There Is No Psychic Contact with The Dead

If the alleged psychics could make contact with disembodied souls, then we’d have a vital piece in the puzzle about the possibility of life after death, the existence of souls, and God. But without exception, they all seem to be liars, frauds, dupes, or just seriously confused.

Many people have claimed to be able to communicate with the dead. If the dead person’s body is long gone in the cemetery, yet we are able to continue to talk to them, then that might constitute evidence for the autonomy of the soul. Again, the problem is that so many of these cases have been exposed. The reasonable person is in a similar position to the one that Hume said we are concerning miracles. Evidence showing the dependence of the mind on the brain is ubiquitous. If someone makes a paranormal claim that contradicts that evidence, then we must ask ourselves: Is it more likely that the person claiming to have had an out-of-body experience or contact with a non-physical soul is lying, deceived, mistaken, or that they are correct? Those who claim to be contacting the dead through séances or psychic means are often using magicians’ cold reading techniques to draw information from living relatives who want to make contact. In many cases, the psychic has even surreptitiously researched information to give back to the bereaved. On the popular television show, Crossing Over, John Edward typically interviews audience members before the cameras go on to find out who they want to contact and what they want to know. Then hours of vague questions, shotgun predictions, and stabs in the dark are filmed and edited down to give the appearance that Edward was able to give detailed and unprompted information about the sought after dead person. The television audience does not get to see the rest of the evidence that makes it clear that Edward is little more than a carnival showman.

Fraudulent psychics will also notice subtle body language cues, clothing, facial expressions, and other details about a person for guidance in directing their allegedly psychic inquiry. Given how often they are lying, mistaken, or misguided, anyone claiming to have contacted the world of non-physical souls must meet a substantial burden of proof to show that they are not employing trickery or making a mistake. To date, that burden of proof has not been adequately met. The Internet is awash with embarrassing video footage of the popular psychic Sylvia Browne flubbing one attempt after another to psychically solve crimes and divine information from the dead. In one tragic example, she tells some devastated and mourning parents whose daughter died of a disease that had nothing to do with her heart that she was murdered with a gunshot to the chest. Notice the way that both parents and Montel Williams struggle to find some possible interpretation to make Browne’s blind, vague, groping answers fit the case:

Mother: My daughter Michelle was 17 years old. She’ll be gone 5 years the 21^st. Sylvia, I don’t know how she died. Please, if you can, how did she die?

Sylvia Browne: She was shot.

(Parents looks confused and skeptical.)

Montel Williams: Circumstances around her death?

Mother: She just collapsed in her room.

Sylvia: I don’t know, but something looks like it hit the chest.

(Mother shakes head.)

Mother: They found nothing on the autopsy.

Sylvia Browne: I don’t care, but it looks like something hit her in the chest.

Father: They did an autopsy, they did whatever they do. She was a healthy child. And she just fell out in her in room. Just fell like golf clubs fall over.

Sylvia Browne: I know, just went down. I don’t know but there was something that hit her in the chest. I’m telling you.

Father: No.

Mother: Could it be her heart, Sylvia?

Sylvia Browne: I could have been her heart. But you know, something sharp.

Montel Williams: Let me ask the question—did she play sports?

Mother: Yes.

Montel Williams: Could she have been, in this last year alone, there have been two young men come home from baseball practice having been struck in the chest earlier and died, and there was no bruising.

Sylvia Browne: That’s right, yeah. Was she any place before this when she could have been hit?

Mother: (shaking head) Possibly, but I don’t think so.

Sylvia Browne: Because it seems like it was almost like a shot.

Father: Could it have been toxic shock syndrome?

Sylvia Browne: Yes, it could. She had really long lashes, you know when you look at her sideways. A very straight nose, and a full mouth. A beautiful girl.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4296044311996545984&q=sylvia+browne&total=243&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3

By the time they are all done speculating about Browne’s fraudulent reading, they have 4 different hypotheses, none of which seem to fit with the facts: The daughter was shot. She was hit in the chest at sports practice. Something sharp hit her in the chest. Or she had toxic shock syndrome. Then, conveniently, Browne changes the subject to a safe discussion of how beautiful the daughter was.

