually coherent account of what God is, and 2) reconcile the existence of God with the rest of what our best scientific model of reality describes, give us reasonable grounds for rejecting the existence of such a being.  This conclusion is defeasible—we should be prepared, like any reasonable people—to revise this conclusion in the light of new evidence.  But 100% of our best, earnest, energetic attempts to find some reasonable grounds for believing have failed.   And all of those failures narrow the possibilities for what that being could be.  Any new proposals must navigate around all those corpses, as it were.  And they must fit with our rapidly expanding empirical knowledge of reality.  The prospects for doing that look more dim than reviving demon possession as an explanation of infections, or of finding new evidence that overturns all of the evidence for evolution. 

We are justifiably skeptical about the prospects of yet another proposal for a perpetual motion machine coming though the door.  The next applicant comes into the patent office and says, “I know that the existence of a perpetual motion machine flies in the face of all the physics and chemistry that we know.  And I know that there have been thousands, or even millions of others, just like me, who insist that they are the first and only ones who ever got it right.  But seriously, you’ve got to believe me.  I am the one who has finally figured it out.  My proposal for a perpetual motion machine really works.”  You’ve got a lot of explaining to do to justify our taking you seriously.     

Know Your Godless Heathen Positions

Unfortunately, in many of the recent discussions about atheism and God, a number of crucial distinctions have gotten blurred together.  It has become common, especially for the critics of atheism, to conflate atheism, materialism, naturalism, evolution, and natural selection.  Then, an objection to one of these positions is taken to undermine all of them.  This would be a mistake since there are several distinct positions here that the atheist may or may not also accept.  And much of the energy that has been expended to knock them down is wasted because several of them turn out to be compatible with theism.  Let’s clarify:

Atheism—Simply put, an atheist is someone who does not believe in a god or gods.  A person’s atheism is wide when they deny the existence of all gods.  We can describe someone as adopting a narrow atheism position when they deny the existence of a particular conception of god.  So Christians are typically narrow atheists about Allah, for instance, or about Thor.

Negative atheism:  The term atheism can be understood the way “atypical” or “asymmetrical” are.  It can mean “simply lacking a belief in God.”  People who have not reflected on the question, or who are not sure can be described as lacking an affirmative belief in God, so they can be characterized as negative atheists along with those who affirm that no God exists.  This sense of the term is not typically distinguished; usually what people mean when they describe someone as “atheist” is that they are positive atheists—they believe that no God exists.  For the most part, when I use the terms “atheist” or “atheism” in my blog, I mean, “positive atheism.” 

Ontological naturalism-is the view that the only things that exist are those that are discovered by and investigated by scientific methods.  This could means something like, “the totality is made up entirely of spatial-temporal objects,” where spatial-temporal objects is understood very broadly. One way ontological naturalism can be spelled out is in terms of causal closure.  Everything that happens is brought about by a fully physical history that is discoverable by science.  There are no spooky, supernatural, or non-natural entities or causes, or if there are, they will be understandable in scientific, natural terms.  (See Naturalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

Methodological Naturalism--  is the view that the best, most effective, or only means of acquiring knowledge is through the methods of science, not through a priori or purely conceptual approaches.  The study of spatial-temporal objects employing the principles of observation, hypothesis, and empirical disconfirmation is the only way for us to come to know the world, even for traditionally conceptual and philosophical problems.  Some people hold that methodological naturalism is compatible with a ontological  supernaturalism.  That is, they insist that we can believe in, or there can exist, supernatural beings, such as God, even though we engage in empirical investigations where no such entities are evident.  The big question for the theist who is also a methodological naturalist, of course, will be, “how is the knowledge of God obtained?”  MN is typically viewed as an epistemological thesis—it’s about how to acquire knowledge—rather than a metaphysical view about the ultimate constituents of reality. (See Naturalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

Materialism—is the view that all things are made of matter and nothing else. While materialism appears to overlap with naturalism, especially ontological naturalism, we should see it as an explicitly metaphysical thesis about the ultimatum constituents of reality, but not as much a view about what the best methods are for acquiring knowledge of that reality.  Some of the Greeks, for instance, arrived at the materialism conclusion through a priori or more conceptual reasoning. 

Eliminative materialism- is a position from the philosophy of mind.  It is the “radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.”   The eliminative materialist believes that with the expansion of our scientific inquiries, there are often concepts such as “demonic spirits,” or “celestial spheres,” that cease to find a place within our theories.  Some terms, like “heat,” we keep, but only be radically revising what we think the ultimate physical constituents of heat are.  Other terms are too embedded in an old model of reality to be effectively salvaged.  The label applies primarily to a position about minds, but we can see the implications for God and many religious concepts. 

Reductionism—complex systems and phenomena can be reduced and explained entirely in terms of their parts and their causal interactions.  Reductionism in philosophy of mind can be contrasted with emergentism, or epiphenomenalism.  According to these anti-reductionist views, mental states, qualia, consciousness or other phenomena are produced by physical processes, but they cannot be explained entirely in terms of them.  For a variety of reasons, theists are often anti-reductionists, but reductionism itself as a thesis about explaining objects in nature is distinct from atheism. 

Supernaturalism—is the denial of ontological naturalism.  Not all things that exist are natural.  There are some entities, forces, or phenomena that exist beyond the spatial-temporal world that science investigates. 

Theism—the view that God exists.  Typically, the God that is of most interest to atheists and people characterized as theists is the singular, all powerful, all knowing, all good, personal deity who is the central figure in the major western monotheistic religions. 

Evolution—is change in objects over time.  Stars, dialects, and political systems evolve.  In biological species, change can be induced by many factors including but not limited to natural selection.  The suspected asteroid collision that brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs was an evolutionary event, but the extinction was not due to natural selection. 

Natural Selection—is a specific causal mechanism on Earth whereby species evolved over time.  The reproduction of organisms yields heritable variations.  Some of these variations render some organisms better able to survive than others.  Those differences in survival rates produce differences in reproduction of those heritable traits in the next generation. 

I won’t embark on an ambitious argumentative thesis at this point.  In fact, I think that wide positive  atheism, and some forms of ontological naturalism, eliminative materialism, reductionism, and evolution by natural selection are the most reasonable positions given what we know.  But I want to emphasize that an objection to reductionism or to naturalism, by themselves, are not objections to atheism.  Atheism (narrow, positive) is a view about the existence of God, nothing more, nothing less.  That view is compatible with a number of other ontological and epistemological views.  So it will not do to conflate these importantly different positions together and accept or reject them wholesale on the basis of a particular objection to one of them.   

