The Inductive Problem of Evil Argument Against the Existence of God

One of the most influential statements of the problem of evil argument for atheism goes something like this. In the history of sentient beings on this planet, there have been countless instances of prolonged suffering and death that occurred in isolation. Rowe gives a now famous example of a fawn that is burned horribly in a forest fire and that dies very slowly over the course of several days. By hypothesis, no humans find the fawn, no one exercises the virtues of kindness or sympathy by helping the fawn, and the slow, torturous death of the fawn doesn’t make some causal contribution to some chain of events that ultimately creates more good than evil, or helps to avoid some worse evil. If the fawn had died even one day or one hour sooner, the world would have been a better place. Surely, there have been many such events in the course of life on this planet. In order for Rowe’s argument to be successful, however, it need only be reasonable that there has been at least one such case in the millions of years that there have been creatures that are capable of suffering.

The argument is that if there was an all powerful, all knowing, and all good being, he would have eliminated such an instance of suffering. But since there surely are such cases in the world, there must not be an omni-God.

Perhaps the most compelling thing about Rowe’s argument, and the reason that it has been so influential, is that it seems obvious to anyone who thinks about it that there must have been cases like the one described. To deny Rowe’s first premise:

“There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”

would be to assert something that seems to utterly defy common sense, namely,

“There has never, in all the billions of years that creatures capable of experiencing pain on Earth, been a single instance where one of them experienced a moment of pain that was not absolutely necessary and that served some greater good or helped avoid some greater evil.”

That is, if you deny Rowe’s first premise, you have to adopt the view that there has never been any suffering that could have been eliminated or avoided from the larger perspective. And believing that have proven to be very difficult for anyone who has experienced what seemed like pointless suffering, or come across the corpse of a whale on the beach, or seen the ravages of disease.

Consider these two cases. These are not the sorts of examples that Rowe had in mind. An important facet of Rowe’s example is that the suffering occurs in complete isolation from human exercises of virtue or moral growth. But the cases graphically illustrate some closely related points:

On Dec. 26th, 2005, an enormous tsunami struck the coast of Thailand and surrounding areas. The best estimates of the death tolls now are around 240,000 people. Twins, Charlotte and Marcus, were vacationing with their parents on the beaches in Thailand when the wave swept inland. Their family became separate and their parents were killed. Here is Charlotte’s firsthand account of the event from The Guardian (Sat., Dec. 23, 2006):

Boxing Day in Khao Lak, 2004. Mum, Dad and I are lying on the sunbeds. Marcus has stayed in our room, watching a film. Mum is reading her diving magazine. I rub sun lotion all over myself. Dad is looking out to sea in a strange way. Mum and I look up and see the water disappear, leaving all the fish on the sand. We see children running out to help the fish back into the water, so that they do not die. Dad wants me to fetch the camera from the hotel so that we can film the water disappearing. I am too lazy. Dad gets up to fetch it himself, but first he and Mum have a little argument. Dad thinks that the water is drawing out. Mum and I shriek, "It's coming in."
"Calm down - of course it isn't coming in," says Dad, on his way to the hotel. I have not seen him since.

Mum and I see the wave. We take our stuff and run. Mum runs away ahead of me. I hear her voice: "For goodness sake run, Charlotte! Whatever happens I will always love you." I have not seen her since.

She disappears without bothering to check whether I am behind her. I run in panic, upwards, as far as I can. Get to a flight of steps where there is chaos. A small child is standing by the steps crying. The mother has left the child alone.

I am holding tightly on to the stair rail when the wave roars in over the whole of Khao Lak. I feel the wave rolling over me and pulling away the rail. I go with the wave out to sea and in again, several times. Under the surface, I swallow gulps of salty water when I try to get air. I will not survive if I do not come up to the surface. In the end I can take deep breaths. With my eyes closed. I am hanging in something, a tree? The roof of a house? The thing I am hanging on snaps and I am pulled out to sea again, out and in. After perhaps seven minutes I open my eyes. I have landed up by the hotel and see masses of people lying there, blood everywhere.

And here is an account of the course of cholera in its victims. The disease has literally killed millions of people in the course of human history.

"Cholera is a horrific illness. The onset of the disease is typically quick and spectacular; you can be healthy one moment and dead within hours. The disease, left untreated, has a fatality rate that can reach fifty per cent. The first sign that you have it is a sudden and explosive watery diarrhea, classically described as “rice-water stool,” resembling the water in which rice has been rinsed and sometimes having a fishy smell. White specks floating in the stool are bits of lining from the small intestine. As a result of water loss—vomiting often accompanies diarrhea, and as much as a litre of water may be lost per hour—your eyes become sunken; your body is racked with agonizing cramps; the skin becomes leathery; lips and face turn blue; blood pressure drops; heartbeat becomes irregular; the amount of oxygen reaching your cells diminishes. Once you enter hypovolemic shock, death can follow within minutes. A mid-nineteenth-century English newspaper report described cholera victims who were “one minute warm, palpitating, human organisms—the next a sort of galvanized corpse, with icy breath, stopped pulse, and blood congealed—blue, shrivelled up, convulsed.” Through it all, and until the very last stages, is the added horror of full consciousness. You are aware of what’s happening: “the mind within remains untouched and clear,—shining strangely through the glazed eyes . . . a spirit, looking out in terror from a corpse.”

“Sick City,” Steven Shapin. The New Yorker, Nov. 6, 2006.

Rowe’s point is that even if some of the instances of people suffering or dying from cholera contributed to some greater good or avoided some greater evil—someone’s immune system grew stronger, scientific knowledge of hygiene and sanitation improved, or some future genocidal dictator died in the crib—it is perfectly reasonable to believe that at least some of the cases did not play some positive role like that. There may have been some net benefit to the suffering that someone like Charlotte experienced as a result of the Christmas day tsunami (although she would likely reject the claim that she is somehow better off for having her parents torn away from her, battered, and drowned), but there must have been some of the suffering and death induced by the tsunami that did not do anything good. The reason Rowe’s argument is so powerful is that there only needs to be a single instance like that to render the first premise true, and the argument sound.

The surprising thing for me is that I have thought about it for years, and I don’t think the argument works. The reason I don’t think it works is that reflecting carefully on the notion of an omni-God and the kind of relationship he might have to the world, it undermines the powerful intuition we initially have in favor of Rowe’s first premise. But a full discussion of that will take some space, obviously, and will fill up the better part of a chapter in the atheism book I am writing.

Miracles Make It Harder to Prove God is Good

Miraculous events that serve to alleviate suffering generate an acute problem for attempts to prove the existence of God from miracle evidence.

Suppose Jesus heals a crippled man so that he can walk again, or cures a group of lepers, or God otherwise prevents some local instance of suffering. Or suppose that of the millions of pilgrims who have bathed or drunk the waters at Lourdes, France, some of their medical problems were miraculously cured. The overwhelmingly obvious question to ask in each of these cases, especially if the event is being held up as evidence for the existence of an infinitely good and loving God, is “why not more?” Even the Catholic Church has only officially recognized a handful of cases at Lourdes as authentic miracles. At any given moment on the planet, there are most likely thousands or even millions of people claiming to have had some beneficial miracle that alleviates suffering. But at any given moment on the planet there are millions or even billions of other people who are not being cured, healed, or benefitted.

So the occurrence of one beneficial miracle in the midst of so many instances of unabated suffering seems to count heavily against attributing omnibenevolence to the source. Here the question is can the occurrence of miracles be reasonably construed as evidence for the existence of an omni- or Christian God? Were some supernatural force to alleviate some cases of suffering and not others, then at the very least it will take some careful argument to show that that evidence is even consistent with the attribution of omnibenevolence. If there were two people walking out in an intersection about to be hit by a bus and you could save one of them both without much effort, but you restrained yourself and only called out to or pulled one of them back, we wouldn’t judge you to be as good a person as someone who saved them both. If a doctor travels to an African village with enough polio vaccine to inoculate 1,000 children, but only gives 10 of them the shot and throws the rest of the vaccine away, and then watches the remaining 990 die or be crippled, we would conclude that doctor was a monster, not a saint.

Even if some supernatural force were to reach out and instantaneously eliminate all of the suffering in the world today, one would think that an omnibenevolent being would have done it sooner. What was he doing yesterday? Was he busy? Off on errands? And what was he doing in 1945 during Auschwitz, or while the bubonic plague was ravaging and killing millions in Europe during the middle 1300s?

Much to our surprise, the classical problem of evil is made worse by cases where God is alleged to have done something good for someone. Every case where someone claims that their prayers led to their rapid recovery from terminal cancer, or that their piety helped bring back a loved one safe from the fighting in a war zone shines a powerful spotlight on centuries of gratuitous suffering that went unabated despite heartfelt prayers, decent lives, and fervent piety.

