Atheism: Proving The Negative

Motivated Religious Reasoning

2011-11-24T17:05:00.000-08:00

This is rough, but here's a first pass at something: Let us consider some features of the human cognitive system that have emerged in our empirical investigations in recent decades.

First, humans possess cognitive systems that are profligate with regard to religious, supernatural or spiritual beliefs. That is, given the two systematic errors that a doxastic system might fall into, erring on the side of false positives or erring towards false negatives, humans are prone to believe more supernatural, religious, or spiritual claims than are true or well justified. We are not, by contrast, the sorts of beings that systematically err because we are too reluctant, too skeptical, or too stingy with our assent when it comes to these sorts of beliefs. The near universal subscription to religious beliefs now and in human history, and the abundance and variety of those beliefs show that, if nothing else, we are too eager to believe in such matters. Too many of those beliefs are incompatible with each other, and too many of them have long since been shown to be false. Even the ardent religious believer, such as someone who endorses the central theses of Christianity, will have have to concur that the vast majority of other religious beliefs in history which are incompatible with Christianity, have been mistaken. If Jesus is the Son of God and the only path to salvation, then Allah cannot be the one true God. If the resurrection of Jesus provides us with spiritual salvation, then the ancient Egyptian believers in Anubis must have been mistaken. Therefore, given the abundance of religious beliefs, and their incompatibility with the facts (the world was not created, as the ancient Egyptians thought, by Atum out of the swirling chaotic waters of Nu), and their incompatibilities with each other, we must conclude that the human religious error rate is very high. And it is very high on the side of believing too much instead of believing too little.

Second, the human cognitive system has a powerful tendency towards motivated reasoning. What is motivated reasoning? We can think of two models of reasoning. First, a person might have a prefered belief already in mind and then go find some post hoc reasoning, evidence, or justification that would appear to support it. Here, the reasoning is being steered by the goal: defending the belief, and believing the conclusion that is best supported by an objective assessment of the evidence whatever that may be has been eclipsed by the concern for truth. Second, a person might strive to conduct a broad, unbiased search for evidence that is open to all outcomes, and then engage in an evaluation of that evidence that is not driven towards any particular outcome. Motivated reasoning is the first model.

Here’s Dan Kahan’s summary:

Motivated reasoning refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to process information in a manner that suits some end or goal extrinsic to the formation of accurate beliefs. “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Ziva Kunda. Psychological Bulletin 1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498. They Saw a Game, a classic psychology article from the 1950s, illustrates the dynamic. Experimental subjects, students from two Ivy League colleges, were instructed to watch a film that featured a set of controversial officiating calls made during a football game between teams from their respective schools. Albert H. Hastorf & Hadley Cantril, They Saw a Game: A Case Study, 49 J. ABNORMAL & SOC. PSYCHOL. 129 (1954). What best predicted the students’ agreement or disagreement with a disputed call, the researchers found, was whether it favored or disfavored their school’s team. The researchers attributed this result to motivated reasoning: the students’ emotional stake in affirming their commitments to their respective institutions shaped what they saw on the tape.

Kahan, Dan. “Foreward: Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law,”

And here, Mercier and Sperber summarize some of the research on motivated reasoning:

A series of experiments by Ditto and his colleagues, involving reasoning in the context of a fake medical result, illustrate the notion of motivated reasoning (Ditto & Lopez 1992; Ditto et al. 1998; 2003). Participants had to put some saliva on a strip of paper and were told that, if the strip changed color or did not change color, depending on the condition, this would be an indication of an unhealthy enzyme deﬁciency. Participants, being motivated to believe they were healthy, tried to garner arguments for this belief. In one version of the experiment, participants were told the rate of false positives, which varied across conditions. The use they made of this information reﬂects motivated reasoning. When the rate of false positives was high, participants who were motivated to reject the conclusion used it to undermine the validity of the test. This same high rate of false positives was discounted by participants who were motivated to accept the conclusion. In another version of the experiment participants were asked to mention events in their medical history that could have affected the results of the test, which gave them an opportunity to discount these results. Participants motivated to reject the conclusion listed more such events, and the number of events listed was negatively correlated with the evaluation of the test. In these experiments, the very fact that the participant’s health is being tested indicates that it cannot be taken for granted. The reliability of the test itself is being discussed. This experiment, and many others to be reviewed in this article, demonstrate also that motivated reasoning is not mere wishful thinking (a form of thinking that, if it were common, would in any case be quite deleterious to ﬁtness and would not be coherent with the present theory). If desires did directly affect beliefs in this way, then participants would simply ignore or dismiss the test. Instead, what they do is look for evidence and arguments to show that they are healthy or at least for reasons to question the value of the test.

Other studies have demonstrated the use of motivated reasoning to support various beliefs that others might challenge. Participants dig in and occasionally alter their memories to preserve a positive view of themselves (Dunning et al. 1989; Ross et al. 1981; Sanitioso et al. 1990). They modify their causal theories to defend some favored belief (Kunda 1987). When they are told the outcome of a game on which they had made a bet, they use events in the game to explain why they should have won when they lost (Gilovich 1983). Political experts use similar strategies to explain away their failed predictions and bolster their theories (Tetlock 1998). Reviewers fall prey to motivated reasoning and look for ﬂaws in a paper in order to justify its rejection when they don’t agree with its conclusions (Koehler 1993; Mahoney 1977). In economic settings, people use information ﬂexibly so as to be able to justify their preferred conclusions or arrive at the decision they favor (Boiney et al. 1997; Hsee 1995; 1996a; Schweitzer & Hsee 2002).

All these experiments demonstrate that people sometimes look for reasons to justify an opinion they are eager to uphold. From an argumentative perspective, they do this not to convince themselves of the truth of their opinion but to be ready to meet the challenges of others. If they ﬁnd themselves unprepared to meet such challenges, they may become reluctant to express an opinion they are unable to defend and less favorable to the opinion itself, but this is an indirect individual effect of an effort that is aimed at others. In a classical framework, where reasoning is seen as geared to achieving epistemic beneﬁts, the fact that it may be used to justify an opinion already held is hard to explain, especially since, as we will now show, motivated reasoning can have dire epistemic consequences. Why do humans reason?

Kahan also offers these ideas about how motivated reasoning occurs:

The mechanisms are also diverse. They include dynamics such as biased information search, which involves seeking out (or disproportionally attending to) evidence that is congruent rather than incongruent with the motivating goal; biased assimilation, which refers to the tendency to credit and discredit evidence selectively in patterns that promote rather than frustrate the goal; and identity-protective cognition, which reflects the tendency of people to react dismissively to information when accepting it would cause them to experience dissonance or anxiety. “What is motivatedreasoning and how does it work?” Science and Religion Today, May 4, 2011.

Ziva Kunda suggests that the mental route whereby motivated reasoning occurs can be even more subtle:

I have proposed that when one wants to draw a particular conclusion, one feels obligated to construct a justification for that conclusion that would be plausible to a dispassionate observer. In doing so, one accesses only a biased subset of the relevant beliefs and rules. The notion that motivated reasoning is mediated by biased memory search and belief construction can account for all of the phenomena reviewed earlier, but the evidence for this process is mostly indirect. The most prevalent form of indirect evidence lies in the constraints that prior knowledge imposes on motivational biases, a pervasive finding obtained in several paradigms. Kunda, Ziva. “TheCase for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498

So we’ve got cognitive and doxastic systems in humans that 1) have a high error rate with regard to religious beliefs, 2) are highly disposed to produce and believe religious claims, and 3) are also strongly motivated to construct reasoning towards those conclusions or beliefs that they favor through a variety of subtle and elusive biases. These dispositions should give us pause about religious claims coming from humans. Considering the source, we should have a high prima facie level of skepticism about religious claims coming from humans. Most of those claims are mistaken, people readily and easily produce religious beliefs, and they will resort to a variety of reasoning gymnastics to construct reasonings that appear to substantiate them.

The question of how best to address motivated reasoning is one that I will have to investigate over several posts in the future. For now, we can consider one popular answer that comes up when the believer is confronted with the motivated reasoning problem. It’s common for the advocate of a religious claim to defend the integrity of his reasoning by some appeal to his sense of how careful he has been in thinking about the question: “I used to be an atheist, but then I became convinced that God was real by reading the Bible,” “I am a very skeptical person and I am not easily duped into believing something that isn’t justified,” and so on. That is, I am a reliable judge of my own errors, and I am a reliable detector of the presence of motivated reasoning in my own judgments about religious beliefs. If it feels to me that my religious beliefs are legitimately justified and as if they arise as the product of dispassionate reasoning, then they are.

Once we make these assertions explicit, it is clear how suspect they are. Since Descartes, the view that I am a reliable source of information about what I believe and why I believe it has persisted, as have the views that I am know when I change my mind, I know why I changed it, and I am aware of those causal factors in my environment that influenced those changes. This optimism about introspectionism has been thoroughly undermined by recent psychological studies. See Nisbett and Wilson’s frequently cited survey: Telling More Than We Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes

We cannot trust the religious believer to be a trustworthy judge of the reliability of his own cognitive processes; his subjective feelings that he is not guilty of motivated reasoning are no more reliable than his subjective feelings that God is real. The religious urge is too powerful for us to simply take him at his word that he has been sufficiently skeptical. See my recent lecture here for details about the anti-introspectionism research: http://www.csus.edu/cppe/symposium/nammour_2011_beingwrong.html

Peter van Inwagen is one of the most widely respected philosophers of religion today. In the light of what we’ve seen about motivated reasoning and the powerful drive to be religious, consider this passage where van Inwagen constructs a story about human pre-history that favors the story of Genesis by creating a sort of Genesis God of the gaps.