Know Your Godless Heathens

The discussion between believers and non-believers on the web is filled with sweeping generalities about atheists’ believing this and believing that. Atheists are guilty of it too. Unfortunately, lots of the people making these claims are not taking the time to actually find out what atheists have been arguing. As a result, the characterizations they are giving of atheist positions and arguments have little to do with reality. I’ve presented a long bibliography of the important sources of atheist thought in the last hundred years here:  Atheism Bibliography.  But I acknowledge that that is a substantial homework assignment. Nevertheless, if you are going to take this topic seriously, you need to work your way through the important works on the topic. A physicist couldn’t expect to follow what’s going on if she hadn’t read Feynman, Einstein, and Newton, after all. And a biologist couldn’t get by without Darwin, Mendel, and Gould.

So here’s a much shorter list of some essential works in philosophical atheism from the last 30 years or so. A few are articles, one is my overview of the field that’s going up at the Internet Encyclopedia (It’s posted here:  Arguments for Atheism in the mean time.) And there are several book length topics. If you read these and understand the arguments, you’ll have a good handle on all the big issues and arguments in the field. The Rowe article from 1979 is the watershed presentation of the inductive problem of evil argument (and restated in 2006). To date, the strongest response that’s been given to it is pretty puny: we just can’t be sure if there have been instances of completely pointless suffering out there.

Start reading:

Drange, Theodore (1998b). “Incompatible Properties Arguments: A Survey.” Philo 1 (2), 49-60. On the web here.

• [A useful discussion of several property pairs that are not logically compatible in the same being such as: perfection-creator, immutable-creator, immutable-omniscient, and transcendence-omnipresence.]

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

• [Everitt considers and rejects significant recent arguments for the existence of God. Offers insightful analyses of ontological, cosmological, teleological, miracle, and pragmatic arguments. The argument from scale and deductive atheological arguments are of interest.]

Gale, Richard (1991). On the Nature and Existence of God, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• [Gale gives a careful, advanced analysis of several important deductive atheological arguments as well as the ontological and cosmological arguments, and concludes that none for theism are successful. But he does not address inductive arguments and therefore says that he cannot answer the general question of God’s existence.]

Mackie, J.L. (1982). The Miracle of Theism, New York: Oxford University Press.

• [Influential and comprehensive work. He rejects many classic and contemporary ontological, cosmological, moral, teleological, evil, and pragmatic arguments.]

Manson, Neil A. (ed.), (2003). God and Design, London: Routledge

• [Perhaps the best recent academic collection of discussions of the design argument.]

Martin, Michael (1990). Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

• [A careful and comprehensive work that surveys and rejects a broad range of arguments for God’s existence. Particularly clear and structured. Many penetrating objections. One of the very best attempts to give a comprehensive argument for atheism.]

Martin, Michael and Ricki Monnier (eds.). (2003). The Impossibility of God. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

• [An important collection of deductive atheological arguments—the only one of its kind. A significant body of articles arguing for the conclusion that God not only does not exist, but is impossible.]

Martin, Michael and Ricki Monnier (eds.). (2006). The Improbability of God, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

• [The companion to The Impossibility of God. An important collection of inductive atheological arguments distinct from the problem of evil. God’s existence is unreasonable. The only one of its kind.]

McCormick, Matt. (2009) “Atheism” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. forthcoming: www.iep.utm.edu.

• [A more detailed survey of the atheism literature and the families of arguments that have become influential in the 20th and 21st century, parallels this bibliography.]

Oppy, Graham (2006). Arguing About Gods, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press.

• [Main thesis: there are no successful arguments for the existence of orthodoxly conceived monotheistic gods. This project includes some very good, up to date, analyses of rational belief and belief revision, ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, Pascal’s wager, and evil. He sees these all as fitting into a larger argument for agnosticism.]

Rowe, William (1979). "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," American Philosophical Quarterly 16, 335-41. On the web here

• [Very important work. Rowe insists that even if there are some natural or moral evils that God could have had a good reason for creating, there are instances of pointless evil that God could have prevented, then there is no God. And there are instances of pointless evil, such as the isolated suffering of a fawn burned in a forest fire. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no God. This work provokes an enormous response in the modern literature.]

Rowe, William (2006). "Friendly Atheism, Skeptical Theism, and the Problem of Evil," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 59, 79–92

• [Twenty five years after the publication of “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” Rowe elaborates on and summarizes the multitude of developments in the argument and his position.]

Schellenberg, J.L. (1993). Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

• [Schellenberg argues that the absence of strong evidence for theism implies that atheism is true. Important development of a new argument.]

Vetting Supernatural Knowledge Claims

I frequently get accused of making the mistake of narrow mindedly demanding empirical proof for things that are not empirical, tangible evidence for the intangible, or applying scientific standards of proof to all knowledge claims when not all knowledge is empirical or scientific.

This sort of comment is typical:

“It always amazes me when materialists clamor for proof regarding spiritual realities in no other than material form. It would be like me asking a physicist for the introspective insight that proves gravity; a plainly ridiculous request. "Spiritual" reality is no misnomer; it is called such precisely because it is spiritual, not material. The distinction here is very real. The means to acquire material knowledge of the cosmos is not the same as one employs to discover spiritual truth. You will never receive a handful of spirit to examine under a microscope, gaze at God through a telescope, or discover a soul on an operating table. The path to spiritual insight will never be found on the outside; it is and will always remain an inner discovery.”

Atheists should reject the switcheroo that is being foisted on them here. Atheists and non-believers should refuse to accept this changing of the topic from "what are the reasons we have for thinking that there is a supernatural being that exists?" to "science and empiricism aren't the only paths to knowledge." First, atheism is not materialism, naturalism, or scientism. At a minimum, the atheist merely denies that there is sufficient justification to believe that “God exists,” is true. In its stronger form, atheism is the view that it is more reasonable to believe that there is no God than to believe or be agnostic. That, in itself, implies or requires no further commitment about the totality of nature. The atheist need not defend an ontological naturalism that insists that no supernatural beings whatsoever exist, although many of us think that is the most reasonable view too. The alleged failings of science, or of materialism are irrelevant to the central question: do we have good reasons to think that God is real?

In looking for an answer to this question, the atheist does not need to insist, at least in principle, that the only way to acquire knowledge of the world is by empirical or scientific means. We can grant that this supernatural, subjective, or non-empirical knowledge is possible. A lot of things are possible, and we’d be foolish to try to argue for their impossibility on the basis of insufficient information.

The problem comes in trying to find some justifying grounds in these so-called internal methods for learning about God. We can allow that it might be possible to acquire some access to another reality or to God through some internal, subjective, personal, or conceptual methods. That’s what many mathematicians believe they are doing when they reason a priori from definitions and axioms to theorems that have sweeping application in the conceptual world of numbers. But what we cannot accept are just any old deliverances of these internal sources without any scrutiny. The other extreme position from a radical empiricism or scientism is having a complete gullibility about these subjective, internal feelings and apply no criteria to them to separate the legitimate from the bogus.