It would have been more plausible, perhaps, to argue that God is all good and loving had that particular beneficial miracle not happened. That is, the theist in these cases would have less explaining to do, and could possibly make more sense of the compatibility of a world that does not have local, seemingly arbitrary miracles, than a world where a tiny bit of suffering is alleviated in a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, or in Amsterdam, while wars, famine, plagues, and drought kill millions elsewhere. If an omni-God performed no local miracles, one might hope to offer up some generalized account of gratuitous suffering like Hick’s soul-making theodicy. But if you try to derive God’s omnibenevolence from miracles, you’ve opened the door wider to the problem of reconciling it with all the staggering amounts of suffering in history that went on without intervention.

From a purely strategic perspective, the Christian theist should view miracle claims with a great deal of caution and skepticism. If God is bothering with those sorts of petty and inconsequential problems in the world, how could one plausibly argue that he’s also the Alpha and the Omega, the grand author of the universe? It seems to me that a God who bothers with statues that cry blood, clouds that resemble the name of Allah, or raising Lazarus from the dead (and not 6 million Jews in the Holocaust) is a harder one to defend and believe in than no God at all.

So even the project of showing that beneficial miracles are consistent with the existence of an all good, all loving supernatural force is plagued (pun intended) with difficulties. Reading off positive, supporting evidence for the attribution of omnibenevolence from some miracle is outrageous.

We Are Wired to Resist the Truth About Pointless Suffering

Here are a couple of conclusions discovered in psychological studies that have profound importance for God believers and non-believers who are considering the question of gratuitous and inscrutable evil and the existence of God.

First, Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness points out that, “research shows that when people are given electric shocks, they actually feel less pain when they believe that they are suffering for something of great value.” The study he’s referring to is P.G. Zimbardo “Control of Pain Motivation by Cognitive Dissonance,” Science 151: 217-19 (1966).

Second, a number of researchers have shown that when test subjects are confronted with puzzling, random, or unexplained sequences of events they spontaneously form hypotheses about a causal relationship between them. They provide causal explanations even when none are apparent, they infer them even when not instructed to, and they remember described scenarios by means of causal cues better than by non-causal memory cues. See B. Weiner, “’Spontaneous Causal’ Thinking,” Psychological Bulletin 97: 74-84( 1985). R.R. Hassin, J.A. Bargh, and J. S. Uleman, “Spontaneous Causal Inferences,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38: 515-22 (2002).

One of the most contentious topics among believers and non-believers is the compatibility of an omni-God with the presence of inscrutable evil in the world. And anyone who has engaged in one of these conversations will note the powerful presence of the sentiment that “everything happens for a reason.” I cannot count the number of times that I have heard people insist on this platitude in response to the question of evil. And it is also obvious how much comfort people derive from that thought alone.

And what these psychological studies make clear is that humans possess a powerful epistemic, and emotional craving a causal explanation for everything they encounter. We find unexplained, random, seemingly unconnected events frustrating to the point of madness. And when it comes to the question of events that create pain, that urge is even stronger. The Zimbardo study shows that the pain actually feel less intense as long as the subject believes that it is occurring for some worthy cause. This sheds new light on the frequent comment by believers, “I just couldn’t face the world or my life if there were no God.” They aren’t kidding. We have a powerful cognitive mechanism that generates causal inferences and explanations even when there isn’t one present.
And in the case of pain, we have an additionally powerful subconscious motive or urge to explain it away in some fashion—it will literally feel less painful if we do.

So the atheist who presses the problem of evil as an argument against the existence of God is up against powerful human psychological tendencies. What gives the problem of evil objection to the existence of God the most force is the line of argument that there are events that generate massive amounts of suffering and death in the world—like the Thailand tsunami that killed over 230,000 people. And that an omni-God would never tolerate such events. So an omni-God doesn’t exist. And if there is no omni-God who permits such events as part of some grand cosmic plan, then those events are in fact random, pointless, and without any sort of redeeming payoff. And it is that last implication of the atheist’s argument that people find so deeply unpalatable. Our cognitive constitution is configured to resist that sort of conclusion, even when it is obviously true, with all its might.

Incoherent: I Believe Because It Makes Me a Moral Person

There is another more superficial argument that also deserves mentioning here. Many people have the pessimistic view that the only thing that could motivate essentially selfish and sinful beings to act morally is the threat of punishment or the promise of reward. The only reason that humans are moral, on the rare occasions when they are, is that they either are actually being selfish and just trying to get the big payoffs for being good: heaven. Or again, they are essentially being selfish and it is only the fear of punishment, of an eternity spent suffering horribly in hell, that keeps them from smashing and grabbing everything they want. So again God is invoked to solve the problem of morality. But here the argument is quite queer. The suggestion is not that people act morally, therefore there must be a God. It is more like, if people were to believe that there is no God, then there would be nothing to restrain them from the worst sorts of behavior. So it is better that we all believe. This is a queer argument because it seems to be an argument not for the conclusion that the sentence “God exists” is true, but the conclusion, “To avoid disaster, it is better for everyone including me and you, to believe that God exists (whether or not he actually does.)” It would be like the case where your ailing grandfather has died, and your grandmother is also in such precarious and bad health that the family decides that it would be better not to tell her. It would be better for her not to believe that Grandpa has died because having that belief itself, even though it is true, would have disastrous practical consequences.

The “Believe in God, or else,” argument here gets even stranger when it is allegedly a believer who states it to the non-believer. This person is playing the role of Grandpa, Grandma, and concerned family all by themselves. The believer seems to be saying about themselves, “well, I choose to believe in the existence of God because if I don’t, I know that I am such and awful person and I have such powerful evil urges that I would not be able to restrain them without the fear of eternal punishment.” The obvious question to ask is, “well, who is the executive decision maker who’s in charge enough to be making that decision about what beliefs are needed to keep me in check?” We’d like to talk to that guy—he seems reasonable and thoughtful enough about his behavior and his urges. Even if you did believe this about yourself, and as a result you come to believe in belief, as Daniel Dennett puts it (Breaking the Spell), how would you go about perpetrating this deception on yourself? You don’t really believe in God, or you don’t see any good reasons to believe other than that doing so would help keep you in check and minding your manners, so you set about getting yourself to actually believe that it is true—not just practical, but really true—that there is a God. What would the next step be? Pascal recognized a similar dilemma and recommended that you talk like the believers, surround yourself with them, act like they do, and go through all the motions as if you believe until you have “deadened your acuteness” which brings to mind smacking yourself with a hammer or something.

But here it’s not you’re just trying to hedge your bets to possibly get into heaven like Pascal was doing. You have recognized that it would produce better, more moral results if you were to believe something false or unsupported because otherwise your natural tendencies, which you have decided are wicked and depraved on grounds that must be completely independent of the God question, will win out. Evidently, you are completely capable of figuring out what is right and wrong and acting in accord with it without any reference to God at along. And this is what the non-believer who was scratching her head at your “Believe in God, or else,” argument was trying to say all along.

In James Morris’ novel, Towing Jehovah, they find the 2 mile long corpose of God floating in the ocean. A small group of people are in charge of towing the body with an oil freighter to the Arctic Circle to keep it on ice. As the truth that God really is dead slowly settles in on the crew, a drunken orgy of violence and sin does erupt. But then one of them gets murdered, and they sober up and realize that it was really their own self-restraint that was leading them to behave themselves all along.

Knowing Your Own Mind About God

In general, we think of ourselves as idealized reasoning agents. When we are making decisions, forming opinions about things, or sustaining a belief or behavior, we tend to think that some careful reasoning and attentiveness on our own part will help insure that the results are rational. We also have the view that the contents of our own minds, our motives, our reasons, and our beliefs are readily available to us, transparent, open, and incorrigible to introspection. You know your own mind better than anyone else, and you know your beliefs, your reasons, your motives, and the extent to which your decisions are reasonable.

Volumes and volumes of contemporary research in psychology and philosophy are making it clear that most, if not all of these assumptions are grossly mistaken. A recent article in New Scientist details a long list of ways in which we all make bad, irrational decisions.

Here are just a few of the highlights:

People are very bad at anticipating how happy a choice will make them, or how bad the consequences of some feared negative outcome will really be. We to think that winning the lottery will make us happier than it actually will, and we tend to think that a disaster like losing a leg will be make our lives much worse than it does.

Our emotions have a very strong impact on the outcomes of our decisions. For example, men who are mad will gamble much more and take bigger risks when they are angry.

Confirmation bias—emphasizing or selecting evidence that supports a pet belief while neglecting evidence that would refute it—affects us dramatically and makes it very hard for us to make decisions that adequately weigh all the alternatives. To make matters worse, we estimate that confirmation bias will affect other people’s decision making much more than it affects our own. Our cognitive constitution tries to latch onto examples or data that corroborates favored views that we have already made up our minds about. The tendency is very strong and it often requires a powerful force of will to resist it and actively seek out contrary opinions, alternative explanations, and different possibilities.

