Gibberish? Non-Cognitivist Speech Act? or Serious Truth Claim?

In meta-ethical theory, they have come up with a salient view about moral claims that sheds light on a lot of puzzling religious utterances. Non-cognitivism is the view that strictly speaking, moral claims are neither true, nor false. They are not the sort of speech act that can or should be evaluated with objective criteria of truth. Instead, when someone condemns an act as immoral, what they are saying is more like “I have bad feelings about what’s going on. I need to express those bad feelings. You should have bad feelings too!! Boooo."

Now consider “Jesus loves you,” “Jesus died for you sins,” “God be with you,” “Accept Jesus into your heart and experience salvation,” and so on. If you take these sorts of claims seriously, they’ll make you crazy trying to figure out just what they mean. Like Flew’s frustrated skeptic in the parable of the invisible gardener, it’s hard to see just what’s the difference between a world where these things are true and a world where they aren’t. There appear to be no experiences or no events that could possibly occur that are inconsistent with Jesus’ loving you, or with God’s cherishing you. For comparison, consider your typical university president, or political candidate who keeps fervently repeating that he’s committed to the future, and who says he’s got a vision of excellence.

We can all save ourselves a lot of trouble if we acknowledge that these sorts of speech acts just aren’t the sorts of claims that make and sort of true or false difference in the world. No state of affairs would count against them, as their utterers maintain. Even as he’s being carried off to jail for embezzlement, the university president or the politician insists he’s a vision of integrity. And no matter how severe the suffering from earthquakes, malnutrition, war, and child abuse get, the religious leaders steadfastly maintain that God loves you. What many of these claims really amount to is something more like public emoting, singing, poetry, or cheering. They are expressions of personal desires, hope, feelings of subjugation, admiration, and humility. And so they aren’t really a matter of true or false, right or wrong. They can be annoying, condescending, or self-righteous, of course.

What “Jesus died for your sins, accept him into your heart” really means is something like “I have sympathy for your plight, we are all lowly and pathetic and in need of paternalistic comforting, you can have it if you perform certain kinds of behaviors and adopt a certain kind of personal posture with regard to your place in the world. When I do these things I feel joyful, I want you to feel joyful too.”

It should be obvious to you that religious ceremonies, rituals, and liturgies all tend to slip away from being true/false sorts of assertions and more towards some kind of religious expressionism. If you’re really taking many of these behaviors as the sort of thing that can be evaluated with reason the way evidence in a court case can, you’re wasting your time and your breathe. It would be absurd to raise your hand at a poetry recitation and say, “I think your claim in the second line of the first verse about love’s being a furry puppy is mistaken. Here’s why . . . “ wouldn’t it?

The problem is, of course, that lots of religious people who are making these utterances do not think that what they are doing is non-cognitive. They think that Jesus really did die for your sins, and that Jesus really does love you, and that those clichés actually mean something. It can be hard to dismiss such behaviors as non-cognitive when the speakers themselves insist that they are making true assertions that make all the difference in the world.

The answer, I think, is that the real measure of whether or not some speech act is cognitive or non-cognitive is not something that is always settled by how the speaker feels about it. The speaker may or may not appreciate the non-cognitive aspects of what they are doing. The university president insists that he is committed to excellence, no matter how poorly his university is doing under his guidance. That what they are saying is non-cognitive will be revealed by the way that the speech acts weave themselves into their worldview. One telling question that I always come back to is this, “just what would it take in principle for you to change your mind about X?” We can’t imagine the university president conceding that in fact he’s not committed to excellence under any circumstances, and it’s hard to imagine how many people who are fond of repeating “Jesus loves you,” and “Jesus dies for your sins,” would ever change their minds about that. Suppose we found compelling archeological (maybe including DNA evidence) grounds that showed that Jesus wasn’t crucified and just live out a normal life as a carpenter. Do you imagine that the people who now insist that Jesus died for our sins would ever accept that evidence and conclude that they were wrong? If a speech act has working its way into a person’s psyche in that fashion we have good reason to think it’s become a non-cognitivist dogma.

Coherence and Atheism

Let’s reconceive proof in terms of what we now know about human beliefs systems, justification, and the progress of the human knowledge enterprise. Coherentists maintain that we can and should work to achieve a high degree of coherence within our belief structures. What that means is that the propositions we believe should be logically consistent, they must be probabilistically consistent, the system is improved in virtue of having more and stronger inferential connections between beliefs, it is less coherent in proportion to how many unrelated, and unconnected subsystems of beliefs there are, the system is less coherent by to the extent it has unexplained anomalies, and the system, above all, must be responsive to the evidence provided by experience.

It’s naïve and antique to think that a proof for a belief is a contained, modular entity, as if once we have a finished proof in hand, a person can stop gathering more justification and stop incorporating new information into their view of the world. Beliefs are not modular, autonomous entities. We only have them and they only become justified in virtue of being embedded in a larger framework that guides us with regard to principles of evidence, rules of inquiry, and standards of justification. Proof for a proposition that gives us perfect, deductive certainty and final justification is a myth from a simpler age. We do not simply accrete new pieces of knowledge that are then finished and laid down for the next layer. Euclid could prove propositions in geometry in the naïve sense until we discovered non-Euclidean geometries. Newton could prove the force of an accelerating object until quantum indeterminacy. Paley could prove the existence of God until Darwin’s natural selection.

What happens inside the head of a reasonable person should mimic the growth of science. As we leave childish beliefs and the over-simplified world of our youth, we incorporate more and more of the new experiences.

