The Evolution of Hating Atheists

The fierceness, passion, dedication, and doggedness of many people’s attachment to their religious beliefs cries out for some sort of biological/evolutionary explanation.  Now evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers are more at liberty to talk about such theses openly in part because of the path that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Boyer, and Atran have forged.   And the thesis that religiousness has an evolutionary foundation has become quite commonplace and widely accepted, at least among academics.  What also strikes me is the soft-heartedness or affection for religiousness that still comes out in people who are otherwise very clear-headed, skeptical, and objective.  Good examples of this can be seen in some of the panel discussions from the Beyond Belief conference in 2006 on Science, Reason, Religion, and Survival.  

What is striking is the reception that Dawkins, and Harris, among others, get when they make a number of thoughtful, calm, and reasonable criticisms of religious believing, faith and the like.  A number of outstanding scholars in their fields respond with hesitation, restraint, and criticism.  But what’s striking is not that their criticisms are astute critiques of the arguments that Harris and Dawkins offer.  The vast majority of the panelists and even the people in the audience seem to agree that religious believing is a childish fantasy with no basis in reality.  What they seem to be more critical of is not flaws in the atheistic arguments, but of the fact that the atheists are openly arguing against religious believing.  They are more critical of engaging in religious criticism than anything else.  Many of the respondents just don’t like it that Harris and Dawkins are openly, and publicly being critical of religion and arguing that believing in God is not reasonable, even though they themselves are similarly critical in private and agree that it is unreasonable. 

This uneasiness about criticizing religious belief erupts in a number of ways.  One comment that atheists commonly get is surprisingly patronizing, even condescending:  “But people need their religious beliefs in order to get by.  It’s cruel of you to want to rob them of something that while false and silly, gives them so much comfort.”  The masses are too foolish and psychologically fragile to be able to handle their lives without religious delusions, so it would be better for everyone if we just let them persist in their happy mistake.  It’s not that the atheist is wrong, per se, it’s just that he’s messing with something that shouldn’t be messed with. 

I think a similar manifestation of this soft heartedness for religious believing can be seen in the rancorous reviews of the popular atheist books and speakers.  Despite its being utterly irrelevant to the point at hand, critics are preoccupied with what they take to be a strident, hostile, angry tone or approach in atheist authors.  (I’ve commented on this before:  Don’t Like My Tone, Am I Being Rude).  If one were to read a stack of reviews of the prominent atheist books and try to generalize about the most common and pointed criticism, it would appear that the worst thing they are doing is openly disliking religiousness to the point of anger and frustration.  (If that’s the most substantial response that an atheist’s arguments are getting, then she’s doing something right in my book.)  Take a look at this recent interview with Sam Harris by an ABC Nightline reporter.  Notice that Harris is calm and reasonable.  He never raises his voice.  He has a sense of humor.  And he’s clearly very smart.  If you turned the sound off, it would never occur to you that he's angry, frustrated, or rancorous.   But also notice that in almost every sentence, the reporter’s discomfort (and disagreement) with Harris is manifest with the inclusion of descriptors like “angry,” “inflammatory,” “infamous,” “fierce,” “harsh,” and “negative.”  

The very existence of people like Harris causes discomfort; we can’t not voice our disapproval, no matter how committed we might be to the principles of reason or journalism.  Even interviews with Osama Bin Laden were conducted with less sneer and backhanded criticism.

A number of social and historical explanations for this affection for religiousness, even among those who aren’t particularly religious (and who should know better), suggest themselves, and I’ve commented on them before.  But I can’t help but speculate about the possible biological origins of it.  The fact that so many people are so religious, and that even those people who aren’t religious work so hard to construct so many convoluted arguments for why religiousness is a good thing, screams out for a biological explanation. 

So here’s an exercise.  If there was a strong tendency or disposition towards a certain set of behaviors that had been written deep into our psyches by evolutionary history, what would it look like in our day to day lives. A candidate springs to mind:  a mother’s fierce or dedicated determination to protect the interests and safety of her children.  Pretty clearly, the disposition to aggressively defend and protect the welfare of one’s children in a species like ours where raising our offspring requires such a substantial effort would be selected for.  (There are other, more shotgun like strategies like the sea turtle who lays hundreds of eggs and then leaves them to fend for themselves.  Lay enough eggs and maybe a few of them will survive long enough to have babies themselves.)  Let’s assume then, for the sake of argument, that evolution did install a powerful mothering urge in us to foster our rare offspring up to the point at least where they can have babies of their own.  If we have that, then how would that manifest itself aside from the obvious ways of a mother protecting, feeding, and caring for her young?  It seems quite plausible that the rest of us, whether we are mothers or not, would be deeply sympathetic with a mother’s love.  We’d look upon it with affection, nostalgia, encouragement, sympathy, and honor.  Manifestations of it would strike us as beautiful, moving, and worthy of praise.  We’d all be less likely to be critical of it, even when a mother’s love goes too far.  When a television reporter interviews that mother of a known serial killer and she still insists that Ted or Henry is good boy who is innocent, we let it slide.  She’s mistaken and misguided, but we understand and are sympathetic  It would be rude, or harsh, or just impolite somehow to call her out on her mistake.    

In general, if evolution has left us with a strong disposition towards it, our ability to think clearly, objectively, and with detachment about it would be compromised.  We’d be less able and likely to see the flaws in it, and we’d be quick to praise, or encourage it.  Our whole set of cognitive skills would be handicapped in its favor.  And on the flip side, consider how difficult it is to think clearly and objectively about a pedophile.  The intense negative emotional and pre-rational reactions we have to it make it that much more difficult to be reasonable in our reactions.  The pedophile who complains about some real injustice in the judicial system, for example, can hardly find a sympathetic ear. 

So now we can see the point about religious belief in this diversion.  If we love religiousness the way we love motherhood, and a substantial part of our love for both has evolutionary roots, then how would you expect people to behave about religion?  You’d expect to see just the sort of inflamed, offended, passionate, and zealous reactions that we see when Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett do their thing.  You’d expect them to be hated or at least disliked and criticized, even by the people who aren’t particularly religious.  You’d expect to see a great deal of resistance to what they are doing, even if there’s not much substance to their objections.  

