My Magical Mind and God

One of the arguments that have been circulating amongst apologetically and philosophically inclined believers lately is the so-called argument from consciousness.  The reasoning roughly runs like this.  No matter how advanced or complete a scientific explanation of consciousness becomes that is based on an external, empirical investigation of the brain, there are some facts about mind that it will not and cannot even in principle explain.  No scientific account will be able to tell us why any particular state of our neurons produces just this internal conscious feel rather than some other.  We can analyze the brain states correlated with eating a ripe banana all we want and explain it all the way down to the molecular level, but none of that explanation will ever account for why it tastes just the way it does instead of like a guacamole.  Then somehow, improbably, these arguments move from this alleged irreducibility of mind to God.  The only way that brain states can be accompanied by any phenomenal states at all, the only thing that could have made them actually feel like something (with banana flavor) to you inside there is if God set it up that way.  (See Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God, Robert Adams' "Flavors, Colors, and God," and J.P. Moreland's "Argument from Consciousness."

If that last bit lost you, from “there are things about mind we don’t understand yet,” to “therefore God is real,”  you’re not alone.   There's a lot of work that needs to be done to connect the dots and a lot of serious philosophers of mind, philosophers of religion, or cognitive scientists aren't buying it.    The argument hasn't gotten much traction in peer reviewed academic journals.

This God of the neural gaps line suffers from a familiar problem in philosophy.  Very often philosophers will consider the radically disparate ends of some phenomena and its alleged mechanical, physical, molecular, or material causes, and throw their hands up at the prospects of ever connecting the two.  When we consider it from our philosophical (and evangelical) armchairs, it seems like that just can’t be any way that mere atoms of matter, molecules, or meat could possibly be responsible for the transcendental joys of listening to Beethoven, or the nuances of a fine French meal, or the rapturous elation of love.  From the inside, mere meat just seems too different from what it feels like to be me.  It just seems to debasing, dehumanizing, and demoralizing to render us down to simply brains.

Part of the problem here arises from linking such a low level physical account with such abstract, high level mental states, and then trusting our imaginations and our intuitions to be a reliable guide to what can or cannot be accomplished by serious scientific research.  I can’t fathom how a vast and complicated physical system like O’Hare airport in Chicago can possibly function either when I watch the janitor at gate 263B empty the trash.  My imagination and intuitions are red lined when I try to leap from my micro access perspective at the gate to what the whole, vast system is doing.  But it would be silly for me to conclude on similar grounds that the airport is therefore some sort of magical, transcendent, emergent, or immaterial entity.

Another part of the problem comes from people confidently concluding that science can never possibly do X, or neuroscience will never explain Y when they just don’t know much about it.  It’s very easy to make these kinds of sweeping pronouncements from a position of ignorance.  That’s also why serious neuroscientists and cognitive scientists aren't about to shut down their research labs because they find the reasoning behind the “Consciousness therefore God,” argument to be so compelling.  A note from history:  declarations that science will never do X usually prove to be quite embarrassing.

Here’s an interesting relevant bit from Cristof Koch’s book The Quest for Consciousness that summarizes one of the major theories we have to explain consciousness now.  Koch is a leading neuroscientist--Professor of biology and engineering at Cal Tech--working on the subject.  Neuroscientists have been looking for the neural correlate for consciousness (NCC) for a while.  They seem to be zeroing on some likely candidates.  (Please don’t argue at this point that correlation doesn’t imply causation—I’m well aware of that and the discipline of neuroscience is well aware of it.  If you’re really sure that the neural events in your brain that correlate with your thoughts are not the causes of your thoughts, then you wouldn’t mind if we, say, opened up your skull and excised those regions of brain tissue, or poured acid on them, right?)  So the view that has emerged involves certain neural firing structures outcompeting or out-shouting, as it were, other firing structure/patterns for temporary ascendency to being more globally broadcast across the brain.  Think of the cases when you can’t get that annoying Lady GaGa song out of your head.  That’s a informational/representational neural firing pattern that has achieved some temporary fame-in-the-brain, as Dennett puts it.  Eventually those neurons will get exhausted and something else will move to the forefront.  But Koch is the expert.  Let him explain it:

"The NCC involve temporary coalitions of neurons, coding for  particular events or objects, that are competing with other  coalitions. A particular assembly--biased by attention--emerges as the  winner by dint of the strength of its firing activity.  The winning coalition, corresponding to the current content of consciousness, suppresses competing assemblies for some time until it either fatigues,  adapts, or is superseded by a novel input and a new victor emerges.  Given that at any one time one or a few such coalitions dominate, one can speak of sequential processing without implying an clock-like process.  This dynamic process can be compared to politics in a democracy with voting blocks and interest groups constantly forming and dissolving. 

Francis (Crick) and I postulate that the NCC are built on a foundation of explicit neuronal representations.  A feature is made explicit if a small set of neighboring cortical neurons directly encode this feature.  The depth of computation inherent in an implicit representation is shallower than in an explicit one.  Additional processing is necessary to transform an implicit into an explicitly representation. "  (47) 

There's lots more, but that's a good start.  This offers us amateurs a glimpse of what part of a neurobiological account of mental phenomena might look like.  And it’s surprisingly potent to explain a lot of things that might have otherwise seemed inexplicable.  So at the very least, we should not gallop off on the God horse when a clear answer to the big how question eludes us.  Those answers have always come into focus through the steady, diligent, and hard work of science.  And it’s closing the gap on this so-called miracle too. 

Pedophile Priests and Catholic Reform

I don't usually comment on social issues in churches.  Nor do I typically pass on a lot of timely news relevant links.  There are a thousand blogs out there that do that quite well, and I have bigger, philosophical fish to fry.  But this piece, written by gay, ex-priest Catholic blogger/columnist, Andrew Sullivan is an exception.