We’ve known since Socrates that in order to have knowledge, a person must have a justified, true belief (Gettier problem notwithstanding). That is, a person does not know something unless first, she believes it, second, it actually is true, and third, she is justified in believing it—she can’t just pull it out of nowhere. And the justification criteria is where these supernatural knowledge accounts invariably fail. In order for a method for producing claims about reality (empirical or supernatural) to be trusted, it has to be reliable. The method must be one that works—that successfully produces true claims about the world. If the method you are using actually produces more false claims than true ones, then we can hardly trust its deliverances. In fact, if it has this sort of track record, like Astrology, or palm reading, or prescient dreams do, then the fact that you arrived at the conclusion by way of that method actually tells us that it is more likely to be false than true. That can hardly be called knowledge. But if the method works—if there’s someone who can gaze into her crystal ball, or read tea leaves, and she can reliably make predictions about the stock market, or find murder victims, or divine tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers—then it’s reliable. And that track record gives us good reason to trust the method and the next deliverance that it produces. Someone may protest that these examples still come down to empirical confirmation. Reliability and the need for some method of discrimination in our methods are not confined to science or the empirical realm, however. If a mathematician can go into a trance and draw out the answers to complicated unsolved problems in the discipline through some mysterious act of divination, we can’t reject that approach outright. The proof is all in whether or not the method works. If her solution to Fermat’s last theorem, or Goldblatt’s conjecture, or whatever, works, and we can check it against some other standard, then she’s building a case for the reliability of her method. And the better the reliability, the more justification it will provide. Then, if the method indicates that the claim is more likely to be true than not, we’re on our way to having knowledge.

So if the theist has another method for learning about the reality of God, we’re prepared in principle to accept that. First issue: if it is not something publicly tangible that can be experienced by the rest of us, what is that method? Is it a voice in your head? A strong feeling? A powerful sense of presence? An overwhelming awareness of a transcendental reality? Something ineffable? Do you come by that knowledge by praying? By thinking? By talking to yourself? Do these ideas come to you when you get yourself into an altered state by fasting? Hallucinogenic drugs? Chanting or meditating? Does it feel like what you figure being overcome by the Holy Spirit must feel like? Do you spin for hours until your consciousness is altered?



Second issue: What are the criteria that you are employing to determine the reliability of this method to acquire supernatural knowledge? How can we tell when the voices or the feelings are lies?

The problem is that we all know that lots of people have lots of these types of experiences that are, for lack of a better word, false. In the course of human history, billions of people have heard voices, felt presences, or divined ideas that just weren’t real. Even the most enthusiastic advocate for internal, supernatural knowledge has to concede that in a lot of cases when people have these experiences, they are bogus. If the Christian advocates this route to knowledge of the Christian God, then he has to conclude that the thousands of non-Christian sects and billions of non-Christians who used that very same method but got different results were mistaken. So just like any other method for justifying a claim, including scientific ones, there must be some way to separate the authentic deliverances of this inner sense from the mistaken ones. What are those distinguishing marks that would allow us to determine the reliability of the method?

Please don’t say that they can only be known privately inside your head too. It can’t be that we (on the outside) can know that your method is reliable because it really, really feels reliable to you. That amounts to a circular proving of the method with the method. Besides, the Sufi mystic, or the Hindu seer both say exactly the same thing about their method for finding (different) ultimate truths about reality. It can’t be the voices in your head that confirm the reliability of the voices in your head, and the feelings of the Holy Spirit can’t establish the reliability of what appear to be the feelings of the Holy Spirit.

What some authors like William Alston and Alvin Plantinga have conceded that person should seek out confirmation of their method outside of their own minds. Good methodology can be distinguished from bad by checking with a community of other believers or experiencers who report having these feelings too. By comparing notes with them, the experiencer can become satisfied that what they are feeling is real.

The problem here should already be evident. If the believer draws the circle carefully and small enough around just those people in their tradition, from their church, or sect, then they might find what appears to be corroboration. But define the community of other-worldly travelers big enough to include the local mosque, synagogue, gurdwara, or shrine and suddenly we find people who are using the very same method to arrive at radically different and logically incompatible results. The history of human religious movements is filled with the near infinite splintering of one group from another over doctrinal and theological disagreements about the so-called one, true meaning of God’s communications. It’s laughable to suggest that the reliability of one’s inner sense of God can be proven by appealing to some consensus among believers that simply does not exist. Proving the reliability of the other-worldly method cannot be a matter of merely checking with your (close) friends.

The problem is made worse by the fact that there is a mentally ill guy on the corner by the supermarket who has lots of powerful, seemingly metaphysically significant ideas springing up in his mind too. The internalist theist has to admit that there needs to be some way to distinguish authentic epiphanies of God and reality from delusions, fantasies, and ideologically driven mistakes. If they have no way to separate them, and just insist that they have some really, really powerful feelings that God is there, what makes their claims any more acceptable to the rest of us than the homeless guy's?

The answer, of course, is that the internalist does not have anything resembling a method and no way of establishing the reliability of their special God sense over all the others. And that’s why we reject their claims to have knowledge this way. The problem has nothing to do with the totality of science or the adequacy of empirical methods to discover all truths. The problem is that so many of these non-empirical methods have produced obvious bullshit for millennia, and we should know better than to just accept some subjective feelings as reliable indicators of a metaphysical reality.

Two points to summarize. First, we should not allow the redirection of doubts about special private knowledge of God to a debate about the methods of science, naturalism, or materialism. That’s all beside the point. The real issue is: what are the reasons we have to think that God is real? Since the subjective realm is notoriously unreliable, it won’t be sufficient to defend internalism by merely insisting that religious belief is subjective and beyond the reach of empirical methods. There have got to be some methods of discrimination or the believer can have no knowledge.

Science is Essential to Morality

In my last post, I asked the question, can science tell us what we ought to do. My short answer there was “not really.” I’d like to elaborate and modify that answer. Science is a far better method for answering all of the questions that concern human flourishing than any other approach we have, including religion.