The full article is here:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19426021.100-top-10-ways-to-make-better-decisions.html

Now let’s consider the God question. On the classic, old school theism model,

1a) the theist holds that a reasonable person who considers the right evidence objectively and rationally will be justified in believing that God exists,
1b) the atheist or agnostic holds that a reasonable person who considers the right evidence objectively will be justified in believing that God does not exist, or that God’s existence cannot be known respectively.
2a) the theist holds that a person who considers that evidence and doesn’t conclude that God exists is being irrational.
2b) the atheist holds that a person who considers all the relevant evidence and doesn’t conclude that God doesn’t exist is being irrational. The agnostic holds that it is irrational not to be agnostic from the evidence.
3) knowing whether or not you believe in God and what sort of belief that is simply a matter of introspecting your own thoughts, and
4) knowing what your reasons are for believing in God (or not) is also merely a matter of introspecting and it will be clear to you what your grounds or reasons for believing are.

Today, despite many developments in what is being called post-evidentialist or post-modernist theism, probably most of the people engaged in this discussion about God either explicitly or implicitly endorse either 1a), 2a), 3) and 4), or 1b, 2b), 3) and 4).

There is a lot to comment on here. But let’s focus on 3) and 4). A number of developments in experimental psychology, cognitive research, and epistemology have made it increasingly clear that 3) and 4) are mistaken. That is, there are good reasons to think that in many cases, what you believe is not actually available to introspection, and the grounds or reasons for your beliefs are either not available to introspection, or introspection is not a reliable or accurate means of determining the grounds of your belief.

I’ll just sketch out a few of the more interesting cases and arguments that seem to support these conclusions. What people will report they believe, it turns out, is highly influencable by environmental factors, priming, context, and expectations. In a number of important experiments, it has been shown that when an image of something that test subjects find objectionable is flashed at them for an interval that is too short for them to be consciously aware of it (approx. less than 250 milliseconds), they will then respond differently to questions or tasks put to them than they do when they are not primed with the fast image. What this suggests is that there are cognitive gears set in motion below the conscious threshold that affect what we experience or are conscious of, but we are completely unaware of these mechanisms. It would seem to follow then, that your introspections of what you believe or what you experience are relatively late stage results of processes that occur without your control, supervision, or access. And your reports about what you believe and why you believe it may or may not align with what is really going on in your head.

A couple of other examples deserve consideration. There are cases where patients, particularly some kinds of stroke victims, will report that they are in pain but there in nothing particularly unpleasant about it. They can recognize that they are experiencing pain, but it lacks the painful affect. There are also cases, now famous in the philosophy literature, of people with blind sight. They report, and insist, that they are blind. But when asked to guess, or given visual tasks that they attempt like counting objects, they will consistently offer the correct answers. And there are cases of the reverse where someone insists that they are not blind, but when given visual tasks it is clear that they cannot see anything. When asked why they didn’t succeed at the counting task or navigating around objects, they will continue to say that they can see but that they were distracted or confused, or they will make some other excuse.

There is a great deal more to be said here about these case and their implications. But an important point that I want to draw out is that our common sense view about being able to know what we believe and being able to know the reasons or causes that lead us to believe it, is simply not trustworthy. Your own mind is simply not as transparent or accessible to you as you thought it was. And this point is particularly important for the question of believing in God. Most people will readily admit that the existence of God is a matter of incredible emotional, psychological, and personal importance. Even without third party neuroscience researchers to test and examine our reports about our beliefs, we all know that when it comes to God, there are powerful sub-conscious, or non-rational aspects of our cognitive constitutions at work. I’ve called this deep felt need that we have for there to be a God The Urge in previous posts.

So here’s the point: since we are not very good at knowing our own minds, and since we all seem to have The Urge, it stands to reason that the rationality of religious beliefs are prima facie suspect. And they should be suspicious to you even if you have thought hard about it and it still seems to you that you have good reasons for believing and that those reasons are why you believe. Strange things happen in the recesses of the human mind/brain. And a lot of very careful research and arguments are starting to suggest that there is an evolutionary, biological foundation of religious belief. I would also submit that the near universal subscription across cultures and across time to beliefs about some sort of afterlife, some sort of higher, supernatural power, screams out for an evolutionary, biological, or neurological explanation. In human history, we just don’t find that many people in that many cultures and eras in such deep agreement about anything. That they all believe in some kind of God or gods and the afterlife, and that they spend their time bickering about the details, suggests that the rudiments of belief belong to something much more basic than our higher, rationalistic intellects.

I am not arguing that rational autonomy is altogether impossible, although I think for many people concerning many beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, it is. But what is becoming clear as science allows us to understand ourselves better, including the deepest, most private parts of our minds, is that achieving rational autonomy is much, much harder than we assumed for centuries. And one of the lessons here is that achieving intellectual discipline and freedom has to be a higher priority in your mental life than adherence to an ideology. Being an atheist or a theist has to come second to being a clear, objective, careful, and diligent thinker. Otherwise it the ideology that’s believing you, not you in charge of your own mind and beliefs.

What If the Lie Really Is Good For Us?

A number of studies have been published in recent years, some of them pretty well designed, that have suggested that there is a causal link between religiousness and longevity, happiness, social satisfaction, health, longer and more stable marriages, charity, being moral, honesty, integrity, mental health, and so on. All of these studies need to be considered carefully in their own right, but I am not going to discuss any of them directly here.

Predictably, non-believers have been very quick to criticize and reject the findings. “The study was poorly designed,” “Praying is good for you because it has an stress relieving effect like meditation, not because God is listening,” “It’s the social contact of regular church attendance that is good for people’s health and happiness, not contact with God,” and “A longer and more stable marriage isn’t a good thing if both partners are miserable and they have 12 kids because the Pope said birth control isn’t allowed,” are typical of the comments. And some of them may be right.
But let’s consider another possibility without criticizing the studies.

What if they are right?

What if it turns out that even though religion is a complete myth, humans are actually better off by any reasonable standard if they believe and practice than if they don’t? Such a scenario is plausible, and in theory it could be empirically verified. That’s what all of these studies are trying to do. If they succeed, then the atheist who prides himself in holding science, evidence, and truth above all other priorities will have to put his money where his mouth is.

So if it turns out that being religious really is good for us, then what?

The possibility presents a much deeper and more profound challenge to the non-believer who wants to wage the God fight. Non-believers will point out, correctly, that even if all of those claims about the positive benefits of believing are accurate, none of those results show that God exists. Beneficial doesn’t equal true. And there are even lots of believers who would concede the point that God’s existence can’t be proven.

But if that point is granted, then what exactly is the non-believer striving to achieve? Is it better for us overall to believe something true, but demonstrably bad for our lives, happiness, and longevity? Except for the rare philosopher among us, I think most people when pressed on the issue would conclude that truth is ultimately of instrumental value, and if it turns out that a falsehood serves our interests better in the big picture, then truth becomes a lesser priority. And if that is right, then the non-believer who wants to fight this fight, who wants to convince people to believe otherwise just doesn’t have a leg to stand on. And this non-believer really needs to ask herself or himself just what it is that they are trying to accomplish?

The atheist should be prepared to admit, if it turns out to be well supported by the evidence, that it might be better for us all to keep believer. Sure, the whole God business is false, it’s a fairy tale, and so on. But if it turns out that believing this particular truth instead of the happy myth makes us more unhappy, less mentally healthy, less charitable, less kind, less compassionate, die sooner, have worse health, and have weaker social ties, then it’s not at all clear that we should all abandon the myth and that Dawkins and the like have our best interests in mind. It may turn out that humans really are better off believing a deception and we’re worse off it we mess with that.

So here’s a reality check for the atheist: If we really mean it that the evidence, reason, and truth are what’s most important, then we need to be prepared to admit that the evidence could in fact show that we are all better off being religious. And if that is true, then we need to think long and hard about the kind of world we are trying to achieve with our arguments.

Jerry Falwell: Exploiting Religious Tolerance and Respect

When I heard that Jerry Falwell had died, I was thinking of the various critical things I had to say about him for the blog when I saw Christopher Hitchens (new book: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.) on Anderson Cooper’s 360. Hitchens deserves a great deal of credit for having the courage to actually say these sorts of things on American television. It is indicative of the sad state of affairs in the U.S. that it makes us cringe to have someone say so many obviously true and critical things about someone who hid behind the protection of our respect for religion. Falwell’s example makes the case better than almost anyone else that our affection for religion has led us to turn our heads the other way and ignore almost anything as long as the author claims that they have religious motivations for perpetrating their crimes. Falwell represented everything that has gone wrong in our country concerning religious tolerance and religious idiocy.
Enjoy:
COOPER: Author and outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens is about as far from Jerry Falwell in his beliefs as one could get. Christian fundamentalists are a major target of his new book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." He joins me now from Raleigh, North Carolina.