Sullivan is calling for radical reform in the Catholic Church and for the resignation of Pope Benedict over the most recent priest child molestation and rape scandals.  What's striking about this piece is that Sullivan gives you an exception insider view to the mind and sexual struggles of a priest who is trying to deal with the archaic and unnatural moral demands of the Catholic Church.  I'm also bringing this topic up because the pattern of priest child molestation and rape over recent decades is provoking a level of disgust, cynicism, and moral outrage in me that I am usually too jaded to feel about church matters.

Here's what I think is happening.  As I have argued on many occasions, for evolutionary or psychological or whatever reasons, humans have a deep seated affection for all things religious.  Whatever the truth of the matter is about God, people really want to be religious.  They have what I've called The Urge.  As I see it, this affection and attachment to religiousness among the population has been exploited, deliberately and unknowingly, by religious institutions like the Catholic Church.  So for decades, or centuries rather, priests have routinely molested and raped children in a horrifying abuse of the trust and investment that people have in them in virtue of this deep seated urge.  And by a variety of social, political, and psychological accidents, the Church has somehow managed to cordon off those rapists from the general sanction and normal treatment that any other child molester would get under the law.  The Catholic Church has actively campaigned, and largely succeeded, in keeping the redress of these cases in house.  They have reappointed, moved, hidden, and minimally punished the offenders, while keeping the normal legal authorities at bay.  We've allowed this to happen.  Emboldened by their seeming invulnerability to regular legal and moral requirements in society, the rapes and molestations have gone on and on and on.  Now, apparently, we have a Pope who was complicit in some of these reprehensible acts of facilitation of abuser priests, at least by Sullivan's and a lot of other careful people's assessments.

Our special treatment, and the invincible status of the clergy in our cultures that arises from our affection and respect for religion has to come to an end.  And at the very least, the Catholic Church must have some radical reforms in the sorts of demands they make on their priests and in the way that they deal internally with people who abuse, molest, and rape children.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/03/sin-or-crime.html

Monkey Morality

On an evolutionary or naturalized account of morality, the natural selection process endowed us with a set of strong behavioral preferences.  That is, morality evolved.  We are built to be moral beings by evolution.  These behavioral tendencies and preferences have been divided up many ways, but Pinker’s list is a good one: 

• Harm
• Fairness
• Community
• Authority
• Purity

See Steven Pinker's “The Moral Instinct”  in the New York Times. 

The idea is that there were selection pressures in place long before we were recognizably human that would have selected for some types of behavioral tendencies over others.  And rather than the common misconception that evolution selects for utter selfishness, a growing body of empirical research is showing that cooperative, constructive social tendencies have been built into us down to the genes. 

Franz de Waal, noted primate researcher, has also provided us with a useful way to view the development of morality.  For centuries we have tended to treat humans as having an evil, selfish, brutish core upon which socialization and the civilizing effects of religion and education impose a thin veneer of moral behavior.  Veneer theory is the view that our chocolate insides are sinful, and our candy coating outside is a set of forcibly imposed moral behaviors. 

See Franz De Waal, "Morality and the Social Instincts:  Continuity with the Other Primates."  (source for the picture.)

But research across many different species has presented a very different picture.  What we appear to have is a deep set of sympathetic behavioral impulses that are fundamental parts of our nervous systems.  The suffering of others isn’t just a forced concern—monkeys, great apes, rats, and even mice all exhibit remarkable behavioral interest in the welfare of others, particularly, but not limited to, their own species.  This research suggests that basic impulses of sympathy, consolation, empathy, generosity, kindness, reciprocity, and fairness run all the way into our pre-human evolutionary history. 

Our nervous systems are built to feel an emotional contagion from the pains and pleasures of others.  Higher cognitive functions allow us to interpret those feelings in terms of empathy for others by recognizing the situation that produced the feelings and the reasons for the other being’s emotions.  Even higher cognitive abilities, laid on top by evolutionary stages, make it possible for us to understand our own feelings and those of others by fully modeling and adopting the other being’s perspectives. 

The charge against this evolutionary and naturalized account of morality is that whatever preferences evolution may have endowed us with, acting in conformity with those contingent behaviors can’t amount to real moral efforts.  One problem is that the account encourages an objectionable moral relativism.  If morality is “just” an evolved set of behavioral preferences and nothing more, then the accidents of history and the variables of evolution could just as well have produced a radically different set of moral principles.  If the tape was run back and play hit again, we could have just as easily ended up praising rape and genocide as virtues and treating kindness, sympathy, and social cooperation as evil.  And if the set of preferences that we have are this arbitrary, then they can hardly be called moral in any robust or meaningful sense. 

Here’s a bit of speculative evolutionary reasoning by way of response to the charge.  At the risk of lapsing into an evolutionary just-so story, let’s consider some of important features or milestones that must be achieved in a species that could end up with something resembling moral behavior.  What’s required, roughly speaking? The creatures must have developed neurologically to the point that they have achieved some level of self-reflection and self-determination in their actions.  Grant me, for the sake of argument, that freedom could evolve.  (See Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves for more.)   

  

It must be possible from their perspective, at least, to view their own actions as under their control and subject to the influence of their will.  We hold a human morally responsible for murder, but we don’t similarly fault a mountain lion for doing the same thing.  The mountain lion who kills a jogger isn’t the sort of creature who could have done otherwise or who could have wanted anything else, or who could have exerted some self-imposed controls over its actions.  But humans can—we think that they ought to have done otherwise because they can do otherwise.  That’s the famous “ought implies can” dictum from ethics.  