Consider this question: What are the valuable questions to have answered in our efforts to live a good life? And once we have a sense of what these questions are, let’s think about the different approaches we might have to answering them. Here are a number of candidates in no particular order:

How can I live longer?
What will make me healthy?
Which vices am I prone to?
Which virtues are the hardest to obtain?
What are the best methods for achieving virtues and avoiding vices?
Which cognitive practices are best for cultivating happiness and fulfillment?
What sorts of lifestyle choices will produce the most happiness and fulfillment?
What sort of education and treatment will be most effective in my children’s education?
What sorts of treatment and what kind of parenting will do my children the most good? The most harm?
What are the best ways to discourage criminal behavior in myself and others?
What are the relative harms of various behaviors?
What are the benefits of various behaviors?
What sorts of social environments are most conducive to human flourishing?
Which social circumstances are the most detrimental to human flourishing?
What sorts of social relationships do humans need in order to flourish?
What are the most effective means for avoiding and defeating addictions?
What sorts of choices are most effective at preventing addiction?
If we seek to improve the lives of others, where are our efforts most productively directed?
What are the dangers of technological innovations?
How can we best prevent and treat disease?
How can we rectify famines, plagues, droughts, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters?
How can we build the best infrastructure for human societies?
What sorts of job pursuits, and working conditions are most conducive to human flourishing?
What are the best methods for establishing public safety?
What are the best methods for education?
What are the most effective methods for rectifying inequalities and bias?
What are the best methods for eliminating human pain and suffering?
What makes humans sick?
Which treatments can cure them?
Which are the best medical treatments?
What harms does poverty do to humans?
How much alcohol is good for humans?
Is smoking a healthy habit?
Do drugs do harms to people?
What are those harms?
Which methods of birth control work?
What sort of family structure and family relationships are most conducive to human satisfaction and success?
What are the differences between people’s perceptions of the truth and the truth?
What are the best methods for achieving mental well-being?
What are the negative and/or positive effects on humans of environmental factors such as air, water, and noise pollution?
Which political systems achieve the high degree of human freedom, fulfillment, and happiness?
What are the effects of various features of an economic system on the welfare of the humans in it?

It seems to me that science is vastly better qualified and demonstratively successful at giving us answers to all of these questions whereas religion fails horribly, or just has nothing to say about most of them. What resources are available to the Christian religion, for instance, for addressing these questions? The Bible is a collection of scattered writings from a variety of Iron Age authors that contains some opinions about some of these matters. But as the idiosyncratic views of just a few under-informed writers from pre-industrial, agrarian cultures, they are of limited use and often just flatly mistaken. Personal, anecdotal opinions about empirical matters are notoriously unreliable, even when these opinions come from wise, experienced sources. We won’t take seriously the claim that the views about these matters in the Bible can be trusted because the authors are channeling some infallible divine source. There are far too many gaps, confusions, contradictions, and flat out mistakes for that to be true. If the Bible authors got their information from some supernatural source, that source has proven himself to be highly unreliable. The musings of a church leader, or the recommendations from a pastor’s sermon aren’t much better since they too are subjective, biased, and anecdotal.

But carefully constructed, double-blinded clinical trials on medications, or large scale, objective analyses of data from scientific investigations give us real, accurate answers. When we gather large amounts of data with methods that are designed to prevent filtering and bias, and then when we evaluate that data actively looking for disconfirmations of a hypothesis using the established principles of sound empirical research, we do a far better job at getting at the truth than any other method.

If you care about human well-being, including your own, it is hard to imagine a single topic where science is not prepared to give you a better answer that is based on the facts. And what is a moral system if it doesn’t take the well-being of humans or sentient beings as its central aim?

Science is absolutely central to informing us about what we ought to do.

Can Evolution Explain Morality?

The standard theist answer is an emphatic no. They’ve repeated the answer countless times without really looking at the evidence. The first problem is that the claim is confused about several different distinctions. Let’s separate some questions:

Can the theory of evolution give us an account of how natural selection might have worked on humans (and other animals) to endow them with a moral sense? Yes. Even since Darwin, people have put forward ideas about how evolutionary forces could have selected for certain kinds of cognitive constitution in early hominids over others. The answer will depend on what we mean by moral sense. Perhaps the question is: Can evolution give us an account of why we care about each other, or why to do good things for each other, why we are generous or compassionate, why we have a sense of justice? Yes, it does. Barbara Kind, Frans de Waal, Marc Hauser, Patricia Churchland, Philip Kitcher, and many others have given careful accounts, supported by empirical observations, of how the process of evolution might have selected for individuals with some behaviors, preferences, and sensitivities and not others. As with any scientific theory, more empirical research and investigation will make progress on figured out which theory best accounts for the facts.

Can the theory of natural selection make us want to be better, more moral people? No. The theory is neutral in this regard. It just tells us what we are. But the process of natural selection does appear to have left us with some very strong desires to be better, more moral people. So evolution has made us want to be moral. But it has also made us favor foods that have very high calorie densities. In the wild, nuts with their high fat content were an important find when food is scarce. But I shouldn’t be following that same preference by ordering another slice of calorie rich cheesecake.

But can divine command theory make us want to be better, more moral people? No, it can’t. What believing that God commands X and forbids Y can do, especially if it is coupled with a threat of punishment or the promise of reward, is give you some incentive to engage in more behaviors that appear to be moral. But acting for the sake of reward or out of a fear of punishment isn’t moral behavior. That’s save-your-ass behavior. That’s utterly selfish, amoral behavior. Moral behavior requires other directed, other concerned, non-self interested motivation. Kant argues that in order for an act to be morally good, it must arise from the right sort of principled motivation that recognizes the autonomy and value of another person as a self-governing being. Real moral actions are one’s that transcend concern about yourself and that recognize others as beings who make choices, employ reason, and have freedom. Following orders from God either because he issued them or because of fear of punishment actually thwarts individual responsibility, freedom, and reason. Even if God commands that we act in selfless ways that acknowledge the rational autonomy of others, doing so isn’t moral if your motivation is that God commanded it.

Socrates showed us in the Euthyphro that whatever God commands, the question of whether that commandment is the morally right thing to do is a completely separate matter. Deciding either to do what God commands (because you are free) itself is a decision that concludes “What God commands is good.” And that is a moral decision that must be made on the basis of grounds other than the mere fact that God commanded it.

Can evolutionary theory tell us what we ought to do? Not really. It can tell us what we are and how we are built. It can tell us what sorts of behaviors are favorable to survival, and so on. But whether or not you ought to do any of the things that you are built to do is a separate question. You’ll have to have some better reasons to do it than the mere fact that we are biologically inclined to do some things rather than others. Biology may have endowed us with inclinations that themselves are immoral. This is the infamous is-ought problem. But the mistake is thinking that this problem is confined only to naturalized accounts of ethics. The is-ought problem is everyone’s challenge, especially for those that think morality comes from God.