“The following story is consistent with what we know of human pre-history. Our current knowledge of human evolution, in fact, presents with no particular reason to believe that this story is false:

For millions of years, perhaps for thousands of millions of years, God guided the course of evolution so as eventually to produce certain very clever primates, the immediate predecessors of Homo sapiens. At some time in the last few thousand years, the whole population of our pre-human ancestors formed as a small breeding community—a few thousand or a few hundred or even a few score. . . . In the fullness of time, God took the members of this breeding group and miraculously raised them to rationality. That is, he gave them the gifts of language, abstract thought, and disinterested love—and, of course, the gift of free will. . . God not only raised these primates to rationality—not only made them what we call human beings—but also took them into a kind of mystical union with himself, the sort of union that Christians hope for in Heaven and call the Beautific vision. Being in union with God, these new human beings, these primates who had become human beings at a certain piont in their lives, lived together in the harmony of perfect love and also possessed what theologians used to call preternatural powers—something like what people who believe in them today call “paranormal abilities.” Because they lived in the harmony of perfect love, none of them did any harm to the others. Because of their preternatural powers, they were able to somehow protect themselves from wild beasts (which they were able to tame with a look), from disease (which they were able to cure with a touch), and from random, destructive natural events (like earthquakes), which they knew about in advance and were able to escape. There was thus no evil in their world. And it was God’s intention that they should never become decrepit with age or die, as their primate forebears had. But, somehow, in some way that must be mysterious to us, they were not content with this paradisal state. They abused the gift of free will and separated themselves from their union with God. Van Inwagen, Peter. The Problem of Evil, Gifford lectures. “The Global Argument Continued.

We do not, as far as I know, have any substantial evidence to think of any of this story about miraculous primates being given magical powers is true. Motivated reasoning is the best explanation that I can see for why van Inwagen or anyone else who struggles through such contortions and logical gymnastics to devise a way to make implausible Biblical stories cohere with our knowledge of human evolutionary history or cosmology. Van Inwagen is correct; for all we know, something like this did happen in human evolution. There are also an indefinitely long list of other mythologies that could be rendered similarly “compatible” with our current anthropological evidence with enough ingenuity and determination. In every case, there are simpler natural explanations for why ancient people believed such stories that are much simpler and better justified than the suggestion that what Genesis describes actually happened. Van Inwagen’s story is an illustration of just how far motivated reasoning can propel otherwise thoughtful and reasonable people out the spiral of silliness.

Conclusion:

So, humans have a high error rate with regard to religious beliefs. They are profligate producers of religious claims, making them highly suspect sources of reliable information about God. Furthermore, their cognitive systems are strongly disposed to engage in motivated reasoning in favor of their prior held religious beliefs. The mechanisms whereby motivated reasoning are subtle and difficult to detect. The believers own assertions that he is not guilty of committing it with regard to his cherished religious views are not reliable. We should be highly suspect of religious claims and the ostensive justifications that are offered for them unless we have substantial reason to think that motivated reasoning is not at work. We’ve also seen that even some of the best philosophers of religion, like van Inwagen, can be swept up by the religious urge. The results are silly and elaborate rationalizations.

More on Motivated Reasoning

2011-11-17T08:38:00.000-08:00

Mercier and Sperber give an impressive argument here: Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory The standard view of reasoning is that its primary function is correct cognitive functions and find the truth. They argue that it is better understood as facilitating persuasion in social or communication contexts. Their thesis, they maintain, better explains the available evidence that shows how bad humans are at reasoning.

Their section on Motivated Reasoning contains this nice summary of some of the literature. The applications to the sorts of reasoning we frequently see coming from religious believers seeking to defend the God/Jesus conclusion at all costs are striking. For now, all I have time to do is offer a long quote:

Motivated Reasoning

2011-10-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

One of my students (Thanks Kate!) found this article. They are arguing for a thesis quite consistent with what I've been pressing in several recent posts:

Boudry, Maarten and Johan Braeckman. "How Convenient! The Epistemic Rationale of Self-Validating Beliefs Systems. forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology.

https://sites.google.com/site/maartenboudry/teksten-1/how-convenient

One passage is particularly relevant to the resurrection discussions I've been in recently:

According to cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, Schachter, & Riecken, 1964; Aronson, 1992; Tavris & Aronson, 2008), when people are presented with new evidence that conflicts with their previously held beliefs, this results in a form of cognitive tension called “dissonance”. Importantly, the strength of this uncomfortable tension depends on the degree to which people have invested in their beliefs, for example by way of public commitment, or by the time and effort spent acting in accordance with these beliefs (Batson, 1975). If the psychological investment in a belief is high, people are more motivated to reduce dissonance by rationalizing away disconfirming data. In the refined version of dissonance theory, dissonance arises not so much because of two conflicting cognitions, but because adverse evidence conflicts with one’s self-esteem as a competent and reasonable person[1]. This accords with our earlier observation that, when people explain away unwelcome evidence, they do so in a way that allows them to uphold an illusion of objectivity. For example, if a psychic has publicly professed his powers and risks losing his credibility, he is unlikely to be put off his balance by blatant failure. Or if a believer has spent a substantial amount of time and money on astrology consults, typically no amount of rational argumentation and debunking efforts will make him renounce his beliefs. As Nicholas Humphrey noted: “psychic phenomena can, it seems, survive almost any amount of subsequent disgrace” (Humphrey, 1996, p. 150). By contrast, if the psychological stakes are low, as in the everyday situations we mentioned above, the motivation for belief perseverance will be greatly reduced. Consider another example related to paranormal beliefs: suppose that Anna and Paul both start to suspect that they have psychic powers, but their level of confidence is not very high. While Paul hastens to tell his friends that he may be psychic and even performs some psychic readings, Anna decides to conduct an experiment on herself at an early point, when her beliefs are still privately held. All other things being equal, it is much more likely that Anna will abandon her beliefs silently when she discovers that they do not pan out (Humphrey, 1996, p. 105), while Paul will rationalize his failures because he has already made a public commitment. Thus, we would predict that people with an inquisitive and cautious mindset are more likely to put their hunches to the test early on, and are less likely to be sucked into commitment to wrong beliefs like these. By contrast, people who rush to conclusions and start spreading the news right away will more often find themselves in a situation where they obstinately refuse to abandon a false belief.[2]

A classic illustration of cognitive dissonance can be found in the landmark study by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who infiltrated a doomsday cult and observed the behavior of the followers when the prophesized end of the world failed to come true(Festinger, et al., 1964). The followers who had resigned from their jobs, given away their material belongings and were present at the arranged place and time with full conviction in their imminent salvation, became even more ardent believers after the prophecy failed, and started to proselytize even more actively for the cult. However, those for whom the cognitive stakes were lower (e.g. those who kept their belongings and stayed home in fearful expectation of what was supposedly to come), were more likely to abandon their beliefs afterwards.

News and Lots of Interesting Research on Reasoning

2011-09-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

I haven't written here in a while, but lots going on.

I just spoke to the San Francisco Atheists on Saturday. And I'll be talking to the SacFAN group on Thursday this week at the Carmichael Library, 6:30: Is Atheism A Religion?

My publication date for Atheism and the Case Against Christ is July.

And I'll be speaking at a big event at Sacramento City College on Thursday, Nov. 10 from 2-4. Details to follow.

Been thinking a lot about this study: Motivated Sensitivity to Preference Inconsistent Information and other related research. In a nutshell, testing shows how strong the tendency is to excessively critique new information that is inconsistent with preferences and to let preference consistent info slide by easy. I can't imagine that this bias is more pronounced anywhere than with religious beliefs. I'm looking for related research that focuses on the tendency with religious beliefs.

I am still thinking about this piece from Jonathan Baron: Actively Open Minded Thinking and the arguments/points I made here: The Defeasibility Test and here: Defense Lawyers for Jesus

Mercier and Sperber have published an important new argument here: Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory They maintain that reasoning did not develop primarily in order to improve knowledge and make better decisions, rather it is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade where social considerations between trustworthy and untrustworthy informers are important.

Nature has a related study this week: The Evolution of Overconfidence where the authors argue that being more confident than your information or skills warrant was favored by evolution. This thesis fits well with another important recent summary on misbelief: The Evolution of Misbelief--Dennett and McKay see esp. the section on religious belief and HADD.

It seems to me that all of these pieces help fill in some of the outline a good description of much of recent religious debate, and a plan for how to best to analyze much religious belief.

Defense Lawyers for Jesus

2011-08-03T00:06:00.000-07:00

There is a mode of reasoning about Jesus and other religious matters that is a seductive mistake. Our inquiries into some matter can be oriented towards defending a belief, or they can be evidence driven by and receptive to whatever conclusion is best justified. The difference is that we often approach the world with pre-formed conclusion or preference already in mind and that guides our investigation. Then as we consider new information that is relevant to that cherished doctrine, we are receptive to the arguments, evidence, and reasoning that corroborate it and we are hostile to arguments that run counter to it. The exercise of our reason is separated from truth as the goal, and it is co-opted in the service of some particular belief that might be deeply mistaken. Consider a lawyer with great rhetorical and analytical skill whose sole purpose is to defend a mob client, without any real concern for truth or justice. The lawyer’s intellectual powers for reasoning, constructing arguments, and answering objections have been detached from the goal of drawing the correct or true conclusion. But the defense of the client, or the skeptical analysis of the evidence against the client, can be complex, carefully reasoned, penetrating, and seductive. Here the conclusion or goal-- get the client off—constrains the reasoning. Reasoning is subjugated to a particular end result. Its critical function is confined to constructing rationales for rejecting any considerations that might show the defendant’s guilt.

