Everything is to the Glory of God

Now it’s thought by many who are religious that we evolved. It turns out, they claim, that natural selection is God’s means of achieving his ends. Futhermore, that evolution was aided from time to time by God giving it a little nudge when necessary.

Now it’s thought by many people who are religious that the physical constants that physics has found in nature—the strong nuclear force, the weak force, Planck’s constant, the mass of the top quark, and so on—are all part of God’s doing. God is responsible for the narrow range of values for the laws of nature that keep our universe on the knife edge that makes life possible.

When we discover that the universe is 15 billion years old and not 6,000, and that humanity has been around for 100,000 years and didn’t start with Adam and Eve, they acknowledge (reluctantly) “yes, that’s right. That was God’s plan. Isn’t the breadth of God’s plan sweeping?”

It would appear that every conceivable discovery is interpreted as evidence of God’s existence and God’s transcendent power, knowledge, and goodness. And no possible developments in our empirical investigations will be accepted as counter evidence. It’s a sort of reverse conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theorist takes everything that happens to be more proof that the government is watching him. The fact that he can’t get any pictures of the black helicopters surveiling him just shows how stealthy they are. The fact that no one around him lets on that they are spying on him just shows how good they are at covering their tracks. The fact that we cannot find compelling evidence that links the CIA and the mob as conspirators in the John F. Kennedy’s assassination itself shows that the CIA and the mob did it because no one else could have so effectively concealed their scheme. But with God, everything we discover, including the fact that there appears to be no need to invoke any supernatural agency to explain any phenomena we analyze, is taken to indicate just how transcendent God is. Even the fact that the universe appears to be just the sort of place you’d expect if there was no powerful, knowledgeable, and caring supernatural being itself is taken to indicate that that sort of being has good reasons for making its presence completely undetectable.

In all seriousness, if God were to build the universe and then give us a book, a doctrine, and a religion with which to worship him, and if all of the remarkable things about God’s role in the creation and sustainance of the universe that believers claim are true, then wouldn’t we have expected to find some hint about them from God, from his religion, from his book, or from his believers before they were discovered by science? In every, science forges ahead through hard work, insight, and struggle, to discover some truth about the world. And then, after science has done all the heavy lifting, the religious dogmatists snatch the discovery, “Of course, we knew that all along because that’s a part of God’s remarkable creation. It all just suggests more praise to God’s glory for his universe.”

There remain many unanswered questions in science now. We aren’t sure about the existence of the Higgs-Boson, or the graviton, or the relationship of the gravitational force to the other fundamental forces. We don’t have a clear, developed picture of the origins of consciousness in evolutionary history. We don’t have adequate information to ascertain the prevalence of life in the universe at large. But presumably with time, hard work, and human ingenuity, we will find answers to all of these questions. So here is the challenge for the believer. If all of those future discoveries in science are going to be co-opted and neatly adapted to show that God is such a profound being, then we should be able to find some indicator of these mechanisms of God’s handiwork in religion, religious doctrine, or the words of God himself without science to do all the hard work. If the four fundamental forces—gravity, strong, weak, and electromagnetic—are all God’s means of constructing the universe, afterall, then why can’t we find any indication of that anywhere in any religious doctrine or tradition before physics discovered them. If evolution was the method whereby God brought life into the universe as so many Americans now believe, then why can’t we find even the slightest hint of it in any religious source or the word of God prior to Darwin’s hard fought battle with those same believers? If the intelligent design hypothesis about God’s interventions in evolutionary history is correct, then why did no religious source ever give any indication of it until the 1990s? If viruses, not evil demon possession, were the source of disease all along and part of God’s plan, why has religious doctrine always been so clearly in favor of demons? If the abundant amounts of apparently pointless suffering and death in the world has always been part of God’s plan to build moral character, then did we not get any indication that this was true from religious sources until after atheists like William Rowe in the 1970s argued that pointless evil is evidence that there is no God?

The answer should be obvious. With every new development and empirical discovery, believers (usually, after resisting the truth with all their might,) construct an ad hoc explanation that allows them to coopt that discovery and contort it into their worldview and use it to their advantage. That their worldview previously contained no indicators of what is now taken to be obvious because of what science has forced them to accept is conveniently written off as metaphor, discounted, neglected, or forgotten. “Adam and Eve? Oh, we never really believed that literally.” “The earth is only 6,000 years old? That’s so quaint—it isn’t what we really believe.” All of the ad hoc re-engineering and reverse conspiracy gymnastics in order to salvage an Iron Age ideology is gross intellectual dishonesty when it is clear that the space left for the God of the gaps is rapidly shrinking.