Do we have evidence about what sorts of general evolutionary circumstances could produce beings with these sorts of cognitive capacities?  We do.  There appears to be a consensus among evolutionary scientists that the evolution of our big brains with their fancy capacities is intimately tied with our evolution in social groups and with the development of language.  It’s very difficult to know which comes first here, but at the least we seem to be justified in thinking that a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the development of higher cognitive functions such as (moral) self-direction  must happen in conjunction with the development of language, and the development of language only occurs in social or group contexts.  (If not, who would one talk to?)  Complex social relationships and robust linguistic communication require a big fancy brain. 

See Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain  

And Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby, Language Evolution.  for some of the work around this thesis.  

So that lets us speculate some more. It would appear then that the only sorts of evolved beings that we would expect to acquire proto-moral and then moral behavioral preferences are beings developing in a relatively stable social and linguistic context.    

What is required for a species to have a relatively stable social and linguistic context?  Think of the roving bands of 30-50 chimpanzees in Kenya.  The evolutionary traits that make those sorts of groups possible are the ones that a conducive to group living.  Now we can see the connection:  Sympathy, generosity, fairness, etc. or some analogs are the behavioral preferences that have to develop in species with higher cognitive functions if they are to have stable social groups.  If they didn’t, they couldn’t function with each other.   We would only expect to find large, stable social groups with complex communications where there are behavioral tendencies that are conducive to social group dynamics. 

This amounts to a roundabout way of suggesting that it’s a least plausible that there are selection pressures in some cases against behavioral norms that are highly disruptive to stable, group social dynamics.  That is to say that if you were to rewind the tape and hit the start button again, you might get creatures who are more hostile, less sociable, and less “fair.”  But it seems unlikely that within species where those behavioral norms take hold, we would not expect the sorts of social cooperative behaviors to develop that must happen in conjunction with the neurological development that will eventually produce beings who are self-governing moral agents.  It seems less likely that creatures who do not take the social cooperation path through evolutionary history would ever develop cognitively to the point of being moral actors.  You either get cooperative, fairness loving creatures with big brains and the ability to reflect on their own actions and make moral choices, or your get creatures that don’t have the brain power to qualify for moral agency. 

As I have pointed out, this is all highly speculative, and I’ve glossed over a lot of very complicated issues.  But the suggestion is that there could be something about the development of big brains like ours that is inextricably tied to particular categories of behavioral norms.  And if that’s right, then the bite has been taken out of the moral relativism charge coming from God believers.  Only certain kinds of moral norms can evolve—the do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you kind.    

Some more sources:

Hauser, Marc.  Marc,  Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.

Wade, Nicholas.  "Is 'Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?”  New York Times

Haidt, Jonathan

Frans De Waal.  Primates and Philosophers:  How Morality Evolved.  

Facing Facts

In the end, one of the central criteria of explanatory adequacy of a theory or hypothesis is the extent to which it fits with the rest of what we know about the world.   If someone is going to adopt the view that God exists, there is a long list of these knowns that the God hypothesis needs to be reconciled with.  There are many, but for the purposes of this discussion I have in mind a group of claims that include these facts: 

• The age of the universe from the Big Bang to now is approximately 13.7 billion years.
• The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. (We can find ancient rocks older than 3.5 billion years on all of the continents, and some crystals have been found that are thought to be 4.3 billion years old.[1])
• Life in the form of the simplest, self-replicating molecules occurs on Earth around 4 billion years ago.
• The dinosaurs existed during the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods from about 208 million years ago to 65 million years ago.
• Placental mammals arise about 54 million years ago.  
• Modern humans (homo sapiens) originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago.  (Humans were not, as some people seem to think, contemporary with dinosaurs.)

There are many more.  But for now, let’s just consider these claims about some milestones in the history of the Earth, and we’ll call this list F. 

If it weren’t for the long established religious doctrines that tell a very different story about the history of the Earth, life, and humanity, there would be less cognitive dissonance, at least on the surface between F and the view that God exists.  But those doctrines present believers with the dilemma:  will you accept or reject F in the light of your religious tradition’s denying F?  Of course, some believers deny F.  I don’t want to deal with this position in great detail, but we can say a few things about it before moving on to the main thesis about F and G (God exists.)  To say that the evidence we have in favor of F is substantial is a gross understatement.  We are now in a position where hundreds of thousands or even millions of very smart people, working very hard have amassed a staggering amount of information that proves F beyond any substantial doubts.  We have diverse and thoroughly vetted evidence that has been subjected to rigorous peer review processes from molecular chemistry, geology, anthropology, cosmology, physics, biology, genetics, and paleontology that support F.   During this process, every claim that was part of the case for F has been subjected to the most aggressive and creative attempts at disconfirmation that we could muster.  That is, we believe the claims in F because of their resistance to our best efforts to disprove them.  

As a result, the person who wishes to deny F is in a very difficult position:  she will have to present arguments and counter evidence that is sufficient to undermine or defeat this massive, scientifically sophisticated, and diverse body of evidence.  In effect, she will have to out-science science by producing a means of disconfirmation that is either better than the ones that the scientific establishment has already considered, or that the entire scientific establishment somehow overlooked before they came to their consensus about F.      Some people argue for the fallibility of radio-carbon dating, for example.  But those criticisms haven’t amounted to anything substantial, and the larger problem is that the evidence we have for F doesn’t not rely on any one particular method of corroboration.  Our methods for corroborating F include hundreds of different techniques from different fields that have been tested, retested, vetted, and carefully scrutinized for any possibility of error.  The person who would simply deny F may not appreciate the range, depth, and quality of this evidence, and she has a Herculean task ahead of her in trying to show that all of it is wrong.