We do our best to catch up to the 21^st century, which is considerably harder and more complicated than mastering the worldview of a 11^th century goat farmer. We have to build and rebuild the raft of beliefs that are keeping us afloat. Sometimes our worldview is shaken deeply and we abandon many planks of our feeble vessels. But with time, patience, and honest inquiry, we can make it more robust and expand its boundaries. Various propositions, sometimes contradictory ones, appear to have been proven, and in a sense they are. But what constitutes proof is a function of the other things a person believes, and the principles of inference that they deem valid, and the contents of both of those categories change dramatically for a person. So what constitutes proof, and what a person takes to be proven change dramatically as they mature intellectually. Forward progress is possible, and more inclusive, coherent system of belief can be constructed as we ask and answer more questions. But this progress may not be acquiring more and more “proven” propositions as knowledge. In fact, progress may amount to abandoning much of what we thought before as we become more discriminating and struggle to achieve greater coherence.

What constitutes proof for us shifts with experience and the expansion of our ideas about the world. When we are young and understand little, we may be easily satisfied with simple answers to simple questions. When we grow intellectually, we become more discriminating. We make finer distinctions, see more subtle problems, and can foresee more distant implications and problems. If we are growing intellectually, what constitutes proof will become more careful too. If our belief structures are increasing in coherence along all the vectors listed above (logical and probabilistic consistency, fewer anomalies, more and stronger connections) incorporating a new belief into the system will require meeting more rigorous standards.

I submit that for a well-educated, reasonable person in the 21^st century who can see the expansion of naturalistic explanations of the world into every corner of our lives—genetics, disease, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and so on—atheism is a more coherent belief (and belief structure) than theism. This is so not because there is a single, definitive geometric style proof of the proposition, but because an atheistic, naturalistic, non-magical, non-supernatural worldview has more potential to achieve a higher degree of logical and probabilistic consistency, better internal connections, fewer anomalous beliefs, and a better incorporation of empirical experience. And that amounts to the most important and substantial sort of proof that humanity has ever had in its long, slow process of maturation.

Dawkins' Law

edge.org is a first rate website.

Here's a recent contribution on their site from Richard Dawkins. Give a comment and state your law.

Dawkins's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty

Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

Dawkins's Law of Divine Invulnerability

God cannot lose.

Lemma 1

When comprehension expands, gods contract—but then redefine themselves to restore the status quo.

Lemma 2

When things go right, God will be thanked. When things go wrong, he will be thanked that they are not worse.

Lemma 3

Belief in the afterlife can only be proved right, never wrong.

Lemma 4

The fury with which untenable beliefs are defended is inversely proportional to their defensibility

The following law, though probably older, is often attributed to me in various versions, and I am happy to formulate it here as

Dawkins's Law of Adversarial Debate

When two incompatible beliefs are advocated with equal intensity, the truth does not lie half way between them.

The Burden of Proof is on the Atheist Redux

I’ve gotten enough comments from colleagues, blog responders, and students to say some more about this, although a full treatment would take many pages.

First, my view is that while in the end I clearly think atheism is the reasonable conclusion to draw, and that anyone who hasn’t yet, should, the starting points for different people and the standards by which they evaluate evidence are highly variable. There simply are no universal standards of reasonableness whereby it would make any sense to say that anyone who doesn’t accept atheism is unreasonable or irrational.

My claim is not that theists have no work to do to justify their positions. Ultimately, everyone can do better than they are doing with regard to having a well-justified, coherent belief system. And ultimately, I think that anyone who doesn’t draw the atheist conclusion has probably gone off the tracks somewhere.

My position is that the burden of proof is in large part a socially determined entity.

It is naïve to think that the Cartesian model applies to human reasoning whereby we start with nothing and then build up a network of justified beliefs one at a time. That’s neither an accurate picture of how we come by our beliefs, nor is it a plausible goal for how we ought to proceed in assessing our beliefs. Wittgenstein got this much right—he said that belief comes first, then doubt second. What he meant was that as a person matures through childhood, everyone acquires a vast network of interconnected expectations, predictive principles, and beliefs about the world. The character that this starting framework of belief takes depends largely on the historical, social, and epistemic context that that person finds themselves dropped into. That context may provide them with beliefs that are false like, “Fever causes demon possession,” and inference rules that are faulty. One nineteenth century logic textbook endorses the Gambler’s Fallacy, for instance. I have a very difficult time convincing some introductory logic students that it’s a mistake. If someone has been surrounded by (authoritative!) people who endorse it, and it appears to be supported by one’s experience, and even your textbooks recommend it, how could a person possibly be held epistemically culpable for not seeing what we now know is a mistake. That would be as foolish as faulting Heraclitus for not knowing the implications of research from 21^st century particle accelerators for atomic and subatomic theory.

So it’s the epistemic context that frames out the starting position for everyone as to what’s prima facie reasonable. Even during the same historical period, that will vary from context to context. Common sense to someone born and raised in the jungles of Borneo will be radically different than common sense to someone born and raised in the same era in urban San Francisco.

The fact that so many people in American culture are religious and profess to believe in God allows us to make some generalizations. The general situation we find ourselves in is one where for the vast majority of people it is completely intuitive and obvious that God exists. Many, maybe most, Americans never paus to consider seriously that there might not be a God. And for the ones who did, the implications as they see it for a meaningless, ammoral, nihilistic existence quickly make it evident that such musings are dangerous and/or preposterous. Many of them have heard of atheists and atheism—but such a prospect seems unnatural, ugly, counterintuitive, and remote. Everyone believes in God, afterall. What could be more obvious?