By contrast, we can attempt to make an objective, balanced, and non-prejudicial approach to the relevant body of information, keeping the truth as our goal. Ideally, we do not let our preference for one outcome or some priori prejudice skew our gathering and evaluation of the evidence. And we are resolved to accept whatever outcome that evaluation supports. The conclusion is open during the search and evaluation phase. And the investigation determines the conclusion at the end instead of the prior belief constructing the investigation from the start. Here it is the evidence that directs us to the resulting conclusion and we are prepared and committed to accepting whatever result that is. The inquiry determines the belief, not the other way around.

We are all guilty of lapsing into rationalizing some preferred conclusion instead of pursuing the second model. With God beliefs, the problem is much more pronounced. People often acquire their religious beliefs when they are young and receptive to supernatural thinking. Some people are among the part of the population with strong or hyper-religious tendencies. The beliefs hold deep emotional, social, and psychological appeal. For many people, the promise of eternal life hangs in the balance. To make matters more difficult, there is a growing scientific consensus that evolution has wired us to be religious. Religious beliefs are at the center of a perfect storm of neurobiological, evolutionary, emotional, social, and psychological forces that make them some of the hardest matters in our lives for us to reason clearly about.

Some believers dedicate themselves to constructing rationalistic defenses of their doctrine. The doctrine itself is the unquestionable starting point, or the presupposition. The purpose of the apologetic or polemic exercise is to then expose flaws, or generate objections to any world view that differs from that doctrine. Reasoning has been subordinated to religious belief; its use is confined to constructing defenses and corroborations of the belief. But the acceptability of the belief itself is not responsive to reasoning. No reasoning is permitted to raise legitimate doubts about its fundamental legitimacy. The domain of reasoning is restricted just as the lawyer’s application of her rhetorical and argumentative skills have been wholly subordinated to getting her client off the hook. The question of guilt is left aside. Nicholas Wolterstorff says,

The religious beliefs of the Christian scholar ought to function as control beliefs within his devising and weighing of theories. . . Since his fundamental commitment to following Christ ought to be decisively ultimate in his life, the rest of his life ought to be brought into harmony with it. As control, the belief-content of his authentic commitment ought to function both negatively and positively. Negatively, the Christian scholar ought to reject certain theories on the ground that they conflict or do not comport well with the belief content of his authentic commitment. (Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 72)

In this light, Wolterstorff and William Lane Craig are defense attorneys for Jesus. Their explicit goal is to evaluate everything with regard to whether it supports their beliefs about Jesus. Reason must be subordinated to faith. Here is Craig in making some candid remarks about his focused pursuit of belief in Jesus at all costs.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4538185102301600532&q=william+lane+craig#

He has a “self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit” in his heart in which he knows that “Christianity is true “wholly apart from the evidence.” With enough diligence and time, any new information can be made to conform to that which cannot and should not be doubted.

What’s particularly chilling and frustrating about Craig here is the tight, and inpenetrable circle that he has constructed. First, reason must be subordinated to faith. Nothing can be allowed to controvert Jesus. Suspend all questions and doubts, no matter how legitimate, until you can devise a way to engineer or rationalize them into conformity with the prior belief. The “right” picture of the evidence is defined as the one that conforms with Christianity. No other outcome is permitted. If you have doubts, “cultivate your spiritual life, engaging in spiritual disciplines, like prayer, meaningful worship, Christian music, sharing your faith with other people, being involved in Christian service, so that you will foster the witness of the Holy Spirit in your life so that you will be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Doubting is an enemy to be denied, rejected, or coerced into conformity with the “incontrovertible” belief. Doubting is the evil work of Satan. (Note that in a genuine intellectual investigation with truth as its goal, doubt is best and only tool we have. Doubt is the welcome antidote.) And finally, when you find a way to engineer an analysis of a doubt that can bring it into conformity with the Jesus belief, it “leaves you with the conviction that Christianity does indeed stand intellectually head and shoulders above every “ism” or philosophy that it might compete with.”

See the circle? Put Christianity first and make all of your reasoning support it. Suspend all doubts, and then employ your reasoning where you can, only to corroborate Christianity. Then you will find that Christianity is superior to any other “ism,” or position. Christianity is right. Suspend any doubts that might lead you to think that Christianity is not right. Then only use your reasoning to defend Christianity, and then you will be satisfied that Christianity is right.

What’s disturbing about the strategy that Craig has constructed to insure that Christian belief is always vindicated is that it can be used to defend any view. Here’s some verbatim quotes from Craig, with only a few key terms changed:

Question: Some of us who wish to subscribe to a belief in unicorns have our doubts. When we go to college, they raise issues that seem to undermine the belief that unicorns are real, magical creatures who give us delight. What is your advice?

Answer: First, they need to understand the proper relationship between faith in unicorns and reason. The way in which I know that unicorns are real is on the basis of the witness of the magical Unicorn spirit in my heart. And this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing that unicorns are real wholly apart from the evidence. . . If I were to pursue this with due diligence and time, I would discover that the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the magical Unicorn tells me. It’s very important to get the relationship of faith in the magical unicorn and reason right, otherwise, what that means is that our faith in the magical unicorn is dependent upon the shifting sands of evidence and argument which change from person to person,. . . whereas the magical Unicorn and his testimony gives every generation and every person immediate access to a knowledge of him that is independent of the shifting sands of time and place and person and historical contingency. . . and finally, the secret will be to cultivate your magical unicorn spiritualism, engaging in spiritual unicorn disciplines, like praying to the magical unicorn, meaningful worship of the unicorn, magical unicorn music, sharing your faith with other unicornists, being involved in Unicornist service, so that you will foster the witness of the magical Unicorn in your life so that you will be filled with it. . . then it will leave you with the conviction that Unicornism does indeed stand head and shoulders above every “ism” or a-Unicornist philosophy.

It is possible to implant, sustain, and foster a belief in anything with this strategy. And since the only permitted employments of reasoning are those that support the belief, it cannot be reasoning that originally justifies the conclusion. The strategy for deealing with doubts insures that the dogma is conserved, immune to any considerations that might lead to its reasonable rejection. Unicorns are silly and somewhat harmless, but the framework for building a mind-consuming cult that Craig has outlined here works for UFO suicide cults, the Branch Davidian, the Jonestown suicide cult, Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo group, the Raelian UFO church, Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Falun Gong, the Church of Bible Understanding, and thousands of others.

Here’s a kind of enslavement far more dangerous than any physical chains. Get some young people interested in your movement. Teach them that your central dogma must be first and central in their lives. Tell them to suspend all of their doubts unless they can construct a rationalization that refutes the doubt and confirms the central dogma. Urge them to surround themselves with other believers and exploit any means possible to foster positive and poignant feelings about the central dogma. Encourage them to feel vindicated that their cult is superior in every way to all other worldviews.

In a healthy arrangement, one’s faculties of reasoning would be engaging in evaluating competing hypotheses by their respective conformity to a broad, objective body of evidence. That is, the vital role of reasoning is to raises doubts that undermine some conclusions, leaving those that fit the best. But doubts that cannot be subjugated to Christianity have been excluded from play for Craig, and reasoning can only be employed with the explicit purpose of corroborating a particular, prejudicial conclusion. Our general predicament is that with enough ingenuity, cleverness, and time, people can construct rationalizations for anything, and then raise doubts and figure out objections to any contrary view. So when you’re deep in it with Craig, it can really feel like you’re reasoning carefully and critically from premises to conclusions. But 9-11 conspiracy theories, global warming deniers, Holocaust deniers, Birthers about President Obama’s citizenship, Illuminati theorists, and countless other examples show how far ill-founded rationalizing can take people from the truth.

Craig’s and Wolterstorff’s revelations here put their arguments for God in a new light. When Craig presses the Kalam argument, or any other argument for a religious conclusion, what we see now is that he doesn’t really mean it. He has openly resolved to reject any other argument no matter what its merits if it doesn’t have the right conclusion. The acceptability of any argument is determined solely by whether it gives him the conclusion he already favors. Trying to argue him out of that conclusion is doomed to fail because the only legitimate function that reasoning can be put to, as he sees it, is in support of Jesus. There are no considerations, reasons, pieces of evidence, or arguments, even in principle that could possibly dissuade him. That would presume that his conclusions about Jesus were arrived at on the basis of reasoning, and not the other way around.

That means that we must attach an asterisk is any pseudo-reasoning or faux-arguments that they present for their conclusions. Without knowing how Craig’s meta-rational convictions actually undermine any rational discourse, you might be fooled into thinking he’s engaged in authentic reasoning and evidence analysis. We should be careful to not confuse a sophisticated rhetoric in the service of a predetermined conclusion for real critical analysis or a genuine appeal to reason to justify a claim.

Ultimately, I think we must treat this sort of choice to enslave oneself to religious belief as arbitrary, groundless, and without principle. If all reasoning is subordinated to the goal of defending the doctrine, then it cannot really be that sound reasoning supports and justifies the doctrine. The defender has constructed a polemical castle in the sky that has no foundation. Ultimately there can be no reasoned preference for the belief that justifies adopting some other ideology that happened to co-opt one’s thinking. If he was motivated, a clever apologist could construct a comparable framework of justifications and rebuttals with a belief in The Great Pumpkin or fairies at the center that is just as impressive. And when it’s UFO suicide cults, or Jim Jones, the results are disastrous. Despite the fact that they seem to employ sophisticated and careful reasoning to defend their beliefs, we have to conclude that they have left the playing field of rationality. If you’ve been seduced by one of these rationalizations, or by something like Christian apologetics, you’ve been sold a bill of goods.