On a side note, depending on what sort of God believer she is, she may have this additional problem.  Suppose  she argues that all of the evidence for F, call it E_F, is insufficient to prove F because it fails to meet the various high standards of proof that the believer demands.  Presumably, that same believer holds that there is another body of evidence, E_G, that is sufficient to prove G, God’s existence.  So in very general terms, this believer is now in the unenviable position of arguing that the quantity and quality of E_F is inadequate to prove F, but E_G exceeds E_F in terms of quantity and/or quality by a margin wide enough to prove G.  (I, for one, am quite anxious to hear what the impressive information in E_G is in this case.)  

Here’s another problem that this believer may get embroiled in.  The methods and information that have produced E_F are deeply ensconced in much of the rest of what we know in science.  The methods and information that produced E_F are so deeply intertwined with the rest of science that denying E_F will most likely also have the unintended consequence of forcing the believer to reject a number of other facts.  This will depend upon the details of the case against E_F, of course, but I suspect that in order to be consistent, the person who denies E_F may well have to also deny claims like e=mc², Boyle’s law, the Ideal Gas Law, Newton’s laws, Planck’s constant, the atomic weight of hydrogen, the atomic composition of carbon, and so on.  That is, if E_F isn’t supported well enough for you, then the evidence for many of those claims won’t be either.  Or in the process of denying E_F you’ll be logically, or mathematically committed to also deny some or many of these other central claims in science.  In short, denying F will most likely require you to also deny too many other things that we know are true and that you probably don’t want to abandon.  But deep seated commitments to ideologies make us do surprising things.   Think of the ever sprawling and more bizarre set of claims that the Holocaust denier has to defend in order to consistently reject the murder of 6 million Jews in WWII.  

But let’s assume that the believer has enough sense to acknowledge the reasonableness of F.  What is the problem then?  At least this believer doesn’t have the challenges that the F denying believer above has.  But this believer does need to connect F to G.  God, as most people regard him, is the all powerful creator of the universe.  It was his plan and his act of creation, in some sense, that brought all of this about.  Since God is thought to have had such a broad role in the universe, believing that God is real cannot simply be compartmentalized off from F.  So one would hope that the believer will have some sort of account of how F fits with G.  If humanity has a special relationship with God and God has a particular interest in the existence of humanity in the world, then it’s only fair to ask, how do we reconcile God’s anthrocentric goals and actions with the facts about the advent and development of humans on Earth?  How can the 13.7 billion year age of the Earth or the billions of years of evolution through many lower life forms before humans come onto the scence be reconciled with God’s special intentions for humanity? 

Let me put the challenge another way.  Recent polling data says that only 30% of Americans believe that evolution, unassisted by God, produced humans, while 51% believe that humans evolved with “God guiding the process.”[2]  In some recent, acutely unscientific attempts to clarify, I asked many of my students to speculate about just what form this “guidance” of evolution by God took.  Exactly what work did they think that God did during the process?  A surprisingly large number of them just didn’t know; they hadn’t really thought about it before.  So now I am asking everyone to think about it.  If you think that God is real, and he is in charge of everything, then how does that jive with all of the facts in F? 

  

“I don’t know,” shouldn’t satisfy us for several reasons.  Since the facts in F are so obviously inconsistent with the traditional religious stories about the origins of the Earth and life and humanity, those facts are at least some prima facie grounds for rejecting the whole account that God did it.  Another way to put it is that the view that God is real should not continue to be the default position once we have rejected the Genesis story.  For eons, people’s doctrines about God and creation have been built around stories that are soundly refuted by F.  So at the very least, we want to hear some account whereby God “creates” it all by way of F.  Even better, we would like to hear some substantial argument that F is in fact the means by which God did it.  Of course, none of the traditional religious doctrines contain such stories.  None of them suggest anything even remotely like the facts in F.  How could they?  Those religious books were written just a few thousands of years ago (after humans had been around for 200,000 years) and we have only come to understand F in the last century or so.  Furthermore, those books tell just the sorts of stories about creation and the history of life that we would expect primitive people to come up with 10 or 15 thousand years ago.  They do not tell the sorts of creation stories that we would expect the infinite creator of the universe to have communicated, given that such a being surely would have known that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and that life evolved on Earth for 4 billion years before humans came along.  That is, the facts in F come as a complete surprise to those who believe G.  And at the very least, the believer must admit that F doesn’t sit comfortably or easily with G as God has been traditionally conceived.  There’s some explaining that needs to be done to have F and G both be true.  "I don't know" is an evasion that is increasingly difficult to hide behind.  As the "I don't know's" accumulate about how a favored hypothesis can be made to cohere with the facts a reasonable person should reach a tipping where they realize that  there are too many gaps or outright  conflicts between F and G to sustain them both.  

Ideally, this is a set of questions that I think the believe who accepts F should want to answer for themselves.  And they are the questions I’d like to hear answers to:

• How does it fit into God’s plan for humans to have them evolve from other life forms by natural selection for 4 billion years? 
• What was the purpose or role in God’s overall scheme of creation of all of the other creatures like the dinosaurs? 
• If God intended for humanity to arise out of his creation, why would they come about by way of a process that seems to make God’s involvement unnecessary?  
• That is, how is it that God is in charge of it all, but it all unfolds according to mindless, blind natural principles exactly as if there were no God?
• Why is God hiding? 
• If God played a role in the evolution of humans, what exactly was that role? 
• What did he do?  
• Did he bring it about that some species died instead of others?  
• Or that some genetic mutations rather than others occurred?  
• Did he send forest fires to wipe out the Cro-Magnons so that other Homo Sapiens could ascend?
• What grounds do we have, aside from a prior commitment to the view that God exists, to think that there was any supernatural involvement in any of these events?
• How come F runs so deeply counter to traditional religious doctrines about the advent of the Earth, life, and humanity?  
• Why is it we’re just finding out about F (if God knew all along)?
• Why is it that God hasn’t appeared to want us to know F?
• Why is it that it has been human ingenuity and the rigors of the scientific method that have produced our knowledge of F and not God?  
• What else are we going to find out besides F that will be suprising in light of G? 
• Can any religious doctrines give us any insight now into other facts about the universe that we’re going to figure out in the future? 

