Going Nuclear

Stephen Law has nicely put his finger on a common philosophical objection and mistake that gets lodged against atheists here:    http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2010/09/chapter-of-book-for-comments.html

During the Cold War, our strategy for “winning” was to resort to an option that would lay waste to everything:  “Maybe we can’t win the war, but we’re willing to start a global thermonuclear holocaust and destroy all life on Earth to make sure that you don’t.”   The global thermonuclear skeptic protests against atheism:  “You can’t prove that there’s no God because we can’t prove anything.  There is nothing we know with complete certainty, so there’s nothing we know.”  or alternately, “There is nothing that we know with certainty, so it’s ok for me to go ahead and believe in God (or whatever I want.)”

So critics who go nuclear on the atheist fall into at least two groups.  First, she might take the view that since absolute certainty that doesn’t admit of any doubts is required in order to know something, then both the theist who thinks he knows there is a God and the atheist who thinks there isn’t are mistaken.  They’re both claiming to have something that cannot be had, so they’re both overstepping the boundaries.  Theism and atheism involve a kind of hubris, ironically, or an illegitimate land grab.  The only reasonable position, thinks the critic, since we can achieve the necessary level of certainty about so little is to withhold assent, be agnostic, and not claim to know either way.  If these skeptical worries are extended further, then nihilism results.  Most or all of our efforts to know or believe reasonably are stultified by an insurmountable burden of proof. 

   We are nihilists!!

Alternately, the nuclear critic might take this view.   Since absolute certainty is required for knowledge, and since there is so little certainty, there is room for faith to take us to the conclusions that reason cannot support.  Since nothing is known, in effect, it’s all faith.  In this family of criticisms you often get the “atheism is just another form of religious faith” complaint.  The criticism here is that ultimately no position can provide the necessary justification, so it amounts to believing despite a lack of justification or evidence at some point.  And believing despite a lack of evidence, or even believing despite contrary evidence, is the consummate example of believing by faith.  So the atheist, with all his pretense at being reasonable, applying skepticism to everything, and claiming to only believe what the evidence supports, is actually engaged in just as much a leap of faith as all the religious adherents he criticizes.  Another variation on this theme would be the nuclear critic who seems to think that since all the other kids are doing it, including the atheist, then it’s ok for him to do it too.  If not view can meet the burden of proof, then there can be nothing objectionable about his going ahead and believing in God.  Radical skepticism paves the way for religious faith.  On this account, it’s hard to see what the atheist might be doing wrong except claiming or presuming more certitude than is real or possible. 

Time to defuse the nuclear bomb: 

The nihilist skeptic is making several mistakes.  First, even if this burden of proof issue is real, it’s not the atheist’s  problem uniquely to solve.  If it’s true that we have to have absolute, doubt-free certainty in order to know anything, then most or even all of the rest of what we think we know goes out the window.  Since on radical skeptical scenarios like the Matrix, or Descartes’ Evil Demon hypothesis none of what we see or experience externally is real, then the only thing I may know is the fact of my own existence.  And even that claim is predicated on this principle’s being true:  all of the reports of my own thoughts, beliefs and subjective experiences that I have through introspection are veridical.  I don’t know that there is a tree external to me, but I do know, through introspection, that I am thinking about and having tree like sensations.  But there is a mountain of research now calling the veridicality of introspection into doubt.  Start here for a survey and a few hundred references:    Nisbett, Richard, and DeCamp Wilson, Timothy.  Telling More Than We Can Know:  Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.   So for the nihilist critic to through this global skeptical problem just at the atheist isn’t an objection to atheism at all.  It’s demanding that the atheist solve a problem that, as formulated, isn’t solvable, and then the critic claims a questionable victory over atheism.  He may feel satisfied that he’s shown the folly of atheism, but only at the cost of giving up everything.  If you’ve burned the whole planet down to a cinder, there’s really nothing to claim victory over. 