The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience

2011-08-01T23:42:00.000-07:00

One of my students (Thanks Kate!) put me onto this amazing paper:

The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience by Jeffrey Saver and John Rabin in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry. The abstract:

Religious experience is brain-based, like all human experience. Clues to the neural substrates of religious-numinous experience may be gleaned from temporolimbic epilepsy, near-death experiences, and hallucinogen ingestion. These brain disorders and conditions may produce depersonalization, derealization, ecstasy, a sense of timelessness and spacelessness, and other experiences that foster religious-numinous interpretation. Religious delusions are an important subtype of delusional experience in schizophrenia, and mood-congruent religious delusions are a feature of mania and depression. The authors suggest a limbic marker hypothesis for religious-mystical experience. The temporolimbic system tags certain encounters with external or internal stimulie as depersonalized, derealized, crucially important, harmonious, and/or joyous, prompting comprehension of these experiences within a religious framework

Take special note of various religious figures and their likely psychiatric maladies in a chart on 501-502.

Review of the Salem Witch Trials Argument

2011-07-21T07:41:00.000-07:00

There's a review of my chapter contribution to The End of Christianity--the Salem Witch Trials argument here:
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/review-of-chapter-8-of-the-end-of-christianity/

He argues that it is possible to consistently hold that they weren't witches at Salem, but Jesus really was resurrected.

Help: Trying to find a study

2011-07-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

I'm going to crowd source this problem. Recently I read a study of Americans, I think, that polled people about their attitudes on the one God/one path, many paths question. They asked people whether they thought there were many paths to salvation or just one, more or less. As I recall, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses turned out to be the most exclusive. They were at the far end of the "one God/one path" scale. I can't remember which denomination was at the other end of the scale. I think the study came out within the last year or two, but I could be wrong about it.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? Do you have the reference? I need it!!

Thanks.

MM

Dead as a Doornail: Souls, Brains, and Survival

2011-07-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

I recently submitted my contribution to an anthology on the survival of the soul, edited by Michael Martin and Keith Augustine. It's titled The Myth of the Afterlife: Essays on the Case Against Life After Death, and it will be coming out on McFarland Press next year. Here's a piece of my introductory chapter in it:

Polling shows that more than 70% of Americans believe in some form of life after death or the survival of the soul (Harris, 2009; PEW, 2008). Many, probably most, of our depictions of the soul portray it as personally aware and with a consciousness that is essentially related to the embodied person. Frequently, we describe the afterlife as someplace where a person, as a soul, is rewarded or punished or where their soul will serve or worship God. Only a conscious, self-aware, thinking entity can do these things. Furthermore, it is not merely that some consciousness or thinking entity survives the death of my body, but that my consciousness will survive. My soul is my consciousness, so there will be continuity from my perspective between my awareness in my body and my awareness after the death of my body. (How could the notions of reward or punishment in the afterlife make any sense without continuity?) In our art, books, movies, mythology, and religious traditions, the transition from this life to the afterlife is often portrayed like the transition we make when we fall asleep and then wake up again. When I wake up, I am the same person, with the same thoughts, memories, personal traits, and the same body as the person who went to sleep. When I die, the soul leaves the body the difference is that when it wakes up, it has left the physical body behind and only the soul has survived with my thoughts, memories, and personal traits. The common view is that something that makes me up will survive, that I will have eternal life, that I will be reincarnated, or my soul will go to heaven. The things that are essential to me as an individual consciousness are my beliefs, my hopes, my dispositions, my emotional reactions, and my memories. So in these popular depictions of the soul, we seem to be identifying it with what we usually call a person’s mind. In what follows, then, we will treat “mind” and “soul” interchangeably.

We are not here concerned with the non-personal accounts of the soul that portray it as something distinct from the physical body and that can exist autonomously from it, or that de-emphasize the conscious, personal aspects of the soul. For example, we sometimes speak of there being an energy or life force in human beings, or that everyone possesses a part of some larger metaphysical entity or force.

The purpose of this introduction is to state the general evidence, particularly the empirical and inductive evidence, that the cessation of biological life also brings the end to a person’s mental life and hence the end of the soul. What are the reasons we have for thinking that the experiences we associate with having a mind, thinking, remembering, or feeling stop when the life of the physical body stop?

The competing views, therefore, are the extinction hypothesis—the view that absent some technological means of preservation or continuity that would sustain its functions, biological death marks the end of an individual’s mind. The survival hypothesis is the view that some significant aspect of a person’s mental life—her consciousness, her thoughts, or her personality—persists beyond biological death.

There is a strong probabilistic case for this simple argument for extinction:

1. Human cognitive abilities, memories, personalities, thoughts, emotions, conscious awareness, and self-awareness (in short, the features we attribute to the personal soul) are dependent upon the brain to occur/exist.

2. The brain does not survive the death of the body.

3. Therefore, the personal soul does not survive the death of the body.

The second premise is not controversial. The evidence in favor of the first premise, then, is crucial to resolving the question of survival. If the case for dependence is compelling, then we must accept the conclusion.

II. Neuroscientific Evidence for Dependence

Decades of evidence from stroke victims, motorcycle accidents, car wrecks, construction site accidents, fMRI scans, PET scans, brain imaging, and other medical studies have given us a detailed picture of which portions of the brain are active in conjunction with specific cognitive abilities and mental states. What that research has shown is that minds depend upon brains. Damaging a part of the brain destroys a part of our thoughts, eliminates a cognitive ability, or alters some personal or emotional capacity. Restoring the electrical, chemical functions of the brain renews the mental function.

While most of us would acknowledge some connection between mental function and the brain, we may have failed to see just how deep the connection runs. Even the most abstract mental faculties and the most specific features and contents of our private, mental states can be mapped directly onto brain functions. Some unusual brain disorders and the mental disruptions they cause illustrate the point. People who suffer from Anton-Babinski syndrome are cortically blind, but they don’t believe or feel blind from their conscious perspective. They will adamantly insist that they can see even in the face of clear evidence of their blindness. They dismiss their inability to perform visual tasks by confabulating explanations. Subjects with blind sight have the reverse problem; testing reveals that they can see, but they report no awareness of any visual stimuli. They insist that they are blind even though they are not. The syndrome results from a specific sort of damage to the occipital lobe of the brain.

Capgras syndrome results from occipital temporal and frontal region lesions in the brain. These patients have the powerful sense that someone they know, particularly a loved one, has been replaced by an imposter. Vilayanur Ramachandran has postulated that the problem arises from a failure of the temporal cortex regions of the brain responsible for face recognition to communicate with limbic system regions responsible for emotional responses (1998). Fregoli Delusion comes from a related form of brain damage that leads the patient to believe that many different people are actually one person with multiple disguises. Cotard’s syndrome, or the delusional belief that you are dead, you don’t exist, or that you have lost your organs or blood results from damage to the interactions between the fusiform face area and the limbic system. Patients with mirror prosopagnosia have difficulty processing the spatial relations of objects in a mirror with other objects in the area, and they often feel convinced that they are being followed. Brain damage or congenital problems with the fusiform gyrus is responsible.

What is important with these brain disorders is that we have mapped their specific locations or functional pathologies in the brain, sometimes down to the millimeter. And the clear physical origin of the problem demonstrates the dependence of the mental capacity upon the brain. The physical structures of the brain are causally responsible for consciousness and its capacities. A neuroscientist examining scans of a stroke victim’s brain can now predict, sometimes with remarkable accuracy, exactly what sorts of cognitive, conceptual, emotional, or psychological problems with patient will experience as a result of their brain damage. The connection is too direct, too pervasive, too immediate, and too strong to be ignored. The physical foundation of mental functions shows that the alleged separation of mind from brain posited by the survival thesis cannot occur. If a region of the brain is damaged or removed, then the correlated mental capacity goes, memory is lost, emotional affects are abbreviated, conceptual abilities disappear, or recognitional capacity will cease.

In a remarkable study in 2005, neuroscientists reported the discovery of what they deemed the Halle Berry neuron. In order to isolate the location of the electrical chaos that induced their epilepsy, patients brains were implanted with electrodes. Then the patient was shown a variety of pictures while the activity of the neurons in the vicinity of the probes was recorded. In several instances, single neurons could be singled out whose activity spiked in response to specific images such as Halle Berry, Bill Clinton, or the Eiffel Tower. One neuron fired when the subject looked at a picture of Halle Berry in an evening gown, in a cat woman suit, as a cartoon, and even the words “Halle Berry,” suggesting that the neuron played an integral role in a large web of neurons who were responsible for a variety of abstract and high level representations of Halle Berry rather than some simpler function such as edge discrimination. This neuron did not respond comparably to the hundreds of other images used in the study (Quiroga, et al., 2005). Again, the evidence is against the survival hypothesis; every aspect of a person’s mental function is produced by brain function.

Research shows remarkable relationships between brain tumors and brain chemistry and bizarre thoughts or behaviors. In one case, the onset of a patient’s hyper sexuality, obsession with porn, and pedophilia parallel’s the growth of a tumor in his right, orbitofrontal lobe. When they removed the tumor, his urges lapsed. A year later, when the tumor grew back, his pedophilia returned (Burns, Swerdlow, 2003) The use of the Parkinson’s drug, pramipexole, has been shown to induce the sudden onset of compulsive behaviors like gambling, hyper sexuality, and overeating (Driver-Dunckley, et al., 2003). Patients with no gambling history are overwhelmed with the urge to gamble when their dosages cross a particular threshold, and they gamble away their life savings. Then when the dosage is reduced, the urge vanishes.