For the most part, these are all normal, reasonable, mentally healthy, cognitively functioning adults. The atheist who scoffs that anyone who believes in God is stupid, foolish, unreflective, or in the grip of a psychiatric disorder simply hasn’t been paying attention and has been shirking their own epistemological responsibilities. This atheist is little better than the sulking and immature teenager who pouts that “Everyone is soooo stupid. They are such conformist sheep. I hate them.” I’ve been there, and I like Bauhaus and Joy Division as much as the next guy. But atheists and atheism as a movement has got to grow up. (Unfortunately, I think some of Richard Dawkins evangelical, anti-theist vitriol may represent some backsliding. Nevertheless, I sure enjoy it.)

To be fair, there are unreflective and even dumb theists, and they need to be shaken up and challenged just like we all do. But it would be a gross and irresponsible over-generalization to be dismissive of theism altogether. And now I’m making two points: one, for most Americans, theism (Christian) is the default backdrop against which any worldview they ultimately settle upon must be tested. Second, there are some powerful, interesting, and challenging arguments for the existence of God out there, and no atheist who has taken the issue seriously can claim to have secured justification for their view until they have considered those arguments carefully and figured out what’s wrong with them.

So like it or not, atheists find themselves in this hostile, or at least contradicting, environment. And that environment sets the framework of principles, rules of evidence, and beliefs from which every person has to start. Since the atheist conclusion is so deeply contradictory to the context they find themselves in, the lion’s share of the burden of proof will be on them.

The alternative view, like Flew’s, seems to be that the belief that there is no such X is always the justified, default starting point, and that anyone who wishes to conclude anything different than just having a blank slate must provide adequate proof to motivate the belief. This is outrageous for a number of reasons. You haven’t done that and probably can’t do that for a great many (maybe most) of the reasonable beliefs you have. You didn’t populate your head with all of your beliefs by deliberately and consciously starting from a blank slate and then only after acquiring sufficient reasons accepting a belief into a special circle of sanctioned views. Becoming a conscious, reflective adult capable of thinking about your reasons already required that you had a full set of beliefs about your world that you inherited from your environment and that came to you naturally. We do not have a blank hard drive for a mind, despite the popularity of that metaphor, that are written onto by experience. A web of beliefs is consciousness—they are what make a worldview possible at all. Without the context of belief you’d have nothing to doubt, no questions to ask, nothing to wonder about.

And just like reasonableness depends on so many subjective factors, evidence is not a clean, objective logical notion. It’s not that people who disagree with you have no evidence at all. What do you think you were the first person to see this singular, unambiguous phenomena in the world because you’re so much smarter than all of them? And you were the first 15 year old to think that everybody is a conformist too, weren't you? Evidence, for the most part, is what a person takes it to be. Evidence doesn’t just exist out there on its own. Some phenomena only becomes evidence in virtue of being taken to be indicative of some conclusion by some person. And obviously, different people can take the same phenomena as evidence to contradictory conclusions. Or they can appear to be observing the very same phenomena, but they are actually taking note of very different details and drawing the same or different conclusions from it. We have discovered that there are better and worse ways to gather and evaluate evidence. But it’s not that when someone draws a mistaken conclusion or one you don’t like that they have no evidence at all. What you disagree with them about is what evidence is relevant and how best to evaluate it. So atheists need to get out of the habit of dismissing all believers as “having no evidence at all.” The believers don’t see themselves that way, and you just come off as dogmatic and irrational for saying it about them. Wouldn’t you think it was laughable if they said about you, “Well, he’s got no evidence and no reasons at all for what he believes.”

The Burden of Proof is on the Atheist

To some extent, what’s rational to believe depends upon what everyone around you believes. A great many of the things that we think are true, we learn from our environment. Our parents, teachers, friends, and people around us give it to us. And we’d be positively irrational if we were to ignore or reject all those sources. They have served us well for lots of things. They’ve been reliable. And we trust them. If you’re going to go against the tide on something that all of those sources believe, then you had better have some really good, compelling reasons. If you are going to conclude that the earth is flat and contradict what everyone around you has so much justification for, then your justification needs to be so good, then the likelihood that it is right needs to be greater than the likelihood that all of them are wrong.

So for any moment in history and a person’s epistemic situation in it, there will be a long list of beliefs that are prima facie justified. Once you’re exposed to those and you become aware that so many people around you believe them, then the mere fact that so many people believe them itself counts as some evidence that those beliefs are justified and correct. That’s not to say that they are correct, of course. In lots of cases, the vast majority of people believed something that is dead wrong. They thought that fever was caused by demon possession and they thought that the earth was flat. The point is that these were justified beliefs. If you had lived in some remote village in France in the 13th century with no education, unable to read or write, and if your primary sources of information about such matters were friends, family, and priests, then it would have been clearly irrational for you believe that fever was caused by a person’s immune system fighting off infection of a virus. What possible grounds could such a person have that would make this belief justified? It would be a true belief, but anybody who believed in that epistemic situation would be crazy. If your culture is full of ideas about spiritual entities and magical forces that are active in everyone’s daily lives, then the claim that fever is caused by demon possession would make perfect sense.

The implication of all of this is that for the modern American atheist, there is an enormous burden of proof. The vast majority of people around you believe that there is a God. They think that God is active and present in every facet of their lives. They think there are lots of very good reasons for thinking that there is a God.

So you can’t just ignore all of that background. You can’t just opt to believe otherwise at will and be epistemically inculpable. Even if everyone around you believes something completely mistaken like “The sun orbits the earth,” their believing it, and so many of them believing it, puts an tremendous burden of proof on you if you are going to break ranks and form a contrary opinion.

