500 Dead Gods Plus 1.

What sort of argument could be made for wide, positive atheism, or the view that no gods or divine beings exist?

Here’s one. Here’s my list of 500 dead gods from a wide range of cultures and periods, revisited:

Aa, Aah, Abil Addu, Addu, Adeona, Adjassou-Linguetor, Adjinakou, Adya Houn'tò, Agassou, Agé, Agwé, Ahijah, Ahti, Aizen Myō-ō, Ajisukitakahikone, Ak Ana, Aken , Aker , Äkräs, Aku, Allatu, Altjira, Amano-Iwato, Ame-no-Koyane, Am-heh, Amihan, Amon-Re, Amun, Amurru, Anapel, Anath, Andjety, Anhur, Anit, Anu, Anubis, Anzambe, Apsu, Arianrod, Ash , Ashtoreth, Assur, Astarte, Aten, Atum, Ayida-Weddo, Ayizan, Azaka Medeh, Azaka-Tonnerre, Azumi-no-isora, Baal, Bacalou, Badessy, Bagadjimbiri, Bahloo, Baiame, Bakunawa, Bamapana, Banaitja, Ba-Pef, Baron Cimetière, Baron La Croix, Baron Samedi, Barraiya, Bata , Bathala, Bau, Beltis, Beltu, Belus, Bernardo Carpio, Bes, Biame, Biamie, Bilé, Bimbeal, Binbeal, Boli Shah, Bossou Ashadeh, Budai, Budai, Bugady Musun, Bugid Y Aiba, Bunjil, Bunjil, Cai Shen, Ceros, Chenti-cheti, Chi You, Chimata-No-Kami, Chun Kwan, Cihang Zhenren, City god, Clermeil, Congo (loa), Consus, Cronos, Cunina, Dagan, Dagda, Dagon, Daikokuten, Damballa, Dan Petro, Dan Wédo, Daramulum, Dauke, Dea Dia, Dhakhan, Diable Tonnere, Diana of Ephesus, Diejuste, Dimmer, Dinclinsin, Dragon King, Dragon King of the East Sea, Duamutef, Dumu-zi-abzu, Dzingbe, Ea, Ebisu, Edulia, Efile Mokulu, El, Elali, Elder Zhang Guo, Elum, Engurra, Enki, Enma, En-Mersi, Enurestu, Erlang Shen, Erzulie, Ezili Dantor, Fan Kuai, Fei Lian, Feng Bo, Four sons of Horus, Fu Lu Shou, Fu Xi, Fūjin, Fukurokuju, Furrina, Futsunushi, Gargomitch, Gasan lil, Gasan-abzu, Goibniu, Gong Gong, Govannon, Gran Maître, Grand Bois, Guan Yu, Guangchengzi, Gunfled, Gwydion, Hachiman, Hadad, Hakudo Maru, Han Xiang, Hapi, Hapy, Heka , Hemen, Hermanubis, Hermes , Heryshaf, Hoderi, Hongjun Laozu, Hoori, Horus, Houyi, Huang Feihu, Hung Shing, Iah, Ibong Adarna, Iho, Iku-Turso, Ilat, Ilmatar, Ilmatar, Imhotep, Imset, Iron-Crutch Li, Isis, Istar, Isum, Iuno Lucina, Izanagi, Jade Emperor, Jar'Edo Wens, Ji Gong, Julana, Jumala, Jupiter, Juroujin, Kaawan, Kagu-tsuchi, Kalfu, Kalma, Kara Khan, Karakarook, Karei, Kari, Karora, Kerridwen, Khaltesh-Anki, Khepri, Khnum, Khonsu, Kidili, Kini'je, Kitchen God, Kmvum, Kneph, Kōjin, Ksitigarbha, Kui Xing, Kuk, Kumakatok, Kuski-banda, Kuu, Ku'urkil, Lagas, Lan Caihe, Lei Gong, Leizhenzi, Lempo, Ler, Leza, Li Jing , L'inglesou, Llaw Gyffes, Lleu, Loco (loa), Lü Dongbin, Lugal-Amarada, Maahes, Ma-banba-anna, Mademoiselle Charlotte, Maîtresse Délai, Maîtresse Hounon'gon, Maman Brigitte, Mamaragan, Mami, Mamlambo, Manawyddan, Mandulis, Mangar-kunjer-kunja, Marassa Jumeaux, Marduk, Maria Cacao, Maria Makiling, Maria Sinukuan, Marinette, Mars, Marzin, Matet boat, Mawu, Mayari, Mbaba Mwana Waresa, Meditrina, Mehen, Melek, Memetona, Menthu, Merodach, Mider, Mielikki, Min , Molech, Mombu, Morrigu, Mounanchou, Mulu-hursang, Mu-ul-lil, Muzha , Na Tuk Kong, Naam, Nana Buluku, Naunet, Ndyambi, Nebo, Nehebkau, Nergal, Nezha , Nga, Ngai, Nin, Ninib, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, Nin-lil-la, Nin-man, Nio, Nirig, Ni-zu, Njirana, Nogomain, Nuada Argetlam, Numakulla, Num-Torum, Nusku, Nu'tenut, Nyan Kupon, Nyyrikki, Nzambi, Nzame, Odin, Ogma, Ogoun, Ogoun, Ogyrvan, Ohoyamatsumi, Ōkuninushi, Olorun, Omoikane (Shinto), Ops, Osiris, Pa-cha, Pangu, Papa Legba, Peko, Perkele, Persephone, Petbe, Pie (loa), Ple, Pluto, Potina, Ptah, Pugu, Puluga, Pundjel, Pwyll, Qarradu, Qebehsenuef, Qin Shubao, Qingxu Daode Zhenjun, Ra, Raijin, Randeng Daoren, Rauni , Resheph, Rigantona, Robigus, Royal Uncle Cao, Ruwa, Ryūjin, Saa, Sahi, Samas, Sarutahiko, Saturn, Sebek, Seker, Serapis, Sesmu, Shakpana, Shalem, Shangdi, Shango, Sharrab, Shen , Shennong, Shezmu, Shina-Tsu-Hiko, Simbi, Sin, Sirtumu, Sobek, Sobkou, Sōjōbō, Sokk-mimi, Sopdu, Sousson-Pannan, Statilinus, Suijin, Suiren, Suqamunu, Susanoo, Ta Pedn, Tagd, Taiyi Zhenren, Tala, Tam Kung, Tammuz, Tapio, Temaukel, Tenenet, Tengu, Tenjin, Theban Triad, Thoth, Ti Jean Quinto, Ti Malice, Tian, Ti-Jean Petro, Tilmun, Tirawa Atius, Todote, Toko'yoto, Tomam, Tororut, Tu Di Gong, Tu Er Shen, Tuonetar, Tuoni, Ubargisi, Ubilulu, U-dimmer-an-kia, Ueras, Ugayafukiaezu, U-ki, Ukko, UKqili, Umai, U-Mersi, Umvelinqangi, Ungud, Unkulunkulu, Ura-gala, U-sab-sib, Usiququmadevu, U-Tin-dir-ki, U-urugal, Vaisravana, Vaticanus, Vediovis, Vellamo, Venus, Vesta, Wadj-wer, Wen Zhong , Weneg, Wenshu Guangfa Tianzun, Wepwawet, Werethekau, Wollunqua, Wong Tai Sin, Wuluwaid, Xargi, Xaya Iccita, Xevioso, Xuan Wu , Yama, Yau, Yemaja, Youchao, Yuanshi Tianzun, Yuchi Jingde, Yunzhongzi, Zagaga, Zaraqu, Zer-panitu, Zhang Guifang, Zheng Lun, Zhongli Quan, Zhu Rong , Zonget.

What sort of view should we have about the existence of these beings?

I haven’t carefully considered all of these gods, nor do I intend to. I’ve only thought about a handful of them, and I’ve only investigated a few of them. In those cases, it became clear that the being in question might have made perfect sense to someone living in a remote village in the jungles of Borneo a thousand years ago, but that god wouldn’t make any sense as an explanation of the world now to me or to you. Gods don’t control the weather. Shooting stars aren’t religious events. The sun and the moon are just physical bodies, nothing more. The world didn’t come from an egg hatched by a cosmic turtle. Given what we have learned now about the natural world, it looks like none of these gods is a reasonable thing to believe in any more. So I have concluded, while being prepared to change my mind in case some striking new evidence in favor of Sobek’s existence comes to light or that the moon is the sun’s brother, that none of these gods are real.

Here are some details about one of them: Puluga, the Sky God of the people of the Andaman Islands

“Puluga is the Supreme Being; he is thought of very anthropomorphically, but he dwells in the sky and his voice is the thunder,the wind his breath; hurricanes are the sign of his anger, for he sends thunderbolts to punish all those who infringe his commandments. Puluga knows everything, but only knows men’s thoughts during the day. . . He created himself a wife and they have children. He lives in the sky near the sun (feminine) and the moon (masculine), with their children the stars. When Puluga sleeps there is a drought. When it is raining the god has come down to earth and is looking for food. Puluga created the world, and the first man, Tomo. Mankind multiplied and had to disperse, and after the death of Tomo grew ever more forgetful of its creator. One day Puluga got angry and a flood covered the whole earth and destroyed mankind: only four people escaped. Puluga had mercy on them, but men still remained recalcitrant. . . “

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion.