A deep dislike for homosexuality is similarly widespread, and there’s a similar absence of any real reasons for objecting to it.  Most people’s first reaction is that being gay is just flat wrong—it fills them with revulsion.  And these negative feelings about it come long before they can offer any thoughtful reasons.  (See Stephen Pinker’s piece about the evolutionary origins of those feelings of revulsion and their connection to morality.)  If religiousness evolved in us, then what the atheist is coming up against when she’s trying to talk someone out of it is much deeper and more profound than mere reasoning.  The atheist is striking a sensitive and raw nerve that millions of years deep in our natures, and, predictably, the reactions are visceral, irrational, and passionate. 

The Divine Attributes: The State of the Discussion

Readers here will know that I do not hold a sanguine view about the prospects for a description of God that 1) outlines being who is worthy of a suitably religious attitude, 2) conforms, even in the roughest way, with the historical accounts that have been given of God by Christianity and other religions, 3) gives a list of properties that themselves are each coherently formed and understood, 4) gives a list of properties that are consistent with each other, and 5) conforms, even in the roughest way, with what we now know about the physical universe through physics, cosmology and biology.  That is to say that we don't have, nor is there forthcoming, any account of God that makes sense along a number of vectors.  Explaining and defending each of these theses is, of course, a complicated matter, but I have been doing it across a multitude of posts, lectures, and published works.

Ex-Apologist (whose blog I highly recommend) has brought our attention to a recent article by Nicholas Everitt called The Divine Attributes.  Everitt has written a well received book called The Non-Existence of God that I also recommend for those interested in a fairly straight forward analysis, using standard analytical philosophical techniques, of the arguments for and against the existence of God.  Here's Everitt's abstract:


"Focusing on God’s essential attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, being eternal and omnipresent, being a creator and sustainer, and being a person, I examine how far recent discussion has been able to provide for each of these divine attributes a consistent interpretation. I also consider briefly whether the attributes are compatible with each other."

It looks like Everitt's overview of the recent literature, perhaps coupled with my overview of "Deductive Atheology" in the Atheism entry of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy would give one a good comprehensive picture of where philosophy of religion is today.

Then, in his summary, Everitt makes this comment:


"The divine attributes thus present a number of intriguing philosophical problems: problems with finding self-consistent accounts of each of the attributes, with ensuring that the accounts form a self-consistent set, and with reconciling the attributes with other seeming facts of human experience (divine omniscience and human freedom, divine goodness and widespread underserved suffering, etc).  Is it possible to formulate a version of theism which can simply sidestep these problems?

Suppose we start with the bare thought of God as a being who is worthy of worship.  Suppose also that we think that to be worthy of worship, a being must have a right to our allegiance, and be worthy of our love, admiration, and veneration. It is surely some such concept of worship-worthiness which has led most of those who have worshiped supernatural beings to do so. Perhaps such a god needs to be powerful – but why omnipotent? Perhaps knowledgeable – but why omniscient? Perhaps good – but why perfectly
so? Perhaps long-lasting – but why eternal? It is not as if there is any overwhelming Biblical warrant for the traditional attributions.This way of thinking of divinity has the merit, from the point of view of an impartial
uncommitted inquirer, of sidestepping the philosophical problems which the traditional attributes bring, while yet retaining the idea of worship-worthy supernatural beings. But it is not a route which has proved appealing to many theists in their reflections on the nature of the being who is the object of their worship."


My off the cuff reaction to this (I haven't had the time to give the whole article a careful read) is that it is surely possible to give a coherent description of a being possessing some degree of power, knowledge, and goodness (we are such beings, afterall), but the resulting account will suffer from new problems:

1)  Do we have any real arguments or evidence to think this sort of scaled down being exists?  The goal, afterall, is not to just give a coherent description of God at all costs.  The goal is form a reasonable set of beliefs about what's true, what sorts of things are real, and what sort of position we have in the universe historically, metaphysically, and morally.  Unless there are some substantial reasons forthcoming to think that such a being is not merely possible but real, the long list of utter failures by the smartest humans in history to render believing in God reasonable sets the prima facie burden of proof very high.  A perpetual motion machine, or gnomes may be possible, but it is fair for us to set the bar very high before we accept them as actual.

2)  I think the prospects for such a scaled down account of God giving us a being that is suitably "worship-worthy" are very dim.  In 1948, J.M. Findlay gave us a very persuasive argument in "Can God's Existence be Disproved?" that no thing short of a full blown omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being will be worthy of the title "God," and the failures of the ontological argument show that there is no such being.  (I will have to read up in Everitt to get clear on what he thinks about a Findlay style approach.)  The point:  If there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being, then there is no being that should be called "God."  And other lesser notions of semi-powerful, semi-knowledgeable, and semi-good beings are philosophically and religiously irrelevant and uninteresting.

3)  It is the practice among careful, respectful, and thoughtful analytic philosophers who find some fatal flaw in an argument for the existence of God to leave every possible avenue of redress open to the theist to save some face and salvage some new, re-engineered account of God from the wreckage.  Not being as careful, respectful, and maybe thoughtful as they are, I am inclined to draw sweeping conclusions from the repeated failures of these exercises in logical and philosophical gymnastics.  See Are We Proving the Negative Yet? and Perpetual Motion Machines and an Argument Against Agnosticism for a couple of examples of my rash, overgeneralizing.  Many billions of people believe.  Many billions more have believed in history.  The widespread consensus among our best experts on the topic, philosophers of religion, is that to date, none of our best efforts to construct a justification for believing have succeeded.  Even worse, as Everitt's summary of the discussion of divine attributes shows, we don't even have a clear, coherent, or non-controversial account of what properties God would have, even if he was real.  And that's despite devoting centuries of our hardest thinking to the project.

It's time for sensible people to see the larger implications of those failures.  We've done our due diligence.  The failure of a couple of philosophical inquiries into arguments for X to produce viable grounds for believing X should just be understood as limited failures of those arguments.  The failures of ALL of our attempts, by  millions of people over the course of thousands of years to produce acceptable grounds for believing X suggests that something else is at work here than just a failure of creativity or limited resources.  (See  The Santa Principle).

4 in 10 Americans are still Young Earth Creationists/Evolution Deniers; No Change in Attitude in 30 Years.