Browne charges thousands of dollars for her “services.” James Randi has openly contested her as a fraud and repeatedly challenged her to take his $1,000,000 test for psychic or paranormal phenomena. She has refused.

There is No Right To Religious Belief

Part of the confusion in discussion about God concerns “having a right to believe” what you want, or people “being entitled to their opinions,” or “being free to believe,” or having religious freedom. It is clear from many things that believers say (usually it is some form of belief in God that is being defended by this route) in these conversations that they believe that these principles of freedom or entitlement are true, and that give us epistemic license with God matters that is unlike what we have in other arenas. You’d immediately find a new one if your doctor said that you have incurable cancer and only 6 weeks to live, and when you asked why she thinks that, she said, “Well, everyone entitled to believe what they want, it’s a free country after all.”

When people makes these comments about religious matters what they seem to be suggesting is that religious freedom is akin to physical freedom or the right to be unrestricted in your activities. You have a legal right to assemble, a right to free speech, a right to free movement and so on. And in all those cases, that moral and legal right preserves your ability to do and say what you want (with a few notable exceptions.) Those rights say nothing about the content of your free speeches and actions. They assure that a whole class of activities be available to you. So with freedom of religion or the legal right to practice and pursue the religious activities of your choice, you are entitled to the same sort of openness.

But having the legal and moral right to say or do a wide range of things should not be confused with having epistemic justification for them. Being free to do it doesn’t remove epistemic accountability or responsibility. Your entitlement to the opportunity to pursue a wide range of activities doesn’t render all of those activities wise, reasonable, correct, or true. You have a right to free speech, and that means you can stand up in a public forum and shout that 2 + 2 = 5, but obviously that doesn’t make it true. Legally and morally you have a right to fall down on your knees and worship the great Juju at the bottom of the river Limpopo. You can burn your house down as a sign of dedication to him, get yourself tattooed from head to foot with images of him (What does the great Juju look like anyway?), or you can go wait on a mountain top for him to come take you to the next realm of existence. But doing all of that would probably be completely silly. Given what you know about the world, such beliefs and activities are clearly irrational, even though you are entitled to espouse them and act accordingly.

Satisfying epistemic standards of justification is a completely different question than the question of rights. Being reasonable, as we saw previously, is a complicated matter. But at the very least, what will render a belief justified is that you have some evidence or some reasons that you take to be sufficiently indicative of the truth of a claim, and that pass some minimum standard of support that we all recognize as acceptable. People can and do ignore the evidence frequently. But it’s a deep confusion to mistake the fact that one can do it for good reasons that one should. You can go to the corner store and spend your entire retirement savings on jelly beans, but being able to do it doesn’t render the act justified. Consider the difference between a murder defendant who tries to excuse her actions by saying that she killed the victim because she had a gun and he was standing there, and the defendant who shot the victim because he had her cornered and was making it clear that he was going to kill her if nothing stopped him. The latter is a good defense, the former is no reason at all.

Let’s distinguish between a right to religious freedom, a right to assembly, and a right to have the religious belief of your choice. Once we look at it closely, it becomes clear that it doesn’t make any sense to say that you have a right to religious beliefs at all. That sort of right is unintelligible, so no such right exists.

First, the right to religious belief is nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or the United Nation Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The moral and legal rights we all have are of a different category than belief. Rights impose duties on others. When you possess a right, than creates some obligation on the part of others to provide something to you. In the case of negative rights, they amount to being assured of having the option to pursue a range of activities without encumbrance. No one can act to restrict you, and they fulfill their duty to you simply by not messing with you. Positive rights are entitlements to receive something more substantial from others than inaction—they have to get up off the couch and give you something to fulfill their duty to you. So your right to an education imposes a duty of paying taxes or some kind of response on others to make sure that you get what you have coming to you.

When we say you have a right to believe what you want, what could that mean in terms of duties for others? Is it a negative right such that they must not present any obstacle to your believing? We could oppose your believing something either with our words or with our actions. Does your putative right to believe impose a duty on me not to say something to the contrary when you claim you believe that 2+2=5, or that the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle, or that God created the world 6,000 years ago? No, clearly not. People can and do believe patently false things. But there are no good reasons for why the rest of us cannot say otherwise, try to talk them out of it, or point out that what they believe is patently false and contrary to the evidence. In fact, one might argue that when somebody has a crazy idea, especially if it is going to contribute to harm to the rest of us, the rest of us have an obligation to speak up. Your so-called right to believe doesn’t mean that I have to nod my head and agree with what you say.