How Big Would God's Universe Be?

Nicholas Everitt gives an argument from scale (in The Nonexistence of God, and excerpted in The Improbability of God, eds, Martin and Monnier) where concludes that the sheer size of the universe and insignificance of humanity in it gives us strong evidence that theism is false. He offers this argument:

1) If the God of classical theism existed, with the purposes traditionally ascribed to him, then he would create a universe on a human scale, i.e., one that is not unimaginably large, unimaginably old, and in which human beings form an unimaginably tiny part of it, temporally and spatially.

2) The world does not display a human scale, So:

3) There is evidence against the hypothesis that the God of classical theism exists with the purposes traditionally ascribed to him.

He likens our situation to that of Robinson Crusoe, wondering whether or not there are other humans on our lonely island. Crusoe provisionally forms some expectations about what sort of evidence he would expect to find if there were someone else—they would leave evidence of their presence, make themselves manifest and not hide, send smoke signals, and so on. Then finding none of the things he would have expected to find, he draws the preliminary conclusion that he is alone.

There’s a substantial problem with this argument. Suppose, as Everitt indicates, we had found ourselves in a universe of a manifestly human scale. Instead of a hundred trillion galaxies, we found a few hundred. The Sun is a mere 10,000 miles from earth instead of 93 million (presumably cooled down to scale). We look beyond the Sun and the next star is a mere 100,000 miles away instead of 3 billion light years. And our natural history is discovered to be 5,000 or 10,000 years instead of 100,000. Would we look at that world and draw the implication that any God worthy of the name was responsible for it? Would that sort of world be indicative of an infinite supernatural force with all power, all knowledge, and all goodness?

Most certainly not. What would be much more obvious in that world is that whatever sort of force or being was responsible for it did not need to have a nature or power or knowledge much beyond our own. If the world displayed a human scale, then the humanness or near humanness of its author would be much more strongly indicated.

My point is not that the scale of the universe we find ourselves in does indicate the infinite power, knowledge, and goodness of God. It does not. (see several previous posts on the question.) But a universe of such staggering scale is at least more prima facie consistent with the claims about God’s profound transcendence that believers typically make. A small, comprehensible universe would make the inference to a being worthy of the title “God” even more difficult, not easier as Everitt suggests. It’s a bit like Groucho Marx’s dilemma when he remarked that he wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member. If the universe were scaled down to anthropomorphic proportions, then the inference to a merely human or near human creator would be obvious.

Possible, Possible, Possible: Overdrawing the God Account

If we do our due diligence and try to consider all the most substantial defenses of God seriously it is evident that inadequacies in the arguments leave them at best able to argue for possibilities, not actualities. There are insurmountable objections to the God positions and arguments. But even if we overlook a host of problems, at most they might show that God possibly exists. Even if we are exceedingly charitable and grant these arguments their preliminary conclusions, they still don’t close the circle—they don’t give us grounds to conclude that God exists. What is frequently happening in these situations is that theists acknowledge difficulties on one topic and expect to be able to overcome those difficulties with a successful argument elsewhere. But when we look at the problems with the whole network of justifications, it becomes clear that there is no actual anchor for the whole tenuous fantasy.

Consider the first cause argument. The universe must have begun to exist, it is argued. And everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Therefore, the universe must have had a cause. Therefore the cause of the universe is God.

Consider design arguments: The universe, or objects in it, exhibit properties that seem to indicate planning, purpose, design, or intent. The best or only explanation for the presence of those properties is that some designer was responsible. Therefore, God designed the universe.

Consider miracles: Many people claim to have witnessed miracles performed by other people who claim to have divine powers. The testimony about those miracles is taken to be evidence that some supernatural event occurred. Therefore God exists.

Consider evil: It’s even more damning that when confronted with the problem of evil as counter-evidence for the existence of God, prestigious philosophers and conscientious believers are reduced by their own admission to arguing that it is possible that there is a God and it is possible that this possible God has a plan (that we don’t understand) that justifies all the gratuitous suffering.