The latest Gallup poll confirms the dismal news.  About 40% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within 10,000 years.  About 38% believe that humans evolved but God guided the process.  And a mere 16% believe that humans evolved without God’s involvement. 

  

Some other results, many of which have been discussed here before:  Education is positively correlated with belief in evolution.  A whopping 47% of those with a high school education or less are young Earth Creationists, while 74% of those with a post graduate education believe that humans evolved on their own or with God’s guidance.  Most Americans believe in God, with about 85% of them claiming a religious identity.  And the percentages of people subscribing to evolution only, evolution with God, and young Earth creationism have remained relatively stable since 1982. 

A few thoughts.  First, what the strikingly high number of YECs and their low levels of education should illustrate to us is that our backsliding scientifically, culturally, and historically into some modern form of a dark age is not uninformed alarmism.  Humans have a powerful and dangerous urge to be religious.  Couple that longing with ignorance and scientific illiteracy and their minds can be overtaken by the most farfetched and bizarre religious fantasies.  Part of the blame for these stagnant and dismal numbers lies with science educators and their failure to adequately confront superstition, ignorance, and tribalism.  I’ll speculate about the pressures that seem to be contributing to their timidity. 

The notions of religious freedom, freedom of belief, and religious identity in the United States have become curiously warped.  Legally and morally we want to insure that everyone is able to pursue the religious traditions of their choosing, and to be able to freely affiliate themselves with any religious ideology.  But somehow those concerns have morphed into a sense of entitlement on the part of the religious to adopt any half-baked, bizarre religious view they like without any concern for justification, evidence or the truth.  Religious belief is all too often treated as a matter of personal taste or preference as if we’re picking from the smorgasbord at Shoney’s Big Boy.  There appears to be no reckoning for what you believe other than you want to believe it.  Whether or not it’s true, supported by the evidence, or there’s are reasons to believe it are strange, ill-formed concerns.  “It’s a free country; I can believe what I want to.” 

Any challenges to these beliefs, no matter how outrageous they are, are taken as affronts.  It’s offensive to even ask, “Why would you think THAT is true?”    Many of seem to think that nothing else is required of us that the mere fact that we choose to believe it.  And if anyone presses them for more than that, then they are accused of being angry, strident, hateful, and intolerant. 

As I have argued here before, religious freedom should be considered the right to be unrestricted in your investigation of various religious ideas.  You should be able to read what books you want, say what you choose, and assemble with people of your choosing.  But your freedom of religion does not absolve you of the general requirement on all of us to be reasonable and seek after the truth. 

Nor does it absolve you of your social, moral, and political responsibilities to the rest of us.  Our fates are intertwined.  Religious beliefs inform who my neighbor votes for, who she elects to the school board, which bond measures she supports, how she educates her children (and mine), who she wants to go to war with, who she wants to make peace with, who she’s willing to execute, which laws she supports, and what sort of society she contributes to.  If a sufficiently large percentage of our population has their good sense eclipsed by Iron Age religious nonsense, we’re all put at risk. 

I think that the only way that so many Americans can continue to believe something as patently false as YEC is that the people entrusted to teach them are either too ignorant, or too timid to hold the bar where it should be. 

Here, again, are the facts.  It is only a slight exaggeration to say that these are as well confirmed by science at this point as the existence of oxygen:

Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, the universe went from a state of infinite curvature and energy to a rapidly expanding chaotic state, the Big Bang.  During the first pico and nano seconds of this period of rapid expansion, the types and behavior of particles that existed rapidly changed as the energy levels  dropped.  Within a few nanoseconds, the kinds of matter and the way they act settled into, more or less, the sorts of material constituents we find today.  Matter continued to expand and eventually, several billion years later, gravitational pull congregates clumps of it together to form stars.  Some of these stars are of sufficient mass to ultimately collapse on themselves, explode outward and spray new types of elements formed in their cores out into space.  That matter eventually coalesces into smaller stars, planets and moons like our own. 

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.  Natural selection and random mutations lead to the evolution of more and more life forms, many of them of increasing levels of complexity.  The dinosaurs emerge from this  process.  The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods range 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, 60 million years after the dinosaurs have gone extinct.  A variety of early hominid groups vie for survival until all related lines except homo sapiens are extinct. 

In 2009, Lady Gaga  releases her first album. 

Religious Belief as Evolutionary By-Product

One of the most important areas of research in evolutionary psychology now is the possibility that evolutionary circumstances actually selected for a propensity towards certain false beliefs.  That is, more and more research is presenting us with evidence that natural selection built us to have some false beliefs.  It turns out that in the right sorts of circumstances, some false beliefs may have provided early hominids with survival advantages.

The ubiquity of religious belief, and the long list of peculiar cognitive behaviors surrounding it, suggest that it should be on that list of evolved misbeliefs.  

Daniel Dennett and Ryan McKay give a thorough overview and analysis of the latest research into these questions in The Evolution of Misbelief from Behavioral and Brain Sciences.  Then a long list of prestigious scholars respond to their arguments.  

Dennett and McKay argue that of all of evidence that has been presented for evolved misbeliefs, the case for positive illusions about oneself and ones close to you is the strongest. 

"The evidence indicates that there is a widespread tendency for most people to see themselves as better than most others on a range of dimensions. This is the “better-than-average effect” (Alicke 1985) – individuals, on the average, judge themselves to be more intelligent, honest, persistent, original, friendly, and reliable than the average person. Most college students tend to believe that they will have a longer-than-average lifespan, while most college instructors believe that they are better than-average teachers (Cross 1977).Most people also tend to believe that their driving skills are better than average – even those who have been hospitalised for accidents (see, e.g., McKenna et al. 1991; Williams 2003). In fact, most people view themselves as better than average on almost any dimension that is both subjective and socially desirable (Myers 2002). Indeed, with exquisite irony, most people even see themselves as less prone to such self-serving distortions than others (Friedrich 1996; Pronin et al. 2002; Pronin 2004)."

Researchers have argued that these biases produce false beliefs that are the result of the proper evolved functioning of our cognitive faculties.  

Religious belief, one might think, is prime for this sort of explanation.  But Dennett and McKay contend that the consensus now is that the propensity towards religious belief is the by-product, not the direct result, of evolutionary pressures.  It may be the result of a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, selection pressures against cheating, or selection for cooperation in social settings.  