Does your having a right to believe impose some duty on the rest of us to restrict our actions? Does it entitle you to not be harassed, physically coerced, kidnapped and brainwashed, tortured, blackmailed, or otherwise physically forced to say and act like you don’t believe it? The answer here is no too. You do have rights that impose duties on the rest of us to refrain from physically encumbering you, but it’s not your right to believe that imposes those duties on others. The reason I shouldn’t kidnap, harass, torture, or physical coerce you is not that your beliefs might be adversely affected, it’s that your body or your physical well-being would be compromised. Those things would cause you pain and suffering. And pain and suffering are bad in and of themselves, not because they have anything to do with your beliefs. It would be immoral and illegal for me to slowly burn a kitten to death, but the reason that would be wrong has nothing to do with kitty’s beliefs. Cat’s don’t have beliefs, nor do they have religious affiliations.

You have a legal and moral right not to have your physical freedoms encumbered, and that rules out those sorts of abuses. Nowhere in the Constitution, or American legal precedents, or in thoughtful theories of morality, rights, and duties will you find an assurance against physical abuses that is based upon a right to believe. Your right to physical freedom is a basic human right to itself and is not built upon something more fundamental like a right to belief.

We can make sense of rights talk about things like freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, a right to vote, a right to legal representation, a right to be treated as an autonomous moral agent. For all of these rights other people can do things that will impair or prevent you from doing something. You might get physically prevented from voting--and we want to make sure that doesn't happen. You might be prevented from assembling--and we want to make sure you are able to do so. You could be deprived of a fair trial, and so on.

But what could anyone do to make you stop believing something? I can talk to you. I can argue with you. I can try to persuade you that what you believe is mistaken. But there’s nothing morally wrong with any of these. You don’t have a right to not have me criticize your reasoning, although you can walk away and not listen if you choose. If I kidnap you, threaten you, or brainwash you to change your beliefs, then clearly I have violated your rights. But it's not your right to believe whatever you want. It's your basic freedoms to be unencumbered. Arguing with you, making a case against something you believe, or showing you evidence that makes it clear that what you believe is mistaken are not things you have a right to protected from. You do not have a right against my claiming that something is false when you think it is true. I do not have a duty to refrain from speaking my mind when you believe something that is unreasonable. (And the same goes if I am the one being unreasonable.) Nor do you have a right to be protected from anything that might change your mind.

Torture, threats, and physical coercion don’t really seem to change people’s beliefs anyway. When the north Vietnamese tortured American POWs and made them confess their conversion to communism on film, what the POWs did to stop the torture was say the words that their torturers wanted to hear. But often they didn’t really believe them, and everyone watching the taped confessions knew that and didn’t hold the confession against him.

In some even more extreme cases, it might be possible to really change someone’s beliefs, but doing so seems to require a much more radical alteration of everything about them. The Simbianese Liberation Army kidnapped millionaire heiress Patty Hearst. After months of abuse, starvation, rape, and torture she was seen helping them rob a bank in San Francisco. A jury, unsympathetic to her defense that she was brainwashed and forced to collaborate, found her guilty of ban robbery and convicted her to 7 years in prison. This was perhaps the closest to successful attempt ever at changing someone’s belief structure, and it still didn’t work. What they did wrong to her should not be characterized primarily in terms of violating her putative right to belief. And her case makes it clear that we probably couldn’t really change your beliefs by force even if we tried the most extreme measures. So another deep flaw in the notion that people have a right to belief what they want is that there is any way to take one’s beliefs away. How can you have a right to something that can’t, even in the most extreme circumstances can’t be taken away? The POW and Hearst examples make it even clearer how thin and off the mark the “I have a right to believe what I want” response is when someone who disagrees presents contrary words to the view. The response is an ill-frame evasion, nothing more. No such right exists or is even intelligible. And the bogus right to believe certainly can’t be a defense for having no good justification for what you believe is true when you live on my block, vote for presidents, have children, elect school board officials, and a host of other actions that have a direct bearing on the lives of the rest of us.