Christopher, I'm not sure if you believe in heaven, but, if you do, do you think Jerry Falwell is in it?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, "VANITY FAIR": No. And I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to.

COOPER: What is it about him that brings up such vitriol?

HITCHENS: The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?

People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this -- of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality, and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men, that we're -- we're not told that people who believe like Falwell will be snatched up into heaven, where I'm glad to see he skipped the rapture, just found on the floor of his office, while the rest of us go to hell.

How dare they talk to children like this? How dare they raise money from credulous people on their huckster-like (INAUDIBLE) radio stations, and fly around in private jets, as he did, giggling and sniggering all the time at what he was getting away with?

Do you get an idea now of what I mean to say?
….
HITCHENS: How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present among us and is an adult male Jew, while, all the time, fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendoes into American politics, along with his friends Robertson and Graham?

HITCHENS: ... encouraging -- encouraging -- encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of was holy land to the people who already live there, undercutting and ruining every democratic and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God?

HITCHENS: This is -- this is -- he's done us an enormous, enormous disservice by this sort of demagogy.

COOPER: What do you think it says about America that -- and politics in America, that he was so successful in mobilizing huge swathes of the country to come out and vote?

HITCHENS: I'm not certain at all that he did deserve this reputation. And I... COOPER: You don't think he does?

HITCHENS: Well, I'm not certain that he was a mobilizer. He certainly hoped to be one.

Well, the fact is that the country suffers, to a considerable extent, from paying too much, by way of compliment, to anyone who can describe themselves as a person of faith, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Chaucerian frauds, people who are simply pickpockets, who -- and frauds -- who prey on the gullible and...

COOPER: Do you believe he believed what he spoke?

HITCHENS: Of course not. He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, I have got away with it again.

COOPER: You think he was a complete fraud, really?

HITCHENS: Yes.

COOPER: You don't believe that, I mean, in his reading of the Bible, you don't think he was sincere in his -- whether you agree or not with his reading of the Bible, you don't think he was sincere in what he spoke?

HITCHENS: No. I think he was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud.

And I think, if he read the Bible at all -- and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book of -- at all -- that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way.

I'm going to repeat what I said before about the Israeli question. It's very important. Jerry Falwell kept saying to his own crowd, yes, you have got to like the Jews, because they can make more money in 10 minutes than you can make in a lifetime. He was always full, as his friends Robertson and Graham are and were, of anti- Semitic innuendo.

Yet, in the most base and hypocritical way, he encouraged the worst elements among Jewry. He got Menachem Begin to give him the Jabotinsky Medal, celebrating an alliance between Christian fundamentalism and Jewish fanaticism that has ruined the chances for peace in the Middle East.

Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man, and because of the absurd way that we credit anyone who can say they're a person of faith.

Look, the president endangers us this way. He meets a KGB thug like Vladimir Putin, and, because he is wearing a crucifix around his neck, says, I'm dealing with a man of faith. He's a man of goodwill.

Look what Putin has done to American and European interests lately. What has the president said to take back this absurd remark? It's time to stop saying that, because someone preaches credulity and credulousness, and claims it as a matter of faith, that we should respect them.

The whole life of Falwell shows this is an actual danger to democracy, to culture, to civilization. That's what my book is all about. COOPER: The book is "God Is Not Great."

End of Transcript.

The only things that need to be added to Hitchens’ candid critique of Falwell are: Falwell devoted his entire life to promoting intolerance, ignorance, hatred, theocracy, and religious lunacy. He did what priests throughout history have done. He employed every dirty trick in the book on behalf of God—he lied, he distorted, he abused, he manipulated, he exploited, he misled and he victimized the poorest and least educated in order to satisfy his most personal petty ambitions to power and adulation. And he cleverly disguised all of it behind the protective banner of “faith,” always insuring that no matter how harmful his words and acts were, they would be sheltered from criticism and from any serious rational scrutiny because he was a “man of God,” and no one who is speaking for God could have any dark motives or actually do any harm to us, could they?

Isn't "God" Just Another Word for New Age Nonsense

It’s quite common for people have some of these views about the nature of God and the variety of religions. They will say, “Isn’t God just the energy in the universe,” or “the God I believe in is all the matter and energy in the universe. Einstein showed that all matter is energy, after all,” and “Science has shown that energy cannot be destroyed.” “Aren’t all the different religions really just different ways of expressing interest in the same underlying force or ultimate reality or energy in the world?” or “the concept of God that people use is another way of describing all the love, power, and energy that we all experience. Worshipping God should be coming to feel that love and energy and spreading it in the world. The notion of God as a person who listens to prayers and passes judgments is too anthropomorphic.”

These attempts to redefine God in a way that would allow us to reconcile what appear to be irreconcilable differences between religions, and to square what we know in science with religion have a great deal of appeal. A New Age interpretation of God appeals to those with a strong spiritual inclination and it might let them avoid the uglier side of organized religions and their histories. It might also make it possible to avoid a number of the paradoxes and philosophical difficulties (like the many detailed in this blog) that plague the traditional notions of God.

So why shouldn’t we redefine God to suit our modern needs and avoid the problems with the old one?

Here is the start of a long list of problems with taking the New Age God route:

1) The energy that spiritualists, psychic healers, and chi masters are describing is not the same energy the Einstein and modern physics study. Energy in physics is electromagnetic radiation. At lower wavelength energies we find gamma radiation and X rays. A small range of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible light (about 400-700 nanometers). And at the high wavelength end of the spectrum we find microwaves and radio waves.

2) One of the reasons that the classic, monotheistic God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent has been so influential in the history of religion is that such a being, if one exists, would be worthy of worship. If there was such a being, the implications for your life, your consciousness, your future, your relationships, and your conduct would be profound. Such a being would be worthy of study, emulation, profound respect, awe, dedication, obedience, and complete devotion. The physical force that warms up burritos in your microwave oven, or the energy the dentist uses to take pictures of your wisdom teeth is not.

3) The various religions in history very clearly do not believe that what they are doing is compatible with or the same thing as what all the others are doing. Catholics do not believe that what the Muslims are doing is just as good. Pentecostals do not believe that they are worshipping the same God as a Buddhist. And they have dedicated vast amounts of time and energy to making it very clear the ways in which they think they are different and the ways in which they think all the other practitioners are wrong. From a very high altitude, it may be possible to make vacuous claims like, “they are all really just doing the same thing.” But we have to blur the details here so much that “same” scarcely means anything at all. We can say of bacteria and of you that you both “eat.” But the differences are obviously more important than the similarities if we want to get beyond 6th grade science class.

4) While it is tempting to redefine “God” to simply mean “love,” or “spirituality,” or some other word that few people find offensive, there are more powerful reasons not to. The term “God” has a very clear set of connotations and denotations in western culture. What the three major monotheistic religious traditions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—agree upon and have always meant by the term is the all powerful, all knowing, and all good creator of the universe who dispenses justice on humankind. Deciding to use the term in a new way doesn’t make those associations go away. It doesn’t clarify or edify anyone who is trying to understand what God is. The billions of people in those traditions don’t understand the term in this New Age form. That’s not what they mean. And that’s not what they want the term to stand for.

5) Skeptics, agnostics, and atheists want to call a spade a spade. If you find some solace in thinking about love or spirituality, or if you think it is an admirable goal to spread love and spirituality in the world, then let’s call it that. The “God” term has baggage. It’s been the rallying cry behind pogroms, crusades, inquisitions, religious tribunals, theocracies, brutal oppression, genocide, and wars among other things. And the goals there weren’t to spread warm fuzzy ideals of love and spirituality.

6) What exactly are people’s motives for wanting to keep the term with the revisionist God-lite program? Is it a lack of courage on the atheism issue? They don’t want to go ahead and take that final step and give the term up all together? They want to have their cake and eat it too? Maybe they want to be able to keep thinking about God and feeling like they have a personal connection with something bigger and better. But here’s a problem. Inevitably, this idea, like any important ones you have, will have other implications. It will strengthen some beliefs, weaken others. It will work its way into the rest of your belief structure. It will help inform who you vote for, what you think is right and wrong, which wars you fight and which ones you refuse, and so on. No belief is an island. And one’s beliefs are never entirely disconnected from one’s actions.

7) Sure, love’s a great thing. And if more people loved each other that would be good for all of us. But I’m not detecting a carefully thought out social and political agenda here. Bumper sticker slogans don’t convince anybody of anything. Vapid truisms about love, God, and energy won’t help any of us deal with the very real menace of supernatural thinking, religious fundamentalism, and theocratic political agendas that pose a serious threat to our lives, our freedom, and our future. By refusing to take the problem of God seriously, you’re facilitating those people who think that God told them to strap on a bomb and blow up a bus, or the ones who think that evangelical Christianity needs to be imposed on everyone on the globe, or the ones who are trying to exacerbate the hostilities between Jews and Palestinians in Israel in order to hasten the coming of the Apocalypse and Judgment Day.