Thinking that God wants us to do some things and not others can’t tell you that you ought to do it either. First, the diversity of religious views and the countless instances of doctrinal in fighting over every moral and religious question makes is obvious that there are no clear answers about what God wants us to do, especially among the people who are most convinced that we should do what God commands. Second, even if someone (mistakenly) concludes that God clearly wants us to do this and not that, whether or not you ought to do what God commands remains to be seen. It doesn’t become something you ought to do merely from the fact that God commands it, or you’d be busy right now committing genocide against the Midianite men, women and boys, but saving 32,000 virgin girls for your own use (Numbers 31), or wiping out the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Prizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. (Deuteronomy 7 1-2). You’d be fulfilling the command to perform human sacrifices (Leviticus 27: 28-29, Judges 11:29-40, II Samuel 21: 1-9.) Or you’d enslave other humans (Exodus 21: 2-6). Or you’d be following God’s commandment to punish witchcraft, heresy, violating the Sabbath, adultery, blasphemy, and back talking your parents with death. (Exodus 22:20, 31: 14-15, Leviticus 20:10 and 24: 16, and Exodus 21:17). If women seriously thought that we ought to follow God’s commands, then they’ he’d this one: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife. . . Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let wives be to their own husbands in everything.” (Ephesians 5:22). (I wish my wife believed that, then I could order her to go make me a sandwich right now.)

Moral philosophers have offered us a number of powerful theories about what we ought to do based on reasoning about morality. These accounts do have the potential to show us what we ought to do. Here are very short statements of just ten of them. There are many more and there are in depth background discussions of each in the authors’ works. One point to note is that none of them mention God. Another is that these philosophers are making an earnest effort to give a reasoned, principled, consistent, and convincing account of why we should do some things and not others.


1. Treat others as ends in themselves, never as mere means. (Kant)

2. A man [should]be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be content with as much liberty with others as he would allow them against him.(Hobbes)

3. “If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. . . . The principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering of any other being.” (Singer)

4. Eudaimonia, or flourishing, for humanity can only be achieved by acquiring virtue with regard to that which sets us apart, or our capacity to guide our own behavior by reason. Fulfillment can be achieved by living well according to this essential nature over the span of a whole life. (Aristotle)

5. Act according to that principle that will promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number.(Mill)

6. Only have aversion for those things that are in your control If you are averse to sickness, or death, or poverty, you will be wretched. . . .If you desire any of the things which are not in your own control, you must necessarily be disappointed; and of those which are, and which it would be laudable to desire, nothing is yet in your possession. (Epictetus)

7. “Man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future. Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower; nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have planned to be." (Sartre)

8. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. (Epicurus)

9. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. And social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that : a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity (Rawls)

10. Refraining mutually from injury, exploitation, and putting one's will on a par with others, may lead to a certain degree of good conduct among individuals. But to make it a fundamental principle of society is a will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. (Nietzsche)

Many people think that it is a serious blow against atheism and evolutionary accounts of human origins that they cannot explain morality. The problem is that in many regards, evolutionary theory does explain morality. But even if moral behavior was a mystery from an evolutionary standpoint (it isn’t), we still wouldn’t have any grounds to prefer a divine explanation for moral behavior. Adding God to the discussion just doesn’t do any explanatory work for us in helping us understand what is right and wrong, what the human moral conscience is, or what we ought to do. We will all encounter challenging, morally complex situations. And in order to get through them, we will have to think about the reasons we have for various actions. And we will have to decide which reasons are better and which are worse. Thinking that God commands something won’t help us decide if it really is morally good to do that. That is, no one can escape the burden of moral responsibility for their actions. And the only tools we have for solving those dilemmas are our powers of reasoning. Some of the very best reasoners among us about moral matters have been philosophers advancing theories of morality. Those accounts do much more towards answering the question of what we ought to do. And they can supplement the evolutionary accounts that we are developing about what sorts of creatures we are. The answer to the lead question is that evolution and philosophy can explain morality, but appeals to God cannot.

Perpetual Motion Machines and an Argument Against Agnosticism

For decades, the patent offices have been besieged with applications for patents on perpetual motion machines, anti-gravity devices, and other kooky contraptions. Eventually the offices in the U.S. and Britain had received so many and had wasted so much of their resources investigating them, they made a policy that they would not consider any application for a perpetual motion machine patent unless the author could produce a working model.

We could say that the offices migrated from being agnostic about their possibility to being defeasible atheists about them. The laws of physics are not completely known, and we could always be surprised, but countless failed attempts to produce such a machine and their knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics have made it reasonable for them to conclude that such a thing is naturally impossible. I also think we can agree that this conclusion is eminently justified and for them to remain agnostic about the existence of such a device would be silly, unnecessarily cautious, and disingenuous.

We’re in similar position about God. Agnostics have the view that they don’t know whether or not God exists. So the ordinary agnostic acknowledges that none of the various cases that are often presented for the existence of God is sufficiently compelling. The question is, in an epistemic situation where there is no compelling evidence for the existence of a thing, what are the circumstances that warrant deciding that no such thing exists versus merely suspending judgment about it.

Our situation is very much like the situation with regard to perpetual motion machines. We have countless examples of gods that people have thought were real, but turned out to be mistakes. See 500 Dead Gods. We have a good understanding of what is often really going on in those mistaken cases. People are subject to enthusiasm. They are prone to make mistakes. A variety of psychological phenomena seem to contribute to the occurrence and powerful character of religious experiences. Science has offered us natural explanations that supplant the divine explanations. And so on.

Furthermore, like the perpetual motion machine, the God hypothesis, if true, would fly in the face of countless other physical facts that we know about the world. We have never been able to corroborate a single instance of an immaterial soul that exists without a body. There has never been a single observable case of a consciousness, human or divine, that was able to exist without a functioning brain and nervous system. In every case where a supernatural, spiritual, or spooky cause or entity has been alleged to be real, our investigations have found nothing. Prayers don’t work. Nature is causally closed such that events within it are always precipitated by other physical causes.

There are things we do not know, of course. But there is every indication that we will continue to uncover the physical, mechanical, chemical, and biological causes for those things with empirical science just like we have done with everything else. Given what we do know about nature, discovering that there is an invisible, being with a consciousness that exists beyond the natural realm and who interacts with the natural realm would be about as plausible as finding out that the moon really is made of green cheese. We can’t say that such a thing is deductively impossible, but it is completely absurd. And someone who insisted on being agnostic about the possibility is being only marginally less irrational than someone who insists that it is true because they have a magic book that says so.

Being agnostic when the evidence for God is so poor and the evidence in favor of naturalism is so good amounts to a sort of ad hoc foot dragging. That same agnostic would never claim that the only reasonable position is to suspend judgment about a cheese moon, or invisible elves, or Thor, or Santa. In order for agnosticism to be justified in such a situation, there must be some evidential considerations that elevate the remote possibility into the range where the claim is nearly as likely to be true as false. The mere possibility that it is true never justifies treating it as a live enough hypothesis to warrant suspending judgment. There must be more going for the claim before we can give it that sort of respect.

So if atheism about Sobek, Paluga, Thor, Gefjun, Krakus, and all the others is justified, then which hypothesis is left standing and what are the considerations that boost it up out of the class of already rejected ideas? If, against all the odds, you’ve got a perpetual motion machine then by all means let’s see it. Otherwise, the only reasonable position to take is that no such thing exists.