Even if we allow that there was a first cause, or that the universe had a designer, or that miracles occurred, the strongest conclusion we can infer from these arguments is that it is possible that God was responsible. It’s possible that an all powerful, all knowledgeable, and all good being was the first cause, but an argument for a first cause doesn’t require that conclusion. There’s always the powerful alien problem, or the possibility of a lesser divine being, or magic dragons, and so on.

It’s possible that the designer of the universe is the all powerful, all knowledgeable, and morally perfect God of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but the design argument doesn’t require that conclusion. At most, the design argument would show that some force with a plan introduced order. Again, that force could be aliens, Allah, a lesser deity, an idiot god, a committee of idiot gods, and so on.

It’s possible that miracles (if they occurred) are authored by God, even though having divine properties are not required to perform them. The force that brought them about might only have enough power or knowledge to do that feat, but is a far lesser being than God.

It’s possible that evolution had some supernatural intervention to help it along, even though an argument for intelligent design doesn’t require an omni-God to be that helper. Aliens, and idiot gods again.

It’s possible that the feelings of a sublime, divine, cosmic supernatural force you’re having are brought about by contact by God, even though we know that contact with God isn’t necessary to induce those feelings. Fasting, sleep deprivation, hallucinatory drugs, and aliens again.

It’s possible that your cognitive faculties are working correctly and the feeling of having veridical access to God is in fact veridical, even though it is not necessary for the feeling to be veridical in order for it to feel like it is. History has shown us over and over again that merely having an intense feeling that you are right is an unreliable guide to when you are.

And it is possible that every single instance of suffering in the history of sentience is actually part of the plan (that we don’t understand) of a possible God. It’s also possible that there is no such plan and no such being.

An important note is that I am not alone in singling out these problems with these arguments. Some of theism’s most accomplished philosophical defenders like Plantinga, Hick, Swinburne, and Van Inwagen acknowledge the short comings of these approaches to the God question.

There is a stunning gap in justification here. In order for a belief in God to be justified for a person, that person needs to have grounds that render the belief likely to be true. It won’t be enough to just sketch out possibilities on every side of the topic: Well, possibly God was the first cause. And possibly God had a reason for tolerating evil. And it is possible that the designer was God. And it is possible that if God designed us, then when our cognitive faculties are functioning properly, we will have a reliable, justified belief that there is a God.

If it is possible that one of the winning lottery numbers tomorrow will be 39, and it is also possible that one will be 7, and another one will possibly be 71, we don’t now have reason to think that the group of numbers: 39, 7, and 71 will probably win the lottery tomorrow.

Theism isn’t reasonable until we have some grounds that make it probable. All of these possibilities added up don’t make theism reasonable.

The believer can’t keep dodging the burden of proof forever. They are writing checks all over town to answer the challenges about these different lines of defense, but there’s no money in the account. If a table has 4 possible legs, we can’t expect it to stand up.

Giving God A Free Pass

One of the most popular responses to the problem of evil from believers has been to argue that we are not in a position to be able to judge the rightness or wrongness of events that we observe because for all we know, somewhere down the line what appears to be a case of pointless evil today will in fact play an indispensible role in a greater good that justifies it. So ironically, the believer here presses for agnosticism about whether or not instances of horrible suffering and death that have every appearance of being utterly pointless or not worth any good that we would accept. We just can’t know, they argue, whether or not the case will turn out to be pointless, so we must suspend judgment about whether or not it actually is gratuitous evil. And therefore, God cannot be faulted.

This agnosticism is coupled, not surprisingly, with a confidence derived from other sources—faith, revelation, the sensus divinitatus, the cosmological argument—that there is indeed an omnipotent, all knowing, and all good God. So even though those cases of suffering appear to be evil, and even though we should be agnostic about them, we can be confident that in fact every case of suffering in all the history of sentience on this planet will work out as a necessary part of God’s plan and are for the better. This shift of the burden of proof for God puts a tremendous amount of pressure on those other sources of information about God to be correct, of course. And none of them prove to be up to the task.

One point that deserves comment here is that no morally decent person would ever accept these kind of logical gymnastics as a defense of any other sort of morally evil act by a person.

Imagine if a serial killer, or a war time rapist, or a prolific pedophile offered up a similar kind of defense: “Your honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know that it appears that what I did was truly pointless and evil. But consider if you will that we do not know whether or not what I did will in fact turn out for the worse. For all we know, my actions may have actually done my victims, or their families, or humanity in general a great service that far outweighs the suffering created by my actions.”