I know that there are some believers such as Craig or Dembski who have attempted to tackle some of these questions.  I do not present these questions as a solicitation for book recommendations—I’ve read those books and I’ve found those attempts at answers to be insufficient for a variety of reasons.  But what I hope to do here is solicit the believer to try to fill in some of the these gaps herself and for us. 

That ultimate answer, I think, is that it becomes too difficult to try to reconcile the God hypothesis with F, if that characterization includes many of the details of Christian or Muslim doctrine.   Reconciling F with G requires too many ad hoc provisions, special pleadings, and equivocations.  This isn't just atheist wishful thinking on my part.  Believers have seen the light on this point by the thousands.  Extensive polling data has shown a robust negative  correlation between education and belief in God and religiousness.  That is, as education (about the claims in F among other things) goes up, belief in God goes down.  Why?  As people learn more about science, as they see how powerful the scientific method is and how predictive it is as a model of reality it simply gets more and more difficult to sustain the religious commitment that they during their more ignorant phase.  As these tensions between F and G build, they give G up.

• Harris Poll
• Pew Forum
• Pew Forum

So for the remaining believers who acknowledge on the one hand that F is true, and who wish to be reasonable, they should be wondering, as we are, what is the back story that can reconcile them?

The answer that I'm suggesting and the one that all of those people in the polls have acknowledged is that the  God hypothesis must be rejected because of its overall failure to fit with the rest of what we know about the world. 

---

[1] http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/main965223.shtml

Finding God in My Own Mind

I’ve been involved in a protracted discussion of the merits of reformed epistemology (RE) in the comments section of Common Sense Atheism’s entry for my podcast.  On the RE view, the believer need not provide any justification for their theism because it is properly basic.  A belief that God is real is a direct, immediate, non-inferential belief that forms the foundations that justify other beliefs.  But it requires no propositional, evidential, or inferential justification itself.  Furthermore, it is aquired through something that Plantinga calls the sensus divinitatus. 

So I’ve been pressing hard to get some details about how this impressive direct hot line to God works. 

I asked: 

Maybe you all can just help me understand what this immediate, direct, non-inferential, basic apprehension of God is, exactly. I’m not really interested in theoretical interpretations or descriptions that are couched in abstract theological babble. I just want to hear some descriptions of the actual phenomenology of these moments, experiences, or apprehensions. Describe the sorts of feelings, sights, smells, or apprehensions that are occurring when one is having this direct hookup with God. For analogies, we have the Jodie Foster contacts aliens example and a guy who knows he didn’t commit a crime because he recalls being at home watching TV on Saturday night and not robbing a liquor store, or whatever. But obviously, one’s encounters with the almighty creator of the universe and master of all reality aren’t really going to be like either of these in any shape, manner, or form. So what exactly are they like? And what is it about them that engenders such profound confidence and such strong ontological conclusions?

A number of the respondents were evasive or only vaguely eluded to the way that we know mathematical truths or how we know that torturing babies is wrong.  Their direct knowledge of God, we are told, is “like that.” 

Not satisfied, and still wanting to know exactly what this special sixth sense of God is like when you have I continued to ask for descriptions. 

Robert Gressis, a philosopher at CSU Northridge, finally offered something more interesting: 

(quote)  I can’t speak for anyone but myself, and I haven’t had much in the way of religious experience, but I’ll give a go at answering the challenge. Here’s the challenge:

“what exactly does it feel like when God’s giving you these basic encounters with his reality. If I’ve got the sense too, I need to know when it’s happening to me. And I need to know how to distinguish it from the a long list of other unusual psychological states that all have completely natural, neurobiological origins.”

First, I don’t have religious experiences that God exists; I’m not sure I have experiences of anything’s existing, other than the experience of finding something that I had thought lost. What the experiences are like, when they occur, are like this: I experience some phenomenon; the thought occurs to me that God is responsible for this phenomenon; the thought that God is responsible for this phenomenon just makes sense.

Now, that doesn’t help you yet, but I wanted to give the general outline before I sketched it in. So, let me start with an example, not of a religious experience, but an experience of sense-making that can be likened to a religious experience.

In the past, when I read what Kant had to say about freedom in theCritique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I didn’t get what he meant. I started to think of freedom as having something to do with activity and being determined as having something to do with passivity. Kant seemed clear enough on that. But I didn’t get why the experience of activity would be any more indicative of a free action than an experience of being passively determined; after all, both feelings must be arranged into a deterministic causal nexus, so it didn’t appear to me to be obvious why one feeling should signify not being part of a causal nexus and why another one should.

Reading Berkeley, though, as well as Wayne Waxman’s treatment of him in Kant and the Empiricists made things clear for me. On Waxman’s account of Berkeley, there were certain feelings of activity that you couldn’t in fact have an experience of. That is, there was no sensible content to the “experience” of acting freely. Since for Berkeley, to be is to be perceived, it meant that free action didn’t exist. But Berkeley had another category, subsistence, which was how perceivers like God and us carried on. We weren’t perceived, so we didn’t exist, but we were still implied by there being perceptions, so something had to be going on with us. And so for Berkeley, that something was non-perceivable subsistence.

Once I read that, Kant’s writings on freedom made a lot more sense to me. Free actions couldn’t be placed in a causal nexus, but it made sense to posit them as being responsible for the feeling of activity. The feeling of activity was an evidence of transcendentally apperceiving one’s own responsibility for something.

The point of all the foregoing was that there was a revelatory feeling granted by a new way of conceiving things that introduced a Gestalt shift in my apprehension of Kant’s writings on freedom. I felt like I got it, finally. Everything had a new cast, even though they were the same words.