Is Puluga real? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. As a hypothesis about the world he’s utterly implausible. If he was real, too many other things just wouldn’t make sense. Puluga was a catchall theory to explain a lot of phenomena that people didn’t have a better way to describe. The stars aren’t divine offspring. The moon isn’t masculine. There was no first human Tomo. Droughts are caused by weather patterns not sleeping gods. Rain is caused by the saturation of the atmosphere with water vapor not a god searching for food, and so on. Puluga is a magical being. There’s no magic.

What others things don’t exist that might help inform wide, positive atheism? Consider some other exotic beings that have been alleged to be real at one time or another. It’s reasonable to believe that:

There are no witches. No ghosts. There are no elves, no pixies, no trolls, no unicorns, no goblins, no fairies, no malevolent spirits, no gnomes, no succubi, no incubi, and no leprechans. There is no Bigfoot. No Loch Ness Monster. No Chupacabras. No Yeti. The Mystery Spot isn’t a Mystery. No houses are haunted. There are no werewolves, or vampires. There are no demons, and no demon possessions. It is not possible to cast a hex on someone and make something bad happen to them. If you step on a crack, you won’t break your mother’s back. Breaking a mirror does nothing negative to your future. Black cats crossing your path do not bring you bad luck. If you wear your lucky Raiders jersey while you watch the football game on television it will have no affect whatsoever on the outcome of the game. The human mind has no magical powers to act a distance. Your astrology forecast doesn’t describe your day any more accurately than it does people who have the other 11 signs of the zodiac. Tarot cards don’t work. There are no psychic powers. Dreams don’t foretell the future. You are not a Sagittarius. It is not possible to read minds. There are no animate spirits that inhabit the moon, the stars, or any natural objects. Weather patterns are not caused by the moods of supernatural or divine entities. Predictions about future catastrophes on the basis of ancient mystical texts have not come true. Bad things don’t happen on Friday the 13th. It is not possible to say some magical words and invoke supernatural forces in the world.

I take it that all of these claims are obviously true, but I’m not going to offer any justification for that here. If your wearing a Raiders jersey while watching tv in Natomas brought about their winning the game in Pittsburg, too many other things just wouldn’t make sense.

There may be some who wish to quibble with my sweeping and hasty dismissals of all things supernatural, magical, and spiritual perhaps because there was this one time when you read your horoscope and what it said was, like, soooo true, and then your cousin said that it happened to her too. And there was this other time when you were camping in the woods with your friends and you heard something strange, and you got really freaked out. I doubt that any such experiences really were of anything supernatural, but in order to make the point I wish to make, I don’t need to defend all of the claims on the list.

You’ll most likely agree that at least a large majority of these claims are true. From that, I think we can draw some general implications. It would appear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, when people have subscribed to some sort of magical, supernatural, spiritual, paranormal, or god account of what is real, we have found another better natural explanation; one that wasn’t anthropomorphic, and that doesn’t invoke mysterious magical forces or gods.
Sometimes there just isn’t any phenomena to describe at all, or in other cases we realized that there were only natural forces and entities at work and the supernatural account just didn’t fit. The supernatural account didn’t address all of the relevant information, or it didn’t address it as well, it didn’t make successful predictions, it required accepting too many other weird metaphysical claims that don’t fit, or it didn’t withstand critical analysis. Furthermore, people make mistakes, they get confused, they are hopeful, they distort, they misrepresent, they see what they want to see, and so on.

Notice that I am not arguing necessarily that people in ancient, less technologically advanced cultures than us were not justified in their beliefs. Depending upon their background beliefs, their education, and the common sense views of their culture, their belief in their god may well have made perfect sense. There’s no way, afterall, that someone living in a tiny village in rural India centuries ago who couldn’t read and who had little formal education, for example, could know what we all know now. So we can’t fault them epistemically for believing as they did. But we can reasonably conclude that their account of the world is lacking. Medieval doctors thought that all disease was the result of an imbalance in the four basic humours—black bile, green bile, blood, and phlegm. Leeches were the cure for an excess of blood in your system. That was great for them, but that’s why I don’t go find a Medieval doctor when my green bile levels are out of whack.

On the basis of what you and I know, I think it is reasonable to conclude that spooky, magical, or supernatural explanations aren’t the best account of what’s true in the world. A good part of our reasons for thinking so are all of the cases where they have failed. The past has shown us that supernatural and spiritual explanations of reality are just barking up the wrong tree. They just don’t pan out.

So where does that leave us? There is a huge burden of proof to be met by anyone claiming that some supernatural or spiritual entity is real in the light of all of these similar claims that have turned out to be mistaken. And all of these cases make it reasonable to conclude that no such beings, forces, or phenomena are real. Think of it this way: once you open that door to let one of these claims in, you’ve got an enormous amount of explaining to do about why we should expect this one to pan out. The followers of Paluga thought that, as did the Sobek-ites, and countless others.

The implication of the argument here is probably pretty clear. If all of those supernatural entities and forces aren’t real, then wouldn’t it be reasonable to apply the same reasoning to the gods that are familiar, like the God of Christianity? If there are enough similarities between the Christian God and the 500 gods, and between the role that the 500 gods played for their believers and the role that the Christian God played for its believers, then the same grounds for rejection should apply.

Of course, there are details that differ, but it sure looks like there’s a problem here. In thousands, or even millions of instances, when people have believed that some supernatural entity was real, it turned out that it wasn’t. The 500 gods on the list aren’t real. And ghosts, magic spells, and leprechans are not real. So how is this one particular supernatural claim, maybe the one that you grew up believing, different, especially when it seems to be analogous in so many ways? All of those other bogus supernatural entities should teach us something. They should leave us with a great deal of skepticism about the likelihood that any other supernatural claim will turn out to be true. It’s possible, of course. It’s also possible that magic is real, or that there are goblins. But we should demand some pretty impressive evidence to budge us off of that skepticism, however. The mere possibility isn’t enough to make them reasonable.

So the lesson we should learn from the countless specific gods, and cases of spooky, paranormal stuff that are not real is that magical, supernatural, spiritual stuff in general isn’t real. Therefore, the Christian God isn’t real, because no gods are real.

No Vital Spirits

Here’s an informative story from Patricia Smith Churchland’s Brainwise

"When William Harvey (1578-1657) began research on the heart, his guiding question was this: exactly where in the heart are the vital spirits” concocted? His question reflected the respectable, conventional, too-obvious-to-be-questioned wisdom of his time. According to conventional wisdom, blood was continuously and copiously made in the liver. The job of the heart was to make vital spirits (by virtue of which life existed) by mixing air from lungs with blood from the liver. The reason death followed the cessation of heartbeat was that the vital spirits ceased to be concocted.

In one of the great stories of science, Harvey ended up discovering something utterly different from what he sought. He discovered that the heart was actually a meaty pump, blood circulates around the body, and blood is continuously made, but not by the pint per minute and not in the liver at all. Shockingly, Harvey’s discoveries implied that almost certainly there were no vital spirits concocted in the heart—or anywhere else either. To come to see this, he had to doff the conceptual lenses of the framework of spirits—vital, animal, and natural—and don a completely different set of lenses." (256)

As I see it, we have long since passed a comparable point to Harvey’s gestalt shift with modern neuroscience and the persistent belief in a human soul. For centuries, we have labored away within a false set of presumptions about there being a special, independent, immaterial spirit that inhabits human bodies. And, not surprisingly, these common sense ideas about the existence of an immortal soul have been at the foundation of another set of myths in our religious beliefs. Our interests in God, heaven, the afterlife, eternal punishment, and human depravity and sin have been predicated on the notion that there is some essential part of us that survives the decay of the body in the grave and that goes on to some other ghostly existence. Without the existence of an eternal soul, the point about religious belief in God becomes largely moot. If we have substantial evidence to indicate that there is no afterlife for a human person, then for the most part, the mental and physical resources that we devote to God and related matters will be a waste of time and energy.

Our investigations into the human brain and nervous system have made it increasingly obvious that like Harvey’s initial presumption of vital spirits, our idea of some personal essence that exists separate from the brain is a backward holdover from model of the world that just doesn’t fit with the facts. When a brain gets damaged, the mental capacities that were produced by or depend upon that portion of our nervous tissues get compromised or destroyed. When we take psychoactive drugs that disrupt the chemical and electrical signals of our brains, the normal pattern of thoughts, reasoning, and phenomenal experience get disrupted. When the effects of those drugs wear off and the regular patterns of neural activity right themselves in our brains, our ideas and sensations return to normal. As neuroscience has pressed forward, we have become able to correlate with greater and greater precision the brain processes that are responsible for every aspect of our mental lives. It has become clear that even the most abstract, ethereal, and elusive experiences—the ones that gave us such conviction that there is something otherworldly and magical about human consciousness and existence—can be analyzed into simple, physical events in the brain.

Unlike Harvey’s situation, however, the belief in the human soul has lingered long after it has ceased to be a theoretically viable account of what we have found in our empirical investigations. Harvey, like Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, was prepared to abandon his presumptions when they were not borne out by what he discovered. But a deep and pervasive affection in us for spirituality and for the notion of God keeps us from moving on and growing up. The lesson we can learn from Harvey’s case is to have the courage and the sense to realign our assumptions, even our most fundamental ones, in the light of new information.