Read the article for the state of the art on research on these topics.  And here's a small portion of their bibliography, mostly the portion focusing on religious beliefs:

Atran, S. & Norenzayan, A. (2004) Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27: 713–70.

Atran, S. (2004) In Gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press.

Barrett, J. L. (2000) Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):29–34.

Bering, J. M. & Johnson, D. D. P. (2005) “O Lord ... you perceive my thoughts from afar”: Recursiveness and the evolution of supernatural agency. Journal of Cognition and Culture 5(1/2):118–42.

Bering, J. M. (2002) The existential theory of mind. Review of General Psychology 6:3–24.

Bering, J. M. (2006) The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29:453–98.

Bloom, P. (2004) Descartes’ baby: How child development explains what makes us human. Arrow Books.

Bloom, P. (2005) Is God an accident? Atlantic Monthly 296:105–12.

Bloom, P. (2007) Religion is natural. Developmental Science 10(1):147–51.

Boyer, P. (1994) The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion. University of California Press.

Boyer, P. (2001) Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.

Boyer, P. (2003) Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3):119–24

Boyer, P. (2008a) Evolutionary economics of mental time travel. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(6):219–24.

Boyer, P. (2008b) Religion: Bound to believe? Nature 455(23):1038–39.

Bushman, B. J., Ridge, R. D., Das, E., Key, C. W. & Busath, G. L. (2007) When God sanctions killing: Effect of scriptural violence on aggression. Psychological Science 18(3):204–207

Guthrie, S. E. (1993) Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.

Hinde, R. A. (1999) Why gods persist: A scientific approach to religion. Routledge.

Johnson, D. D. P. & Bering, J. M. (2006) Hand of God, mind of man: Punishment and cognition in the evolution of cooperation. Evolutionary Psychology 4:219–33.

Johnson, D. D. P. & Kru¨ ger, O. (2004) The good of wrath: Supernatural punishment and the evolution of cooperation. Political Theology 5(2):159–76.

Johnson, D. D. P. (2005) God’s punishment and public goods: A test of the supernatural punishment hypothesis in 186 world cultures. Human Nature 16(4):410–46.

Johnson, D. D. P. (2008) Gods of war: The adaptive logic of religious conflict. In: The evolution of religion: Studies, theories, and critiques, ed. J. Bulbulia, R.

Johnson, D. D. P. (2009) The error of God: Error management theory, religion, and the evolution of cooperation. In: Games, groups, and the global good, ed. S. A. Levin, pp. 169–180. Springer.

Kelemen, D. (2004) Are children “intuitive theists”? Psychological Science 15:295–301.

Norenzayan, A. & Shariff, A. F. (2008) The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science 322:58–62.

Norenzayan, A. (in press) Why we believe: Religion as a human universal.  In: Human morality and sociality: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives,  ed. H. Hogh-Oleson. Palgrave/Macmillan.

Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1(4):515–26.

Randolph-Seng, B. & Nielsen,M. E. (2007) Honesty: One effect of primed religious representations. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 17(4):303–15.

Randolph-Seng, B. & Nielsen,M. E. (2008) Is God really watching you? A response to Shariff and Norenzayan (2007). The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 18(2):119–22.

Randolph-Seng, B. (2009) Nonconscious vigilance: Preconscious control over the influence of subliminal priming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Texas Tech University. [BR-S]

Rappaport, R. A. (1999) Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. Cambridge University Press.

Rossano, M. J. (2007) Supernaturalizing social life: Religion and the evolution of human cooperation. Human Nature 18:272–94.

Shariff, A. F. & Norenzayan, A. (2007) God is watching you: Priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game. Psychological Science 18(9):803–809.

Sosis, C. Genet, R. Genet, E. Harris & K. Wyman, pp. 111–117. Collins Foundation Press.

Sosis, R. & Alcorta, C. (2003) Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology 12:264–74.

Sosis, R. & Bressler, E. R. (2003) Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research 37(2):211–39.

Sosis, R. (2000) Religion and intragroup cooperation: Preliminary results of a comparative analysis of utopian communities. Cross-Cultural Research 34(1):77–88.

Sosis, R. (2003) Why aren’t we all Hutterites? Human Nature 14(2):91–127. [JB]

Sosis, R. (2004) The adaptive value of religious ritual. American Scientist 92:166–72.

Sosis, R. (2005) Does religion promote trust? The role of signaling, reputation, and punishment. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 1(1):1–30.

Wilson, D. S. (2002) Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion and the nature of society. University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, D. S. (2005) Testing major evolutionary hypotheses about religion with a random sample. Human Nature 16(4):382–409. 

Teaching Atheism

The topic of teaching courses on atheism has come up over at John Loftus' blog Debunking Christianity.  

My course has come up.  And the question of indoctrination vs. liberal arts teaching has invoked some confusions (and ire).  

So here's a slightly dressed up version of some comments I've posted over there.  

I've taught one of the few university level courses about atheism in the country.  Syllabus and readings here: 

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mccormickm/AtheismSyllabus.htm

The difference between what we do at a typical accredited liberal arts university and what they do at Bible colleges where they are cranking out so many bogus Ph.D's in bible studies is that we study and discuss the works without any prior presumption that they are correct. My students are reading Plantinga and Craig right along with Martin, Flew, and Hume, and we critically analyze all of their arguments. The irony is that since we are reading so many atheist works, I end up playing devil's advocate, as it were, and arguing the position of the Christian or theist. Here, by contrast, is the mission statement from the Talbot Theology school at Biola: 

"Talbot School of Theology is committed to biblical inerrancy. By biblical inerrancy, we mean that the Bible is without errors of any kind in its original manuscripts. Biblical inerrancy is an essential part of our ministry training and helps define our view of biblical authority."

By contrast, my course asks questions, consideration objections, develops critical evaluations, and explores with no ideological presumptions or dogmatism: 

"In this course we will consider a range of important philosophical contributions on the topic of atheism. It will also consider a number of responses and criticisms from the theistic camp, and then the range of responses open to the atheist. We will consider the tension between science and religion. We will address questions such as: Does science motivate atheism? Is religious faith compatible with science? Can science give us positive evidence for the non-existence of God?"