So I really can't make any sense of the claim that you have a right to believe what you choose. Even if people have the right, that doesn't give anyone the right not to be criticized, corrected, argued with, or refuted by the evidence. And it doesn't give you the right to continue to believe something that is patently false when you know better and all the evidence is against you.

Furthermore, it’s not even clear that other people can do anything to stop you from believing what you want to, even if they tried really hard. I have certainly been in lots of prolonged philosophical debates with people where no argument I could muster and no reasons I could give were adequate to dissuade someone of something that I thought was totally unreasonable. Sometimes I can convince someone, and sometimes they convince me. But I didn’t violate their bogus right to believe by convincing them to change their minds, nor did they do some belief injustice to me by trying or succeeding in getting me to change mine. In fact, I consider it a great benefit to have someone straighten me out—they’ve given me something very valuable that they didn’t have to.

So the right to believe that people keep talking about really doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not a negative right—it imposes no duties of restraint on others that weren’t already covered by your real rights. It’s not a positive right—I don’t have to pay taxes or make some positive contribution to your being able to form beliefs. You’re going to do that, no matter what I do or don’t do. Nothing I could do would make it possible for you to form beliefs whereas you couldn’t before. And nothing I might withhold will make it impossible for you to form beliefs.

What renders a belief reasonable is that a person has good reasons for it. They have done a good job of gathering the evidence, they have considered it carefully, they have reflected on the various ways in which they could be wrong, they have taken alternative views seriously, and they have arrived at an informed view about what the evidence indicates or supports. It doesn’t acquire justification and it is not reasonable simply because you can believe it, or because of some entitlement to religious freedom and tolerance. Our freedoms include lots of things that are positively stupid to do. Having a right to pursue those mistakes doesn’t render them wise, supported by the evidence, or thoughtful.

Another problem with the so-called right to believe is that no one really thinks it’s true. If somebody told you that a principle they live by, one of their fundamental beliefs, is that whites are superior to blacks, or that the Jews ought to be exterminated, you would not accept that they have a right to believe that. We would be scandalized if some claimed that for them it is an article of faith that the Holocaust didn’t happen. If a mother said to the cancer specialist that she has a right to believe that her son doesn’t have leukemia even though all the test results say otherwise we would say she’s unfit. Or imagine if the doctor asserted that he had faith that your child has leukemia. You’d go get another opinion. If a teacher claimed that he has a right to believe that the Earth is flat if he wants to, we’d take our kids out of his class and file a lawsuit. If a car mechanic told you that he just has a feeling that your car needs a $100 repair, but no more specific evidence, you’d find another mechanic. We would invoke more stringent standards of evidence for a mere $100 car repair than we demand from people concerning their most profoundly important religious views.

People can and do believe a lot of things, and many of them are patently and obviously false. Calling it a "belief" and invoking some mysterious right to it doesn't render it true or reasonable or well-supported by the evidence. In fact, you probably think that a person has a duty not to believe something as inflammatory and hurtful as the racial superiority claim or the leukemia diagnosis unless they could show that they have met the highest standards of evidence. So why is it with religious beliefs we have reversed this and the religious believer doesn't have to offer any evidential support whatsoever? We can't simply take it on faith that blacks are inferior, or that women are not as smart as men, or that homosexuals are pedophiles. So why do we give people a free pass when they take it on faith that there is a God and that God told them to do all sorts of things?

Confusing Possible with Probable and Having a Right to Believe

People are often confused about the difference between possible and probable. In the context of questions about the reasonableness of religious belief, or whether or not someone is epistemically entitled to believe in God, many people will defend their belief say that “God exists,” or “God has a plan in which all suffering serves a greater good,” by asserting or arguing that it is possible that God exists, or that God has a plan. That is, they make the inference from the fact that there is a possibility, even a very small one, that X is true, to thinking that it is therefore reasonable to believe that X is true.