So now, what was seeming like a harmless little personal indulgence is looking like yet another belief that you need to earn. You need to answer questions for yourself and for the rest of us (since you are living in our neighborhoods, voting for our politicians, putting people on our school board, having my kids over for a sleep over with your kids…..) about what exactly is it you believe and why. Do you really think that electromagnetic radiation, like the kind that beams reruns of “Three’s Company” into your TV is worthy of the attention and concern that the rest of us give to the term “God”?

Textual Exegesis Will Not Solve Religious Problems

Frequently in history, religious people have committed great crimes against humanity. And they have done it for explicitly religious reasons with religious motivations. They kill, maim, commit mass murder, fly planes into buildings, beat women for having more than their hands and eyes exposed, deprive women and girls of their basic human rights to education and political representation, behead blasphemers and heretic, burn sinners at the stake, imprison and torture those who misstep in the faith, and on and on. The examples are too numerous to mention.

And there is also frequently a gross failure on the part of the religious to take responsibility for the acts committed by their social and historical movement. Too often, when they are confronted with the atrocities committed by religious zealots, they explain away or dismiss the acts by asserting that “well, those weren’t real Christians,” or “that’s not what a true Muslim would do,” or “they are misunderstanding the Bible,” or “they are misinterpreting those passages of the Koran.” And many other religious moderates nod their heads, confident that no one who is “truly” religious, or who understands religion as they should would ever do something so horrible. Antony Flew coined the “No True Scotsman” fallacy to describe this mistake.

The religious moderates may be confident that “really” religious people would never do such awful things, but from the outside, it is much less clear to us that such a claim is true. Religion is as religious people do. Is it just an a priori truth that if someone is really religious they won’t commit horrible, intolerant acts against others? That’s not the way they see it. As they see it, the only way to be truly religious is to fly the plane into a building, maim or kill anyone who violates the holy law, or to destroy all of those who lack the proper faith. So from the outside, how are we to determine who really represents religion? They all insist that their way is the right way—and as we see it, it’s all spooky, superstitious make-believe. From the outside, they all look dangerous or potentially dangerous to us, especially since the drive towards fundamentalism, intolerance, and theocracy always seems to be present. None of the religious traditions are free from their bad seeds, and even what appear to be progressive and moderate sects have produced their nutcases.

So the non-religious are non-plussed by the “Well, they don’t represent true Christianity” response. Religious people keep saying that, but it doesn’t really jive with the facts. Christianity and Islam keep producing people who are violent, intolerant, and oppressive. That really does seem like it is a part of true Christianity, whatever that is.

We are also unimpressed by the feeble attempts to dismiss the horrible acts of the faithful by appeal to textual exegesis. Far too often we have heard that if a passage is understood in its “proper” context and in the “right” way, then that extreme belief, or act is clearly not what God intended. Even George Bush was quick to point out in many public forums that those Muslims who committed 9-11 and other terrorist acts do not represent true Islam. (Somehow I doubt that Bush knows much about Islamic doctrine.)

I’m not a relativist in general. I do not think that the truth is just what some individual, or some group, or whole culture thinks it is. I don’t believe that there are no objective universal moral principles. But I am at a complete loss when I am trying to understand someone’s claim that a passage in the Bible or The Koran has a ”correct” or “true” interpretation. What I have seen over the years is thousands of people conveniently invoking that endorsement for the reading that they are giving to that passage. It would appear that if we are to take their word for it, then there are as many “true” or “correct” interpretations of a passage as there are people reading it. Everyone seems to have a great deal of confidence that the way they are understanding it is the way to see it and all the others are wrong. From the outside, I just see a lot of people frittering away vast amounts of time and energy doing textual exegesis on a document that is a complete train wreck of ambiguities, contradictions, stylistic conflicts, omissions, extraneous details, competing themes, and vagaries. It doesn’t even make sense to me to talk about one single true or correct interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and that’s a very carefully written, cohesive, and remarkable work of art written by one person (a genius) in a relatively short period of time. Anyone who thinks that the Bible or the Koran are internally consistent, cohesive, sensible works full of sound advice about morality, society, and our personal lives probably hasn’t read them. And they can’t seriously expect those of us who are not religious to view their over confident textual exegesis project with much understanding or sympathy.

“Oh, ok, now I see. You’ve made it clear to me that your fundamentalist movement is the first one to get it right and all these Catholics, and Lutherans, and Anglicans have all been getting it completely wrong for all these centuries. It’s so obvious now that you say it, I don’t see why all of them can’t see it too. They must all be stupid and sinful—all 800 million of them.”

In a debate I pointed out recently that 55% of Americans believe that the faithful will be saved by the Rapture before the end of the world, and more than 36% of Americans say that the Bible’s book of Revelations is full of true prophesies. My responder argued that the “correct” interpretation of some passage or other did not suggest anything about an afterlife. So that would mean that at least 165 million Americans, all of whom have complete confidence that they have gotten the Rapture business right, are all wrong about the text, but my responder had it right. And he seemed to be suggesting, with a straight face, that “true” Christianity doesn’t actually include a rapture or an afterlife. There’s not much that binds all the varieties of Christians together under the label, but what has been an essential part of the institution for its entire history is that they think that Jesus is the son of God, and that believers are going to heaven in the afterlife.

The textual exegesis response to religious crimes against humanity is a frustratingly evasive answer to a real problem that the rest of us are desperately concerned about. Religious people have the capacity to commit staggering harm to the rest of us. And they are frequently intolerant of disbelief and disregard of their religious agendas. But when we raise those concerns and we justify our suspicion of religion, their misdeeds are almost always dismissed and explained away by some cryptic appeal to an ancient text that has been “misunderstood.” What the text says really has nothing to do with the real problem we are facing. Religious ideas have enormous appeal, and religious movements spawn murderous zealots, sociopaths, and theocrats. So religious institutions and the people within them need to take responsibility for those disasters. With 165 million Americans thinking that the Rapture is coming any day, it would seem that we have already crossed over the line where the so-called extreme fringe of the movement has become mainstream. The non religious are worried because they are the people that the “true” believers will come after first. But when they are done with us, they are going to come after the religious moderates whose faith isn’t profound enough and whose zeal is lacking commitment.

The God Urge

There are few things that we want to believe more than that there is a God. We want to believe so much that we will go through absurd contortions of reasoning and belief to make it feel like there is more justification for the belief than merely that we want it to be true. The only other sort of case where the gymnastics of reasoning to compensate for a failure of evidence resemble the case of religion is when the evidence is there that a husband, a wife, a boyfriend, or a girlfriend is cheating. And rather than face the evidence and admit the horrible, painful fact of it, we imagine other interpretations of the evidence, possibilities, extenuating circumstances, and justifying reasons that absolve them of responsibility. The difference with religion is that it’s not just one person doing it with their friends trying to convince him that his wife is unfaithful, it’s the whole race of humanity engaging in the deception. And they support, encourage, and fortify our resolve to sustain the redirection of reason.

Not everyone has the urge in equal amounts, and it often manifests itself in very different forms, but there's no denying that we find the prospect of a godless, material, deterministic, soulless universe ugly, horrifying, nihilistic, and hopeless.

The urge make it harder for us to get our heads straight about why we believe in God and why we are religious--we often think we believe for what appear to be good reasons, but in fact it is our emotional, psychological, and personal enthusiasm for the God idea that makes those reasons look better than they are. The urge makes it harder for us to even know why it is that we actually believe. It seems to us on reflection that we believe because there is good evidence, but in fact, unbeknownst even to ourselves, it is the urge at work behind the scenes.

So it's very hard to find the urge and to know what it's up to in your head. It works hard at hiding itself--we don't want to think about ourselves that we do what we do or believe what we believe primarily out of psychological or emotional need. We have a very hard time thinking of ourselves as mere effects of some causes beyond our control. (It's never seems too hard to analyze the causes of other people’s beliefs, however.)

It should be noted, of course, that it’s not just religious beliefs that have the problem where wishing something is true interferes with our ability to think clearly about whether or not it actually is true. We have this problem for all sorts of beliefs--even atheists have it.

It is this urge to believe that bolsters our God beliefs. It raises our threshold for what we will tolerate in the name of religion. It amplifies our emotional commitments to religious ideas. In general, it contributes to our tolerating and committing all sorts of unpalatable and detrimental things for the sake of religion.

Of course, theists will attest that something similar is going on with the doubters and skeptics. “There’s nothing that they want to disbelieve more than that there is a God. They don’t want to admit the fact, and they will go through enormous contortions of reason to try to make their disbelief seem reasonable.”

If they make that argument, then I guess it will be up to you to determine who is more obviously guilty of distortion and logical gymnastics to justify believing what they want to be true.