My purpose in teaching philosophy classes is the liberation of the intellect and the development of critical reasoning capacities. Their purpose is the propagation of a particular ideology, whether it is correct or not, regardless of the evidence. That distinction is vital.   

There's a potential misunderstanding in the way we're talking about "defending" a view here. When I teach the problem of evil, first I present a challenging statement of the problem. Then I explain and defend John Hick's soul building theodicy at great length. That produces a great deal of discussion. Then I present some powerful criticisms of that view. So in the course of an hour, I'll end up "defending" three different, contrary positions. I don't pretend to give the final answer to the issue, nor do I claim to have settled the question. The net effect of all of this back and forth is to 1) show students that the problem is not easily dealt with or dismissed, 2) educate them about various important responses that have been given, and 3) get them to develop more thoughtful and sophisticated ideas about it. In the end, I don't really care if they come out as theists or atheists. I've got enough confidence in their intellectual capacities and the power of liberal arts education ideals to let them work it out for themselves. I measure progress in terms of intellectual development, not in adherence to an ideology. The purpose of a religiously based education is to foster and entrench a particular set of conclusions or beliefs. The goal of religious education, if you can call it that, is to propagate beliefs.  What sermons from the pulpit and classes in religious education seek is a world where more people believe a particular set of ideas.  The methods or approaches to achieving that state are secondary, as long as the result is more of those beliefs. 

The proper goal of a liberal arts education, and of science education, is to develop critical methods for figuring out which conclusions are most reasonable to believe. This is the fundamental mistake that so many people make when they try to conflate science as a kind of religious faith. The essential goal of religious institutions is to subjugate minds and promote a particular set of beliefs, regardless of the facts or the contrary evidence. The essence of science is the application of a set of methods for best gathering and evaluating evidence in order to draw the most reasonable conclusions, whatever they may be. 

For some students, if they suspect that the instructor is not a believer, the unfortunate reality is that they will be immediately suspicious of your motives and your integrity.  Many of my students haven't ever heard an argument for atheism before and they've come to expect that being an atheist just means you are an amoral nihilist intent on destroying their faith.  There's also a growing body of research about people's tendency to simply become more entrenched in bad religious ideas when they encounter powerful counter evidence and arguments.  The ironic and perverse result of exposing many people to contrary views, at least in the short run, is that they just dig in deeper and become more adamant about their original views.  See this study, for instance:  http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/would-anything-change-your-mind.html

Batson didn't study the long term effects here, and I don't know if there is any research to support this, but my guess is that even if people get more dogmatic in the short run, the long term effect is liberalize and soften their attitudes.  My philosophy of religion students have an online discussion group.  For an interesting read, see what they're saying here about what they think they've learning this semester.  (This is not prompted by me in any way--they post whatever questions or ideas they want to.)  

http://groups.google.com/group/religioncsus/browse_thread/thread/34c7d7db59186470?hl=en

or here:  

http://groups.google.com/group/religioncsus/browse_thread/thread/a3b270b43238303a?hl=en

Atheists and nonbelievers are a tiny minority in an ocean of belief.  I think one of the most important things that an atheist can do outside of the classroom is to be an exemplar of thoughtful, careful reasoning.  We've got to patiently and repeatedly explain the various problems with God beliefs because religious thinking has such a stranglehold on the culture and people's personal lives.  The vast majority of people have never even heard a thoughtful argument in favor of atheism; they don't know what it is, or what reasons might lead one to think it is true.  What little information they are getting about it is distorted and maligned through religious sources and it's tainted with emotional and moral animosity.  As you can see from my students' comments, many of them had no idea that there are atheists out there who are reasonable and who aren't axe-wielding, homicidal maniacs.  Since there are so many of them and so few of us, and their information is so poor, we’re stuck having to explain over and over and over what the basics are.  The additional challenge is that religion has often actively undermined the capacities in them that would allow them to think critically and objectively about religion. 

What some atheists need to be doing is comparable to what many gays have done--educating, living by example, and presenting themselves and their ideas out of the closet as a viable alternative.  But I do think there is room and need for more militant voices too.  The civil rights movement needed both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  We need both Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. 

Here's a big question:  which should be more important to us fundamentally:  A) believing that there is no God and promoting that viewpoint, or B) believing those conclusions that appear to be supported by our best efforts at broad, balanced evidence gathering and objective critical analysis?  The latter project might well lead a reasonable person to conclude that God exists, but I submit that it's still more important to pursue B) than A).  And THAT'S the difference between what I'm doing when I'm teaching atheism and what they are doing in seminaries, bible colleges, and other religion factories.  

Evolution, Theology, and Pseudo-Profundity

Here's an interesting lecture given by Daniel Dennett about the way that religious ideas take hold of our minds.  As with many things he says, I think he's right on the money with much of this:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_9w8JougLQ

Naturalism and the A Priori

Developments in epistemology over the last 100 years have shifted the ground under the feet of philosophers of religion, including many fighting the good fight for atheism.  In particular, the a priori aint what it used to be.  Once upon a time, philosophers thought that a priori reasoning provided us with the strongest, and most compelling forms of arguments in natural theology and atheology.  But after Godel, Carnap, Quine, and many others, a priori knowledge has taken on a decidedly conventionalist flavor.  


I've been reading an article by Penelope Maddy called Naturalism and the A Priori that is very interesting.  While her topic is not proofs or disproofs of God, much of what she has to say about naturalism and the epistemological foundations is directly relevant.  A couple of choice paragraphs:

To describe naturalistic philosophy in general. Quine appeals to a favourite image:

Neurath has likened science to a boat which if we are to rebuild it. we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. (Quine 1960: 3) The naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory as a going concern. He tentatively believes all of it, but believes also that some unidentified portions are wrong. He tries to improve, clarify, and understand the system from within. He is the busy sailor adrift on Neurath's boat. (Quine 1975: 72)

For the naturalist, there is no higher perspective, where transcendental or other extra-scientific considerations hold sway. The naturalist operates 'from the point of view of our own science, which is the only point of view I can offer' (Quine 1981b: 181).