The number of things that are possible is infinite. But in general, we do not think that the fact that something is possible gives us good reason for thinking it is true. Part of the confusion is related to people’s views about “having a right to believe what they want,” or “being entitled to their opinions,” or “being free to believe,” or having religious freedom. It is clear from many things that believers say in these conversations that they believe that these principles of freedom or entitlement are true, and that what they mean is that religious freedom is akin to physical freedom or the right to unrestricted in your activities. You have a legal right to assemble, a right to free speech, a right to free movement and so on. And in all those cases, that moral and legal right preserves your ability to do and say anything (with a few notable exceptions.) So with freedom of religion or the legal right to practice and pursue the religious activities of your choice, you are entitled to the same sort of openness.

But having the legal and moral right to say or do a wide range of things should not be confused with having epistemic justification for them. Your entitlement to the opportunity to pursue a wide range of activities doesn’t render all of those activities wise, reasonable, correct, or true. You have a right to free speech, and that means you can stand up in a public forum and shout that 2 + 2 = 5, but obviously that doesn’t make it true. Legally and morally you have a right to fall down on your knees and worship the great JuJu at the bottom of the river Limpopo. You can burn your house down as a sign of dedication to him, get yourself tattooed from head to foot with images of him (What the hell does the great JuJu look like anyway?), or you can go wait on a mountain top for him to come take you to the next realm of existence. But doing all of that would be completely stupid. Given what you know about the world, such beliefs and activities are clearly irrational, even though you are entitled to espouse them and act accordingly.

I’m not even really sure what it means to say that someone has a right to believe some claim. That right is nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or the United Nation Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights we all have legally and morally amount to being assured of having the option to pursue a range of activities without encumbrance. No one can act to restrict you, and they fulfill their duty to you simply by not messing with you. These are usually called negative rights. Positive rights are entitlements to some actual action on the parts of others. They have to get up off the couch and give you something to fulfill their duty to you. So your right to an education imposes a duty of paying taxes or some kind of response on others to make sure that you get what you have coming to you.

But when we say you have a right to believe what you want, does that mean that people have an obligation to not say something to the contrary when you claim you believe that 2+2=5, or that the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle, or that God created the world 6,000 years ago? I guess it’s possible for you to believe that, although I find it hard to believe that anyone really does, even when they say they do. But your so-called right doesn’t mean that I have to nod my head and agree. I can and will point out that you are wrong, and give you my reasons why. Does your so-called right to believe entitle you to not be harassed, physically coerced, kidnapped and brainwashed, tortured, blackmailed, or otherwise physically forced to say and act like you don’t believe it? No. It’s not your alleged right to believe that guarantees that other people can’t do that to you. You have a legal and moral right not to have your physical freedoms encumbered, and that rules out those sorts of abuses. No where in the Constitution, or American legal precedents, or in thoughtful theories of morality, rights, and duties will you find an assurance against physical abuses that is based upon a right to believe. Your right to physical freedom is a basic human right to itself and is not built upon something more fundamental like a right to belief.

Furthermore, it’s even clear that other people can do anything to stop you from believing what you want to, even if they tried really hard. I have certainly been in lots of prolonged philosophical debates with people where no argument I could muster and no reasons I could give were adequate to dissuade someone of something that I thought was totally unreasonable. Sometimes I can convince someone, and sometimes they convince me. But I didn’t violate their bogus right to believe by convincing them to change their minds, nor did they do some belief injustice to me by trying or succeeding in getting me to change mine. In fact, I consider it a great benefit to have someone straighten me out—they’ve given me something very valuable that they didn’t have to.

So the right to believe that people keep talking about really doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not a negative right—it imposes no duties of restraint on others that weren’t already covered by your real rights. It’s not a positive right—I don’t have to pay taxes or make some positive contribution to your being able to form beliefs. You’re going to do that, no matter what I do or don’t do. Nothing I could do would make it possible for you to form beliefs whereas you couldn’t before. And nothing I might withhold will make it impossible for you to form beliefs.