Science Always Replaces Supernatural Explanations

An Argument Against Supernaturalism

1. In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena
that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; there was a natural, physical explanation.

Fever was thought to be caused by demon possession.
Insanity was thought to caused by spirits.
Epilepsy was thought to be caused by evil spirits.
Bad weather was thought to be the wrath of angry gods.
Disease was thought to punish the wicked.
Settling foundations of buildings were thought to be ghosts.
Elves and fairies were thought to bring good/bad luck.
Witches were thought to be able to cast spells and curses.
Unexplained natural phenomena were explained by magic.
Pregnancies in convents were thought to be incubi (not priests)
Sexual dreams and encounters at night for men were thought to be succubi.
Mythological gods were thought to govern every aspect of the natural world.

2. Many of the specific explanations of phenomena offered in connection with the existence of the Judeo-Christian God have turned out to be mistaken.

The wicked aren't punished with disease
The good aren't blessed with success.
Prayer doesn't work.
Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state.
Many miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions.

3. It is reasonable to conclude that all supernatural explanations are mistaken and that we will discover a natural, physical explanation for everything.

4. Therefore, it is not reasonable to believe that the existence of the Judeo-Christian God adequately explains anything and that there is no such supernatural entity.

Can We Find Evidence for the Divine Properties In the Universe?

Recall that the classic approaches to the proof for the existence of God have particular challenges with regard to the Divine properties. The teleological argument purports to show that there must have been a divine designer who is responsible for the order and complexity of the cosmos. Such an argument, if it is successful (they are not), will give us the conclusion that the being responsible for the universe must have had enough power to create the universe. It is not at all clear that a teleological argument could ever give us omnipotence from that evidential ground alone. Even though it may take an incredible amount of power to create a whole universe, even a complex, and highly ordered one, we can readily imagine first, a being who has it in his power to create the universe, but doing so is all that he can do. It will exhaust his power completely to do so. He will not have any more power beyond that to rectify or change anything about that universe. In fact, we could imagine a being for whom the task is so near the limits of his power that the act of creating the universe destroys him.

Now, by contrast, we can imagine a being that is something more like the traditional characterization by western theists of God. An omnipotent being, as God is by hypothesis, could build this, or any other logically possible universe. Doing so would not generate any taxation on his power, or push him to his limits. Creating this universe, or even one that is more complex, more highly ordered, would be effortless for such a being.

The challenge for us, of course, is that we are behind the veil on this alleged act of creation. So even if the teleological argument goes through and gives us compelling evidence that some divine, supernatural being must have had a hand in the creation of the universe, what evidence could we possibly find from within that universe that would inform us to a reasonable degree about whether the being that did the act was of the first weaker sort, or of the latter omnipotent sort?

I see no such evidence. No matter how impressive an act of creation we determine must have given rise to the universe we inhabit, it will always be an open question whether the being who performed that act had just enough power to pull it off, and was utterly weakened or even destroyed thereafter, or had enough power to do that act, and to repeat it, to change it, or any of the other acts that would be within the scope of omnipotence.

And that's just the challenge to the teleological argument on the question of power. Suppose the teleological argument succeeds (it doesn't), would we then have sufficient grounds to conclude that the supernatural agency involved was omniscient? Or was he just smart enough to perform that act? The only answer to these sorts of challenges that the theist might make is to argue that omnipotence and omniscience are necessary to perform an act like create all of the universe. But since it is readily imaginable that some being of great power and knowledge, but not full omnipotence and omniscience, could perform the act, how will it be possible that the theist can argue that omnipotence and omniscience are necessary? Such arguments will not succeed. There are too many open questions from behind the veil. Unlike Toto, who yanks aside the curtain for Dorothy, we cannot get a privileged glimpse into what the wizard is up to and what sorts of tools and powers the wizard has at his disposal.

And those are just the problems for omnipotence and omniscience. What about omni-benevolence, or infinite goodness, or omni-justice? In the history of the debate over the teleological argument, it has been exceedingly rare that the proponent of the argument has been willing to argue that we can get any goodness, much less infinite goodness, as a property of the responsible supernatural being from an examination of the artifact created. That is, while many have argued that it will take great power and knowledge, even infinite power and knowledge to build this universe. No one is foolish enough to argue that there are properties empirically manifest in the universe that make it resoundingly evident that whoever or whatever was responsible for creating was certain to possess an infinite amount of love for that creation, moral superiority, goodness, or justice.

Indeed, the classic theodicies struggle long and hard just to try to make it plausible that the divine being responsible for the universe might possibly have good intentions behind all the horrors, and unfathomable suffering that sentient creatures here undergo. That is, defenses of God have expended vast amounts of energy and ink just to make this conclusion reasonable: the staggering amounts of seemingly pointless suffering in the world could possibly be compatible with the existence of an omnibenevolent being because that being might have good reasons for making it appear that he does not exist, for allowing moral evil to go unchecked, for standing by while tsunamis, earthquakes, plagues, hurricanes, and pestilence wrecks complete havoc.

The insurmountable challenge for the theist who would put all his or her eggs in the teleological basket should now be clear. The teleological theist needs an argument from the apparent complexity and order that we can observe in the universe that is strong enough for omnibenevolence that it can meet the challenge of evil. But ironically, all that teleological arguments and theodicy accounts of evil have tried to show is that God might still possibly be infinitely good despite the overpowering evidence to the contrary. Without a compelling argument for omnibenevolence from some quarter, the promisory note we were given in connection to the problem of evil challenge is not met. The answer to the problem of evil was something like, "well, God might possibly still be infinitely good despite all this apparently pointless suffering because he might have good reasons for tolerating it." But then when our attention turns towards those arguments for the existence of God that might give us some real reasons to think that God is infinitely good we don't even find an adequate argument for the conclusion that the creator of the universe is good at all. Honestly, if one were to examine all the events in the world and all the suffering, would it be manifest that whoever was in charge of the show even cared at all about what was happening to those puny beings down there? It is manifestly obvious that whoever is in charge of the show is not omnibenevolent.

So where do we get the check we were offered for the bill of evil paid? Where is the argument that gives us any more grounds to think that God actually is good than the modest assertion that he might possibly be infinitely good?

And we cannot tolerate any more slippage from mere possibility to probability. There appears to be nothing but possible legs holding up the table of theism--no real legs.

Believing in God is Immoral

It’s frequently argued that unless a person believes in God, they can’t or won’t be moral. If the threat of divine punishment and the promise of heavenly reward are removed, humans, sensing that no one is minding the shop, will rape, pillage, plunder and otherwise misbehave with wild abandon. Alternately, many people think that moral prescriptions cannot arise from purely natural sources—if we are only fancy, evolved monkeys, if we are nothing but physical creatures, then there can be nothing governing us except the law of the jungle. So many people think that only by believing in God will we be restrained enough to be moral.

We need to turn that argument around completely. Not only is it possible to be a moral person without a belief in God, there are some very good reasons for thinking that in many cases believing in God is itself actually immoral.

In general, isn’t it a bad thing to believe a claim that :

1. you know is false,
2. contributes to the confusion or false beliefs of others,
   
3. encourages supernatural, spooky, non-critical, fuzzy-headed thinking,
   
4. fosters fear and anxiety.
5. creates complacence about social problems, social policy, and the future of humanity on this planet.
   
6. undermines the advancement of science
7. contributes to the stagnation of human progress.
8. encourages a historically outdated, over-simplified worldview.
9. stalls our progress in dealing with new, complicated and important moral issues
   
10. has no good evidence in its favor.
    
11. encourages cultural and ethnic strife.
12. gives people false hopes.
13. is self-deluding.
14. fosters fear, confusion, and fuzzy, magical thinking in children.
    
15. fosters false beliefs in children.
16. impedes children’s acquisition of our most important, modern advancements in knowledge.
17. is a case of akrasia:
    

The ancient Greek concept of akrasia is acting against one’s better judgment or having a weakness of will. Consider the heroin junky, or the smoker who is trying to quit, or the alcoholic. In their clearer moments, they can see what's wrong with their lives. They know that quitting is the sensible thing to do. But those needs creep up, the rationalizations start gaining traction, rational thought lapses, and he finds himself with a hypodermic or a cigarette in his hand. The psychological, emotional, and physical desires are too strong, and the intellectual habits, the fortitude of will, and his resolve are too weak.

Isn’t it true that one does something blameworthy or bad if one succumbs to believe those things that we want to believe when we know full well that the belief is undermined by the evidence. If out of a weakness of will, you allow yourself to believe something because of your emotional, psychological, or social needs, but not because you see good reasons in the form of evidence for it, aren’t you letting yourself down? You are letting all of us down. You are condoning believing in that way, you are lowering the bar for yourself and for everyone else, you are acknowledging that you cannot or you will not submit your beliefs to the arbitration of reason.