Retraction retraction? Imagining No Religion

The furor over the removal of the “Imagine No Religion” billboard in Rancho Cucamonga has gotten more complicated and more interesting. If you read the article in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin here, you may have noted this important claim:

According to Redevelopment Director Linda Daniels, City Hall had received 90 calls of complaint since Wednesday.

"We contacted the sign company and asked if there was a way to get it removed," Daniels said.

What would be very significant about this is that an official in City Hall construed the FFRF billboard as a problem and as a result she called the sign company and pressured them to remove it. Ordinary citizens complaining about such a billboard would hardly be surprising; but city officials have no business exerting pressure on private businesses in order to eliminate the free expression of ideas.

When I complained to the city on the email address I posted here last night, I received an email today from Kristen Compean and/or Fabian A. Villenas, Principal Management Analyst (it’s not clear which from the email.) They said, among other things,

“I am responding back to your inquiry to clear up any misunderstandings and to make it clear that the City of Rancho Cucamonga gave NO direction in the removal of that billboard message, or any billboard message. In fact, the City does not have any authority over the content of a billboard and the City does not approve what is put up on a billboard and is not authorized to remove billboard advertisements.”

The latter claim is surely right. No city has the authority in a case like this to approve or remove any billboard ads on the basis of their content—although there will be exceptions for community decency cases, but I’ll leave that for later. But the first claim, that the city gave no direction to remove the sign is in direct contradiction with what Wendy Leung reported in her article (“Controversial `Imagine No Religion' billboard removed in Rancho Cucamonga”) quoted above.

So either Linda Daniels did pressure the sign company and Kirsten Compean and Fabian Villenas are mistaken, or Linda Daniels did not pressure the sign company and Wendy Leung is mistaken.

I have emails into all parties and I am hoping to get some clearer answers. Rancho Cucamonga may have just gotten itself into some hot water with an abuse of power. And the whole scandal makes it clear that they really needed to have the billboard up and they all needed to spend some time imagining being free from the stranglehold of religious dogma.

I think on a reasonable construal of censorship and freedom of speech, the removal of the billboard and cancellation of the FFRF’s contract was wrong. There are other venues, of course, where the FFRF and others can express their ideas. But that’s not the point. The FFRF sought to purchase ad time and display their billboard like any other group just like the countless religiously themed billboards out there. But their attempt to make use of the same venues as any other religious citizens was thwarted because being non-religious is so immensely unpopular.

For comparison, consider this rough analog. Imagine that a non-profit group working on behalf of African Americans put up a billboard that said, “Imagine having a black family.” And then an outraged (racist) community flooded the billboard company and city with calls protesting the horrible suggestion that they are black or are related to black people. And then, as a result, the company takes the sign down. Would you have any doubt that the free expression of ideas had been violated here and that the action was an example of prejudice and censorship?

When the typical citizen is quoted in cases like this about billboards, or “In God We Trust” on the money, or the “Under God” on the flag, there’s a very common theme. They often say, “I’m all for freedom of speech, of course. And they have a right to think what they want. But there are limits to what the rest of us what to hear. They are being too strident and their message is deeply offensive to us.”

Reading between the lines, those of us on the other side know what this all means. Non-believers really don’t have freedom of speech or freedom from religion if the exercise of those rights mean actually disagreeing or rejecting the religious views and practices of the mainstream. Or, even if they have the rights, the widespread social stigma on non-belief is strong to result in the de facto repression of those ideas in public.

Freedom of Speech, Only for the Religious. Freedom of Thought, but only for Religious Thoughts.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, co-founded by Dan Barker, recently put up a billboard in Rancho Cucamonga, CA that said, “Imagine No Religion.” The outcry from residents was immediate. The advertising company that owns the billboard immediately took the sign down and promised to refund FFRF.

I’d encourage you to complain about the censorship and the prejudicial treatment of free thought by complaining to the company:
General Outdoor Advertising
909-983-4414
http://www.general-outdoor.com/Contact.htm



Correction on my earlier post: Despite the claim that is being circulated, the City of Rancho Cucamonga claims that it applied no pressure concerning the billboard and that it has no power over what the company chooses to put on it. Focus your complaints on General Outdoor Advertising.

Still Think You've Got an Immortal Soul? You Need a New Brain

I’ve argued in a number of contexts against the immortality of the soul. Whatever a soul is in the popular imagination, it seems essentially to have your personal properties of memories, beliefs, desires, self-awareness, and consciousness. That is, your soul is you. The problem, of course, is that all of these features of you depend upon the function of your brain to exist. Disrupt the brain enough with drugs or abuse, damage it with trauma or a stroke, or destroy it, and all of stuff that makes up your mind will stop. This is not a particularly new or creative idea. It’s become a simple, obvious truth throughout the neurosciences and even in philosophy of mind. While many philosophers hold out, insisting that there is something magically irreducible about qualia, beliefs, intentions, or what have you, they will almost all concede that even if the mental cannot be readily reduced or eliminated into the physical, the mental depends upon the physical. We have no plausible evidence in favor of the view that a mind could exist without a brain. But we have mountains of evidence that the mind is utterly dependent for it features on the existence of the brain. This much is widely accepted even though there are a wide range of views about how best to theoretically describe the mind.

In case you didn’t notice, I’m equating the soul with the mind. I won’t apologize for that. That’s the widespread practice too, at least among people who are willing to talk seriously about souls. And I can’t make any sense of any accounts of the soul that I have heard that try to tease out a difference between it and what we traditionally identify as the mind.

In three lines, here’s the argument:

1. Everything that we attribute to the soul depends upon the brain to exist.
2. At death (or soon thereafter), the brain ceases to exist.
3. Therefore, at death the soul ceases to exist.

The action is all in the first premise, of course. I take it that your own experience of what a triple espresso does to your thoughts, LSD, brain damage, strokes, and evidence from the animal world make premise 1 obviously true.

Sometimes people will resist, arguing that the evidence from neuroscience, car wrecks, hallucinogenic drugs, and monkey studies is all consistent with viewing the mind as a sort of remote pilot. The soul, they say, isn’t really dependent for its existence on the brain. Rather, a functioning brain acts as a sort of control nexus through which the ontologically separate mind exerts influence on the physical world. When you damage or alter the brain, you’re not actually compromising the mind itself. You’re really just inhibiting or damaging the control panel that interacts between mind and body. If something like that were true, then you’d expect to see people’s ability to act, talk, and express themselves compromised by brain alteration. But that’s at least consistent with the mind’s being completely fine.

This is a modern sort of dualism, you’ll notice. And one set of responses to this view has to be the same objections that are always given to Cartesian substance dualism: how does a physical thing interact with a non-physical thing? how can a mind that has no spatial location connect to a brain that has spatial location? And so on. I won’t pursue those worn classic objections here.

But here’s a problem to consider. If you think that your soul is a separate or separable entity from your brain, if you think that your soul doesn’t essentially depend for its very existence on the normal functioning of your nervous system, then you should be willing to engage in an experiment with us. Suppose that we had the technology to do a brain transplant on a human being. If you think your soul is some magical, mystical entity that floats free of the natural world, then you should be willing to undergo a brain transplant. It should be ok with you to have your current brain taken out, tossed in the disposal, and then have another one stuck into your skull. Since your mind’s functions don’t depend upon brain configuration or operations, then it really shouldn’t matter which one we put in there. The new brain shouldn’t change your thoughts, your desires, your self-awareness, or your memories since those are all safely part of your soul.

So how about it? Are you willing to undergo a brain transplant and let us toss your old one into the rubbish? Honestly, if you’re still clinging to this medieval nonsense about souls leaving the body, then your brain is due for an upgrade.

Inside the Mind of a Religious Mystic

Dan Barker has been on a speaking tour and came to CSUS to speak. He had a number of interesting things to say. From his teens until his thirties, Barker was an evangelical, fundamentalist preacher. As he matured, and was exposed to people with different views, an interest in learning led him to ask more and more questions about the rigid, dogmatic worldview he had constructed. When he was deep in the faith, like lots of Christians, he was utterly convinced that the particular reading and doctrine that he and his church peers took away from the Bible was the “one, true reading” and that only those who agreed completely could go to heaven. All others would be cast into eternal torment for their heresies.

But as Barker began to realize that there were other reasonable, earnest, decent Christians out there who had a different view about the exact doctrines of the Bible, doubts began to creep in. At first, Barker slowly began to broaden his circle of inclusion for “good” Christians, reasoning to himself that perhaps some of what he had taken to be an obvious, literal truth in a passage of the Bible could be reasonably construed in another way. And he even began to suspect that some of those passages might be metaphorical, not a literal transcription of truth straight from the realm of God. A broadening base of experience, an honest look around the world, and some courageous self-critique inevitably led him to doubt the complete self-assurance that he once had.