The evidence from neuroscience shows that it is the proper functioning of the brain that makes even the most abstract cognitive abilities possible. Stephen Pinker says,

If you send an electric current through the brain, you cause the person to have a vivid experience. If a part of the brain dies because of a blood clot or a burst artery or a bullet wound, a part of the person is gone -- the person may lose an ability to see, think, or feel in a certain way, and the entire personality may change. The same thing happens gradually when the brain accumulates a protein called beta-amyloid in the tragic disease known as Alzheimer's. The person -- the soul, if you want -- gradually disappears as the brain decays from this physical process (2011)

When our brains are intact and healthy, we experience the full range of conscious and mental abilities that are attributed to the soul. But when electrical, chemical, or structural functions of those regions of the brain are compromised, there is a direct, commensurate loss of those abilities.

To a less extreme degree, we can also see the physical foundations of the soul in our everyday lives without brain damage or electrical probes. The physical dependence of mental states is evident when alterations of the chemistry of the brain with drugs, food, sleep-deprivation, fasting, or coffee change the way we think. Brain chemistry affects the prevalence of positive or negative thoughts in our minds, our being irritable or happy, or our being cognitively impaired from too much alcohol to drink. Too little to eat or drink and our thoughts grow slow and negative, too much caffeine and our thoughts race. Even the weather seems to have a pronounced affect on the character and direction of our thoughts. Hallucinogenic drugs induce visions in the mind of a different reality. People on PCP often envision spiders and have a powerful belief that they can fly. Millions of people take anti-depression drugs every day—chemical compounds that alter the chemical events in the brain—that produce a change in their beliefs, feelings, dispositions, and other mental states. The causal dependence in these cases is clear; the mind depends upon specific chemical and electrical reactions in the nervous system. Modify those reactions even slightly and there is a corresponding change in the mind and its contents. Even something as common as a cup of espresso shows that those elements of consciousness that are alleged to survive biological death and depend directly upon the brain.

If there was empirical evidence for survival, that is, if consciousness persists without the brain, then we would expect to find some exceptions to the close, direct correlations between the electro-chemical events in the brain and mental states, cognitive capacities, and conscious experience. If there were cases where we could establish that some or all of the mind functions that we attribute to the soul occur in the absence of brain processes altogether, or in the absence of the particular brain processes that have been most closely correlated with those functions in other cases, then we would have some striking evidence for survival and against the first premise in our argument. Suppose that we found cognitive abilities and consciousness to be present or absent with no apparent relation to the state of the human brain. If brain damage of various sorts left cognitive functions unscathed, or if consciousness persisted despite alterations in brain chemistry and structure, then we might have some evidence to doubt the correlation and the causal connection. Likewise, if some mental function lapsed while the brain was completely intact and functioning, we might have an empirical indicator of mind/brain autonomy. But we find no such violations in either direction.

The End of Christianity--now available

2011-06-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

The End of Christianity, a new anthology edited by John Loftus from Prometheus Press is out now. It includes my chapter presenting the Salem Witch Trials argument against the resurrection of Jesus, and a long list of other interesting articles.

It's on Amazon here: The End of Christianity

Here's the Table of Contents:

I. Why 2000 Years is Enough

1. Christianity Evolving: On the Origin of Christian Species, by Dr. David Eller
2. Christianity's Success Was Not Incredible, by Dr. Richard Carrier
3. Christianity is Wildly Improbable, by John W. Loftus

II. Putting an Ancient Myth to Rest

4. Why Biblical Studies Must End, by Dr. Hector Avalos
5. Can God Exist if Yahweh Doesn’t?, by Dr. Jaco Geicke
6. God’s Emotions: Why the Biblical God is Hopelessly Human, by Dr. Valerie Tarico

III. Living on Borrowed Time

7. The Absurdity of the Atonement, by Dr. Ken Pulliam
8. The Salem Witch Trials and the Evidence for the Resurrection, by Dr. Matt McCormick
9. Explaining the Resurrection Without Recourse to Miracle, by Dr. Robert Price
10. Hell: Christianity’s Most Damnable Doctrine, by Dr. Keith Parsons

IV. Science Puts An End to Christianity

11. Is Religion Compatible with Science?, Dr. David Eller
12. Neither Life nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed, by Dr. Richard Carrier
13. Life After Death: A Scientist Looks at the Evidence, by Dr. Victor Stenger
14. Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them), by Dr. Richard Carrier

And abstracts of the chapters.

Get it. It'll be good for you.

A Monument to Vanity and Self Promotion

2011-06-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

I've been compiling stuff for an author bio and promotional form and I've got this partial list of videos, debates, podcasts, and interviews.

Wrongology: Knowing My Own Mind: http://www.csus.edu/cppe/symposium/nammour_2011_beingwrong.html

“Did Jesus Return from the Dead?” Debate with Prof. Russell DiSilvestro, Bridgeway Christian Church, Sacramento. May 2010. Video:http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6B3DA67A7E8D1104&annotation_id=annotation_234124&feature=iv

The Resurrection: Jesus and the Salem Witch Trials, Sept. 20, Hinde Auditorium, CSUS.

Video: http://vimeo.com/15351235

Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus, Sept. 21, Hinde Auditorium, CSUS.

Video: http://vimeo.com/15338250

Does God Want Us to Believe in Miracles? Sept. 20, 21, 22. Hinde Auditorium, CSUS.

Video: http://vimeo.com/15339056

Capitol Public Radio Interview: Matt McCormick and Russell DiSilvestro, Did Jesus Return from the Dead? http://www.capradio.org/news/insight/2010/09/20/insight-debating-miracles--tracy-nelson--science-comedian--freebadge-serenaders

Podcast: (interview) http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/05/18/episode-45-an-impending-rapture-revisionist-history-interview-with-matt-mccormick/

Podcast: (interview) Thinking Critically about God and the Philosophy of Religion. Think Atheist, May 8, 2011. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thinkatheist/2011/05/09/think-atheist-radio-show-episode-7-dr-matt-mccormick-may-8-2011

Podcast: (interview) Theism and Double Standards, Common Sense Atheism, Feb. 11, 2010. http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=6461

Video Interview: The Case Against Christ and the Salem Witch Trials, Atheist Church with Keith Lowell Jensen, Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrsBMrJ-_OY&feature=channel, Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gprRjMgzowY

Interview: Morality, Yes. God, no. Sacramento News and Review, Nov. 11, 2008. Online here: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/morality-yes-god-no/content?oid=878785

Interview: Personnel Profile, Dr. Matt McCormick, Capitol Weekly. 1-03-2008. Online here:

http://www.capitolweekly.net/article.php?xid=wswrc75j9qo9u3

Interview at An American Atheist

2011-06-02T10:41:00.001-07:00

I was interviewed for a podcast for the blog An American Atheist recently about philosophical atheism: It's here:

http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/05/18/episode-45-an-impending-rapture-revisionist-history-interview-with-matt-mccormick/

Thinking Clearly About Freedom

2011-05-31T06:28:00.000-07:00

Sam Harris has (another) great post on the muddled notion of "freewill" that obscures so much of our thinking about religion and morality here: Morality Without "Freewill". Much of this is agreeable although I find something elusively off the mark about the way he's framing the discussion.

Two brief ideas. First, the native conception of freedom that many non-philosophers seem to be operating with is of some inexplicable force, originating with us, that defies the ordinary physical, naturally lawful order of events. Free acts are little miracles, as it were; violations of the causal closure of the physical world. This view is completely at odds with what we know about the physical world and how brains operate.

Second, people's motivations are frequently backwards on the topic. If some argument or piece of evidence suggests that we don't have freedom in this wrongheaded sense, then that is typically taken as an irrevocable reductio of that argument. If the implication of argument x is that we don't have freewill, then x is immediately objected because we have an incorrigible intuition of our own freewill, or, at least, we dislike that implication intensely enough to be motivated to reject the argument.

Part of what Harris is struggling with in the book (The Moral Landscape) is providing a clear conceptual scaffolding that can serve as an alternative to the old one. People's inability to extricate their thinking from the hopeless mess of religious moral notions is also the source of a lot of the resistance he's getting, even from people who aren't overtly religious.

Contemporary Philosophy of Religion and Atheism

2011-05-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

The guys at The Think Atheist Show interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. We talked about the case for atheism in philosophy of religion, my book, and proving the negative. The podcast is here.

Dead as a Doornail: Problems with Evidence for Life After Death

2011-05-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

I'll be talking to the Sacramento Freethinkers Atheists and Nonbelievers (SACFan) group on Tuesday, May 17 at 6:30 at 191 Lathrop Way, Sacramento.

The vast majority of Americans believe in some sort of life after death. Many of them cite out of body experiences, near death experiences, and other unusual phenomena as evidence. There are even fundamentalist Christians and apologists like J.P. Moreland here who are citing these occurrences as evidence for an afterlife. Let's take a take a close look at what sort of evidence would be needed, what we have, what being dead is, and what really being dead is. The case we have from OBEs, NDEs, and other phenomena is really poor for life after death. OBEs and NDEs face a timing problem, an error checking problem, and several other challenges before we can take them seriously.

A version of the slides I'll be using is here: Dead as a Doornail.

I've also got several relevant earlier posts such as

When Do We Die?

What Would Be Evidence for Life After Death?

I hope to see you there.