And isn’t it also true that your belief in God fits many, most, or all of these conditions? The problem for those with the religious urge is that culturally we have widely endorsed sloppy, indulgent, irrational thinking, especially when it comes to religion. There's a church on every corner trying to draw them in. And we've all elevated the abdication of reason in matters of God to a noble virtue instead of rejecting it for the dangerous and demeaning practice that it is. Most people, when they are being clear headed and thoughtful, know that there are no good evidence in favor of theism, and there is a lot of evidence contradicting it. But, many people want there to be a God. They hope that he's listening to their prayers. They don't think they could face life without him.

So they permit themselves to "believe in" God in the "hope" sense of "believe." ("I believe that my husband will make it home safely from Iraq.") But we don't usually distinguish carefully between that sense of "believe" and the "I believe because the evidence indicates that it is true" sense of believe. (NASA says, "We believe that there is no water on the moon.") And the comforting, hoping kind of belief settles in naturally. Then we find ourselves surrounded by like minded people who feel the need to believe(h). No one is comfortable acknowledging their weaknesses, and no one wants to attribute flagrant irrationality to themselves. So in time, hoping beliefs slip into a stronger kind of belief. We talk ourselves into thinking that it really is true that God exists. We hear others acknowledging our belief and our needs. And they encourage us to be strong, to have faith, to sustain that belief. We rationalize, we blur, and we feel more and more strongly that this thing that we want to believe really isn't just a hope, it's correct, it's the truth.

What originated as something that we knew wasn't true but we hoped was true anyway exploits a weakness of the will and becomes a belief that we think is true and that we think there's good evidence for. The drug works its way into the crevasses of your reason. You find a way to get what you want and placate your reason: you believe because you hope it is true, and you enslave your reason to making it seem like it’s a legitimate claim to the truth.

What we need is a twelve step program for God beliefs and religiousness.

"Hi, I'm Matt and I've been clean since 1982."

We Don't Have the Right Dataset to Make the Design Argument

Here are some more ideas about design that follow from the previous post.

What sort of physically manifest, empirically observable features of objects in the universe would allow us to infer that 1) those objects must have been created from nothing, and 2) the creator of those objects must have been outside and superior to natural law itself? The objects themselves cannot tell us either of those conclusions. That is to say, the design argument to the conclusion that an omni-being with power and existence beyond physical matter is underdetermined. The strongest conclusion we could possibly derive from the existence of orderly, complicated, artifact-like objects in the world, is that there may have been some creator within the context of matter and physical laws who was responsible.


In order to make the sort of analogous reasoning the design argument requires, we would need to be in this sort of extraordinary position. We would need to be witness to the origins of a large number of universes, some ex nihilo and some not, and some with physical laws and some without. Then we might be in a position to say that in the vast majority of cases, when we find a universe like X, with features A, B, and C, then that universe was created by an omni-being from nothing and that being instantiated those natural laws from a state with no natural laws. Then if it was true that the universe we currently inhabit possesses features A, B, and C, whatever they are, we could reasonably draw an inference to the strong God conclusion.


Being privy to no cases of creation ex nihilo and no cases of the creation of natural laws or of universes, the design argument is grossly underdetermined by the evidence.

God is Not a Watchmaker

The design argument, particularly when it is based on an analogy between orderly objects that we know have been designed (like watches) to the design of the universe that also exhibits order, is subject to a fatal flaw. The familiar argument asserts that in cases where we find an artifact that has orderly parts, smaller parts and machines contributing to the function of larger machines, and other organizational features, we are thoroughly justified inferring that the object was designed with a purpose in mind and that it had a designer. The structure of a watch found on the beach makes it obvious that it had a watchmaker. The universe exhibits similar features, so we are justified in inferring that it had a designer.


The fatal flaw in this argument is that its advocates typically fail to see just how profoundly different the creation of a universe is from every other case of purposeful design we have ever encountered. We know of countless cases of watchmakers making watches, carpenters designing and building houses, and electrical engineers building computer chips. In every one of these cases, two things are true that are not true in the case of God's creating the universe: a) the laws of nature are in place and they make the act of creation possible for the carpenter or the watchmaker, and b) matter exists and the human creator manipulates it into a new form.


Consider a). The carpenter or the watchmaker creates within the context of natural law. It is the regular, predictable behavior of matter according to the laws of physics that makes it possible for the watchmaker to employ steel, or glass towards his ends. The natural properties of wood, steel, and concrete facilitate the carpenter's choice of materials and the sort of design he conceives of and enacts. Were it not for the physics of nails, hammers, and wood, the carpenter would not be able to create anything. In fact, we have NO examples, NO experience, perhaps even no coherent conception of creation that is outside the laws of nature.


God's alleged act of creation of the universe includes creating the laws of nature. He could have made it so that the speed of light was faster, or slower. He could have made it so there was no light. He could have made matter have more fundamental constituents, or fewer. He could have made no matter at all. An omnipotent being is not constrained by physical law; omnipotence includes the capacity to instantiate any set of physical laws that themselves are logically consistent. Here is the first element of the profound disanalogy in design arguments. God's act of creation, if we can call that an act in any coherent sense, if it includes the choice, design, and creation of the laws of nature, is utterly unlike any act of design we have any experience of because all of our creations occur within the context of natural law and those natural laws makes those acts possible. An act of creation that instantiates a complete set of physical laws that govern matter from a state where there are no laws of nature is nothing like our manipulations of matter into different forms within the laws of nature.


It is difficult if not impossible to know what such an act would be like. One can't use matter to create physical laws. God can't employ a hammer and nails, or a watchmakers tools to bring it about that reality itself has order and structure.


Consider b). Every act of creation that we have ever engaged in, and perhaps that we can even conceive, takes existing matter and changes its arrangement. Iron is smelted from ore and made into steel that is used to build a skyscraper. A tree is milled into lumber that is cut and fashioned into furniture. Chemical elements are combined into different combinations to make compounds. God's act of creation of the universe is said to be ex nihilo, that is, from nothing. There was an empty state and God somehow brought it from that state into being occupied by matter through some mysterious exertion of his will. Again, we have no examples, no experience, no analogies, perhaps even no conception of how such a thing could be possible.


The design argument is only as strong as the analogy upon which it is based. It will only succeed if what the watchmaker does with the watch is analogous to what God did with the universe. The more features in the universe and in the alleged act of its creation that we can find that resemble those features of the ordinary, familiar cases of design and creation like the watchmaker's, the stronger the analogy. If the argument is going to work, and its authors do not cheat with presumptions about God's existence, it will move backwards from the object to a conclusion about the object's origins. The intent of the argument is that without any presuppositions about the existence of God, or God's intentions, or the act of creation, we can examine the object in question (the universe) closely, and infer that it must have had a designer from the presence of obvious, empirical features in it.


But whatever passing and superficial similarities there might be between watches and the universe, the profound differences between manipulating existing, lawfully behaving matter into another form and an act that a) creates the laws of nature themselves, and b) brings matter into being from a state of nothingness completely undercuts the argument by analogy. What a watchmaker is to a watch is nothing like what God would be to the universe. So the argument fails.

What Would be Evidence for Life After Death?

If possible, the doubter needs to be prepared to outline what sort of evidence would convince them, at least hypothetically. If no possible set of events or body of evidence would change their mind, then they are being dogmatic and irrational.

There is no plausible or convincing evidence, as far as I can see, that a person's mind or consciousness or spirit or soul can exist unless their brain and nervous are in minimal working order. And all the indicators suggest that when the brain goes, so does the soul.

But what sort of evidence could support the claim that a person's soul or mind exists without their body? Do near death experiences count? When someone has a very close, scary brush with death and has an overwhelming, life changing experience as a result, could that show that we exist beyond this material plane? If someone is unconscious on the operating table and has a powerful, vivid experience of floating up a lighted tunnel towards long lost loved ones or to Jesus or whatever, could that show that the mind doesn't need the brain to exist?

I think the answer to these two questions, as posed, is no and no. The human brain is capable of remarkable things. We have accumulated examples of brain disorders, drug trips, altered states and a host of other cases where a functioning but disrupted brain produces incredible visions, hallucinations, experiences, and feelings. And we have accumulated lots and lots of examples where even though someone feels like they are floating, or sees a tunnel (you can get this sensation just by standing up too fast) or has some other delusion and they are clearly, and demonstrably wrong. When you stand up too fast and your field of vision shrinks to a tunnel, clearly there is no tunnel and you are not floating up it. So we have lots and lots of examples of altered brain states that produce experiences that are mistaken. Therefore, it is just not enough for someone to report having had an extraordinary, unusual, or even life changing altered state of consciousness. Those happen all the time to just about everybody, and they aren't real.