Barker described the mystical experiences he had of God during this period in great detail. On a daily basis he said he could sense a presence, a voice, and a guiding force in his thoughts. Barker, like a significant percentage of humans, has/had a strong tendency towards auditory and mental hallucinations. He says that we could think of the distribution of people across a bell curve of a propensity for religious experience. For people like him out at the edge of the curve, the feelings of transcendence, elation, and a non-sensory awareness of a divine presence are powerful and undeniable. If you couple that propensity with the cultural expectations of charismatic, evangelical Christianity, the result is people who are utterly convinced that God is a real presence in the world, and their sect is the authentic means of access to him. The innate neurological dispositions of lots of human beings are going to predispose them to find this notion of the “testimony of the Holy Spirit in your heart” to be completely plausible and familiar. Of course, if they had been raised in a Buddhist, Sikh, or Zoroastrian cultural tradition, they would have attached a different significance to those same feelings. And we must assume that if someone like this received a robust scientific education that included some neuro-biological basics about human dispositions towards altered conscious states, then the results would have been quite different. Given that we know that the human nervous system is capable of falsely, producing a wide range of quirky, strange experiences, it’s a crime that so many people remain in the dark about what they are going through. And it’s also a tragedy that ignorant, religious zealots fill the heads of these people with their Stone Age supernaturalism. The God delusion has such a deep hold on their minds and lives that many of those people will never be able to struggle free the way Barker did.

Take a look at Barker’s recent book for a surprising and internal account of someone whose consciousness has been throttled by a religious delusion: Godless: How An Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists.

Barker is not also the co-founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the co-host of Freethought Radio, a nationally syndicated talk show about atheism.

Another Paradox for the Soul Building Defense: God Has No Virtue, and Humans are More Virtuous Than God

One of my students realized that there is this serious problem in Hick's famous soul-building defense:

Here is an argument that occurred to me as I was grappling with paragraph [5] of Hick's theodicy, Evil and Soul-Making, and trying to make sense of Hick's claim that the state of a person who masters temptation (and endures suffering in the process)to become good is better than becoming good in any other way.

1. "...one who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptations, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or virtue."

2. Man attains to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptation, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations.

3. God is inherently good and morally perfect. God has always been in a state of virtue.
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4. Therefore, Man is good in a richer and more valuable sense than God.


With respect to Premises 1 and 3, it could be argued that God was not created and that God is eternal, a being whose existence has no beginning and no end. The point here is that Hick seems to be arguing that it is better to achieve virtue by overcoming temptation and enduring suffering than to have virtue without overcoming temptation and enduring suffering. I would think that God, the paragon of virtue, has always been virtuous and has not achieved virtue by overcoming temptation and enduring suffering.

If suffering and overcoming temptation is the best path to moral virtue (and even better that being virtuous from the get-go), then why doesn't this apply to God? Why wouldn't it be just as good or better to be in a state of virtue ab initio? If virtue is an inherent quality of God, why wouldn't his creations (in his likeness) also have this quality ab initio?

What Does the Bible Really Say? It doesn't matter if we don't have reasons to think it's true.

Hoards of Christian sects—Lutherans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists, Episcopalians, Catholics, Non-Denominational Christians (who think that they have avoided being a doctrinal sect by fiat)—have prolonged disagreements over the question of what the Bible really says. They argue, cite passages, cherry pick, and pour over the text in an attempt to settle their disagreements over who is really the true Christian, and who’s got the correct doctrinal tenants. The modus operandi for the combatants is usually something like this: approach the text (often with a predisposition towards a particular doctrine--usually those of the church you happened to grow up in or the one you’re most familiar with); find some passages that seem to generally support your take on baptism, Satan, repentance, or whatever; discount those passages that don’t support your reading by arguing that they are taken out of context or they don’t really mean what they appear to mean; reject the position of the other sect and charge that they aren’t really Christians because they aren’t following the true (your reading) word of God; feel assured that you have secured your place in heaven to watch the hellish barbecue of all those who disagree with you.

Before we consider the confusions buried in this practice, consider for a moment how much time and energy human beings have spent engaging in these sorts of textual disputes. It staggers the mind to reflect on the millions of work hours and the intellectual energies that have been poured into this textual exegesis practice.

Is there one, true real Christianity? A single doctrinal interpretation of the Bible that perfectly reflects God’s will better than all of the other Christian sects? These arguments over the text belie a naïve presumption that there is such a thing. But consider this problem from the outside. The non-believers who have made the shift see Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists, and Pentecostals bickering over who’s reading and understanding the book the correct way. Even among members of a sect, it is exceedingly common for people to have vicious disagreements about which way to understand a given cryptic passage. What is the real lesson we should learn from Abraham’s test of faith when God commanded him to kill Isaac? When Jesus miraculously withered the fig tree that had no fruit, what lesson was he really trying to teach us? The simple fact is that there is no widespread agreement about any of these issues even among the believers themselves. Given that so many of them have disagreed for so long about so much, it strikes those of us on the outside as ludicrous to keep scouring the texts in hopes of finding the one, real answer, whatever that may be. Texts never give us some unadulterated, interpretation less access to deep truths about reality. And all of these endless arguments over the Bible as if it does is a titanic waste of time. A text is always mediated by the background, the predispositions, the biases, the confusions, the goals, and the expectations of the reader. It just isn’t possible to read a book and not find some of what you put in there yourself.

Ironically, what many of the disputants here are doing is making appeals to evidence from other parts of the texts, from outside historical sources, or from Bible scholars. If only they could expand that respect for the relevance of evidence to a broader circle without the presumption that whatever the evidence indicates, it must corroborate some form of Christianity.

To be fair, engaging the Bible and other believers in a search for the answers does have a virtue. When believers pray, or listen to the deliverances of faith, there’s no outside check on them at all. There’s no effort to corroborate or cross check what they think with anyone else but themselves. Praying for the answers amounts to just checking to see what you want to be true. At least when they go to the Bible and discuss its meaning with other Christians there’s some effort to get some input besides just their own private thoughts. It’s a step in the right direction.

But if we have great numbers of people all bickering over the correct interpretation of a text, we have to ask this question: will prolonged analyses of the text actually produce a definitive answer to that question, or is the attempt to find the only right interpretation itself wrongheaded? Clearly it’s the latter. The interaction between reader and text never works that way.

Maybe “better interpretation” means something like “adheres more closely to the author’s intentions”? Perhaps we could make some headway on this front, assuming that the author had a set of clear, consistent intentions and that the author was able to communicate those well. If not, then we’ll have no hope of finding them in the text. One problem is that lots of literary theorists, constitutional scholars, historical philosophers, and art critics will tell us that the author’s intent may or may not be what’s important, meaningful, or useful about a text. Listen to an artist talk about their work and compare it to your impressions of it before you heard that and you’ll appreciate the difference. Often an artist’s ideas about what they are doing completely diverge from the impact that they have on us.

But there’s a more serious issue here. Suppose we manage to excavate the author’s real intentions behind the words. Then what? What does that tell us about the world? What does that tell us except that the author intended to communicate X and Y? With the Bible, the question of what Paul or Moses or Matthew intended to accomplish when they put pen to papyrus is vastly different from the question of whether what they say is true. When the homeless guy at the stop light mutters to you about alien invasions and mind control, he really sincerely intends to warn you about the impending doom from outer space, but the truth is independent of his heartfelt avowals and has to be ascertained by some metric other than “what does he mean.”

So prolonged debates about who is the true Christian are a bit like English professors arguing over who is the one true Robert Frost-ian. Imagine one of them reading a couple of Frost poems, citing several passages in support of an interpretation, and then announcing that he is the One, True, Real Robert Frost-ian, the one who has the only accurate interpretation of the text, and all of the other fake, misguided students of Frost are going to hell for their ignorance.

We make the same mistake in the perennial disagreements over what the founding fathers really meant when they wrote the Constitution, as if settling that dispute could somehow tell us what’s the right thing to do now, 200 years later. It may be that Founding Father X had view P about subject R. That’s of historical interest, I suppose. But we should be careful not to treat those guys as religious figures issuing special revelations about the truth—it’s pretty clear that that’s not what they intended. But the question of whether or not we should enact laws that affirm that view must be decided on grounds other than that some long dead person thought P about it.

The presumption through all of this for the believers, and the reason why they invest so much energy into understanding the text, is that it contains the real words of God. If you think that, then if we can figure out what it says, then we will have the deep answers, straight from the source, that we need.

But let’s consider what reasons we might have to thinking that the book contains the words of God. A temptation would be to point to the book itself and the claims that it contains about the book coming from God. But we can all see the flagrant circularity of that view: Why do I believe that the Bible is the word of God? Because the Bible says it is. And why do I believe that there is a God? Because the Bible says that there is.

No, if we are going to attach some supernatural significance to the words, then we need to find some source other than the text itself that provides us with justification for thinking that it’s a communiqué straight from the creator of the universe.

Ironically, during the first few centuries of Christianity, there were hundreds of Christian sects who were all arguing over what the real nature of Christianity was. And they wrote thousands of documents about their various doctrines. Some thought that Jesus was a man, some thought that he was not resurrected. Some thought he was just a prophet. And there were countless other variations on theme. Then in the second and third centuries, a handful of the stories were canonized by an influential group of sects and the rest of these other early Christian documents that did not conform were forcibly excluded from official recognition and they were banned as heretical. Even then, with the 27 or so books that were settled on for the New Testament, internal contradictions are rife. Look up the four different accounts of the resurrection for starters.