Wrongology

2011-05-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

I presented in a panel at CSUS in the Nammour Symposium recently. I presented a summary of anti-introspectionist research, or research that shows we don't know our own minds nearly as well as common sense suggests. Video is here, I'm the second speaker:

http://www.csus.edu/cppe/symposium/nammour_2011_beingwrong.html

New Domain Name: provingthenegative.com

2011-05-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

The domain name, provingthenegative.com is now mine. If you enter it, you'll be routed here. It's a bit catchier than the blogspot one (which still works as well.)

www.provingthenegative.com

Proving the Negative

2011-05-06T22:26:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving a talk to the Atheist Advocates of San Francisco on Sunday. It's widely alleged that one can't prove the negative concerning God. Not surprisingly, I maintain you can. The group has put up this notice about the talk: http://atheistadvocatesofsanfrancisco.com/meetings.html

I'll be using a version of these slides in my talk: Proving the Negative

The talk will be Sunday, May 8, from 4:30-6:30 in the Audre Lorde Room, Women's Building, 3543 18th (at Valencia) San Francisco. Hope to see you there.

And if you haven't seen this, it's time. Tim Minchin is brilliant:

The F Word

2011-04-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving a lecture about faith and atheism for the UC Davis student atheist organization AgASA tonight (Thursday, April 28 at 6:00pm, Young Hall, Room 198. The slides for the discussion are here:

The F Word

This is a slightly revised version of The F Word talk I have given in recent months. A more detailed prose explanation of one of the main points, to go along with the perhaps cryptic slide bullet points is here: Open the Floodgates

Some believers have protested that my account faith isn't accurate or adequate. A wide range of examples of ordinary usage of the term like these have led me to a provisional definition:

I have faith that my husband will come home safely from Afghanistan.
I have faith in my wife.
I have faith that the Detroit Lions will win the Superbowl this year.
I have faith in the President despite his recent problems.
She’s lied to me so many times before, it would take a huge leap of faith to believe her now.
Loaning him the money to start his own business was an act of faith.
“Let’s have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” (Abraham Lincoln)
“To follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.” (Benjamin Franklin)
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” (Martin Luther King)
"Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods." (C.S. Lewis)

Provisionally then, the sense of faith that I think is most important in epistemological terms, that is widely invoked, and that is most seriously flawed is this:

“Faith” is invoked when there’s a shortcoming in the evidence and believing is still the goal.

S believes p by faith means S believes p despite inadequate evidence.

Inadequate: on the whole, the evidence shows ~p.
Inadequate: on the whole, there isn’t enough evidence to justify p.

If there were enough evidence to justify p, then there’d be no need to invoke faith.

Faith is belief without sufficient evidential justification.

I argue that there are a number of problems with believing through this sort of faith. The internal problem, or the issue that the faithful believer himself ought to be troubled by, is The Floodgate Problem linked above. The external problem concerns the degree to which one person's faith can function as a reason for someone else to believe. If Smith has faith that p, then can Smith recommend that Jones do likewise? I argue that at the very least, having faith is a sort of indulgence not justified by the evidence on Smith's part, and that Smith cannot have any recourse to claim that to failing to have faith is a mistake, irrational, or part of some failure to fulfill Jones's epistemic duties. Smith can't make a leap of faith and then insist that Jones would be epistemically culpable for not doing likewise. Atheists often ask me, "What do you say when someone says that they have faith?" The partial answer is that no answer is needed--unlike cases where Smith gives Jones reasons, arguments, or evidence for p, if Smith goes beyond the evidence to believe p by faith, Jones can reasonably ignore him. Evidence for p would impose a rational obligation or epistemic culpability on Jones--if there is a sound argument for p, Jones would be remiss to refuse to accept the conclusion. But if Smith has faith, he's gone beyond what is rationally required by the evidence and this (irrational) indulgence can't be similarly recommended or prescribed to Jones. In fact, there are a number of reasons for Jones to reject this sort of epistemic policy and that should trouble Smith than they often do.

I have been assured several times that this account of faith, despite is nearly ubiquitous occurrence among believers, is inaccurate, and that a proper Biblically or theologically based account offers a much stronger position to the faithful believer. I have read, reread, studied these other themes in what I can find about faith for years, and I confess that for the most part, I find them either to be incoherent gibberish, or they are close enough in spirit that the problems I outline in these arguments apply directly or indirectly to them.

So I will offer a plea--if the account of faith I am considering here and elsewhere in my work is mistaken and there is some widely used sense of it that avoid the problems I'm raising, then please tell me what that is and tell me exactly how is steers clear of the problems I have raised. But I also request that you do it without citing Biblical sources as if those claims are uncontroversial or obviously true. That some claim occurs in the Bible falls far short of giving me, or any reasonable person, grounds for thinking it is true, or even that it makes sense, by itself. In fact, indulge me--if it makes sense, then it should be possible to explain what faith is without citing Bible passages at all. The only people who find those citations to be illuminating are the ones who have faith and the ones who find what the Bible has to say to be philosophically sophisticated and relevant. Those of us on the outside aren't helped by it much.

And if you are in the area, please come by the lecture tonight.

The Natural Theologian's Dilemma

2011-04-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

Before developments in the 20^th century like post modernism, and watershed shifts in the philosophy of religion like reformed epistemology, the standard approach to the existence of God was natural theology. Natural theology takes the view that it is possible to render a successful argument for the existence of God. That is to say, a reasonable person who finds the premises to be acceptable is rationally committed to accept that God exists. For centuries, the debate has been over the acceptability of those premises whether in cosmological, ontological, or teleological arguments.

Now, the NT theist faces a dilemma. Either our epistemic situation is such that it renders the conclusion “God exists” reasonable, or our epistemic situation with regard to God’s existence is ambivalent (or worse.) If the NT takes the view that our total evidence supports “God exists” more than the alternatives, then he faces a new problem. Consider whatever particular line of argument that he puts forward as showing “God exists.” The question we must ask now is, could an omnipotent, all knowing, all good God have rendered our epistemic situation in some regard so that the evidence was better in favor of that conclusion? If God had wished his existence to be known through this particular form of argument or line of reasoning, could God have made the evidence better, brought it about so that there were even stronger considerations, or a more compelling case to be made? Most people’s views, including believers and non-believers, are that God’s existence cannot be proven or shown through the evidence. So, by implication, those people think that the case for God could be much better than it is.

Non-believers insist that, at a minimum, our evidential situation makes non-belief, or even disbelief, epistemically inculpable. She violates no epistemic duty in not believing. She may even feel that our total evidential situation is such that believing or being agnostic are epistemically culpable. Believing in or even suspending judgment about God are not supported by the evidence.

The problem for the NT theist who insists that the evidence supports G is that by most people’s reckoning, the existence of God could be more manifest, more abundantly clear, and non-belief could be less epistemically inculpable. Informally, among my students and the believers I talk to, the vast majority of them are skeptical that believing in God can be arrived at through argument or proven through reasoning. Believing, to the masses, is a matter of faith and requires going beyond what is available evidentially.

If the case for God could be better than it is, and it is not as good as it could be, then what can we make of the NT theist’s position in the context of arguments or evidence that could have been?

If the case for God could be better, then why isn’t it? It is very difficult to fathom how a being as powerful and knowledgeable as God is alleged to be would not be able to make his existence better know through some means that would be amenable to our investigations, our arguments, and our reasonings. Since he didn’t, the only sort of limitation that there might be on his bringing that state about must be his own goals. In some fashion, God, if he is real, must not want us to believe by way of the natural theological project. A number of answers or possibly justifying goals have been offered along these lines:

Theists like Howard-Snyder and Moser in Divine Hiddenness have suggested a preliminary list:

Maybe revealing himself is not a high priority. It is not something he wants. That would explain why he doesn’t do it. It’s not that he can’t do it, he doesn’t want to.

Remaining hidden enables people to freely love, trust and obey Him. Coercion is incompatible with love.

Being hidden prevents a human response based on improper motives like fear of punishment.

Being hidden prevent humans from relating to God and their knowledge of God in a presumptuous way.

God's being hidden allows us to recognize the wretchedness of life on our own without God, and to stimulate us to search for him with the appropriate attitude (contrition.)

If he revealed himself, then it would not be possible to have the real risk associated with passionate faith.

If he revealed himself, then the temptation to doubt would be reduced or eliminated. Doubt makes religious diversity possible and gives us opportunities to assist others and ourselves in building personal relationships with God.

While these are fascinating suggestions, I think they fail for a variety of reasons. But arguing against these justifications for divine hiddenness is not my goal here. (Hidden Theists are to be commended, however, for acknowledging what atheists have been arguing for all along—there are not sufficient evidential grounds for concluding that God is real.) What I’d like to focus on is the implications of divine hiddenness for natural theological approaches to belief.

The NT theist cannot have it both ways. He cannot on the one hand argue that “God exists” is the reasonable outcome of a non-question begging, objective analysis of the arguments and evidence, while endorsing justifications of divine hiddenness like those on the list on the other hand. He cannot insist that God’s existence is manifest and reasonable while also claiming that God has his reasons for withholding his existence from serious inquiry. God’s existence is either justified by our epistemic situation or it is not. And the very fact that the arguments for his existence are so embattled, weak, complicated, and unconvincing, even to other believers, works against the NT theist. By defending the NT approach with some new, carefully constructed, and subtly nuanced version of the cosmological argument, or whatever, he faces the much harder question: if this is how God wanted us to arrive at belief, then why did he give us so little to work with? Why would God have done such a poor job or facilitating our apprehension of the reasons and their implication of his existence? Why did God do such a poor job of it? Currently, over 70% of professional philosophers whose careers and expertise are devoted to ascertaining the reasonableness of the very best arguments we have concluding that there are no compelling rational grounds for God’s existence in the traditional, NT sense. A NT theist may think that there is a successful argument for the existence of God. But given the historical, social, and philosophical context, he cannot reasonably conclude that existence of God could have been no more convincing than it currently is, by any measure. Even if he thinks some argument succeeds, surely he doesn’t think that God could not have arranged the epistemic situation to be better than it is. To think that God’s existence is manifest through argument, and that not even God could have made it more obvious is just to flatly ignore the hoards of reasonable people who have thought long and hard about the problem and concluded otherwise. God’s existence is obvious to no one, and it is obvious it could have been more so. Put it this way, I am a mere human being with exceedingly limited faculties; making my own existence undeniable and obvious to someone is painfully easy.