Some atheists—consider Antony Flew’s famous “presumption of atheism”—think that since it’s the theists that are asserting the positive claim, and since the default position is not to believe, then they burden of proof is on them, not on the disbelieving atheist. I think the above considerations show that it’s the prevailing set of beliefs in one’s epistemic environment that establish the default beliefs, and the burden of proof is shifted to anyone who wants to deviate from that.

But all that’s ok with me because there’s more than enough justification for us to show that there is no God. It’s just that we are going to have to deal with a lot of flat earthers before our own beliefs have a secure justification.

Does Sin Corrupt our Ability to See God or Does the Religious Urge Corrupt our Reason?

A group of philosophers sympathetic with the Christian take on things have constructed a complicated and technical account of God beliefs and their source in human cognition known as reformed epistemology. On the view, espoused by Plantinga and Wolterstorff and widely cited and supported in recent years, humans are endowed by God with an innate faculty for sensing God under the right circumstances. This sensus divinitatus is one aspect of a properly functioning cognitive and belief forming system in humans. When it is not corrupted by the invasive noetic effects of sin, this faculty produces a belief in God that is immediate, direct, and non-inferentially justified. That is, a belief in God is properly basic according to the reformed epistemologists. It is not supported by any other independent or more fundamental facts. It cannot be justified on the basis of other beliefs. Rather, it’s axiomatic like the law of non-contradiction or the identity of indiscernibles. The sensus divinitatus will manifest itself in a variety of ways—when you see a sweeping vista of majestic mountaintops, or when your first child is born, or upon pondering the vastness and magnificence of the universe in the night sky.

Misinterpreting these feelings of the divine as indicators of a non-Christian God as a Hindu might, or suppressing them and denying that God is manifest in experience are all the by-products of a sinful nature. Doubters, skeptics, and deniers—anyone who doesn’t buy into the Reformed Epistemology picture—have all had their God given God detectors corrupted, co-opted, and distorted by sin. What they need, of course, is the salvation of Jesus to cleanse them of their immorality and to restore the proper function of their belief faculties. Then they will see that they were not right with God before. And then they will have properly basis religious experience of God. So the view has a the tidy way to deal with criticisms and legitimate objections. No objection to the whole scheme can have any merit because it arises from doubt, which is really just wickedness. If you had some experiences that seemed to have profound religious significance, like any normal person you would wonder about alternative explanations. Could this just be a weird artifact of my neurology? I wonder what natural explanation there could be for this strange disassociation? Maybe I ate something bad? The full-blown theistic supernatural explanation is one possibility. But according to Reformed Epistemology any suspicion that you have that it might have been something natural is really the result of your innately evil nature and the taint that sin has placed on your ability to think straight. They position undercuts any objections with an ad hominem attack on the moral character of the questioner.

The whole scheme is also clever (and insidious) for inventing a notion of private evidence that shouldn’t be held up for any public scrutiny by someone who has doubts. Once you’re in the special club, you’re provided with “self-authenticating witness of the holy spirit” that gives you perfect, unassailable assurance about your God doctrine no matter what empirical questions or doubts may arise. Ordinarily, evidence is something that is sharable and public. The prosecuting attorney displays the gun that was the murder weapon for everyone in the court, the dentist looks at X-rays, and your mechanic points to the leaking oil around a gasket as evidence that there is a problem. But this special God feeling isn’t like that; it’s just a feeling you have that something’s got to be true, so it can’t be shared with anyone else. Plantinga and some of the people in this camp suggest that the earnest Christian in this situation ought to consider alternative explanations for their experience. Many properly basic beliefs, including the God one presumably, are defeasible. If you have the experiences, and if your conviction that that’s really God your feeling persists after you have scrutinized the belief and reflected on what might be causing it, then you will have a warranted, and true belief that there is a God.

Needless to say, the notion of private evidence here is deeply problematic. Imagine an IRS agent telling you that she’s got self-authenticating, private evidence that you can’t see that you owe the government an extra $20,000 tax dollars. Imagine a doctor telling you that she’s got self-authenticating evidence that you’ve got cancer, but the evidence can’t be grasped by anyone who doesn’t already believe it. Or imagine your husband telling you that he’s got special, private, self-authenticating evidence that you’ve been cheating on him. Then suppose furthermore that they assure you that their conclusion is right because they have thought long and hard about it and considered other possibilities. Evidence that's private isn't really evidence at all and a mere feeling that something just must be true, no matter how strong or persistent, is never enough to give it warrant.

Here’s a model of human rationality and religious belief that is much more accurate. Humans are endowed by evolution with a remarkably effective set of problem solving skills that can be group loosely under the general heading “reason.” In the right circumstances, our reason allows us to devise complicated and elegant solutions to challenges, make accurate inferences and predictions, and arrive at many well-justified and true beliefs. We manage to cure diseases like polio and land people on the moon. But our cognitive systems are kludgey and imperfect. They’re strapped together with disparate functions and tools that were available at various stages in a long, convoluted evolutionary history. Sometimes they don’t track the truth at all, like when you have an attack of claustrophobia, or you can’t bear to even look at a dish that once made you sick when you were a child. Sometimes our cognitive faculties overreact, mislead, underestimate, or misjudge.