After this deliberate exclusion of competing stories centuries ago, we now frequently have Christians who will point to the overall coherence of the New Testament as evidence of its authenticity. The irony is that this loose coherence was forcibly created by Christians centuries after the events described, and that even with their efforts to force a single doctrinal account through the inclusion of only those books, the New Testament is still full of glaring inconsistencies. Then, centuries later, a Christian reads the book and declares “I believe that this book represents the unerring perfect word of God because it is perfectly internally consistent.”

Atheists and non-believers are prone to get caught up in this misframed dispute over what the book really says. They will fall for questions about whether or not the Bible really says X, or whether or not Catholics are really Christians, or whether or not real Muslims are intolerant of non-belief. Then discussions between believers and non-believers that had promise of getting to the heart of the matter—whether or not any of the claims are reasonable to believe—morph into disagreements about what the correct interpretation of the book is. Far too much time and energy has already been wasted studying the Bible. Before any non-believer devotes their attention to it, she should have a clear answer to this question in her head first: Do we have evidence that makes it reasonable to believe that any of the supernatural claims in this book are true? If we do not, then that should profoundly affect the attitude we take about its worthiness for study.

So one of the many troubling things about the prevalence of doctrinal disputes is the way it frames the discourse we are having about religion and God. Instead of actually talking about the reasons we might have for believing, we spin our wheels about what a loose Iron Age collection of heavily revised stories says about what some people’s views were about it 2,000 years ago.

Like George H. Bush’s crafty undermining of anti-war protesters during the first Gulf War: “They don’t support our troops! They are unpatriotic!” The protesters quickly shifted to the defensive, offering assurances that they are patriotic and that they DO support the troops. In the scuffle, the original and vitally important question of whether or not the war itself was a just one was completely lost. Those who would have argued that it is not were now investing all of their energies into proving that they are patriotic and troop loving despite their doubts about the war. It was too late for any real objections to the war because opposing the war had now been defined as being unpatriotic and troop hating.

Therefore, page shuffling discussions of whether or not the Bible really says X, and over who are the real Christians are misplaced. The notion that some source can somehow magically provide us with deep metaphysical truths about reality is a medieval myth. The real question of whether you should accept a claim as true involves the evidence, the reasons, and how well it fits with the rest of what we’ve been able to figure out about reality through science. When we consider a claim and whether or not it fits with the rest of what we believe to be true about the world, the criteria should be logical consistency, probabilistic consistency, corroboration by other known claims, predictive value, sensitivity to observations, and integration. On all of those criteria, the Bible fails horribly internally, and its incompatibility with the rest of what we now know about the world is even worse. So agonizing over what the text really says is a bit like fussing over the place settings on the Titanic.

Everything is to the Glory of God -Revamped

Lots of religious believers now believe that humans and life on earth evolved. It turns out, they claim, that natural selection is God’s means of achieving his ends. Furthermore, 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. It turns out that God has fine tuned it all for our benefit.

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?”

By many believers’ reckoning, the Big Bang, which wasn’t even postulated until a few decades ago by cosmologists, turns out to be God’s means of creation. (Never mind that no one in the history of any of these religious traditions offered any hint that it occurred until after we defied religious authority and discovered it on our own.)

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 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 sustenance 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, after all, 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, many believers (usually, after resisting the truth with all their might,) construct an ad hoc explanation that allows them to co-opt 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.

Either the universe is as we would have expected to it to be according to traditional theism or it is not. Believers are in a very difficult position with every new discovery or invention that doesn’t fit nicely within the traditional theistic picture. If they argue that the world as we are finding it is exactly as we would have expected it to be on the theistic hypothesis, then they need to explain how it is that theism has not anticipated so many of the results we have found. They need to explain how it is that the world has turned out to be so obviously not exactly as traditional theism described it. Why has traditional theism been blindsided by every important scientific development for 500 years? Worse, why has traditional theism viciously resisted and tried to erase them from our collective consciousness all of those same developments at every stage? If a 3 billion year evolutionary process was God’s modus operandi all along, then why is it that hundreds of millions of believers still insist that evolution didn’t occur and that it was all created in its present form a few hundred generations ago? If the Big Bang was God’s act of creation, then why is it such news to those whose God has given the one, true access to perfect knowledge of reality through the Bible? Apparently these manifestations of God’s knowledge and power aren’t as obvious in his plan as the revisionist believers would like.

If all of this is all part of God’s infinite wisdom and creation, why didn’t God and all of his followers seem to have a clue about the rotation of the earth, biological history, geology, physics, chemistry, morality, and the origins of life? The story they did tell was the one that we would have expected Iron Age humans with no scientific grasp of the universe to give about the nature and origin of humans and the universe.

When the members of that tradition now try to backpedal and give God the credit ex post facto for the complexity, and breadth of the empirical world discovered by those who broke from religious authority, the hedging is clear. They’re re-engineering their story to fit the facts and trying to insist that that’s what they believed all along. But as we discover more and more about the way the world is—in stark contrast to the theistic picture—it gets harder and harder for the believer to continue this ad hoc revisionism while the rest of us keep a straight face. Consider the popular view that the “days” described in the Genesis creation story may have lasted longer than our days, so maybe life did evolve for 3 billion years on earth and Genesis is actually giving an accurate record of that. “Yeah, yeah, that’s what we believed all along. We knew that life evolved and humans came from monkeys from the start. Yeah, that’s the ticket.” Never mind that in Genesis the order of primordial events contradicts what we now know about the development of life and events on earth on a long list of points.

If, on the other hand, believers acknowledge that what we have discovered about the universe, the earth, and life on earth is not consistent with the picture that traditional theism had us believe, then they have several other very difficult problems. If the world is not as theism described it to be, then all of that counter evidence weighs heavily against the plausibility of traditional theism and any doctrine that finds its origin in it. That is, believing today has its roots in believing from the past. Without the inception of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in their historical contexts and the sweeping social institutions that they have become, it’s hard to see what would motivate a modern theism. If your belief doesn’t trace its origins back to the advent of Christianity, then what exactly is there to recommend it? It’s not that there can be no independent grounds upon which to rest a modern version of theism. But the vast historical establishment of Christianity has been a substantial factor in leading people to believe. The fact that so many others for so long have believed, and that they have passed that believe on to us through our education, our culture, our churches, and our personal and social lives is not insignificant. If it turns out that historical belief has little or nothing real to stand on, then what is left for a modern human who knows about these discoveries and scientific developments to build their belief upon?

Take a belief in witchcraft as a historical parallel. 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, and 500 years ago, the view that witchcraft was real was pervasive. Many elements of our culture and our heritage were built around it. Our social, legal, economic, and religious institutions acknowledged it. Everyone knew that witches and magical powers were real. But science has shown us the light. At one point, for a person to believe in magic was understandable, even excusable, given that so many people believed in it and since there seemed to be so much corroboration of it in the culture. Someone in a village in Massachusetts in the 1600s could hardly be blamed for believing given the context they were in. But today we don’t have that excuse. And without all of the push to believe coming from the culture around us, the remaining believers appear to be uneducated cranks, ideologues, or counter-culture dropouts.

So it stretches credulity beyond the limits of charity for us to accept the revisionist believer’s story. They can’t defend the claim that the universe that we’ve discovered is just as we would have expected it to be coming from God. Our discoveries fly in the face of too many of the traditional articles of faith. And if the believer acknowledges that traditional theism seems to have gotten so many basics wrong about the nature of the world, that weighs heavily against the plausibility of traditional or modern theism.

There’s one other much less appealing alternative for the believer. They can dig in and insist that all of the discoveries that we have made about the history of the universe, Earth, and life on earth are mistaken if they are not consistent with the traditional theistic story. The earth really was created in its present form 6,000 years ago. All humanity came from Adam and Eve. There really was a great flood that wiped out all life that wasn’t on the ark. There really was a deity who visited a small group of people in the middle east 2,000 years ago who performed miracles and who wants us all to believe in his existence. And so on. But this science denying believer is in a worse position than either of the ones we considered above. This believer has to defend the reasonableness of all of these claims against the mounting evidence produced by centuries of scientific work by the greatest minds in history. This believer has to outperform the smartest biologists in history by arguing that all of their scientific work is mistaken. This believer has to claim expertise beyond that of the entire historical academic community. This believer needs to know enough about cellular biology, carbon dating, radioactive dating, geology, paleontology, sociology, psychology, physics, chemistry, and cosmology to be able to reasonably argue that the conclusions that the experts in all of those fields have reached are all wrong. This believer has to out-science the scientific community and claim that really, when you do good science, what it shows is that the Bible and traditional theism was right all along.

So the believer is deeply mired in a paradox. There’s the God of traditional theism and the story it tells about what the world is, and there is the account of what the world is that our hard work in science has given us. The believer can argue that the two accounts actually don’t diverge at all and that what we’ve discovered in science was all a manifestation of God’s plan all along. The problem is that traditional theism has not anticipated or concurred with the picture of the world science has given us. Or the believer can concede that the plan and God of traditional theism don’t jive with the world we have found. That significantly undermines the reasonableness of belief that is based upon traditional theism. Or finally, the believer can stubbornly insist that what we thought we knew about the world in an Iron Age religion is in fact accurate down to the last detail and all of what we think we have discovered is in fact mistaken. The easiest way to extricate themselves from this hopeless mess, of course, is to just give up this notion that there is such a being as God and join the rest of us in the 21 century.