One common reply here is that God could not fully reveal himself to us without robbing us of our freedom. It’s not at all clear to me what sort of freedom would be compromised—it didn’t seem to have robbed Moses, Abraham, or Satan of their freedom. But the problem here would be for the NT theist to make this claim. If God cannot , for whatever suspicious reason, show himself to us for fear of robbing us of our freedom, then that suggests that the best arguments we have leave our freedom with respect to God’s existence intact. That is to say that the best arguments we have do not commit us to believing, which is another way of saying that they just don’t work.

The NT theist is saddled with a deep dilemma, then. Not only must he meticulously construct a version of the case for God (of the argumentative gaps) that does not fall prey to the long list of standard criticisms of the close cousins to that argument, he must also explain why it is that God was forced to bury this glorious, essential, and redemptive truth in exactly the contentious, ambiguous, and unconvincing, indecisive circumstances where we find it. He has to argue that the evidence shows that God exists, and then explain away so much epistemically inculpable non-belief, so many failures of other arguments for God’s existence, and the absence of a better reasons and evidence. He has to navigate the impossibly fine line between “the evidence is compelling—not believing is irrational and epistemically culpable,” and “God has his reasons for withholding his existence from us lest we be convinced.” Coming up with an argument for God now, I maintain, is too little and too late.

If, on the other hand, the theist embraces the other disjunct of our premise from the outset: our epistemic situation with regard to God’s existence is ambivalent (or worse.) Then we are done. He has now acknowledged the atheist’s point—believing is not justified by the evidence. What remains will be determining whether believing anyway in a situation like that is reasonable. At the very least, the theist who acknowledges divine hiddenness cannot maintain that non-belief in that situation is epistemically culpable. He cannot claim that God’s existence is not manifest because he has justifying reasons for not revealing himself and that a person who does not believe in that circumstance is irrational, unreasonable, or somehow epistemically blameworthy for not believing. He may argue, I suppose, that such a non-believer is failing to fulfill some duty to have faith, or a responsibility to believe passionately, or some other mandate to believe that which is not epistemically justified. But I have my doubts about his being able to successfully defend this strange new form of obligation to believe.

So one of my standing questions about any allegedly successful argument for the existence of God is not about the support for the premises or the details of its justification. My question is, why isn’t the argument vastly more convincing than it is given that God surely could have done better sooner. And since he didn’t, I have to conclude that not even God wants us to believe by route of such an argument—if he did, then he could have easily made it believable. Call this the epistemic challenge for God: even if you think that God’s existence is supported by some argument, you must acknowledge that God could have arranged things so that the evidence was much better than we find it. That he didn’t shows that it wasn’t his intention. So why should any of us take your argument seriously? Not even God wants us to.

Good News: Prometheus to publish my book, working title The Case Against Christ.

2011-04-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

Prometheus has agreed to publish my book about Jesus' resurrection. Tentatively, we'll be working on final revisions of it for the Spring 2012 book season. More details as they develop.

The Morality Test for God

2011-03-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

Let’s frame the question of God’s goodness another way. There are countless ordinary cases where we judge a human to have acted rightly or wrongly. Very roughly, when someone is in a convenient position to do something about some serious instance of pointless suffering, and she knows about it, and she is a morally decent or good person, we expect her to do something. Or we do not expect her to act (or fail to act) in a way that brings about serious pointless suffering in others when she knows that the action will bring it about and a choice is available to her to pursue some other course of action that would not cause it. Furthermore, if serious, pointless suffering occurs, and she could act to prevent it at some risk or harm to herself, we very often label that action as heroic or supererogatory. And we hold those sorts of acts, such as running into a burning building to save someone, in high moral esteem. You’re a good person if you strive to avoid causing unnecessary harm to others, and you’re an even better person if you work to alleviate or prevent harm to others at great cost or risk to yourself.

This is all making very short work of a huge number of issues in moral theory, but I just need to get a basic idea across. We have a set of expectations about what morally good people do, what morally wicked people do, and what morally heroic people do. And we form out judgments about a person’s moral merits on the basis of their fulfilling or failing to fulfill those expectations.

Suppose a human stood by and watched someone drown, did nothing while someone was swept away and crushed by a tsunami when it was easy to save him, or she did not act to stop an instance of child sexual abuse, or she set up an apparatus that would kill or maim some innocent passerby, and so on, would we consider that human to be good? If a person labors endlessly to help the unfortunate, educate children, house the homeless, or give medical care to the sick, would we consider that person to be morally good?

God is, by most accounts, good. So here’s the problem. There are countless instances where, if a human acted with regard to some instance of suffering or tragedy the way God apparently acts, then we would readily and without doubt condemn that person as morally wicked. That is, if a person acts like God acts, there would be no doubt in our minds that that person was morally evil. We can ask this question about cases of apparently pointless suffering:

If a human did what God is allegedly doing right now, would we consider that a morally good action?

Some examples may help. If a person unleashed a virus on the planet that killed or maimed millions of people, we would think that person was evil. If a person could have prevented the suffering of those millions of people and didn’t, we would think that he is evil. The same goes for cases of famine, drought, war, genocide, and so on.

If working tirelessly to aid refugees, feed the starving, house the homeless, prevent disease, spread literacy, cure cancer, and end war are morally good, then why doesn’t God do any of them? If ignoring human suffering, tolerating child abuse, being indifferent to injustice, and allowing the propagation of ignorance and hatred are morally bad things, then why does a good God do them?

If the answer to the morality test question is no, then God fails it. If God fails the morality test, then we have (another) serious challenge to the claim that God is good. In general, if we gather enough serious challenges to the claim that X is good, then I think we are justified in rejecting the claim that X is good. At the very least, as the gap grows between what God does and doesn’t do and our normal associations with the label “good,” the more it seems like something has got to give.

The problem of evil is complicated, and I won’t pretend to capture all of the issues here. All I want to do is bring out a different way of thinking about it. There is a profound cognitive dissonance in the way that we talk about God’s goodness and our ordinary moral judgments. On a regular basis we ascribe moral goodness or moral wickedness to innumerable human cases, but we often fail to notice that God is doing none of the things that we praise, and he is doing what we’d normally consider to be evil. Yet we insist that he is good. The believer should take this question to heart:

If God is good, then why doesn’t he do the things that we consider to be good?

It’s on this question that I really want to focus. Experience has taught me that raising these issues provoke people to raise all sorts of tangential matters. Some reactions are predictable: how can we know what is really good or evil? Lots of those instances of suffering are caused by humans and not God. We must not hold God to the same moral standards that we apply to humans. God does act in morally good ways everyday through the acts of those that love him, And so on. Some of these are off topic, and none of them really answer the question.

God’s defenders will be quick to point out that the same standards of moral behavior should not be applied to God here that we apply in ordinary situations. But we must be particularly careful not to succumb to the temptation of ad hoc defenses, special pleading, confirmation bias, or bogus redefinition. We can acknowledge that God, if he were real, would be special. But the theist who would pursue this line is in danger of redefining his terms into incoherence. Imagine the ardent defender of Kim Jong Ill or Muammar Gaddafi:

“Yes, I know that Kim Jong Ill has systematically starved, abused, tortured, killed, and neglected the North Koreans, but he really is good.”

“It seems like Gaddafi has brutally oppressed dissidents, sponsored terrorism, assassinated his political opposition, and engaged is terrible nepotism, but in fact, he’s exceedingly virtuous and moral, and those actions are actually the extraordinary manifestations of goodness as it applies to him in his vast moral superiority to us.”

These sorts of redefinitions don’t work in any other cases. And what’s often driving the defender is confirmation bias, dedication, over zealousness, spin, emotional investment, or malevolence. We can only sustain the claim X is good in a case like this by utterly undermining the meaning of the term. If we must redefine the term entirely in order to sustain attributing it to X, then we should rather conclude that X is not good. If what you actually mean when you say “God is good,” is that God is indifferent, callous, or evil, that’s fine. Let’s just be clear by what our terms mean. I can argue that God is cheese too. Those behaviors aren’t what “good” means. And if that’s what you mean, then you really aren’t entitled to call God good, which is my point here.

What can we say about the overall result of applying the morality test to God? The results are grim. In general, God does none of the things that good people are supposed to do, and he either actively commits or by omission allows to happen countless events that only the most callous, murderous, insensitive, morally bankrupt human would commit or allow to happen. That is, by our ordinary moral standards that we apply to countless actions on a daily basis, God is a moral monster.

What are the possible responses to this dilemma for the believer? First, and obviously, the believer will insist that it is not fitting to apply the same moral standard to God. Owing to his infinite power, his knowledge, or his moral perfection, the ways that God’s goodness manifest themselves are not comparable or measurable by the human standard. Some of this is to be expected and to an extent, it is right. Were there such a being, we would expect the manifestation of his goodness to be different—it would transcendent our ordinary standards.

This approach is reflected in John Hick’s soul building defense, or Van Inwagen’s view in“The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence,” in Philosophical Perspectives, 5: 135-165.