The nuclear nihilist has another problem made clear by G.E. Moore.  Roughly, the principle that the whole objection is based upon is this:  Knowledge is not possible unless one can acquire absolute, doubt free certainty.  Call this the Certainty Principle (CP).  In contrast, consider some alternative claims that we would ordinarily treat as knowledge:  I have a right hand.  My name is Matt McCormick.  There is an external world full of objections that exist independent of my mind.  Smoking causes cancer.  And so on.  Call these Ordinary Facts (OF).  The crucial question for the nuclear nihilist is, what are the grounds, reasoning, evidence or considerations that lead you to adopt CP or think that it is true?  And how is it that the considerations that lead you to CP are so powerful that they trump the considerations that would lead you to believe OF?  Put another way, how is it that you know CP?  Are you certain of it?  Is that certainty beyond any doubt itself?  The nuclear nihilist is saying, in effect, that once all the relevant considerations are made, the reasonableness of CP completely eclipses the reasonableness of OF.  CP is better justified than OF, so we should abandon OF in favor of CP.  Now that we’ve framed the skeptical hypothesis Moore’s way, it’s easy to see the answer.  Given the choice of starting points between “There is nothing we know,” and “there are a great many things that we know,” there aren’t enough considerations that favor the former over the later.  Faced with the principle,  “If you don’t know it with absolute certainty, then you don’t know it,” and its implications, we should reconsider what led us to accept the principle instead of running off on the fool’s errand of trying to procure absolute certainty for everything we thought we knew. 

The other problem here is that skeptic appears to be ignoring a significant literature that presents arguments that do exactly what he’s denying can be done:  deductive atheology.  We now have thousands of carefully constructed analyses of the properties of God that conclude that no being with X property, or X and Y properties can exist because X or the combination of X and Y are logically, conceptually at odds with each other.  See the sections of Single and Multiple Property Disproofs in my Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Atheism for starters.  Also see The Impossibility of God, eds. Martin and Monnier. 

Also see Theodore Drange’s Incompatible Properties Arguments:  A Survey.    And see a number of Patrick Grim’s articles on omniscience such as “Against Omniscience:  The Case from Essential Indexicals,”  

Or “Truth, Omniscience, and the Knower,”   Or there is this exchange between Grim and Plantinga  “Truth, Omniscience, and Cantorian Arguments:  An Exchange.”   Even if you find some of these arguments inconclusive, it is important to note that they are alleging to do that which has been pronounced impossible by the nuclear nihilist.  It would be premature of him to simple decree that no such argument has or will ever succeed in showing that God is impossible.  So we can’t really take him seriously. 

The rejoinder at this point might be:  “But even if those arguments show that some notions of God are incoherent, they can’t prove that there’s no God at all, or that all gods are impossible.”    But now it appears that the goal posts are being moved.  Arguably, if a being isn’t omniscient, then that being isn’t God.  If the properties that we can coherently attribute to something can’t achieve a minimal amount of greatness, then we shouldn’t be labeling the lesser sorts of beings as “God.”  Think of “God” as a title, like heavy weight boxing champion of the universe.  It’s a placeholder for a certain kind of great entity.  The being that fills it should be powerful, knowledgeable, and good in their greatest or maximal instantiation.  If the greatest sort of thing that can exist falls far short of that minimal greatness, that lesser being doesn’t become God.  If omnipotence is incoherent, or if it is impossible to be both all merciful and all just, or if moral perfection is impossible, then it would appear that nothing worthy of the name God can exist.  Retreating to other, lesser characterizations and then clutching at hope that one of those might pan out doesn’t salvage God.  Even worse, the possibility of some other, lesser beings existing out there certainly doesn’t undermine the atheism that results from reflecting on deductive atheological arguments.  If I consider the long list of DA arguments and then (tentatively) conclude that there appears to be no description of a being that is on the one hand, sufficiently great to be worthy of the title “God,” and on the other hand, logically, conceptually, and internally coherent, the nuclear nihilist can hardly criticize my conclusion.  The justification for atheism isn’t undercut by the charge that there may be other lesser (but not worthy of the title “God”) entities out there.  