God is Hiding

God could have caused much more compelling miracles that would have been believable to a much wider range of people and far more impressive. God could have made the evidence for his existence, say in the details of nature, vastly more obvious than he did. If God wanted to, he could have made his existence obvious and manifest to everyone. If God had chosen to do so, he could have left compelling evidence that life came from him, not from evolution, and that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. If God had chosen to, he could have created the world so that humans, allegedly his chosen, favored beings in the universe, were of obvious central importance in the cosmos. If God had chosen to, he could have had Jesus appear and provide much more evidence to people who were not his fanatical followers. If God wanted to, he could have caused the Big Bang and made it obvious that he was the cause. If God wanted to, he could have made it easier for us to discover the cure for polio, or for cancer, or for bubonic plague.

If he exists, he certainly has the capacity to make his existence known. Mere humans are able to manifest themselves far more obviously. He would know how to make his existence known. He would have perfect knowledge of the most effective means of revealing himself. Even the most impressive alleged cases of God’s presence in the world are utterly trivial against the scale of what a supernatural being with God’s extraordinary powers could have brought about. In all of the questioning, exploring, pleading, and seeking that billions of people have engaged in for centuries, he has refused to respond in any unequivocal ways. In every instance where someone claims to have contact with God, we can easily think of vastly more effective and unmistakable evidence that such a powerful being could have transmitted if he had chosen to.

But instead, if we are to believe that God exists and that he is the creator of the universe, then we must accept that a loving, powerful, caring God who wants us to believe in his existence set up the entire universe to look exactly as it would if there were no God. He deliberately obscured or hid every bit of information that might have made it possible for people to come to believe in his existence in a reasonable, sensible manner. Instead he devised a set of natural laws, a course of natural events, and a process of natural selection that when taken together render need for God as an explanation completely pointless.

God, if he exists, is hiding so effectively that the world looks just as we would expect it to if there were no God; it doesn’t have any of the features we would expect to find if there were a God. All of our attempts to confirm his existence have come up empty handed. God is hiding so effectively that even by their own admission, the vast majority of believers admit that in order to believe they must do it by ignoring the contrary evidence and having faith. He is hiding so effectively, we must conclude, among other things, that he does not want us to believe. If he wanted us to believe, things would be different in a thousand obvious ways.

So the believer can insist that there really is a God, and that he really wants us to believe in his existence, but he has gone to extraordinary lengths to make that difficult. Then the believer can construct some elaborate justification for thinking that this sort of God exists, but he has complicated reasons for keeping his existence perfectly hidden. And then the believer must engage in elaborate conceptual gymnastics and ad hoc justifications in order to make the whole implausible story consistent with the seemingly Godless world. Or the believer can ask himself this question: isn’t it more reasonable to just acknowledge that the world looks just like there is no God because there is no God?

The Real Evil of Original Sin

Is disobeying a commandment immoral? 2,500 years ago in the Euthryphro, Socrates showed that the question of whether or not God commanded something is conceptually distinct from the question of whether or not it is good. The mere fact that God commands or forbids something doesn’t render it good or bad, and it doesn’t provide one with sufficient justification for doing it or refraining. It’s always an open question whether the command is a good one. Or, a person always has to invoke some other criteria and apply them for their own reasons to the case to decide whether following the commandment is worthy. Consider the difference between obeying the speed limit which is 65 mph, and abiding by the law that forbids kidnapping. Both are the law, but only the latter one has a clear moral justification too.

What criteria can one apply to commandments to decide their morality? Moral theorists for centuries have provided us with lots of plausible answers: Aristotle argued that we strive to increase our virtues to maximize human flourishing, Kant argued that an action isn’t moral unless it is done on the basis of a universalizable, rationally consistent principle as its motive, Mill argued that actions are right or wrong to the extent that they promote or diminish happiness or utility, and so on. Presumably, when believers make their choices about which commandments they will follow—maybe you try to honor your mother and father, but you opt not to obey the commandment that mandates execution for anyone who does not—they already apply some criteria like Aristotle’s, Kant’s, Mill’s, or others. Clearly, it won’t do to simply justify an action on the grounds that it has been commanded. God has commanded a lot of morally abhorrent things like the rape of virgin girls and the wholesale slaughter of whole races of people.

Adam and Eve, we’re told, disobeyed a commandment. And because of that error, they and all of the rest of humanity (who had nothing to do with that choice) are condemned to an eternity of horrible suffering unless they rectify the mistake. But the commandment, “Don’t eat from this tree,” as I argued in “The Sin of Original Sin” is one of those examples, like the speed limit, or cleaning up your dog’s poop in the park, that may have been the law, but there’s nothing clearly moral or immoral about it. Aside from God’s capricious threat, there doesn’t appear to be anything about eating from the tree that might justify classifying it as immoral. No one will be evidently harmed, it doesn’t obviously violate any Kantian principle to respect persons, it doesn’t seem especially selfish or negligent. In all the centuries that we’ve been hearing about how wicked and deserving of torment humanity is, have we even paused to ask the question: What exactly was wrong with eating the fruit off of that tree? And now that I ask it, it’s plainly obvious that there was nothing wrong with it evident in the details of the story we’ve been told. And there’s certainly nothing so wrong with it to warrant the infinite punishment that Christians so smugly threaten us with. In fact, you’d think that in general obtaining as much knowledge of the world as you can, including knowledge of good and evil is a positive thing. How can you know to do the right thing if you don’t know the difference? Ignorance is obviously harmful, willful ignorance is even worse.

Of course, believers will insist that eating from the tree WILL cause great harm—if Adam and Eve do so, then they will bring enormous suffering down on humanity. But it’s not the act that actually creates any harm to anyone—it’s God’s seemingly random creation of the rule and his subsequent willingness to subject humanity to hell that causes the harm, not the act itself. The harm that befalls humanity as the result of the fall isn’t humanity’s fault, nor does the fruit from the tree cause it. God is the cause of the resulting suffering. God is the one who chooses to inflict (presumably he could refrain) eternal suffering on humanity.

People made a similar mistake when they focused all of their blame for 9-11 on American foreign policies that supported Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the past. Lots of critics responded that we had it coming. That’s forgetting who’s directly and immediately to blame: the guys who freely and deliberately flew the planes into the buildings (we’ve also largely overlooked that 17 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian, not Afghan or Iraqi). Doesn’t blame fall first and foremost on them? To focus instead on other surrounding and sometimes remote elements like the CIA or the American contributions to anti-American sentiments in the Middle East, suggests that the hijackers themselves are not autonomous, moral agents who are directly responsible for their actions. It’s like saying, “Oh they couldn’t help themselves—look at how mad we made them with our policies afterall.”

The Christian who touts Adam and Eve’s mistake in Eden as justifying God’s wrath on us makes a similar mistake, like the domestic abuse victim who after being beaten by her despicable husband, defends the guy and justifies his action: “You can hardly blame him for beating me. I didn’t have his dinner ready, and I didn’t clean the house. I really deserved it. He warned me that if I didn’t do what he said, he’d beat me. So really it’s all my fault. I had it coming.”

Could it be more obvious that the mere fact that some tantrum throwing tyrant issues a command and then threatens to punish disobedience severely doesn’t make that act immoral? And his warning that he will punish you forever doesn’t render that punishment just. Notice also that several of the famed 10 commandments aren’t remotely moral at all—they seem only to be designed to sustain God’s threats and secure his position of authority: Don’t worship any other gods, don’t worship idols (because I am a jealous god), don’t misuse my name, don’t do anything except worship me on Sunday.

No doubt the abusive husband would like to get his vicimtized wife and familty to abide by some similar rules so he can sustain his tyranny. And perhaps he’d even punish infractions severely. But again, his doing so clearly doesn’t make his behavior moral and infractions immoral.

Being a mature, responsible, morally autonomous agent can’t come from commands. It’s got to come from making reasoned, principled, informed decisions. We don’t need commands from God, we need explanations, reasons, and arguments. We need to be convinced that doing X is the right thing, not threatened, berated, or inflicted with guilt and fear of not doing it.

So we should be outraged, morally incensed that Christians would have us accept this perversion of real morality. We should be shocked at their presumptuousness. We should recognize the petty, juvenile, and insulting nature of the original sin model. And we should reject their attempts to foist blame on humanity (and their distant, unsuspecting offspring) for hellish punishments, instead of the volatile and capricious tyrant who would inflict them. The real evil is in Christians’ propagating this perverse misanthropy. The original sin doctrine spreads humiliation, sorrow, self-loathing, and lies about the real human nature.

The Sin of Original Sin

Like lots of the utterly bizarre and nonsensical claims of Christianity, we’ve all become inured to the strange counter logic of the notion of original sin. Lots of bellicose Christians will invoke a sanctimonious, and strangely confident tone about the inherent depravity of humans. We’re prone to wickedness by our nature; we’re morally depraved; we’re deeply deserving of God’s scorn and punishment. There’s even a kind of perverse pride in their eyes when they point to our downfall in the Garden of Eden and how it shows that we’ll get what we deserve.