What renders a belief reasonable is that a person has good reasons for it. They have done a good job of gathering the evidence, they have considered it carefully, they have reflected on the various ways in which they could be wrong, they have taken alternative views seriously, and they have arrived at an informed view about what the evidence indicates or supports. What renders a belief probable is that it is more likely than not to be true. There is a greater than 50% chance that it is correct. It is not probably that you will win the $100 million lottery tomorrow. Although it is possible. And many people will believe unreasonably that they will win, contrary to all the evidence in front of them. They don’t have a right to believe that as far as I can see. Beliefs aren’t the sort of things that fall within in the purview of rights and duties. People just have them. And it’s an unfortunate thing that so many of them are as silly, unreasonable, and unjustified as they are. We should all be doing a lot more to try to prevent that from happening. We should do much more than nod our heads and say, “Well, people are entitled to their opinions,” and walk away, but obviously we shouldn’t resort of any kind of physical coercion to stop it. We should all be prepared to say about something that someone else says is true that we disagree with, “No, that’s mistaken. Here’s why….” And we should all be prepared to listen, think about it, and maybe accept it when someone says it to us. Let’s practice out loud: “That’s bullshit!” “You’re wrong!” “Why would anyone with any sense believe such nonsense?” “But there’s a mountain of evidence against that silliness.”

If you’re still confused about the difference between possible and probable, here’s a long list of things that that are possible—there’s nothing contrary to logic that renders them false like “there are no married bachelors,” but most people do not think they are true or probable.

It is possible that there was no Civil War
It is possible that the Holocaust didn’t happen.
It is possible that the Apostles made it all up.
It is possible that Mohammed made it all up.
It is possible that someone slipped something into Jesus’ drink before he was entombed to make him look dead.
It is possible that Jesus was walking on a sandbar at low tide.
It is possible that wearing a raw steak hat wards off disease.
It is possible that eating three year old rotten duck eggs is good for your health.
It is possible that your positive pregnancy test is a false positive.
It is possible that your negative pregnancy test is a false negative.
It is possible that even though you are taking birth control pills exactly as prescribed everyday you are pregnant.
It is possible that the government is watching everything you do and hiding it very well.
It is possible that there was no Jesus.
It is possible that Christopher Marlowe wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays.
It is possible that having sex with a virgin cures HIV.
It is possible that eating the flesh of your enemies gives you power.
It is possible that birth defects are caused by wickedness from a past life.
It is possible that the Detroit Lions could win the Super bowl.
It is possible that fever is caused by demon possession.
It is possible that the earth rests on the back of a (invisible) turtle.
It is possible that lightening is thrown by an angry Zeus.
It is possible that natural disasters are God's anger with sinners
It is possible that the moon is made of green cheese.
It is possible that the stars are light shining through tiny wholes in a
heavenly orb that surrounds us.
It is possible that the moon landing in 1969 was faked on a secret Hollywood set by NASA.
It is possible that aliens conspired with Oswald to kill JFK.
It is possible that the CIA is responsible for 9-11.
It is possible that there is a secret Christian society -the Knights Templar--that run the world governments.
It is possible that Jesus married Mary and had kids.
It is possible that exorcisms cast out the devil.
It is possible that the juice and crackers actually turn into the body and blood of Jesus in your mouth
It is possible that Poseidon rules an underwater kingdom.
It is possible that wishful thinking can help you win the lottery
It is possible that wearing your lucky underwear will help you win the basketball game
It is possible that Santa exists.
It is possible that there are still dinosaurs.
It is possible that dunking an accused witch underwater will reveal whether or not she is a witch.
It is possible that giving someone the evil eye will actually harm them.
It is possible that failing to pass on a chain letter will bring disaster to you.
It is possible that hexes work.
It is possible that you can concoct a love potion from herbs.
It is possible that crossing yourself will ward off evil spirits.
It is possible that blessing someone who sneezes helps protect their soul.
It is possible that if you concentrate you can levitate.
It is possible that martial arts masters can channel chi.
It is possible that tossing spilt salt over your shoulder improves luck.
It is possible that opening an umbrella indoors or breaking a mirror is bad luck.
It is possible that the bumps on someone's head indicate personality traits.
It is possible that conceiving in the spring produces boy babies.
It is possible that swinging a wedding ring on a string in front of a pregnant woman's stomach will reveal the sex of the baby.
It is possible that bad things happen on Friday the 13th.
It is possible that people do more wild things on a full moon.
It is possible that plants can think and have feelings.

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.