  

One more problem for the nuclear nihilist:  rejecting atheism because it fails to pass the Certainty Principle invokes a double standard.  I suspect that the nuclear nihilist has artificially raised the burden of proof just for those arguments he wants to defeat, but he doesn’t really take it seriously for everything else he believes.  He believes, along with Moore, that he has a right hand and a left hand, that Barack Obama is the president, and that smoking causes cancer.  Beyond the debate with the atheist, his words and his behavior betray him.  The vast majority of what he accepts and acts upon in his life fall far short of meeting the outrageous burden of proof, but he takes all of that to be known, reasonable, true, and justified.  It would never occur to him to doubt that benzene is carcinogenic were we to put a beaker full of it in front of him and ask him to drink it.  Dennett’s apt description here is that we are playing tennis and the critic lowers the net when he serves, but when I try to volley back he raises it as high as possible.  (Then he claims victory when I can’t get the ball back over the net.) 

This post is running long, so I'll deal with the nuclear advocate of faith in the next post.  

Are We Proving the Negative Yet? Lecture in Berkeley.

I'll be speaking to the East Bay Atheists in Berkeley tomorrow (January 16) at 2:00 in the Berkeley Main Library, 3rd Floor Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St.

Here's the write up for the East Bay Atheists about the lecture.

I'll be giving an updated version of the "Are We Proving the Negative Yet?"  lecture.  Here are the slides.

Please come if you're in the area.  

More Disastrous Effects of Adding God Into Our Moral Decisions

Being moral is hard.  Trying to sort out and prioritize the most ethically salient features of a complicated decision and then make a choice is filled with ambiguity.  And when the stakes are high, the complexities and ambiguities amplify our apprehension.  So it's no wonder that so many people derive comfort from the idea that God can see through the fog and provide us with clear and certain moral answers.  The problem, of course, is that he doesn't.  Believers are notorious for cherry picking the passages from the Bible, edicts from the Pope, or other divine sanctions that suit them while ignoring the ones that don't give them the answers they want.  Even worse, we broadcast more of our own moral sentiments onto God than we do other people, in part because what God wants is so murky.  
See http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/illusion-of-moral-guidance-from-god.html.  


Also see:  "Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs."  Epley N, Converse BA, DElbosc A, Montelone GA, and Cacioppa JT.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19955414


Other research has also shown that we are prone to change our minds about moral matters when we are forced to consider the opposing viewpoint or alternatives, but we frequently conceal that shift in attitude from ourselves and insist that the view we changed to was the one we had all along.  Combine that tendency with our predisposition to attribute more of our own views to God, and you create idiosyncratic, and capricious decision makers who invoke God as their authority.  


It turns out that that combination is just as scary as it sounds.  Here's a recent study about the effects of scriptural violence on aggression by Brad J. Bushman, Robert D. Ridge, Enny Das, Colin W. Key, and Gregory L. Busath.  


"When God Sanctions Killing:  The Effects of Scriptural Violence on Aggression,"  Psychological Science, Vol. 18, Number 3.  http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2007/bushman.cfm

ABSTRACT—Violent people often claim that God sanctions their actions. In two studies, participants read a violent passage said to come from either the Bible or an ancient scroll. For half the participants, the passage said that God sanctioned the violence. Next, participants competed with an ostensible partner on a task in which the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones (the aggression measure). Study 1 involved Brigham Young University students; 99% believed in God and in the Bible. Study 2 involved Vrije Universiteit–Amsterdam students; 50% believed in God, and 27% believed in the Bible. In Study 1, aggression increased when the passage was from the Bible or mentioned God. In Study 2, aggression increased when the passage mentioned God, especially among participants who believed in God and in the Bible. These results suggest that scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers.



So now consider the combined point of all three threads of research.  1) We project more of our own views onto God than others who we know more about.  2)  We can be easily induced to change our minds about moral matters and then we hide the shift from ourselves.  And 3) when people think that God sanctions violence, they become more aggressive themselves.  That is, adding God to the considerations in moral matters would appear to make things worse because we don't actually  know what God wants, but we endow him with our own views, but when the un-moored views inevitably shift around, God provides us with a sort of carte blanche endorsement of whatever they morph into.  And adding God into the story exacerbates our aggressive and violent proclivities.  And you thought violent video games were bad.  

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.