Our fancier faculties of reason are also often overwhelmed by a variety of emotional, psychological, and biological forces that erode our ability to reason well and see the truth. One legacy of our evolutionary history appears to be a powerful disposition towards religious belief, experiences, and feelings. Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker have recently argued that natural selection may have endowed us with a sort of mind-attribution module. Construing other organisms behavior as the product of the planning and goals within their minds, whether they really have them or not, would be an effective mechanism for anticipating and projecting the behaviors of potential predators and prey. But we’re just built to take it too far and endow everything with a mind—the wind, the ocean, the starry sky, and the world itself.

In an earlier post, I called it the Urge—a powerful and seductive need we have to be religious. Completely aside from the factual question of God, it is obvious to anyone who observes humans and their religious activities that we desperately want there to be a God and we will adopt the most contorted gymnastics of reasoning to rationalize the belief. Even if there are some theists with good reasons, there are far more with sloppy, fallacy ridden, biased grounds that they offer for their beliefs. And in lots of these cases, it’s not really the poor reasoning that is offered in defense of someone’s God belief that led them to believe at all. More often it is the case that people have the belief first as a result of the Urge’s infiltration of their consciousness, and then they back fill that conclusion with some superficial reasons. So the Urge is really the dark side of your nature that threatens to corrupt your more noble aspects. It’s the alluring, siren call of religion itself, not sin, that will co-opt reason’s ability to see the world in an accurate light.

Staying on the straight and narrow will require resisting the temptation of religion’s easy, emotionally satisfying answers to the biggest metaphysical questions. Living up to your potential to reason clearly and evaluate the evidence objectively demands that you be constantly vigilant against seduction of religion’s false comforts.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

An Associated Press poll recently reported that 1 in 4 American adults did not read a single book last year. And of the few who did read anything at all, their primary choices were the Bible and related religious works, “The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds in the survey, more than all other categories.” Full story here.

The problem: every new human baby on this planet is essentially the same empty container as baby’s have been for thousands of years. Despite the fact that we have made astounding general advances in science, knowledge, medicine, and culture, a new baby’s head has none of those advances and advantages in it by default. We have to start over educating every new generation, catching them up to the front edge of where our collective knowledge is for that generation. A baby could be raised to have just as backward, ignorant, and simplistic a worldview as a baby born a 1,000 years ago if it doesn’t get access and exposure to the crest of the wave of our knowledge of the world.

If we feed our minds with superstitious, religious, fuzzy-headed religious nonsense, and judging from the poll information we’re reading little else, we are in real danger of turning future generations of us back to a dark age of theological tyranny. Americans are buying tens of millions of copies of the Left Behind books, which describe in elaborate gloating detail all of the horrible wretchedness that non-believers will be left to endure at the hands of the anti-christ after the believers are all raptured to heaven. (No doubt all of the readers view themselves as being among the chosen few virtuous people who will be saved.) Countless copies of the Bible are sold every year so that people can engage in endless textual exegesis that promises to do little except hold us back politically, historically, and morally as it works its way into our minds and our lives.

Our minds will come to embody those ideas, principles, images, and practices that we put into them. Even if you think it’s a good thing that so many people are reading the Bible, you cannot think that it is good for us that that’s all we read when we read at all. There are so many better sources that we could be expanding our knowledge of the world with. And the further behind a generation falls by not reading and getting educated, then the harder it will be for the next generation to catch up. And the less we know about biology, physics, history, and society, the easier it will be for the darkest side of the religious urge towards fundamentalism, intolerance, and ignorance to take over.

Science is Not A Religion

Special Guest Blog this week: Scott Merlino, Ph.D., Philosophy Department, CSUS

Lots of people believe science should get off of its high-horse and admit it is a religion or just like a religion since it too is built upon apparent articles of faith. For instance, what scientist can deny that a world outside of humans, languages or minds actually exists? However, this article of faith is hardly unique to science: Religious people accept it too. In fact, I'll wager that most all of the basic claims about reality that science accepts are also accepted by the religious. But wait, don't scientists accept the Big Bang Theory or Darwinian Evolution, whereas many religious people do not? Nope. Many scientists do not accept Big Bang Theory but they do accept that the origin and the complexity of the cosmos need explaining. Similarly, many scientists are ambivalent about Darwinian Evolution and acknowledge that it is possible that many (maybe even all) complex life forms emerge without any natural selection operating whatsoever. Such scientists accept that life begets life and even that sometimes it is possible that non-life produces life but propose alternative explanations for life that either diminish the scope of natural selection as a creative force or supplants it with another natural (chemical, physical, probabilistic) process.

What scientists believe as fellow observers of the world is that there are curious phenomena needing explaining. There appear to be law-like regularities in nature or curious organisms behaving in ways sometimes conducive to survival and sometimes not; they only sometimes accept explanations of these provisionally, based on observable, testable, imperfect evidence. Religious people agree superficially with this attitude, but, where they differ with science is in their purely faith-based belief (wholly not dependent on empirical evidence) that not only are such things describable by observation and inference, such things are only fully explicable by reference to at least one intelligent, super-powerful, supernatural creator-being or force whose existence cannot be doubted.

Every article of faith in science is subject to doubt and only accepted conditioned on and constrained by empirical evidence. But most articles of faith in religion are never doubted, each is unconditionally believed and none are constrained by any evidentiary limits whatsoever. Faith overrides "reasonable doubt" in religion or when coupled with wishful thinking. Faith licenses the religious to accept what appears impossible: miracles, healings, epiphanies etc. In science, faith is the enemy of reasons for accepting; indeed, grounds for reasonable doubt are sought out---no scientist wants to accept what might be false or better accounted for by a more accurate theory. Religion says: "Many miracles are inexplicable, thus a mysterious divinity must be their cause." Science says: "Many allegedly miraculous events have been reported and are heretofore inexplicable, thus we need to consider (a) whether such events occur and (b) whether other explanations account for what is alleged before we settle on any traditional, popular or untestable explanations."