Which brings us to another strange component of the Original Sin doctrine. It’s not just that we’re wicked, but we’re wicked and deserving of punishment because of something that your ancient ancestors did. In religious contexts, that notion doesn’t bother them at all. But of course, if you tried to get someone to pay for their dad’s defaulted mortgage, or put one of them in jail for a crime that their mom did, they’d scream about how grossly unjust that is. Once people have heard all this surreal religious metaphor and metaphysics enough, it just sounds perfectly natural and normal. But when we take it out of its ordinary context and cloak it with equivalent but unfamiliar language, the insanity becomes clear: “So there’s a giant, invisible space being who lives in the sky and he can read minds and grant wishes?” “And you go to your sacred space god worship session once a week you drink the blood and eat the tissue of another space god who is the big one’s offspring?” Seriously? But in the Christian’s mind, it all makes sense somehow that someone who existed thousands of years ago made a bad choice (Eve), and even though you didn’t know this person or have anything to do with the decision in question, you deserve to be punished for their crimes. And by eating juice and crackers and calling it the blood and flesh of Jesus, it is possible to somehow rectify the sin debt.

Which brings us to the question of what exactly it was that Adam and Eve did wrong to bring all this tenacious guilt and horrible suffering down on the rest of humanity. One of the many paradoxes of Eden is that Adam and Eve presumably didn’t understand the difference between good and evil before they ate from the tree. It was the tree of KNOWLEDGE of good and evil, after all. So they couldn’t have possibly understood or appreciated the implications of God’s threat. Nor would it have been clear to them that disobeying a command, which is distinct from doing something immoral, was somehow wrong. Recall your frustrated mother saying, “because I’m the mommy, that’s why!” Nevertheless, when Adam and Eve did this thing that they couldn’t have possibly appreciated as wrong, they tainted all of humanity with some sort of metaphysical stain that cannot be removed unless those people adopt the right sort of belief states about God. And aside from not doing what they were told—recall that freewill is usually celebrated by Christians as God’s great gift to us too—there’s no plausible interpretation of the whole thing that could possibly warrant the reaction. I mean, it’s not like they went out and committed genocide or something. He said “Don’t eat from this tree.” That’s not a moral commandment, it’s just him flexing his muscles. Consider the difference between the law that puts the speed limit at 65 and the one that prohibits rape. Neither eating fruit, nor refusing to do something that a power tripping-bully demands of you are immoral. Nevertheless, because of their action, every one of the billions of humans to descend from them is condemned to an eternity of unbearable suffering. Oh sure, THAT’S fair.

Recently there have been a bunch of cases in the news where some slimy preacher who has cloistered himself into a compound in the boonies with a bunch of naïve followers. Then he precedes to lord his power and religious authority over them so that he can rape all the girls, banish the boys, all while hiding behind the banner of our religious tolerance. Imagine if one of these guys insisted that one of the girls have sex with him, but when she refused, he set about to inflict horrible suffering on her and all of her descendents. Would we defend his actions by insisting that they had, after all, willfully disobeyed his commandments?

Imagine a parent who puts a ripe, sweet apple (Genesis doesn’t say it was an apple, by the way) down on a chair in front of a normal, hungry, curious toddler, and then says, “Whatever you do, don’t eat this.” And then she walks off. Then when the inevitable happens, she storms into the room and thunders at the child for breaking her arbitrary and pointless rule. Next, she puts the kid on a plane by himself, sends him to be dropped off in the middle of the Sahara desert with no preparations, no food, no water, and no aid. But it gets even better. She arranges it so that every single person who descends from that little boy in the desert (if he survives) from now on must 1) believe in the Great Mother in the Sky, 2) obey all of her commandments no matter how antique, or pointless they are, and 3) if they don’t comply, they will be tortured mercilessly for eons. All because the clueless toddler, who didn’t have any knowledge of good and evil after all, took a bite from the apple. Not because anyone did anything that was actually wrong like commit genocide or enslave a race, but because he broke a capricious and irrational rule.

“Oh, but I don’t think all that stuff literally happened,” says the moderate Christian. “Those are just enriching stories that communicate important moral, social, and cultural lessons.”

Fine. How exactly is it better to endlessly thrust this harmful nonsense into a child’s head and reinforce it in a thousand other ways when you’d readily admit that you don’t even think it is true? How can people form mentally healthy self-images or come to value humanity for their remarkable capacities and virtues against this misanthropic backdrop?

So when an Original Sin Christian is feeling sycophantic about the inherent moral corruption of all of humanity, and about humanity’s need for a long, hard spanking because they’ve been sooo naughty don’t expect the rest of us to even comprehend your point.

Current Theories of Abiogenesis:

The myth that we have no hypotheses, and no explanations for the origin of life on earth persists. In fact, biologists are considering and testing a long list of possibilities that would explain the shift from non-living to living materials. Here’s a few summarized from Wikipedia.

Primordial Soup—Miller-Urey use a mix of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen to form basic amino acids in the lab.

Deep Sea Vent Theory—Hydrogen saturated, heated, fluids from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor mix with carbon dioxide laden water. Continued chemical energy from the interactions sustains processes that produce simple organic molecules.

Spontaneous Formation of Small Peptides from Amino Acids: Sidney Fox demonstrated that the conversions could occur on their own.

Eigen's hypothesis—Eigen and Schuster argue that some molecules, possibly RNA, can serve as an information storing system that brings about the formation of other information storing systems, or a kind of replication.

Wächtershäuser's hypothesis: Günter Wächtershäuser argues that some compounds come with inboard energy sources like iron sulfides that could release energy and synthesize simply organic molecules. His experiments produced small amounts of dipeptides and tripeptides.

Radioactive beach hypothesis: radioactive elements such as uranium may have concentrated on beaches and become building blocks for life by energizing amino acids, sugars from acetronitrile in water.

Homochirality: The right or left handedness of organic molecules may be explained by the origin of compounds in space.
Self-organization and replication: Under the right circumstances, many non-organic molecules exhibit properties of self-organization and self-replication.

"Genes first" models: the RNA world It has been argued that short RNA molecules could have formed on their own. Cell membranes could have formed from protein-like molecules in heated water. Chemical reactions in clay or on pyrites could have initiated self-replication.

"Metabolism first" models: iron-sulfur world and others. Some theories argue that metabolic processes started first, then self-replication.

Bubbles collecting on the beach could have played a role in forming early, proto-cell membranes.

Autocatalysis Some substances catalyze the production of themselves such as amino adenosine, pentafluorophenyl ester, and amino adenosine triacid ester.

Clay theory Complex organic molecules could have arisen from non-organic replicators such as silicate crystals. It has even been reported that the crystals can transfer information from mother to daughter crystals.

Gold's "Deep-hot biosphere" model Gold argues that life originated miles below the surface of the earth. Microbial life has been found there. And it may be present on other planets.

"Primitive" extraterrestrial life Organic compounds are common in space, and early life may have been transferred here from other planets such as Mars.


Even if none of these hypotheses turn out to be corroborated by empirical investigation, the important point is that there are a number of live hypotheses being considered.

Grasping at Possibilities

There’s a common response to hard challenges to belief. Frequently, the theist falls back to the answer, “Well, you can’t prove it wrong!” The idea seems to be that in general belief is epistemically permissible as long as one doesn’t have compelling proof to the contrary. So a belief is warranted or at least not irrational in cases where one’s evidence on the whole supports it, and also in those cases where one’s evidence seems to neither confirm nor disconfirm it on the whole.

Plantinga, in his modal version of the ontological argument seems to be resorting to a similar sort of defense. He acknowledges that his argument doesn’t prove the conclusion that God exists. Proof would require true premise different than the conclusion that, when taken jointly, imply the truth of the conclusion. Plantinga concedes that someone who already believes in God would accept his premises, and thereby would see it as a proof. But no non-believer would accept them because the conclusion that God exists is, in effect embedded in the premises. Circular arguments can be sound, after all. But they don’t convince anyone. But after acknowledging that he hasn’t proven the existence of God, he says something curious. He says that he has established the rational acceptability of believing. He seems to think that his argument establishes that there is nothing contrary to reason in believing, so it is somehow now warranted to believe. The point also seems to be that he could not fault someone for being irrational for not accepting the argument, given that it assumes the very thing it is intended to prove. I think a careful read of his argument shows that he asserts the rational acceptability of believing. But showing it is another matter.

But what interests me here is the notion that belief is epistemically inculpable or rational for S in cases where S’s evidence does not, on the whole, disprove p. Consider some examples where this is obviously not the case:

I don’t have any proof that there is not a Ferrari sitting in my garage right now (while I am not in there), therefore it is acceptable to believe that there is one.

I don’t have any proof that my neighbors have not had their minds taken over by aliens, so it is reasonable to believe that they have.

I don’t have any proof that Gefjun, the Norwegian goddess of agriculture, does not exist, so it is ok for me to believe that she does.

Imagine that you have a suicidal friend who is consumed by negativity and depression. He laments that he thinks he will die of cancer. You say, “But you don’t have any real reasons to think that you have cancer.” He says, “Can you prove that I don’t have cancer? No, you can’t. See, so I have cancer. I am just going to kill myself now and get it over with.”