A man named Ottis Toole is suspected of being the killer of Adam Walsh. After Adam was abducted from a Sears store and killed, his father John Walsh, who was leading an relatively unremarkable life until then, was motivated to become one of the most influential and effective anti-crime activists in American history. His program “America’s Most Wanted,” and legislation that he was instrumental in helping to pass have been responsible for putting tens of thousands of criminals in jail. Although Ottis Toole was suspected of being the culprit, he was never charged. But suppose that he had been, and suppose that he offered the “For a Greater Good” defense. Suppose he had argued that he shouldn’t be condemned for murdering (by decapitation) that little boy because of all the good that it created.

What should be obvious is that morally decent people would never accept either the agnosticism defense, nor the greater good defense, in real world cases.

But what is stunning is that ordinary people with normal, appropriate moral reactions to real cases of moral evil like the Adam Walsh case will suddenly abandon all sense of moral decency when the question comes to God. They will accept any justification, no matter how tenuous, as long as it gives them some slender thread of an excuse to absolve God of responsibility for things that they would never let anyone else get away with.

Sam Harris: The Problem with Atheism and Being Spiritual Without Spookiness

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2007/10/the_problem_with_atheism.html

Does the Atheist Need to Respond to Faith?

In order to secure reasonable justification for atheism, does the non-believer need to answer the faith defense for theism? Your typical atheist feels compelled to say something (negative) about believing in God on the basis of faith, but do they need to? The answer is no. The faith account of belief in God presents no challenge to non-belief.

When one has faith that something is true, they believe it despite inadequate or contrary evidence. No one would say that they have faith that their basketball team was going to win the playoffs if by all measures the team is vastly superior to all of their rivals. People invoke faith when the chips are down, when life looks grim, when they can’t conceive of why God would allow someone innocent to suffer, or when it doesn’t look like there’s adequate justification in terms of evidence. If we had ample, compelling evidence, then there’d be no need and no room for faith.

Reason is prescriptive. When there is compelling evidence in front of someone and they understand it, and it is clear that it implies a certain conclusion, then they ought to believe that conclusion. Suppose that Smith is a defendant in a trial where the prosecutors have shown video of Smith holding up the liquor store, they found the gun registered in Smith’s name with his fingerprints on it, multiple witnesses all testified that Smith did it, the store owner identified him as the robber, other witnesses heard Smith promising to rob the store the day before, and Smith’s alibi has been shown to be false. The jurors, if they are reasonable people, should convict him on the basis of the evidence. If they don’t, they’re being irrational or unreasonable, and they’re failing to fulfill their epistemic (and moral) duties. So when the right conditions have been met, the evidence prescribes belief (there can be lots of mitigating circumstances that we will ignore for the moment). When someone doesn’t believe under those conditions, then they are epistemically culpable or at fault. By not believing, they make an epistemic mistake that they should rectify.

But faith is not prescriptive. When someone chooses to believe in God despite the fact that the evidence underdetermines or even contradicts the conclusion, on what grounds could they maintain that others who haven’t done the same have somehow failed in their epistemic duties, or are rationally culpable? In what way could the non-faithful possibly being doing something wrong by not also having faith? A believer by faith simply has no grounds from which they can argue that others who don’t have faith ought to. They can’t criticize the non-faithful for doing something contrary to reason or ignoring the evidence by not believing. In not believing by faith, the non-faithful are seeking to accept only that which is supported by the evidence. What is the faithful believer going to say: “You’re not listening to reason! You need to accept the obvious implication of the evidence! All of the evidence indicates that you should believe on faith!!”

In order to secure justification for believing that there is no God one would need to seriously consider the best arguments that have been made for the conclusion that there is a God. Those arguments are at least prima facie grounds against the reasonableness of non-belief. Believing there is no God is premature until one has good reasons to think those arguments are unacceptable. But the fact that many people have opted to believe even though they acknowledge that they don’t have reasonable grounds for doing so presents no challenge whatsoever to the person who concludes that the reasonable conclusion is to disbelieve. If their belief is acquired by faith, then they can make no claim against the rationality of atheism. They have made it clear that reasons and evidence are irrelevant to them—they’re going to believe what they want and to hell with being rational. Rejecting the relevance of having justifications for beliefs leaves them with no leverage and no possible complaint against the atheist.