A similar rejection of the transcendental level is found in Arthur Fine's 'natural ontological attitude', or NOA?l The context here is the realism-anti-realism debates of the late 1970s and early 1980s, exemplified, for example, by Putnam's attack on 'metaphysical realism' and van Fraassen's agnosticism about unobservables.  As Fine understands it, the impulse towards realism is actually based in 'homely' beliefs, which, he says,

I will put it in the first person. I certainly trust the evidence of my senses, on the whole, with regard to the existence and features of everyday objects. And I have similar confidence in the system of 'check, double-check, check, triple-check' of scientific investigation, as well as the other safeguards built into the institutions of science.  So, if the scientists tell me that there really are molecules, and atoms, and y/J particles, and, who knows maybe even quarks, then so be it. (Fine 1986: 126-7)

From this point of view, we can ask after the relations between humans, as described in psychology, physiology, linguistics, etc., and the world, as described in physics, chemistry, geology, etc., and draw conclusions about the relations between sentences and the world, an investigation that may result in a correspondence theory of truth or a deflationary theory of truth or some other theory of truth or no theory of truth at all, depending how things go.  But however they go, this theory will be just one part of our overall scientific theory of the world.

On these matters, Putnam and van Fraassen agree with the NOAer [someone who adopts a Natural Ontological Attitude], but they don't stop here; each, in his own way, goes beyond science, to a higher level. There Putnam distinguishes metaphysical realism, which adds to NOA's core an extra scientific correspondence theory of truth, and internal realism, which  adds to the same core a Peircean analysis of truth as warranted assertability in the ideal limit.  Focused on the problem of ontology rather than truth, van Fraassen adds an extra level of epistemological analysis where we must abstain from belief in molecules and atoms and electrons, despite our acceptance of these same entities for scientific purposes, Here the holder of our homely beliefs will be tempted to object that atoms really do exist, thus embodying  Kant's 'incautious.. listener', faced with 'a question. . . absurd in itself', who then gives 'an answer where none is required' (A58/B82-3): he wants to insist on the reality of atoms, but all the genuine scientific evidence, though accepted at the lower level, has been ruled out of bounds at the higher level; the frustrated Scientific Realist ends by stomping his foot. Fine's proposal is that we rest with the natural ontological attitude and resist the temptation to engage in extra-scientific debate.

To subject our naturalism to the same challenge put to both Kant and Carnap, we should ask: is naturalism itself a scientific thesis? I think the right answer to this question is that naturalism is not a thesis at all, but an approach. The naturalistic philosopher is the Neurathian sailor, working within science to understand, clarify, and improve science; she will treat philosophical questions on a par with other scientific questions, insofar as this is possible; faced with first philosophical demands-that is, questions and solutions that require extra-scientific methods-she will respond with befuddlement, for she knows no such methods; from her scientific perspective, she is sceptical that there are such methods, but she has no a priori argument that there are such methods, but she has no a priori argument that there are none; until such methods are explained and justified, she will simply set aside the challenges of first philosophy and get on with her naturalistic business. Naturalism contrasts with both Kantianism and Carnpianism in forgoing any 'higher-level' considerations.


Wow.  

The F Word

I'm speaking at the SacFAN--Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists, and Nonbelievers--meeting tonight at 7:00 pm.  Details here:  Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists and Nonbelievers

My topic is "The F Word:  An Atheist's Guide to Addressing Faith"

My Powerpoint slides are here:  The F Word

I'll be writing up the lecture and posting it here shortly.  Please come if you're in the area.

A Paradox for Christianity: Natural and Supernatural Religions

Dedicated Christian believers will readily acknowledge that many human religions arise from natural, not supernatural sources.  That is, while the Christian may think that his religion was founded on real, supernatural events, or the actions of a genuine supernatural being (God),he will accept that many of the world’s other religions like Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Zoroastrianism, and so, had natural origins.  Those religions came about through human enthusiasm, hallucinations, historical contingencies, mistakes, mythologies, psychiatric disorders, social movements, faulty and revised memories, evangelism, or other naturally occurring phenomena.  For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these natural religions and contrast them to a bona fide supernatural religion that really does originate through the intentions, actions, miracles, or interventions of a divine being that has power and knowledge that transcends the merely natural world. And if the followers of a natural religion hold the view that their doctrines are from a  supernatural source, they are mistaken.  That is to say that they follow a false religion.  Many Christians will be quite comfortable with calling these false religions.  Other people who are more sensitive to issues of religious tolerance will be uncomfortable calling them false.  But if we are being clear, everyone will have to acknowledge that some religions entail, require, or recommend that we accept many claims as true that are, strictly speaking, false.

How many false, natural religions are there in the world?  Even if he is a dedicated adherent to one he believes is of supernatural origin, a reasonable believer will have to acknowledge that there have been thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of them.  For most believers in a particular religious tradition, the vast majority of other religious traditions have natural origins and are therefore false.  Even if there is a God, it is obvious that human history spawns great numbers of false, natural religions.  Countless religious ideas spring from human social and mental life, then some catch on and become the start of a whole religious movement.  Thus far, even the deeply committed Christian should concur with all of my premises.  But now I’d like to explain what I take to be a devastating problem for the Christian in reconciling the view that his or her personal religious views are authentic while so many others are false.  The question that should be deeply troubling to the Christian from the inside is this:  why would the one true God who sought to establish the only real religion bury, confound, obscure, or hide it in the midst of so many other false, natural religions? 

Here’s what I mean:  Christianity has relatively inauspicious origins.  What we have today is a very small number of copies of  writings that were written decades and even centuries after Jesus is alleged to have preached, been executed, and the returned from the dead.  Two hundred years or so after the alleged events, the modern Bible was sifted from thousands of early writings that gave very different accounts of Jesus and Christian principles.  A very long and complicated  process with unreliable nodes of transmission provides us with claims of highly dubious origins.  Numerous doubts accumulate at the beginning with the alleged eye witnesses, then the stories are repeated an unknown number of times by an unknown number of people before they are written down by a small group of unknown authors.  They these stories are copied and finally the Bible we know is culled from thousands of other written works.  At each stage of transmission, we should have several worries about the fidelity of the process that accumulate and amplify by the time the Christian stories get to us.  I’ve discussed these layers of doubts and their cumulative, amplifying effect in many early posts. 