Science can function without believing that whatever it accepts is true or beyond reasonable doubt. Religion cannot. For instance, science can explain religious experiences (REs) or near-death "out of body" experiences (OBEs) without referring to souls, spirits, gods or angels. Religious people think these are proofs of the divine or immortality or evidence of life-after-death. But scientists do not go so far, since they know, from careful, controlled observations that human minds are capable of imagining all sorts of things, especially under the influence of brain chemicals released during stressful events. Also, meditation, drugs, exhaustion, hallucination, seizures, brain surgeries and even memories induce and inform REs and OBEs. Religion cannot even entertain the possibility that prophets did not talk to God (or divine messengers) or that its messianic-heroes healed the sick or arose from the dead. Can a religious person really imagine there is no heaven or a life without meaning? Science routinely imagines the cosmos without a beginning or life without a purpose.

So here are five big differences. (1) Religion presumes more than science, since it assumes the existence of entities or a non-physical realm about which science remains skeptical or silent, given that whatever science cannot examine and test science is neutral about. (2) Religion has too many articles of faith science can do without: In science, what explains with fewer commitments to unsubstantiated speculation or unobservables is better than what explains with more. (3) Religion has a built-in faith-based immunity to criticism and scrutiny which science rejects; the scientific attitude requires a perpetual, skeptical attitude about articles of faith however much these may support what one wishes to believe. (4) Religion believes what it does not bother to prove, since evidence is either not needed or optional as long as it is complementary; science accepts only what it proves (tests) and this is only conditioned upon the quantity and quality of the evidence available. (5) Religion never rejects or corrects its foundational beliefs, but science often does---this is the source of its honesty and its usefulness. Science is a self-correcting, revisionary, fallible process that routinely revises and even abandons altogether inadequate hypotheses in favor of better ones.

Is Heaven Guilt Money?

When many people consider the suffering and death that seems gratuitous in this world, they find comfort in the idea that the next world will be continual, infinite bliss. In response to problem of evil challenges to the existence of God, theists have often tried to absolve God by pointing out that a completely miserable existence in this life will be vastly outweighed and overshadowed by the unimaginable bliss of heaven that will go on forever. It would seem that they think that the evil in this world really doesn’t matter because there is so much good to come. Tom, a recent commenter, summarized William Lane Craig this way: eternal life with God is so infinitely pleasurable and glorious that the sufferings of this life are not even worthy to be compared with it. If Heaven is +100, then evil on earth is only, say, -5.

Good-Will-Outweigh-Evil theodicies of this sort completely miss the relevant point. Suppose Michael Jackson, after sexually molesting a child, pleads, “but that was just a few minutes of harm I did to him. Compare that to the incredible wealth and happiness I lavished on him and his family with the 10 million dollar out-of-court settlement I gave them. Doesn’t that incredible reward make a difference?”

Or imagine that Donald Trump walks by an alley in Manhattan and witnesses a brutal mugging. All Trump needs to do is dial 911 to get the victim, call him Smith, some help. Trump doesn’t call, and Smith gets brutally beaten nearly to death. Later in a fit of guilt Trump donates 100 million dollars to Smith and his family, and acquires all of the best medical care for Smith to assure him a speedy and complete recovery. Does the award that Trump gives Smith after the gratuitous suffering absolve Trump of moral responsibility? No. Should Trump have done something? Yes. Should we conclude that Trump did the moral and virtuous thing when he ignored Smith’s mugging because of the amends that Trump made later? No. And Trump’s guilt would have been that much worse if he had done the beating, right?

Obviously, committing some horrible atrocity to someone, or standing by idly when you could have done something to stop it is not rectified by any amount of award or “guilt money,” if you will. Even if we have eternal bliss in heaven, that doesn’t change the fact that on that those children were herded into the gas chambers at Auschwitz, or that the tsunami wiped out 240,000 people. Gratuitous suffering is gratuitous suffering, no matter how peachy things are later. The immorality of committing it to someone or allowing to happen when you could have done something isn’t affected in the slightest by the fact that it won’t always be happening.

It is a perversion of morality and indicates a twisted slavishness to the God idea for Good-Will-Outweigh-Evil theodicists to dismiss all of the gratuitous suffering in human history with this wave of the hand. No person with a minimal amount of moral decency would ever accept such a superficial justification for such moral neglect in the face of profound evil. Among other things, espousing this view thoroughly discredits any claim that the theist might have made that morality can only come from God and only by believing. What this justification makes clear is quite the opposite—often it is a belief in God that makes it possible for us to achieve a level of moral insensitivity and moral distortion that we would not have had the imagination to come up with otherwise. The slavish devotion to the God idea drives us to new lows of moral indifference.

The Super Evil Challenge

Let’s say in a problem solving situation or an exertion of the will of a being with a purpose, when all of the downsides, negatives, and evils have been reduced as much as they can given the parameters of the problem and the tools available for solving it, then the evils associated with the solution or act have been optimized. It is not enough that some good come from an evil, nor is it enough that more good come from the evils. It might not be worth it, or there might be some better solution available with less evil. Suppose that you have a tooth that has a cavity that needs to be treated. You could continue to ignore it. Or a neighbor has offered to pull it out with some pliers with no anaesthetic for free. Or you can go to the dentist on 25^th street who will fill the cavity for $500. Or there is another dentist on B street who will fill the cavity for $250, and you have every reason to think that the 25^th street dentist and the B street dentist will do equivalent work. You can afford $250, but not $500 for the problem. There are 4 solutions available in the situation, but one of them is better overall than the others. The evil that you will have to endure with the B street dentist, the discomfort of getting the tooth worked on, the lost time from work, and the $250, is optimized with regard to the solution which is addressing the cavity.