Many atheists feel compelled to respond when a believer says, “Well, I have faith that God exists.” The atheist will offer a variety of criticisms of believing by faith. But it should now be clear that justifying atheism doesn’t require discounting faith. Furthermore, trying to rebut faith is typically futile. The faithful have already implicitly (or explicitly) acknowledged that what the evidence or arguments indicate is irrelevant to them. By invoking faith, they have already embarrassed and made a mockery of themselves more than any thoughtful reasoned rebuttal could accomplish.

Self-Deception: Religion and Science are Compatible

Many very smart, otherwise ungullible people, have an affection for religion that belies their true motives and their intelligence when they offer accounts of how science and religion can coexist. Those same people can show such acumen and clarity of thought when it comes to matters in their fields—in biology, physics, and philosophy. But for religion there’s no contortion, no rationalization, and no accommodation that they won’t stoop to because they are so deeply in the clutches of the urge to believe. They so want the religion in their hearts to settle nicely and comfortably with the science of their minds that they’ll do anything to make them fit together. And they get hearty applause and accolades from eager audiences who are delighted to have their craving for religiousness validated. Consider Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, who has sold countless copies of his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Stephen Jay Gould, former Harvard biologist, coined a name for the position that has been taken up by hopeful compatibilists all over the world: NOMA, or science and religion are Non-Overlapping Magisteria. Here’s a few of his comments in the famous essay about NOMA:

[Concerning science and religion] No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or "nonoverlapping magisteria").

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch clichés, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual] grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology.

As plausible, and reasonable as this may sound at first glance, realize that no one would even consider accepting an analogous defense of the place of magic or astrology in our lives:

The worlds of magic and science are non-overlapping magisteria. One concerns the realm of physical, empirically confirmed, objective, testable facts. The other concerns a realm of magical forces, wishes, spiritual entities, and the mystical power of symbols. Science addresses what is the case in the empirical world. Magic fulfills a vital and universal need in human hearts for personal and spiritual guidance. It provides meaning and counseling for a side of humanity that is not addressed by science. The two worlds do not overlap—they concern themselves with different subject matters. Nor do they conflict because they take essentially different topics, principles, and phenomena to be their subject matter. They don’t conflict any more than the study of art and its principles conflict with the study of botany. Furthermore, magic is so deeply loved and needed by so many people that science should not presume to overstep its bounds and claim to have an authority on the truth in that realm where it has no standing.

I deeply love and respect the separate domains of science and magic and the NOMA solution to their apparent conflict.

We should not be seduced by the compatibilist, “separate worlds” view that has become so popular. Science makes claims about the world, about humans, about our anthropological origins, about morality, and about the way we came to exist that are directly in conflict with and incompatible with the worldview of religion. Religion makes assertions about what is true in the world, what the nature of being human is, what our origins are, what our destinies are, and what sort of activity science should be that are in direct conflict with the worldview of science. The earth cannot be both 6,000 years old and 3 billion years old. Humans cannot both have a consciousness or soul that depends on the brain to exist and one that is immortal and independent of the body. Humans cannot both be evolved by means of natural selection from other earlier life forms and also created complete, all at once before the existence of any other animals. We cannot have the biodiversity that we have on this planet today if a flood a few thousand years ago killed all but a few pairs of animals on Noah’s ark. Prayer cannot both work and have no plausible empirical evidence in its favor. Humans cannot be both inherently wicked and corrupted by sin, and essentially sympathetic, social animals like their great ape cousins. The world cannot both be a natural, physical place explainable by science and capable of empirical explanation, and inhabited with spirits, demons, evil satanic forces, miraculous violations of physical laws, and an all powerful, magical supernatural deity.

Nor can we continue to ignore these profound incompatibilities by only focusing on those aspects of science and religion where the conflict appears to be less acute. Religion, religious movements, and religious adherents have a fundamentally different set of social, political, moral, educational, and personal goals and views that the rest of humanity. Whether you think that the truth is the province of science or of religion has a profound and direct affect on what sort of person you are, who you vote for, what kind of parent you are, what you think the future of humanity is, what kind of future you want for humanity, what sort of government you think we should have, what laws we should pass, which people are criminals, and which wars we should fight. And the only way that you can conclude that on the whole, the scientifically inclined and the religiously inclined have no substantial incompatibilities on all of these accounts is if you just haven’t been paying attention.

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.