The people engaged in the creation and transmission of these early ideas would have been subject to all of the same natural phenomena that affected the foundations of all of the false religions in the world:  psychosis, bereavement hallucinations, the Asch effect, source amnesia, superstition, false supernaturalism, Iron Age ignorance, paranormalism, confirmation bias, fabrication, hedging, revised memories, poor eyewitness abilities, propaganda, spin, mythological influences, heightened paranormal expectations, suggestibility, the lack of the scientific method, gullibility, and so on.  At the very least, the Christian must acknowledge that these phenomena are real, and that they very frequently are responsible for spawning other religious movements.  Even if Christianity is truly of a supernatural origin, and none of these doubt amplifying factors affected its formation, they would have been close at hand, and their presence obscures and undermines our ready acceptance of it.  We know that these phenomena affect people and that they spawn religious movements.  And we have very little reliable information about the origins of Christianity that might convince us that they were not a factor. 

So the question for the Christian is, why did your God make your religion indistinguishable from all the natural religions in so many of these ways?  The puzzle is made worse by the facts that, by your own reckoning, your God has the power, the knowledge, the intention, and the will to make himself and real supernatural origins of the Christian religion evident to all humans.  In fact, by your own reckoning, he is going to hold every human in history morally and epistemically culpable if they do not acknowledge the real supernatural origin of Christianity by condemning them to an eternity of unimaginable torture. Yet despite having the ability, knowledge, and desire to transcend above all of the false, natural religions, he does not. 

The embedding of the one, true religion—Christianity—within human history in a fashion that makes it look like so many false religions should create deeply troubling cognitive dissonance for the believing Christian.  The simple and inescapable answer is that Christianity isn’t the one, true supernatural religion.  Your religion is a natural religion, just like all of the others.  And now you’ve been right to brink of accepting the conclusion.  You already acknowledge that the vast majority of religions in history arose by misguided, natural avenues.  And you can see that the origins of Christianity resembles those false religions in many salient ways.  You have to acknowledge that we have very little, reliable information about the origins of Christianity.  And you can see that God, if he were real, and if he had the power and character that you have imputed him, would have done it differently.  He could have and would have done it better.  All that remains is for you is to abandon the wild gyrations and rationalizations that are typically attempted to escape this dilemma to explain God’s hiddenness.  The simple and obvious solution is that Christianity is a natural religion.  

Video: Debates on the Resurrection, Salem, and Miracles

We now have videos of all three recent debates between me and Asst. Prof. Russell DiSilvestro:

Debate 1 video:  Jesus and the Salem Witch Trials
          McCormick slides, Debate 1
          DiSilvestro slides, Debate 1

Debate 2 video:  Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus
           McCormick slides, Debate 2.
           DiSilvestro slides, Debate 2.

Debate 3 video:  Does God Want Us to Believe in Miracles?
          McCormick slides, Debate 3.
          DiSilvestro slides, Debate 3.

Thanks to Russell for doing the debates, and thanks to David Corner and Christina Bellon for filming.

Summary:  In the first debate, I argued that the same epistemic standards that lead us to reject the occurrence of real witchcraft at Salem, if we are being consistent, should lead us to reject the historical argument for the resurrection. In fact, by any fair measure of quantity and quality, we have far more and far better evidence for real witchcraft at Salem. So a fortiori the case against the real resurrection is that much worse.  People can respond to this argument three ways:  1.  they can accept the implication for Jerusalem and conclude that we don't have sufficient evidence for anything supernatural in either case.  2.  They can argue that there are important differences between Salem and Jerusalem that justify accepting the former and rejecting the latter.  or 3. they can bite the bullet and accept that there was real witchcraft at Salem and a real resurrection at Jerusalem.

Much to my surprise, Prof. DiSilvestro has taken this last position.  It's hard for me to think that he's not just caught up in the grip of an ideology, but he seems to think that it's not that unreasonable to conclude that the women at Salem really were witches.  And, he argues, there are many other instances of magic, miracles, and other supernatural events in our ordinary lives.  This seems like the least reasonable alternative of the three options to me--some of my colleagues have pressed for 2. for some interesting reasons.  But there you have it.  I take Russell's embracing of that option to be, more or less, a reductio of his view.  And I can't imagine how someone could hear what was said and not conclude that I won that round of the debate, whatever "won" means in these contexts.

Russell also presented his historical argument for the resurrection.  Roughly the structure is something like:
There are facts:  Jesus was killed and buried.  The tomb was found empty.  The followers of Jesus reported having Jesus appear to them afterwards.  There are several possible natural explanations for these facts like hallucinations, the wrong tomb, etc.  And there is the possibility that he really was resurrected.  There are problems with all of these naturalistic explanations because they don't cohere with what the Gospels say or some things we think we know about the early Christians.  So the only remaining conclusion is that Jesus was really resurrected.

I have several responses to this sort of argument, but probably the easiest thing to point out is that the argument that I give in debate 2 gives us a number of very strong reasons to doubt the so-called "facts" that Russell is citing.  So I'd reject his first premise.  There are several other nit picky or technical problems with the rest of this argument, but it would be boring to delve into those here.

In the second debate, I presented the evidence from Lourdes that shows that humans are very, very unreliable sources of testimony about miracles.  And I presented a lot of other evidence from empirical psychology that shows why we should reduce our estimation of the reliability of the people who conveyed the resurrection story across the centuries to us.  When all of these reasons to doubt are in place, it forces us to acknowledge that we cannot reasonably conclude that the resurrection didn't really happen.

Again, I think Russell's replies here were quite weak.  He spent some time arguing that just because we have reasons to think that generally human miracle testimony is very unreliable, we shouldn't conclude that this particular case (the resurrection) is unreliable.  I didn't understand this argument, because as I see it, that's exactly what all of these reasons to doubt miracle testimony do--they should reduce our confidence in them.  That doesn't imply that resurrection didn't happen, but I have given a lot of reasons for thinking that we don't have enough reliable evidence to believe it.

One of the interesting ironies of the position that I am taking here is this:  I can grant for the sake of argument that the resurrection really did happen.  The problem is that it has been mired and obscured in an epistemic context that forces us to write it off.  Even if it did happen, we should look at the sketchy evidence and the doubt raising facts of the history of the evidence and conclude that it is not reasonable to believe.  Russell also  gave a number of contemporary anecdotal miracles stories that, as far as I could tell, illustrated just the sorts of psychological worries that I was trying to raise.  Again, I don't think I understood his point here.