Theistic solutions to the problem of evil should be understood from the other side of the equation. We find ourselves in the midst of what might possibly be the equivalent of a complicated, painful, and very large procedure that is lasting for eons. If there is an omni God, then the evils of the procedure would have been optimized. Every pain, every death, every bit of suffering, and every parking ticket or ingrown toenail would have been minimized as much as is logically possible. But we don’t and can’t know from seeing the planning and decision making process that things have in fact been optimized. We don’t even know that there was planning or decision making process at all or that any of it has a point. And the analogy is strained by the fact that God is alleged to be an omni-being. The dentist (and your neighbor) is limited by her knowledge, her tools, her education, her ability to deaden pain, and her materials. She will readily admit that her methods are not perfect, but they are the best she can do. But an omni-being would suffer none of those physical limitations of knowledge and power. An omni-being would be able to produce the best solution that is logically, not just physically, possible.

From where we are in all of this, all we can do is observe features of the events surrounding us and try to figure out first, if there was a planning and decision making process to it at all, and second if there are any reasons to think from the events around us that every single evil that has ever transpired is an optimized evil. Is someone going to work on us with a pair of rusty pliers? Is there any point to it all? Or is it evident that this is the most highly tuned, sensitive and pain-efficient procedure that an infinitely wise, good, and powerful being could have produced?

In every case in your life where you perform some action from the most trivial to the most important, you do so on the presumption that the world could be better in some fashion than it actually is. Things would be better if I had a cup of coffee. Things would be better if we could achieve peace in the middle east. Things would be better if a Democrat was elected president. Things would be better if I stepped out of the path of that oncoming bus. Right now, without even thinking about it very hard, you can come up with a thousand ways in which the world could be improved. And you can come up with a list that isn’t just about improving it selfishly for you, but ways in which it could really be improved for everybody.

First, it’s hard to see how we could possibly rectify believing that evil has been cosmically optimized with any sort of action on our parts. Second, it’s also obvious that every decision that you make, opinion that you express, and action you perform presumes that evil has not been optimized in the world. If we didn’t presume that things are not optimal, we’d have no grounds for acting. Third, of the face of it, every one of us encounters a multitude of situations every day where it sure looks like things could be better than they are, if only by a little bit.

So the burden of proof for theism in the face of the problem of evil is to overcome all of the evidence in all of our lives for a suboptimal world and show that evil has been optimized in every regard for every moment of all of history. The indirect route of doing that is to give an argument for an OG’s existence that is more compelling than the extent to which evil does not appear to be optimized. Can the burden of proof that all evil in the history of sentience is optimized evil be met? Do we have reasons for believing in God that are more compelling than all of the suffering in history. I don’t think that we have such reasons. The vast majority of people, even the believers, seem to agree that the existence of God is not the sort of thing that can be proven or shown through argument.

Bogus Probabilistic Judgments and God

There are frequentist and Bayesian approaches to probabilistic judgments about the likelihood that some claim is true.

In frequentist probability judgments we must have prior observations of the relevant data to produce a statistical claim such as “In the United States, 51% of babies born are female.” With that data about the previous rate of female babies, we can pick a random baby being born and predict that there is a 51% chance that it will be female. This claim is represented as P(f) = .51.

So if the property in question is certain, then the P(x) = 1, and if there is no chance that the property will occur then P(x) = 0.

In many cases, however, where we have not been able to observe prior relevant instances of the property or phenomena in question the Bayesian probability assessments allow us to form a probability judgment. If we were trying to predict the likelihood that a new technology would break down such as a missile that had never been launched before, or the likelihood that a basketball team in one division could beat a team in another division where they had never played before, we would have no previous data upon which to base the estimation.

We would need to use our other knowledge of factors that would be likely to affect the outcome. Suppose that I am trying to judge the probability of c = Hilary Clinton wins the United States presidency in 2008. And I have a body of relevant background knowledge K. We are asking what is the probability that c is true given background information K? or P(c|K)? If we had frequency data, like in the case of the percentage of female babies born in previous years, we could use that in our background knowledge.

The Bayesian formulations of probability are particularly useful because they allow us to distinguish between different probabilities that different individuals would assign to the same event given different subjective kinds and amounts of background information. If Susan has a great deal of information about Clinton’s bid for the presidency, and that information, as she sees it, strongly indicates that Clinton will win, then P(c|K) for her will be higher than Mary who has a lot of information that appears to indicate that Clinton will lose. So naturally the kinds of background information, the amount, the quality and reliability of it will affect the resulting estimations that each woman gives to the event. If Susan primarily reads left wing, liberal, pro-Clinton news sources, yet she thinks that those sources give her an accurate picture, then the likelihood of c|K will approach 1.

Another important component of point about probabilistic reasoning is that the total probability of all the possible outcomes must add up to 1. So if there are only two teams, A and B, competing to win a game, then since one of them must win, P(A|K) + P(B|K) = 1. And if there are currently 12 candidates for the Republican, Democrat, and all third party nominations, then the probability of all of those added together must be 1. So as the options increase, the likelihood that any one outcome will result is diminished. This aspect of probabilistic reasoning is relevant in the God cases we will consider.