What’s Left to be Agnostic About?

Larry Brand, a documentary film maker, just interviewed me for a film he’s making about atheists. Our discussion got me to thinking about agnosticism. Here’s a clearer statement of my view of it than I think I’ve given of it before.

There are a lot of thoughtful people out there who claim to be agnostic about the existence of God. They will acknowledge that many of the more evangelical and traditional conceptions of God do not make sense. They are not comfortable with the more literal readings of various religious texts or with a strongly anthropomorphic god because they acknowledge the host of problems associated with that position.

But as they see it, there is still a live possibility lingering here that the atheist has been too quick to dismiss. It’s the idea of an absolute ground of being, a source of meaning, a force, a power, or something that exerts influence on the universe with some purpose in mind. It is something that is greater than us, and it is more than can be explained or understood in merely naturalistic or material terms. We’ll call this a supernatural force, or SF. And the omni-God that so many people believe but that this agnostic doesn’t accept is the OG.

First, we should note that we’re not really talking about any sort of recognizable belief in God any more. We’d be hard pressed to even call a belief in an SF a kind of theism. In mainstream religious movements in the West, God has (at least) five essential features. He’s all powerful, all knowing, all good, there’s just one of them, and he’s a personal, conscious being. This last one is the most important for this discussion. Traditionally, God is anthropomorphic—he has a mind or thoughts, he has a plan, and he forms personal emotional and loving relationships with humans. And it’s really this aspect of God that the SF agnostic has moved the furthest away from. This is probably because to the extent to which we endow God with personal, caring, teleological, and conscious motives we make it harder and harder to reconcile that God with the facts. In many people’s minds, suffering, evolution, randomness, and the relative unimportance of humans in the big picture seem to indicate that the world just doesn’t have one of those sorts of beings in it. If it did, there are too many things about the world that would be different. So the SF agnostic has, more or less, conceded the atheist’s point about the sort of God that the vast majority of humans believe in. The SF agnostic is actually an atheist about God, Allah, Jehovah, Zeus, Thor, Sobek, Puluga, and all the rest. She only has reservations leading to suspension of belief about some much more nebulous, non-traditional and non-anthropomorphic thing. If she and the wide atheist are disagreeing about anything, it is about the conditions under which it is reasonable to suspend judgment about a hypothesis vs. simply disbelieving it.

We should allow that some of the difference in epistemic policy here can be legitimately due to different personal preferences. Experience may have led one person to want to be more cautious about lending her assent (or dissent) to hypotheses and generally taking her time in gathering evidence and formulating opinions. While another person may have more of a shoot first, ask questions later approach and be less inclined to suspend judgment about anything unless some relatively specific conditions are met. But if the former person’s policy leads her to think she should be agnostic about Zeus, Sobek, and Gefjun (the Norwegian goddess of agriculture), instead of simply disbelieving them, then she’s being too skittish, unrealistic, or just pretentious. And if the latter person is inclined to just reject everything unless some substantial evidence can be produced in its favor, then he’s being thoughtless and injudicious.

Personal preferences aside, what should it take for a hypothesis to warrant a serious agnosticism? I cannot be merely that it is might be true or it is some conceivable possibility. There are a host of other things that are possible, but reasonable people are not agnostic about them: elves, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and Chupacabras. It is possible that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck. But it would be silly to be agnostic about any of these on the grounds that they are possible. In order to warrant a considerate agnosticism, there must be more in favor of a claim. There has to be at least enough evidence in its favor to elevate its likelihood from the merely possible into a range where it could turn out to be true. If the probability that a claim is true ranges from 0 to 1, and the tipping point from probably not true to probably true is .5, then surely the reasonable range for agnosticism for a hypothesis is in the vicinity of .5. Let’s just stipulate that it’s .4 to .6. Greater than that and you’ve got grounds to believe it, and less than that you should disbelieve it. You wouldn’t assign a .5 probability to the existence of Santa, or to the claim that wearing a raw steak hat wards off illness. Those are probably way down in 0 to .1 range. And you would assign a very high probability to the claim that Barak Obama is the President of the U.S.

So what does it take to elevate a claim into the .4 to .6 range? The agnostic we are considering has granted that the anthropomorphic, traditional conceptions of God that so many other people believe in are not real. So those fictions, and those people’s beliefs in them shouldn’t count as someone boosting the supernatural force hypothesis up into the suspension-of-judgment range. The widespread beliefs in Santa, or ghosts, or the view that having sex with a virgin will cure HIV don’t do anything to make those claims even slightly more likely to be true. So widespread belief in an OG shouldn’t influence the probability that we assign to an SF.

This hypothesis will seem ad hoc, nevertheless, I’m going to put it out there because I think it really is at the heart of agnosticism that some people claim to subscribe to. Some agnostics are actually people who want to be believers, but they just can’t bring themselves to disregard all the counter indications.

To be honest, I think that what happens for a lot of agnostics is that they started out believing in an OG. They were raised religious, participated in religion with their friends and family, and they even enjoyed it or found it fulfilling. But as they explored the question intellectually they came to acknowledge that really what’s entailed by those religious doctrines can’t be true. They couldn’t reconcile the religion that they knew with the rest of what they know about the world. So they, perhaps grudgingly, gave up on that notion. But a desire to be religious in some form lingers, and there is still a great deal of appeal in the idea of some transcendent, supernatural force that holds out hope for something more than just matter and the reality we are faced with here. So these agnostics back off of the traditional notion of a thundering, judging, Biblical creator God but hold some optimism for an SF. They remain agnostic about that possibility because that idea doesn’t have the glaring inconsistencies that sabotaged traditional belief for them. If it is these sorts of personal desires that have led to a person’s elevating the possibility of an SF to the agnostic range, then I think this sort of agnosticism is ill-founded. If what’s really going on in their heads is that they wish they could believe in God, but they can’t bring themselves to buy into the deeply problematic being who is the center of belief for so many other people, then they don’t really have any evidence that would warrant suspension of belief about an SF; they are, more or less, religious believer wannabees. Subjective motivations like desire, need, hope, or psychological affect should not be permitted to influence the objective probability value that we assign to some claim about reality. My wanting to win the lottery, no matter how bad, doesn’t actually change the odds in the slightest—Oprah and The Secret notwithstanding.

Maybe if we consider a paradigm case of suspension of belief about some other hypothesis it can shed some light on the appropriate circumstances for agnosticism about God. Not everyone will agree with me, but the existence of intelligent alien life seems like a hypothesis that it would be wise to be agnostic about. It is certainly possible that it exists, and there are many considerations that lead us to think that the probability could be much higher than zero. We know life developed in our case, and given the enormous numbers of stars and planets in the universe, those conditions could be found in many other places. But there is too much we don’t know about the prevalence of planets with life conducive conditions. Even when life develops, it may be extraordinary for it to develop into intelligent life. Evolving to the point where they can engage in space travel or interstellar communication may be very, very difficult even if life turns out to be relatively common. Some thoughtful people conducting the search for extra terrestrial intelligence are divided about the issue. And so on.