In debate 3, I presented a number of ways in which the alleged Christian miracles could have and should have been better if God intended us to believe on their basis.  The evidence for the resurrection could have been far better than it is.  So since it is so poor, and since it looks just the way you would expect it to if the Christian religion arose from natural sources instead of supernatural ones, then we must conclude that God doesn't really want us to believe in them.  That is, let's assume that what the Christians are saying is right and that God does want us to believe in the resurrection on the basis of the evidence that we have.  I argue that even from the inside, this whole scheme doesn't add up.  It doesn't make sense that God wants us to believe the historical evidence because if he did, he would have made it so much better.

This puts Russell and many other Christians into a bind.  They need to argue on the one hand, as Russell did on day 1, that the available evidence should lead us to think that the resurrection was real.  Russell argued that a real resurrection was the best available explanation given all the facts.  But then they need to explain why it is that the evidence isn't any better than it is given that God is all powerful and all knowing.  It certainly can't be the case that God wasn't able to make his existence or the resurrection known to us.  So the historical Christian is trapped trying to argue both that the evidence is just enough and compelling as it is, and that God has good reasons for not making it any clearer, or more evident to us.  If they argue that God is leaving room for love, or faith, or mystery, or choice by remaining hidden, as it were, then they are undermining the original argument that the historical evidence demands that we accept the resurrection.  You can't have it both ways.
My own take here was that Russell was thoroughly caught on the horns of this dilemma and that his efforts to have it both ways in debate 3 are very poor.  He also gave a number of other anecdotal miracle stories from books and people he knows.  I think these were intended to show that either real miracles do happen all the time, or that sometimes when a miracle does happen, even when it is obvious, we still reject it.  But the cases were things like trees getting struck by lightening or people rescued from floods.  I didn't understand how they were to the point at all given that we were debating whether or not we have sufficient historical evidence to justify believing in the resurrection.

Please watch the videos and judge for yourselves which arguments are most compelling.  I'd love to hear your conclusions and your reasons.

.

Slides: Believing the Resurrection

I have my Powerpoint slides for all three debates (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Sept. 20-22) up here:

Jesus and Salem
It's often argued that it is reasonable to believe in the resurrection of Jesus because of the historical evidence in its favor.  That's a mistake.  We have a mountain of comparable evidence, much more actually, that there were real witches at Salem, Mass in the 1690s.  We should reject the resurrection for the same reasons we don't think the Salem Witches were real.

Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus 
We can see from cases like the (false) believers at Lourdes and others that humans are really, really unreliable when they report miracles.  Furthermore, the early Christians would have been highly disposed to believe supernatural claims about Jesus, they were ignorant of a wide range of psychological facts about humans and their religiousness, and the Jesus story has been filtered through a long process with the goal of promoting belief. I argue that these layers of doubt undermine the output--the resurrection story we now have.  And we should not believe it.

Does God Want Us to Believe Miracles?
It's clear that the Christian miracles, when viewed from a distance are really crummy miracles.  An all powerful, all knowing, and all good God with the various goals that Christianity has attributed to him could have and would have done a much better job.  Here's a number of ways to perform better miracles, for God's next attempt.  The argument:  1.  If God had sought to ground Christianity on the New Testament miracles, we would expect them to be much better in several ways.  2.  Since they are so poor, we have to conclude that God did not or does not want us to believe on their basis.  So that suggests that Christianity is based on a grand mistake.

How's that for three days work?

Three Debates: The Resurrection and Christian Miracles

Russell DiSilvestro (a colleague in my Philosophy Department) and I are going to do a series of debates about the resurrection at CSUS (California State University, Sacramento--where our dept. is) next week, Monday through Wednesday.  Here's the run down:

Debate 1:  The Resurrection:  Jesus and the Salem Witch Trials

Monday, Sept. 20, Hinde Auditorium, Student Union, 3:00-4:15:

McCormick:  The resurrection has frequently been supported by appeals to the quantity and quality of historical evidence that we have, primarily from the Bible.  But by a parallel argument, we should believe that there were really witches with magical powers at Salem, Mass. where we have  evidence of greater quantity and quality.  Therefore, by the standards we already employ, we should reject the resurrection. 

DiSilvestro: Salem and Jerusalem are disanalogous in ways that make the latter stronger than the former. But in any event, the evidential case for a real resurrection at Jerusalem is strong enough to conclude that it happened.  If this implies that the evidential case for real witches at Salem is strong enough to conclude that there were some, so be it.  The obstacles to believing in real witches are not as impregnable as they seem. 

Debate 2:  Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus

Tuesday, Sept. 21, Hinde Auditorium, Student Union, 3:00-4:15

McCormick:  Large numbers of alleged miraces at Lourdes, France and elsewhere that have turned out to be mistaken have shown us that miracle testimony is very unreliable.  These cases and other considerations reduce our confidence in testimony about the resurrection to the point that we must reject it. 

DiSilvestro:  Some of the differences between the miracle reports from Lourdes and the resurrection reports make the latter stronger than the former.  But in any event, the resurrection reports have features that should lead us to accept them.  Even if miracle reports are in general very unreliable, this should not lead us to doubting all miracle reports, and it should not lead us to doubting the resurrection reports in particular. 

Debate 3:   Does God Want Us to Believe in Miracles? 

Wednesday, Sept. 22, Hinde Auditorium, Student Union, 3:00-4:15

 McCormick:  The evidence we have for the resurrection and other miracles is sketchy at best.  It would be well within God’s power to produce compelling miracles.  Since he has not done so, it must not be God’s intention for us to accept them. 

DiSilvestro: There are several good reasons that God might have for allowing the available evidence for the resurrection to be just about what it is already, rather than more or less.  When these reasons are carefully considered, it should lead us be very skeptical about—indeed, it should lead us to to reject--the claim that God does not intend for us to believe in the resurrection.

It should be a good set of discussions and it will be well attended judging by the early interest.

Russell and I have also been slated to be interviewed on Capitol Public Radio with Jeffrey Callison on Monday morning at 10:00.  Tune in if you're interested.   http://www.capradio.org/

There will be videos of the debates and we'll get them posted soon.