What about God? Bayesian reasoning has been used lately to calculate the probability that God does or does not exist. In a famous modern version of the design argument, Richard Swinburne has argued that our background information renders it exceedingly unlikely that all of the matter in the universe would behave according to such a simple, elegant, consistent, and orderly set of natural laws.

Swinburne says,

“That there should be material bodies is strange enough; but that they should all have such similar powers which they inevitably exercise, seems passing strange. It is strange enough that physical objects should have powers at all—why should they not just be, without being able to make a difference in the world? But that they should all, throughout infinite time and space, have some general powers identical to those of all other objects (and they all be made of components of very few fundamental kinds, each component of a given kind being identical in all characteristics with each other such component) and yet there be no cause of this at all seems incredible. . . . Yet this orderliness, if there is no explanation in terms of the action of God, is the orderliness of coincidence.” (70 Pojman—The Existence of God, 1979)

As Swinburne sees it, there are only two possibilities. Either God is responsible for the existence of an orderly universe, or it is the product of random chance. So we are comparing the probability that the orderly universe came about by God’s hand to the probability that it just happened. Most of us would agree that it does seem exceedingly unlikely that chance could have produced all natural law for all matter over all time. And Swinburne maintains that we have background information about God’s preferences for beauty, order, simplicity, and structure, and we have reason to believe that God would desire an environment that would be conducive to our existence and the growth of our knowledge and moral virtue. So the resulting probability that we would find a universe like this one as a result of God’s act of creation is vastly greater than the probability that we would find one that is the product of random chance. Thus, the probability that God exists is very high.

The problem with this sort of reasoning, even though it may appear to be compelling at first, is that it reflects a profound lack of imagination and myopia about the range of possibilities.

Suppose I am visiting a foreign country and I wander into a stadium where a very popular professional sports game is being played. I don’t recognize the sport, I know nothing about the rules, and I have very little information about the context of the match. But it does appear to me after watching the plays for a bit that there are two teams, and each is trying to outscore the other. I also see a big scoreboard at the end of the field and an enormous trophy that appears to be waiting for the winners. I look at the teams, see the red jersey team score a few times, and figure out that they are ahead by many points on the scoreboard. So I conclude that given that one team’s losing means the other one loses, and that red is substantially ahead, the probability that the red team will win the trophy is very high, and the probability that the green team will win the trophy is very low. The two probabilities must add up to 1, so I make an educated guess that the red team has a .8 chance of winning the trophy and the green team has the other .2 chance.

I leave before the match ends, and later I ask one of my local friends about the game. He tells me that in fact there is a very large tournament that is being played. The match between the red and green teams is just one of over a 1,000 matches that will be played between 2,000 teams. The winners of each round move on to the play other winners until a winner from among all of the 2,000 original teams is awarded the big trophy that I saw. Obviously, this new information and all these new possibilities that I did not previous know about affect my estimation of the likelihood that the red team would win the trophy. They may have been likely to win that match, but the likelihood of their beating every other team in the tournament for the trophy is an entirely different matter. And with my gross lack of information about the game and the other teams, I realize I am not in any sort of position to assign a likelihood to red’s winning the trophy now. With games, hazarding a guess in these circumstances is harmless. But if the outcomes in question were more important, say about whether the navigation system in a new passenger plane will work, it be would be irresponsible and foolish of me to offer my ridiculously under informed opinion about the outcome.

The mistake I made in estimating their chances of red’s winning as so high is comparable to the mistake that people, including Swinburne, frequently make with regard to God’s existence. If in fact there were only two possible outcomes—either the red or the green team wins, or either God created the universe or it happened by chance—then odds that one of those two outcomes will result will be much higher than if there are 1,000 or 2,000 total possible outcomes. If there are an infinite number of possible outcomes or hypotheses, then it would not appear that we could reliably or successfully apply Bayesian probabilities to the scenario at all.

That is the problem with leaping to the God option as the only other possibility besides random chance. What we are trying to explain, according to Swinburne, is the cause of all the orderly matter in nature. How many different supernatural forces might be responsible? It might have been some supernatural but sub-omni being—one that lacks all knowledge, or it might have lacked all power, or it certainly might have lacked all goodness; there might have been 2 of them, or 10, or 50; it might not have been a blind, unconscious force, not a personal being; it might have been aliens; it might have been 2 aliens; or a stupid alien; or a negligent alien, and on and on and on. What we have seen with the teleological and cosmological arguments is that the evidence before us underdetermines the God inference. God might have done—it seems possible that an omni-being could have done it. But many other forces that are lesser than God are consistent with the results we find too.

Since this list is infinitely long, we can’t really get any help from Bayesian reasoning because we just don’t have adequate background information to assign probabilities to all of these hypotheses, and there appears to be an infinitely long list of them. Over and over again in God arguments that invoke Bayes theorem to motivate their conclusion we see this failure of imagination and artificially narrow assessment of the possibilities. Stephen Unwin is guilty of the same mistake in The Probability of God. It happens so often that we have to suspect that they are being disingenuous in introducing probabilistic reasoning of any kind in the first place. People are easily overwhelmed by all the technical talk and formulas. But when the results at the end of the page show that the probability that God exists = .85 or some such high number, we’re all suitably impressed with how “scientific” it all seems. But if we are serious about considering all the possible explanatory hypotheses and trying to sort between them, then we’ll have to treat the God story as just one competing among many. And if the list of possibilities is infinitely long, then we should reject this bogus application of Bayes theorem to the matter in principle.

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.