What does this example show us? The idea can’t be merely consistent with what we know. If we make goblins undetectable, or give Santa a cloaking device, those hypotheses can be made consistent with everything else we know. There has to at least some plausibility to the hypothesis such that it could fit in with the known facts. We need to have, at least in outline form, a sketch of how that thing could be true and how it might dovetail with the rest of what we know about the world. We can anticipate several different ways in which aliens could fit in the world we know. Xeno-biologists (how about that for a cool job?), physicists, chemists, and cosmologists can give us a number of plausible accounts for how they could exist (not merely that they might possibly). Liquid water does appear to occur naturally on other planets in the universe. And some of those planets and stars appear to be the right temperature, age, and type to support life. The molecular construction of life could take a number of different forms, and so on. All of those considerations lead us to give it higher initial probability than we would to an invisible elf hypothesis.

So if we can take a lesson from the example, what the SF agnostic owes us is some account of an SF that fits comfortably with the rest of what we know or experience. Or put less confrontationally, if order for the SF hypothesis to warrant agnosticism, there must at least be enough evidence in its favor and some account of how the existence of such a thing could comfortably fit in with the rest of what we know.

What do we have regarding an SF that might lead us to give it this status? We’ve already seen that it cannot be the prevalence of belief in an anthropomorphic God among other people. And it can’t be our hoping that there is something else that leads us to give the real thing a greater probability. Are there phenomena, experiences we have, or other evidence that could be explained by an SF? Here the SF agnostic may say yes. She may point to internal phenomena: human consciousness, feelings of the sublime, transcendent experiences, our moral facilities, or religiousness. Or she may point to external phenomena: the advent of life on Earth, fortuitous circumstances, or the alleged fine-tuning of the cosmos.

But it cannot be merely that it is possible that these things are brought about by an SF that will warrant agnosticism about it—they could possibly be the work of Sobek too. There has to be sufficient evidence in favor of the SF hypothesis over the others to elevate it to the neighborhood of .5.

Do we have that? Here’s why I don’t think we do. We have many natural (non-supernatural) hypothesis that are either the probable explanation of each one of these phenomena, or we know enough about them to know the vicinity where the natural explanation will be found. None of our substantial efforts to understand these phenomena and others in natural terms have pointed in the direction of a supernatural explanation. Quite the contrary, in every case where we thought there was some supernatural force or cause at work, investigation revealed a natural one. There are no ghosts, no evil demons, no spiritual possessions that cause disease. The alleged miracles that we have investigated have turned out to be the result of human fallibilism, enthusiasm, or deceit. 10,000 supernatural hypotheses have given way to natural explanations.

So the burden on the SF agnostic is to point to evidence that would warrant our not lumping the SF hypothesis in with all the rest of the non-natural forces or beings that have failed. The world, all of it, looks to be a natural place where everything can be accounted for in natural terms. What’s left to be agnostic about?

Can't Be Moral Without God? Wrong.

Many people believe that in some fashion it is not possible for a person to be moral without God. So the charge that atheists are somehow lacking morally in this regard is brought up again and again.

There are a lot of confusions embedded in these discussions coming from both sides. We need to get clear on what the claim might mean and sort out some ambiguities. The first ambiguity concerns whether the claim is to be taken in an epistemological sense or an ontological sense. That is, do they mean that if a person doesn’t believe in God, they won’t be moral, or that if God does not exist, then morality would not exist? The second ambiguity concerns what “be moral,” means here. Does it mean act in a morally decent, law abiding manner, or does it mean ground their moral decisions on the right moral considerations?

So that gives us several different ways to interpret the sentence. At the risk of being tedious, let’s deal with them one by one. Is it true that unless a person believes in God, then they won’t act in a morally decent, law abiding manner? No. There are a billion or so Buddhists on the planet, and several hundred million atheists, just for starters, who do not believe in any sort of divine being, but it would be absurd to suggest that none of them act in a morally decent, law abiding manner.

Is it true that unless a person believes in God, they won’t ground their moral decisions in the right moral considerations? Again, this can’t be true either. Kant, Mill, Rawls, Aristotle, and many other respectable, plausible moral theories give accounts of how moral decisions should be grounded without any requirement for the actor to believe in God. If the someone wishes to defend this claim, then they will need to argue that none of the widely respected, studied, and emulated moral theories that have been developed in history are right and that no acts that are done in accordance with them are moral. That seems like an extraordinary and implausible position to take. It seems that at least one of these must be at least as plausible as divine command theory. In fact, the vast majority of expert moral philosophers have taken them all to be superior theories.

Is it true that unless God exists, then no one would act in a morally decent, law abiding fashion? It’s hard to know what the critic is getting at if they say yes. They might be thinking that it’s only the fear of God or respect for God’s commandments that makes people behave themselves. But again, this is myopic. There have been billions of people in history who don’t believe, don’t know about, or who have taken no note of God in their deliberations, but they have behaved morally. So it’s not believing that God is present that keeps people in line. Whether God exists or not, there are people who think he does not and who behave morally. So it seems implausible that his existence or non existence makes any real difference in their behavior.

Is it true that if there were no God, then no one would ground their actions in the right moral considerations? We can imagine that the critic would insist that this one is true. Sure, lots of people do ground their actions in other, non-God considerations, and they also behave in what appears to be a morally decent manner. But in fact, says the theist, none of their actions are based on the right considerations. He might insist that if there were no God, then there would be no sense of morality in humanity, or humanity would have never developed an awareness of a moral dimension in their lives, or our natures would be radically different. God is responsible for our capacity to act in moral ways, so if there were no God, then there would be nothing like morality at all. And then this moral capacity, that can’t be explained any other way is employed as evidence for the existence of God.
The problem with this position, of course, is that it is danger of being circular reasoning. How is it that the theist came to know that the moral capacity in humans could have only come from God. It’s embarrassing if the answer is “from God.” It’s even worse if that moral capacity, that God told them came from God, is then used as evidence that God exists. God tells me that only God can provide us with morality. My morality proves that God must be real.

The critic might try to go deep here and insist that even though many moral systems like Aristotle’s or Mill’s make no explicitly appeal to God, if it hadn’t been for God endowing humanity with a capacity for moral action or a moral sense, Aristotle and Mill would have had anything in human behavior to theorize about. They wouldn’t have even been aware of any moral dimension to our lives. But this argument also seems to beg the question, and it’s very hard to see how one might defend it, particularly since we have some plausible alternative accounts of how morality arose in humanity. Evolutionary biologists have given us a large body of evidence now that indicates that evolution built us, along with lots of other species to be moral. We observe proto-moral behaviors in all sorts of animals now, and we have a number of theories that about why evolution might have selected for altruism, sympathy, cooperation, and other social instincts.