Now, let’s apply that to God. There were certain experiences in my life–in my own case, the main one I can think of is kind of peculiar. I was in church, and I strongly felt that God was a monster. I didn’t feel that because of suffering in Africa or anything like that; I felt it because I disliked strongly the people around me in church. They weren’t kind or open, and they seemed to me that they could not care less whether I ever showed up to church at all. And I felt angry at God for attracting such milquetoast people. But with that condemnation of God, there was a great feeling of liberation. I felt great–I felt I was truly myself. I felt as though a burden had been lifted off of me. And, if I remember things correctly, I felt an intense feeling of thankfulness–my feeling of personal liberation and the ensuing sense of comfort in my own skin made me feel a kind of gratitude to God. I felt like this is what I could be. And attributing that to God made the most sense to me. Seeing God as the provenance of this feeling just made the most sense to me–it was part of the Gestalt shift.

Could this feeling have a natural, neurobiological origin. Surely. In fact, if God exists, and wants us to come to know him, I would expect us to be hardwired for belief in God. I would expect that there were certain circumstances in which many people felt attributing certain psychological states to invisible agents made the most sense for us.

Can I know how to distinguish this state from a hallucination? Nope. I don’t know how to distinguish any of my states from hallucinations.

So, I shared. Now, I want you to share with me, Matt. You don’t have to, of course. You may be less confessional than I. That said, when you write, “Please give me some reasons to think that you all are not just putting us on”, are you serious? Do you think that the people who talk about their religious experiences are just lying to you? Do you think they’re lying to themselves? I ask because this is the second time you’ve mad this request; you’ve also written, “Religion, particularly some of forms of Christianity, seems to have a corrupting effect on a set of cognitive faculties that were already pretty kludged together by evolution, and the noetic effects of the Christian ideology exploits various gaps and glitches in the system. The result is often a near total highjacking of the cognitive system that borders on delusion.” In other words, you think “some forms of” Christians follow a religion that brings them close to the brink of delusion. What do you mean by that? Do you literally mean a kind of psychological pathology that would perhaps be helped by therapy? Do you think this is a serious condition? Do you worry about such people?

I don’t mean to come off as hostile. I hope I didn’t. I have been told such things before, though–that I have psychological problems, that I shouldn’t be allowed to teach philosophy, and all because of my theism. So it’s something of a sore spot for me. 

(End of quote.) 

I’m grateful to Robert for taking a serious question seriously and trying to answer it.  This is better than the evasions I typically get, but it still has a number of problems.   Here’s my response:

This is interesting, but it doesn’t sound like the sort of direct, non-inferential access to God’s existence that Plantinga and co. talk about. You said, “I’m not sure I have experiences of anything’s existing.” I am taking RE to maintain that the apprehension of God’s reality is immediate, quasi-sensory, and basic (not involving any propositional or inferential justification). And the resulting conviction that God is real is strong enough that long and careful deliberation on the part of the Christian who reflects on Marx, Freud, and others with objections to theism will still leave them reasonably convinced that God is real. The basic apprehension of God defeats all of these defeaters. It doesn’t sound to me like there’s anything nearly up to this epistemological task in the story you are telling, but I don’t know the whole story. That is just to say that it doesn’t sound like you are putting all of your eggs in the RE basket, or at least you shouldn’t. I wouldn’t, if I were you.

So now, as I understand it, the analogy is roughly something like this. Thinking of God as a real being provides a set of sense-making, understanding granting, or revelation type feelings about certain sorts of cognitive, personal, and emotional dissonances. Believing that God is real is to those cognitive dissonances what Waxman’s interpretation of Kant and Berkeley are to dissonances about Kant’s theory of freedom.

There are several things that I think have gone wrong here. In no particular order: The analogy is out of whack. Waxman’s reading of Kant is just an academic interpretation of a work of philosophy. Reading it and understanding it doesn’t entail accepting any claims about real objects existing. And it certainly doesn’t entail accepting the existence of a vast, all powerful, all knowing supernatural creator of the universe. That is, the stakes are vastly higher and more metaphysically significant in the God case than they are in the Waxman/Kant case. The only sorts of analogies that I can think of that might work better would be hypotheses about the existence of subatomic particles like the Higgs Boson or something where there’s a whole bunch of empirical data, and no other hypothesis can explain it so well (and make our cognitive dissonance go away) as positing the real existence of the particles in the universe.

But there’s the rub. The sorts of dissonances that you’re talking about are feelings—anger, frustration at first, and then liberation, thankfulness, comfort with the acceptance of God. And none of these would be adequate to indicate the existence of something big and important. The study I cited above is just the start of the empirical evidence that shows how unreliable our cognitive faculties are, especially when we are angry, frustrated, overjoyed, enthusiastic, bitter, ingratiated, and so on. Men gamble more and engage in more risk when they are angry or sexually aroused. We’ve got lots of really telling evidence that people’s feelings of confidence and certainty after they have taken a test, for instance, aren’t predictive of their actual performance on the test. We’ve got compelling evidence that subjective certainty isn’t callibrated well with performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks. In fact, for many things, as certainty goes up, performance actually goes down. In fact, I can’t think of any instances where the presence of all of these emotions wouldn’t make us more suspicious of the conclusions that the cognitive agent comes to. At the very least, the feelings should be treated as something tangential to the actual evidence that is relevant to figure out what’s real, not as the evidence itself. Why do I believe that the horse won the race? Not because I am jumping up and down happy, but because we can observe the horse at the front of the pack. The happiness is the reaction, not the reason.