Theist: You can’t prove that there is no God, so there’s nothing wrong with believing.
Atheist: Ok, since we can’t prove there is no God, then there’s nothing wrong with not believing.

I don’t have any proof that John McCain and Sarah Palin are not evil time travelers from the future intent on destroying the United States, therefore I believe that they are.

In general, lacking evidence to the contrary for p does not entitle a person to believe it anyway. In general, doing that would be patently irrational. Resorting to this defense is a flimsy, last ditch effort to retain some semblance of reasonableness but we can see that there’s no defense to be had here.

God and the Big Bang

The Kalam argument is clear and short:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

The argument has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and various problems with it have been brought out at length.

The universe that Craig has in mind in this argument is the physical universe—the totality of space, time, and matter. So we must be clear about what we are agreeing to in accepting the first premise. Accepting the first premise appears to be accepting that there must have been a non-spatial, non-temporal, and non-material cause of the universe since many physicists assert that space, time, and matter begins at the Big Bang. For many, an immaterial cause before that is precisely they result they want. But acknowledging this implication should raise doubts for us about the principle itself. There’s no doubt that the principle of sufficient reason, or something like it, seems to operate in the vast majority of ordinary, spatial, temporal, material cases. One might argue for premise 1 on those grounds. But then the problem is that we are using an inductive generalization about the behavior of matter within the universe to draw an inference about the totality of the universe itself and causes that may lie outside of space and time.

There’s a pretty substantial obstacle to overcome here. At no point in the history of our investigating such matters have we encountered a single non-spatial, non-temporal, non-material cause. In instances where we have tried to ascertain the cause of physical events, we have found other finite, spatial, temporal causes. That evidence should not be readily discarded. The other avenue whereby premise one is often justified is by so-called “metaphysical intuition.” It is self-evident, says Craig. So now we must ask ourselves, given the choice between going with what’s intuitive and following the lessons that physical inquiries have given us in the past, should we expect the universe to conform to our intuitions?

It’s not that there are significant reasons to reject premise 1. But it would appear that if it entails a non-spatial, non-temporal, non-material cause of the universe, it is presuming a large part of what the argument hopes to show. The existence of such a cause for the universe is exactly what is under contention.

Here’s another worry about premise 1. Earlier versions of the cosmological argument and Russell’s response to them have shown us an important lesson. While it is typical for finite, particular objects in space and time to have a particular cause, it is not evident that collections, sets, or larger groupings of objects must have them too. That is, it is more reasonable and evident that every individual thing that begins to exist has a cause. But that may not apply to the totality of all things considered as a single object—the universe. Paul Edwards’ eskimos example illustrates this point clearly. Russell said, the fact that every human being has a mother doesn’t imply that they all have the same mother. So we have to be careful that we are not misunderstanding the first premise.

Another set of points that are frequently appreciated is the limited scope of this conclusion. The presumption by many seems to be that if the conclusion is true, then we have a viable proof for the existence of God. What’s lacking, of course, are any reasons to think that the cause here has any of the traditional divine properties. It’s not evident that the cause would require omnipotence or omniscience—a cause with less could do it. A cause that only contains the capacity to bring about the physical universe and nothing else would be sufficient. And that sort of cause would be less than omni. Contrast it to a cause that could bring about an infinite number of universes, for instance. Nor is it evident that the cause must be good. Indeed, classical theodicies struggle long and hard just to argue that God’s existence is logically compatible with the extent of suffering and death that we find in the universe. Expecting to observe that same suffering and then read omni-benevolence as necessary in its cause is utterly implausible.

An argument is needed that the cause must be personal and singular as well. Craig has contended that besides material causation, the only sort of causation that we are familiar with is personal, so we can confidently conclude that the immaterial cause of the universe is personal. But here’s a problem. In all the cases where we have observed this so-called “personal” causation it has depended upon a physical cause—the body and the brain—to bring about the effect. We don’t have any examples to draw from of non-physical, non-spatial, non-temporal causation. We have never observed a single instance of a brainless mind causing anything. So if an argument has as its conclusion that there must be such a cause responsible for the universe, we should be cautious at the very least. It’s not that such a thing is clearly impossible. But we have to restrain ourselves from rushing to some conclusion that we favor, especially when so much physical evidence mounts against it.

In recent years, physicists and cosmologists have proposed a number of hypotheses about the cause of the Big Bang. These include an account of a Big Bounce, a multiverse, Branes, and other exotic physical hypotheses. It remains to be seen if any of these are born out by the evidence. But what is important is that while the Kalam argument would evidently have us declare a halt to investigations into the Big Bang because we know with certainty that it must have been caused by a non-spatial, non-temporal, personal omni-God, scientists have been steadily plugging away finding physical explanations. It would be foolish to ignore those developments on the basis of some metaphysical intuitions, particularly when our intuitions have been so grossly wrong in so many previous cases. God as the cause may be “self-evident” to Craig, but legions of the world’s best scientists continue to probe deeper and deeper into these so-called mysteries.

Where does that leave us then? The argument certainly isn't enough to give us reasonable grounds to conclude that God exists. I’m not sure that any of these are crippling objections, or substantial arguments that the premises are false. But they are good reasons to proceed with caution, be agnostic, and not leap to sweeping conclusions from intuition that will be embarrassed by the advances of physics and cosmology.

Explaining Our Moral Intuitions

In the moral argument, dealt with in the last post, the second premise is that real, objective moral obligations exist. Non-believers tend to react to this claim with a wide range of non-sequiturs. Pointing out that not everyone agrees about morality, or that people in different cultures have different values, or that lots of people who don’t believe in God are nevertheless moral all miss the point. The believer’s claim here is that whether everyone acknowledges it or not, moral claims like “rape is wrong,” “genocide is evil,” “generosity and love are virtues” are true. It is also a mistake to argue that there are some cases where many things that seem good are not, or that actions that seem to be evil may be necessary. Those instances don’t suggest that there is no truth about the matter, only that it isn’t simple.

But let’s consider what non-circular grounds one might have for thinking that the claim is true. Even if people everywhere seemed to agree about some fundamental moral values, that might be consistent with the claim, but it won’t provide much support. More often, believers consult a powerful sense that they have that certain things are wrong and others are right. Call it gut instinct, moral intuition, a sixth sense, or an innate sense of right and wrong.

I won’t deny that many people have such a thing. And as Stephen Pinker and other moral psychologists make clear, these are distinct feelings from sentiments, judgments of taste, or raw emotions. With taste or emotions, we confine our sensation to our own experience. I might find oysters disgusting, but I don’t think it’s wrong for you to eat them. With moral judgments, however, my sense of the matter goes beyond me. We feel that if someone else violates these principles, then they deserve to be punished or reprimanded. They haven’t merely done something that I find disturbing or upsetting. The sensation is that they have violated something larger than my feelings about the matter and it needs to be set right.

What could a reasonable person infer from these sorts of sensations? From the inside, could one tell whether or not they are innate? I don’t think so. One might expect innate feelings to always be present, and that they would not shift or change. But in fact, for most people, a distinct sense of right and wrong comes rather late in their development. And they tend to drift over the years. Consider how attitudes about homosexuality have shifted or smoking. But that’s all consistent with some sort of innate faculty, however.

From the inside, could one tell if one’s moral sentiments were from God? They might feel like they are. One might have an overwhelming sense that God wants X or God disapproves of Y. It may even seem like God is talking to you. And we should acknowledge that people can have some persuasive experiences that are very hard to deny.

Since one is not able to independently confirm the source of these sensations, figuring out what’s going on becomes a matter of carefully considering all of the competing, alternative hypotheses that would explain it. Let’s grant that God’s installing an innate, inuitive sense of morality is one of the explanations on the table. What about others?

Here’s the crucial question: if 4 billion years of evolution had cultivated a strong set of moral dispositions such as fairness, sensitivity to pain or harm to oneself and others, respect for authority, and so on, what would it feel like to be subject to those feelings? It would feel innate, immediate and distinct. From the inside, I can’t see how one would be able to distinguish whether evolution or God was the source of the moral intuitions. And the same goes for the wide range of other hypotheses that are often raised to explain them.

Furthermore, the evidence is mounting that just those moral sentiments and some others are present in a wide range of non-human animals. Monkeys show accute sensitivity to standards of fairness. Monkeys, rats, and others feel the pain of others as if it were contagious. Rats will starve themselves rather than eat if their eating seems to inflict electric shocks on another rat. The examples go on. And as for hearing the voice of one’s moral conscience, or even God himself, a recent study concluded that as many as 70% of undergraduates had experienced auditory hallucinations.

The God explanation might have been sufficient 500 years ago, if one knew no better and had no other explanations available. But now, knowing what we know, one can’t simply conclude upon having a strong gut instinct about some moral matter that God is responsible. Furthermore, given the flexibility of these sentiments, their drift over time, and their known fallibility, the naturalistic hypothesis fits much better. Also notice that if one is seeking to show the existence of God from moral intuitions as evidence, then it won’t do to intuit that God is the author of the feelings. We don’t have any more reason to assume that that intuition is correct than the others. And it would be foolish to argue, perhaps like Descartes, that I have a powerful idea that God exists. I also have a powerful idea that God would guarantee the truth of my powerful ideas. Therefore, God must actually exist.