It’s possible that the capacity for moral behavior that we find in ourselves came from God, but the critic needs to argue that that’s the only possible source it could have come from. And that much stronger claim is very hard to give a plausible argument for.
So it looks like whatever they mean by the claim that you can’t be moral without God, it can’t be right. Some of the things that sentence might mean are obviously false, and other interpretations fall into circularity or have to argue for some claims that can’t fit with the facts.

Guilty!

Suppose that you have been falsely accused of committing a crime, say, a murder, that occurred many years ago. There is very little evidence connecting you to the murder except the testimony of 4 people named Mike, Monty, Larry, and Jacob. Your defense attorney puts them on the witness stand and interviews them one at a time. During the questioning several important facts about their belief that you committed the murder are revealed. It turns out that none of the four actually saw you commit the murder. They’ve never even met you before. But each one of them admits that they heard some stories from some other people that you committed the murder. And it cannot be established that these other people were witnesses either and they are not available to be questioned. None of the 4 knows how many times the story was repeated or passed around before they heard it. They heard that a lot of people were witnesses to the murder, but again, none of those people are available and it is not known who they are. It turns out that the murder happened 30 years ago and they heard about it because the accusation that you did it has been talked about and remembered by these other unavailable people during all these years.

It also turns out that Mike and Larry got the story from Monty. They believe that you did it entirely on the basis of Monty’s telling them that you did. Furthermore, when the attorney tries to get the details straight about what happened at the crime scene, none of them tell the same story. The important details (that they all got from other people) are different in every case.

At one point, the prosecution puts a man named Perry on the stand and he affirms that you did it too. But he admits that he wasn’t there and he did not see it. Rather, he had a powerful vision during a trance while he was walking down the street one day and a voice he heard told him that you committed the murder.

The prosecuting attorney makes an attempt to assure the jury that you are guilty because there are lots and lots of people out there who believe it because they heard it from Mike, Monty, Larry, Jacob, and Perry. But the judge prohibits it because “Everyone knows that it is true,” is not an admissable form of evidence in court. But it never becomes clear why the judge allowed the hearsay evidence of the 5 men to be heard in the court in the first place.

The prosecuting and defense attorneys close their case. And the jury, all being good Christians, promptly convicts you of murder and sentence you to death.

If you haven’t figured it out: Mike, Monty, Larry, Jacob, and Perry are all Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, respectively.

Does it sound like fair grounds upon which to convict a person?

A murder charge and conviction are no less important in their impact on a person’s life than the changes that Christian’s believe we should enact in our lives for Jesus. If it is not reasonable to convict a person of murder on these grounds, it is no more reasonable to believe that 2,000 years ago a person came back from the dead on similar grounds, especially since it matters so much.

Suppose that we debriefed the jury after the trial and asked them about their decision and when we raised doubts about what they had done, some of them said things like, “Well, I know that the evidence was really sketchy, but in the end you just gotta have faith. And I have faith in my heart that he did it and deserves to go to prison for the murder.” Would that make the decision better or worse? Some of the others said things like, “I was raised Lutheran and we were always taught that he did the murder. That’s just the way I was raised. So when it came time to decide, I just went with that.” One of the other jurors said, “Yeah, the evidence for his guilt was really weak. But I just figure that it’s a good bet to find him guilty anyway. I mean, it could be wrong, but you never know—he might really have done it. There’s a 1 in a billion chance that he did. So if I convict him, then I will have done the right thing and justice will be served.” Another juror said that he just went along with the others to keep his grandmother happy.

There will be complaints about this story, no doubt. “The cases aren’t the same because in this case the person is accused of something bad, a murder, and it is a false accusation. But Jesus’ resurrection is true.” There are two problems with this response. The murder charge is analogous because it and the Jesus belief are both decisions of great import. What matters is that what is decided on the basis of the information at hand will have an enormous impact on a person’s life. There’s no question that believing in Jesus does have a radical effect on people, and there is no question that millions of believers think that it should have that effect on you. If believing in Jesus seems like a minor, trivial matter to you, then perhaps you should rethink the implications of it. But even so, believing something irrationally is irrational, no matter how big or little the belief is.

Furthermore, if the source of a person’s conviction that Jesus’ resurrection happened is the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, then complaining that the murder case is different because it is a false charge is begging the question. The point is that we don’t know whether or not Jesus came back from the dead, except on the basis of their words, so we can’t then assert that we are sure their words are accurate because Jesus came back from the dead.

There is a disanalogy here that actually makes the case for Jesus worse. To make the murder trial closer, Paul would have to tell his vision story about 20 years after the alleged murder. Then 10 to 20 years later, Mike, Monty, and Larry would come to the courthouse and give their stories. Then a full 90 years after the alleged murder, Jacob would show up and give his account of the murder.

But we must assume that the Christians on the jury would still be untroubled by the problems in the case for your guilt and when they promptly convict you on the basis of it, we should find them guilty of nothing unreasonable or unfair in their decision.

Eyewitnesses

Go here and watch this video. Focus your attention closely and try to count the number of times that the team of people with black shirts passes the basketball:

Basketball passing

Eyewitness testimony is, of course, overrated. We have heard that it is not reliable many times, but we may fail to appreciate just how bad it can be. Daniel J. Simons, a visual cognition researcher at the University of Illinois has created a number of experiments with shocking results. In the video above, a group of people in white and black shirts pass a basketball back and forth while rapidly changing position. Subjects are instructed to watch the video and keep track of the number of times one of the teams exchanges the ball. During the video a man in a gorilla suit saunters across in front of the basketball players, looks at the camera, beats his chest, and then walks off screen. An amazing 56% of the test subjects, who were focusing their attention on the ball passing behind the gorilla failed to even notice the gorilla standing in plain sight. People who are shown Simons’ video and instructed to do the same are typically incredulous that the gorilla was there until they are shown the video again. Show the video to someone else and tell them to count the number of times the black shirt team passes the ball.

Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). “Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events.” Perception, 28, 1059-1074.

There were 30 to 100 years that passed between the alleged events surrounding Jesus’ death and when they were written down by the authors of the Gospels who based their accounts on hearsay sources. The stories passed through an unknown number of people and repeated an unknown number of times before they were written down. But suppose that on the best case scenario, the authors actually spoke to someone who claimed to be a witness to the resurrection of Jesus. If we don’t notice a man in a gorilla suit jumping up and down in front of us as it is happening, how reliable is our recall going to be about something we think we saw 30 years ago?