Another problem, and no doubt you won’t see it this way, is that while God might seem to make all the pieces fall into place about some of these problems that were bugging you, when you take a really broad view of the dissonant issues that need to be resolved, introducing God makes it harder, not easier to make sense of it all. The problem of other religions, other supernatural beings, the inductive problem of evil, a host of deductive atheology arguments, the problem of divine hiddenness, and so on all make it really hard to countenance God as the answer to a much broader class of questions about reality, the origin of the universe, the success of science and naturalism, and the failures of orthodox religious dogmas. As I see it, if one wants to sign on for some orthodox conception of God like Plantinga’s Calvinism or Van Inwagen’s Catholicism, or Craig’s fundamentalism, the only way to make your worldview roughly coherent is by adopting a long list of increasingly strained metaphysical, epistemological, and moral provisions that help to make the old world doctrine sit more comfortably with the general advances in human knowledge that we have made. You have to take on too many complicated, ad hoc, or bizarre views about evolution, natural selection, consciousness, human moral failings, history, cosmology, science, neurology, and so on. That is, God might make you feel better about some little, local stuff, but it’s really hard to see how he fits with the rest of what we know.

Sharing: no, actually, this doesn’t sound delusional to me—I think believing in God on grounds like this, if this is what RE entails, is unreasonable. Presuppositional apologetics is pretty scary. All of the tens of hundreds of millionis of apocalyptic millenialists and rapture nuts are really scary. I get comments from people who find my blog just about every week where it appears that Christian ideology has devoured their whole consciousness and they’ve completely lost the capacity to think about the issue with any objectivity. And they appear to be ready to pull the trigger, as it were.

I’ve gone on long enough. So just one more little note. You said, “In fact, if God exists, and wants us to come to know him, I would expect us to be hardwired for belief in God.” Yeah, I see why this appeals. But I am always surprised at the lack of imagination about this issue. If God exists, and he wants to make his existence known to us, couldn’t he have done a better job? Wouldn’t it be a trivial matter for an all powerful being to do a better job than, say, I can do when I want people to believe something? (And please don’t give me the old line about faith, or about God not wanting to compromise our freedom to choose.) I have to think, given that he could have made it abundantly clear, and given that he didn’t, if there is a God, he doesn’t want us to believe in him.

There are many more details and the comments continue.  But I thought I’d share some of the more interesting stuff here. 

RE takes an enormous amount of energy to unpack and understand.  It is a sophisticated and subtle position.  But in the end, I find it highly dubious for a number of reasons, some of which are listed above.  The retreat that RE advocates have made to the protection of their own minds has come with a cost.  The natural theology project seems to have been abandoned.  Rather now the efforts are to establish that someone who believes is in no violation of their epistemic duties.  That is a significantly less ambitious project than the former efforts to produce a sound argument for the existence of God that would render it unreasonable for anyone who acknowledged the truth of the premises to refuse to believe.  Now, it would appear that the RE advocate just wants to be left alone with their epistemic community where they can share their basic knowledge of God. 

That might be less objectionable were it not for some problems.  First, many RE advocates continue to pursue and present natural theological arguments and engage in vigorous debates with non-believers over what they take to be compelling evidence for God’s existence.  Second, Plantinga has pursued an argument that naturalism and evolution entail that our cognitive belief forming faculties are unreliable unless we posit the existence of God who designs and maintains them.  So it would appear that the natural theological project is still alive and well.  But now objections to belief in God are met with assurances that the believer’s direct access to God provides them with a defeater defeater that successfully refutes the various objections to their view.  Objections to their view, and a failure to acknowledge the sensus divinitatus in the hearts of all people are just indicators of the wretched state of the noetic faculties of non-believers due to their sinful and corrupt natures.  This battery of approaches to the existence of God effectively barricades RE off from all criticism and makes it deeply suspicious, not to mention circular:  How do I know that God exists? I can apprehend it immediately with my special cognitive powers. How do I know that I can trust my special cognitive powers to deliver the truth? God designed them and made them function properly.  You can see the circle here in the course of a 6 minute video.  "It just seems to me right that there is a God.  It's more like a personal experience.  . . . .If you don't believe in God and you think we evolved, then you have to believe that your cognitive faculties are unreliable."  






It is unfortunate that the view has gained so many adherents.  See the comments section for some more of my ideas on how to avoid the various red herrings and non sequiturs that are often brought up in its defense.  

Interview--Podcast

Luke, over at Common Sense Atheism (a very good blog with lots of stimulating ideas), has posted an interview that he did with me recently as a podcast here:  McCormick Interview.  He's also indexed the discussions and draw links to lots of other posts.  The podcast has also stirred up a number of criticisms of my positions among his theistic readers.  An exchange between me and them has been unfolding in the comments that may be of interest to you too.

And while I'm at it, I should direct your attention to two very rhetorically effective posters, one that he created.  The first is a long list of 2800+ dead gods that you don't believe in.  The visual impact of seeing several thousand of them all listed in one place makes the point better than the long winded analysis that I'm prone to.  Second, there's this very demonstrative poster at Sam Harris' Reason Project showing hundreds of contradictions in the Bible that create all sorts of challenges for believers.

My Imaginary Friend

The view that you can’t be moral without God is one of the most widely held among believers.  The claim is muddled by ambiguities, however.  Does it mean that people won’t behave morally unless they believe God exists?  Billions of non-believers on the planet who are perfectly decent people prove that wrong.  Does it mean that people wouldn’t have a moral conscience if it weren’t for God?  Animal research that has discovered remarkable proto-moral behavior in animals from rats to monkeys shows that that’s mistaken too, although I expect that once this research becomes too widely known to reject or ignore, believers will start claiming that the animals got their morals from God too.  Does it mean that unless a person believes, they won’t have the right motive for doing the right thing?  No, doing the right thing because you think you’re being watched or threatened with punishment isn’t being moral; that’s utterly selfish.   