The brainless mind defender needs to show more. Here's one example of the sort of evidence that would help make the case. Many people have claimed to have had life-after-death experiences, or out-of-body experiences. The problem is that brains are clearly capable of producing these experiences and they aren't real. But if we could establish that someone had their experience, saw the lights and the tunnel, floated up to meet Jesus, or otherwise had their profound encounter with God during the same time that we had every reason to think that their brain was not functioning well enough to possibly produce those experiences, then we'd have some important, significant evidence. If someone's heart or breathing stops on the operating table I don't think that is enough. Your consciousness is only indirectly dependent upon the functioning of your heart. I watched a magician on tv the other night hold his breath for over 7 minutes underwater. And he was clearly conscious, thinking, and having experiences. The oxygenated blood in a person's system is enough to sustain brain activity for quite a while.

Let's suppose that Smith's heart and breathing stop while he's on the operating table. Furthermore, suppose Smith is resuscitated later and he tells an elaborate life after death, or out of body story.

We would need to establish a couple of things. First, we would need to establish, and this would take a lot of sophisticated and sensitive medical monitoring, that say from 10:05 until 10:23, that Smith's brain had either ceased functioning altogether, or enough of its functions had ceased to prevent hallucinations, dreams, visions, and conscious feelings. Second, we would need to have some plausible indicators that the experiences that Smith had subjectively occurred sometime during that 18 minutes when his brain was out of commission. How would we show that? This is a hard one. If Smith was conscious and lucid and didn't appear to be having any hallucinations until 10:05, and then he wakes up at 10:23 and immediately reports having his out of body experience, that would be suggestive. If Smith was unconscious but had a relatively high functioning brain from 9:30 until 10:04, we can't just take Smith's word for it that the experience he had occurred between 10:05 and 10:23. How would he know? Did he have a vision of an accurate clock too? Would it help if he insisted that his experience went on for days and days? No, because subjective time just doesn't match up with objective time.
In fact, I think it is exceedingly rare that anyone who is suffering this kind of trauma will have an on/off episode where they go from being fully conscious and having a functioning brain to being unconscious and having a completely shut down brain. The other problem is that if so much of the brain has shut down so completely that it rules out the possibility of hallucinations and visions, I suspect that the damage is irreversible. Hearts and lungs shut down briefly and people can be revived. But brain's can't just be shut off and started back up. If there is enough damage to the brain that the oxygenated blood that is in the system can't keep it going, or the rest of the systems cannot support the brain's functions, then I think that brain will never come back to normal function. Smith won't be telling any stories.

But maybe it could happen with the right kinds of circumstances, or with advances in medical technology. But the challenge for the "souls can exist without the brain" thesis is to find a real case where we can say that some experiences were occurring and they couldn't have been the faulty product of an altered or damaged brain.

He Has No Brain, So God Doesn't Exist

By every indication we have, immaterial souls, brainless minds, or entities that occupy some ethereal afterlife do not exist. The widespread belief that humans have an immortal soul that survives the death of the body is utterly unfounded. A body of neuroscience research that grows every day has given us an increasingly fine grained understanding of the neural architecture of the brain that is responsible for producing our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, our goals, our plans, and our consciousness. A mountain of evidence indicates that brain damage produces mind damage. And that the destruction of the brain causes the destruction of the mind. That is to say that everything that has been traditionally associated with the immortal soul is dependent upon the brain to exist. So when the brain dies, the soul goes with it.

God is thought to be a person. He has plans, desires, goals, and emotions. He acts, he creates, he loves, and he commands. He reacts to our behaviors. He is alleged to form personal relationships with people through prayer and meditation. He communicates to them through signs and indicators. Sometimes people claim to have heard his voice, felt him exert his will, or even to have encountered him directly.

So by the most common characterizations, God has a consciousness. By my account above, to have a mind is to have a soul. Minds and souls are different terms for the same thing. So God can be said, by common accounts, to have a mind or to have a soul. His soul, they say, filled with love for us, his creation.

God is thought to be immaterial. While God has contact with the material world, he is not in it.

Or alternately, God doesn’t have a brain. But if God is alleged to be a person, and being a person requires having a mind. But having a mind requires a brain, and God doesn’t have a brain.

Therefore, God does not exist.

The most likely responses to this argument will be something like these: First, “Isn’t it possible that God is not a person?” Second, “Isn’t it possible that God does have a brain? Maybe it’s something bigger than we have ever encountered, or it’s someplace we have never seen or been?”

Perhaps. These might be possible. But possibilities do not render a belief reasonable. It is possible there is a million dollars in my bank account. But it would be flagrantly irrational of me to conclude that there is a million dollars there because it is possible. What we need to see is some evidence, any real indicator that such a thing is true. And until that evidence is in hand, we are justified in concluding that that suggestion is as preposterous as it sounds.

Does the Theist Have a Moral Advantage Over the Atheist?

One of the most common comments on atheism is people expressing confusion or consternation about the possibility of an atheist's being moral. It is usually thought that if one thinks there is no God, then there is nothing to restrain you from doing whatever sort of horrible acts you might want to do--there's no one who is going to punish you in the end. This objection to atheism has been dealt with thoroughly and clearly again and again. See Kai Nielsen, Michael Martin, Bertrand Russell, Antony Flew, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Peter Singer, and Sam Harris, to name a few.

But here's another important consideration: The view that morality emanates from God is called Divine Command Theory. The criticism of atheism above presumes that on our own, we cannot determine what is right or wrong--only God can determine that, so we must obey his commandments.

Suppose you can figure out exactly what things God has determined to be good and which ones are evil. That alone is a daunting task given that so many billions of people on the planet can't seem to come to any kind of consensus about what that is. And typically people cherry pick the commandments that appeal to them while ignoring all the ones that are not so charming. For example, people like to cite the 10 Commandments as a obvious, clear statement of morality. "Honoring your father and mother," sounds like a great idea. The punishment for failing to obey this commandment is to be put to death. That's also the punishment for taking the Lord's name in vain, and for coveting your neighbor's goods, and all the other commandments. So, if we were to do what the Bible commands us to do, we need to put every person who has ever disrespected their father or mother, or who has slipped and said, "God dammit," to death.

First, it's clear that people who think that the Bible contains clear, obvious moral commandments probably aren't serious, or haven't actually read it, or they are just picking the commandments that suit them. Second, I don't care if God commanded it, executing someone for being disrespectful or using the word "God," in a rude way is positively barbaric, not the pinnacle of moral virtue.

Back to the original problem. Suppose we can figure out what God's commandments are (we can't seem to.) Now the most that any person who considers the texts is that the book says that God commanded them. It doesn't follow that God did command them, or that there is a God, or that we should do everything that a book says we should because it insists that God issued the commandments. There are thousands of religious documents all over the world that contain stories about spiritual leaders, some even claiming to be God, that issue commandments that you are currently ignoring. You don't think that the commandments of Zoroastrianism are binding, do you?

Now even if God said it and the book you choose to adhere to accurately relays that commandment, it doesn't follow from that alone that one should do it or even that it is good. You have to make your own moral choice, on criteria of your choosing, about whether or not it is a good thing to follow that commandment. You have to figure out which features of the commandment are relevant to deciding whether or not it is a good commandment to follow, one that you ought to obey. But the choice, the moral responsibility for deciding to act according to those commandments instead of some others still falls squarely on your shoulders, not God's. You have to figure out, on the basis of other facts than just that God commanded it, that doing X is a good thing. The second order choice, "Is it a good thing or a bad thing to do what God commands?" is still entirely up to you. That is, even if there is a God (there isn't) who gives us clear commands (he doesn't), acting on them is my choice. And it is my fault if I pick the wrong commandments, and it is to my credit if I choose the right ones. Complete, 100% moral responsibility falls entirely on the person who makes the choice, in every case. People are fond of saying that morality can only come from God and that only God is capable of recognizing what is right and wrong. But deciding to do what you take God to command is itself a moral choice that only you can decide. The theist might respond, "But I am not deciding what is right or wrong. Only God can do that. I just do what God commands." What that means is that you have made the decision to do what God commands instead of something else, and that decision it unavoidably moral because the rule you are deciding to follow are commandments about what is moral.

Notice that when someone says that they bombed the abortion clinic because God told them to do it, or to fly planes into a building, we don't immediately let them off the hook simply because they claim to have divine authorization. We expect them and everyone else to make moral choices about which principles deserve to be followed, whether you think they came from God or not. It is never enough to foist the moral responsibility for one's actions onto God, because you cannot divest yourself of moral responsibility. Moral responsibility cannot be separate from any human free choice.

So the theist who thinks that the atheist is amoral and directionless just hasn't reflected on the basic moral challenge for all of humanity. What all of do is entirely up to us. If you decide that since God commands X, Y, and Z, you ought to do them, you aren't absolved or moral responsibility for those acts. You decided that doing what God commands is good, and you deciding that doing X, Y, and Z instead of something else was a good thing. So the atheist and the theist are in the same boat for figuring out which principles are morally acceptable ones to live by and why.