Any way you parse the claim, it comes out absurd.  But what’s even more difficult to sift from the believer’s confused assertions is any clear account of what God wants us to do.  Even a casual read of the Bible or other religious doctrine makes it immediately clear that what believers typically do is emphasize the passages that suit them and ignore the ones that don’t.  They’re all sure that we have to consult God to find out what’s right and wrong, but thousands of years of bickering makes it quite clear that there’s no agreement about exactly what those rights and wrongs are.  If their example is any indicator, God wanted us all to cherry pick the rules that we agree with and then find ways to explain away the ones that we don’t. 

For some firsthand evidence that you don’t think, reason, or consult the Bible to get your moral values, go to http://yourmorals.org/, create an account, and take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, the Sacredness Survey, and the Disgust Scale survey.   The results will be quite revealing, and it shouldn’t be hard at all to imagine that your moral reactions to challenging situations is the product of evolutionary forces. 

These may sound like snarky over-generalizations, but new empirical research shows that people are more prone to project their own ethical judgments onto God and attribute them to him than any other agents.  That is, when people are asked to make estimations of the ethical views of other humans and of God, they are most egocentric about God—whatever they think is wrong, it just so happens that God does too.  And whatever they think is morally right, it just so happens that God endorses that too, even when their own views about what is right or wrong change.  Claiming that your moral judgments have a divine foundation amounts to little more than dressing up one’s instinctual or visceral reactions and giving them a supernatural stamp of approval.    

Epley, Converse, Delbosc, Monteleone, and Cacioppo  conducted a series of surveys and studies to get people to give estimations of the moral judgments of others.  In one case, people were asked to predict the views of people whose moral beliefs are well known, like George Bush’s, and people whose views are not well-known like Barry Bonds.  They were also asked to speculate about God’s views.  Other studies they conducted found ways to bring out the subjects’ moral views and then test the subject’s estimations of God’s beliefs.  The researchers even devised a way to map the regions of the brain that were most active during thinking about other people, self, and God. 

What they found was incredibly revealing.  It turns out that it you’re a liberal, then God is too.  If you’re a Republican, then so is God.  If you are opposed to abortion, or same-sex marriage, so is God.  Subjects consistently made the most egocentric attributions to God.  No matter what their views were, God shared them across the board.  But these same subjects would not do that when making estimations of the moral views of other humans.  Even fMRI scans showed that when people were thinking about God’s beliefs the brain activity was most similar to that when they were reflecting on their own views, in contrast to areas of the brain that were active when subjects thought about other humans’ beliefs.  Who would have thought that God is just like me, no matter who I am or what I believe?  How could that be?  Maybe it’s because God is imaginary?    

The authors say,  

In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.

What this suggests, of course, is that people don’t really get their moral judgments from God at all, despite their insistence that all morality comes from God.  There’s too much variation in what different people think they are getting from God.  The arrow is really going the other way—God (the imaginary being) gets all of his views from people.  And one of the reasons that it’s so easy to attribute so many conflicting ethical judgments to God is that the sources of information about God’s views like the Bible are so hopelessly vague, scattered, and contradictory.  People were much less likely to attribute their own views to people like Bush or Obama because we actually know what they think about the issues.  But the vagaries of religious doctrines surrounding God make him a more or less blank slate for people to write themselves upon. 

In one of the most revealing studies, the researchers manipulated the subject’s moral views about some topic by having them write and deliver speeches for or against some position.  The subjects’ attitudes about the position varied in parallel with the position they were assigned to defend not suprisingly.  When you have to actually think hard about the other side, you tend to soften your stance or change your mind.  Have them deliver a speech in favor of the death penalty and their views shifted in favor of it, and vice versa.  And when they were tested before and after the manipulation, it became clear that their assessment of God’s view of the position shifted too.  According to the subjects, God (and the subject) favored the death penalty more before the subject wrote and delivered a speech opposed to it, and then God’s view of it shifted against it afterwards along with the subject’s. 

It’s very difficult not to be cynical about what this is suggesting.  Apparently when believers make declarations about God’s moral judgments, what that really means is something like, “Whatever I happen to be thinking at the moment about what is right and wrong, well, that’s what God wants.”  Or, “not only do I hold the correct moral views, but mine are endorsed by the creator of the universe himself.”  And sometimes even, “If you disagree with me, then that means you’ll be punished for eternity in hell.”   Furthermore, it pretty clear that if someone thinks that they’ve got divine sanction for their peculiar list of moral rights and wrongs, they are not going to be receptive to the suggestion that they could be wrong, or that there could be subtleties in the issue that they are missing, or that they might come to have a more sophisticated and intelligent view if they reflected on the topic with an open mind.  But there’s no need for an open mind or any constructive reflection on your views when you’ve got God on your side and he’s already settled the issue once and for all. 

There’s a form of moral narcissism going on when believers righteously proclaim God’s will.  They aren’t offering a moral opinion with some reasons to support them—they are issuing God’s own commandments.  Their views are views of the almighty creator of the universe.  Take heed or burn for eternity.  But we must listen closely because my/God’s views are subject to change at any time. 

The view that morality comes from God suggests that there is a single source of infallible moral guidance, and that ultimately the responsibility for figuring out what is right and wrong is not on our shoulders.  Our position is merely to be obedient to God’s higher authority.  So the appeal to God’s authority to settle moral questions effectively cuts off any real and careful analysis of the vital details.  Our job isn’t to figure out what is right and wrong, after all, it’s just to do what God tells us.  So what’s particularly dangerous here is how a set of unreflective moral intuitions are getting promoted to the status of divine command with the introduction of God into the picture.  If we were realistic and conceived of moral problems as falling squarely on our shoulders to solve with the resources we have, we would give them the sort of in depth consideration they deserve and we’d work harder to figure out what makes some things right and some of wrong.