See the Stanford Encyclopedia for a brief overview

Very generally, these arguments suggest that once we unpack the details of what it would be for an infinitely powerful, knowledgeable, and good being to create a world, we might well come to expect the world to be, more or less, just as we find it in terms of the amount and distribution of seemingly pointless suffering. That is, theodicists like Hick and van Inwagen think that the gap between the world we find ourselves in and the sort of world that God would create isn’t nearly so wide once we consider the requirements of creating a regular universe that fulfills the variety of God’s diverse goals, and once we appreciate how different a being of God’s capacities relationship to the world would be.

I don’t think that Hick or van Inwagen argue that the state of suffering in the world serves as favorable evidence for the existence of a good God, but I haven’t looked at them closely for just that question. I think their views are that if we have sufficiently strong independent evidence for a good God’s existence, then we can see that the suffering in the world is consistent with his goodness.

They might be right, but the problem with their account is that the world that they would have a good God create is indistinguishable from a world with no God at all. Or at least the differences between the world God would create and a Godless world are too small to make it possible for those of us living in one of them to be able to tell which one we’re in. When we put the question to them: If God is good, then why doesn’t he do any of the things that good people do? their answer seems to be: when you’re THAT good and powerful, your actions cease to resemble ordinary good or evil actions altogether. But now we are losing our handle on the claim because of the redefinition problem above. On what grounds can we still confidently assert that God is good? What does it mean to say that he is good now?

This is not yet a devastating argument against God’s existence or goodness. There is much we do not know, and God, if there were one, would no doubt be mysterious to us in many ways. But it is a very substantial prima facie strike against views that God is real and good. Unless the morality problem can be dealt with in some specific ways that I will detail below, God’s failure on the morality test should lead us to conclude that there is no God (where being morally perfect or infinitely good is an essential property of being God.)

Here’s the problem from another angle. If we had some other, independent grounds for thinking that God is real and that God is morally perfect, then our conclusion that God is real and morally perfect could withstand some of the challenge. In general, the conviction or confidence that we attach to the conclusion that God is real and good, like anything else, should be proportional to the quality and quantity of evidence we have. A rational person proportions the strength of their belief to the evidence they have. If that evidence is only weakly in favor of the conclusion, then we should only provisionally accept it. If that evidence becomes weak enough, or if the evidence mounts in favor of rejecting the conclusion, we should do so.

In the big picture, the evidence in favor of God’s existence is weak, and the evidence for God’s moral perfection is even worse. Neither the cosmological nor the teleological arguments give any indication of the moral status of the first cause or the designer. Quite the contrary, if one were to look at the state of the universe and try to draw some inductive conclusion about the moral character of the responsible party, only utter moral indifference would seem plausible. When confronted with the problem of evil, theists have spent centuries just trying to argue that God’s goodness is possibly compatible with the amount and distribution of suffering we find. That is, the strongest response that many theodicies have been able to muster to the problem is that there might be a good God out there. Even worse, skeptical theists have retreated to the meager position that we just can’t know what the function of suffering is in God’s plan. For our current purposes, those answers amount to a tacit concession that God’s goodness cannot be generalized or inductively inferred from the state of the universe.

The ontological argument has some more potential, if it were successful, to prove the moral perfection of God. It’s a deductive argument that proceeds from an analysis of the superiority intrinsic to the concept of a great, perfect, or ultimate being. So it could potentially prove, if successful, that God must necessarily be morally perfect. The problem is that by widespread concession, the ontological argument doesn’t work. See Graham Oppy’s The Ontological Argument for the best thorough and recent analysis. And even if there was some version of the argument that we found compelling, the problem of God’s failure to act in all of the morally salient circumstances under consideration would raise a serious question about that argument. If the ontological argument proves that God is morally perfect, then why is it that God doesn’t do any of the things we associate with moral virtue? This conflict could be taken as an indicator that there is something seriously amiss with the allegedly successful ontological argument.

Recently some theists have alluded to a moral argument for God’s existence that alleges to show that God, a morally perfect being, exists from the presence of a moral sense in us, or from the existence of moral facts. These arguments have yet to be defended in any plausible form in the open forum of philosophical peer review as far as I know. Until they are, I’m not sure that we need to take them very seriously. There is a reason that this alleged indispensible connection between moral facts and God escaped all of the greatest moral theorist in history (Kant, Hume, Mill, Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Rawls, Epicurus, and so on), namely, it’s implausible. Furthermore, God’s failure on the morality test that I am outlining here will be a substantial blow against the premises that might be put forward in such an argument. We can state the question a new way: If the existence of moral facts, or a moral sense in us, proves the existence of God, then why doesn’t God seem to appreciate or adhere to any of those facts?

The failure of God on the morality test gives us strong prima facie evidence against God’s existence that weighs heavily against these alleged independent grounds.

So we do not have the independent, substantial arguments we need to establish the goodness (or reality) of God that might withstand or overcome God’s abysmal failure on the morality test. God’s failure on the test should sustain the conclusion that there is no God until some answer is forthcoming.

Once again, the central question is clear and straightforward, and it ought to have a clear, non-evasive answer: If God is good, then why doesn’t he do any of the things that good people do? There is a great deal more that a good human could do, if she had the power and the knowledge. God is alleged to be a great deal more powerful and knowledgeable than we are. So if there were such a God, a great deal more of those good acts or ends would be achieved.

Many of the traditional answers to the problem of evil come roughly in the form of saying, “There could be some good, absolving reason for why a good God does not do what someone with moral virtue would do. So possibly God is good.” But notice that just restates the problem rather than answer it. It is also possible that there is no good, absolving reason for why a divine being hasn’t done what a virtuous person would do, in which case there is no God. The mere possibility that there is a good reason isn’t enough to solve the problem. It is possible that there is an infinitely evil and powerful being, but there are absolving reasons that prevent him from making things vastly worse than they are right now.

The Unreliability of Introspection, Anti-Intuitionism, and God

2011-03-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

A particular philosophical methodology and set of assumptions run through many of the arguments for God in the literature.

Cognitive Transparency: If it is in my mind, then it will be evident to me that it is.

Cognitive incorrigibility: I can’t be mistaken about what I take to be the contents of my own thoughts. If on introspection, I take X to be a content of my own mind, then it is true that X is one of my mental contents.

Belief access: If I believe it, then I am or I can become aware that I do, and the same for my disbeliefs.

Justification Access—I have privileged access to the reasons, evidence, or considerations that led to my believing what I do. My reasons for believing p will be incorrigible and transparent to me.

Propositional/Belief Modularity--beliefs are modular. You either have one or you do not. You change your mind and cease to have it, and so on. Beliefs, and the cognitive structures in mind that contain or map them, have syntactic or logical structure and relationships, and they have semantic content.

Intuitionism: my immediately introspected hunches/feelings/reactions to philosophical thought experiments or questions about natural, metaphysical, or logical possibility can be treated either as highly reliable or perfectly reliable (!) indicators of natural, metaphysical, or logical possibility in the right sorts of circumstances. My intuitions are data that should be incorporated into philosophical theories or arguments.

The influence of these approaches and presumptions is beginning to wane in the discipline, but many of them, or versions of them play central roles in theistic arguments and positions. Some people allege to have immediate, direct awareness of God's presence in the universe. The Holy Spirit "witnesses" to others, providing allegedly incontrovertible knowledge of the divine. Some claim awareness of a special set of non-physical, objective moral facts in their minds that prove the existence of a transcendent moral agent.

Here are some fascinating research and articles that could pull the rug out from under introspectionism and intuitionism:

Schwitzgebel, Eric. The Unreliability of Naive Introspectionism

DePaul, Michael and William Ramsey, eds. Rethinking Intuition

Nisbett, Richard and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, Telling More Than We Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes

Williamson, Timothy. "Philosophical 'Intuitions' and Scepticism about Judgement."

Churchland, Paul. Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitude.

How Biophilic is the Cosmos

2011-03-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

On some (particularly poor) versions of the design argument, the fact that life in the universe, much less human life, appears to be exceedingly rare is taken as significant. Recent research that arises from improved telescope imagery technology has been putting the number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy very high:

New Estimate for Alien Earths: 2 Billion in Our Galaxy Alone

The Probability of Design

2011-03-07T19:54:00.001-08:00

I’ve been going through Richard Swinburne’s and Robin Collins’ versions of the teleological argument for my Philosophy of Religion students recently. A striking point has leapt out at me. Both arguments insist that some empirically discoverable features of the universe make it more likely than not that God was responsible for it. In Collins’ case it is the fine tuned constants and values in physics that make the world hospitable to life. For Swinburne, it is the fact that there is something rather than nothing, the matter in the world is uniform and subject to uniformities of succession (lawful behavior), and that the laws of nature are relatively simple and elegant.

In both cases, it is fair to attribute to these authors the view that were it not for the efforts of God, the universe would have a radically different state than we find it in. That is, the occurrence of physics in a world left to itself is exceedingly unlikely. Another way to put it is that the non-God augmented or default state of the world is to be nothingness, or chaos. Call this N) The default state of reality (without God) is nothingness or chaos.

It’s this last statement that I find to be extraordinary. I have always been incredulous about design arguments. But the more I ponder this idea, the more stultified I become. What I cannot fathom is how anyone might claim to argue with confidence that N is true. On what possible basis, aside from a prior (question begging) assumption that orderly worlds must come from God, could one claim to possess reasons that justify N. I certainly can understand that many people have very strong intutions in favor of N, and that it is a very appealing notion. But the majority of people have the strong intuition that they can control the physical world with their minds if they just believe hard enough.

N) is an intriguing claim, certainly. But I, for one, just don’t have the sort of confidence necessary in my intuitions to proclaim that they are reliable guides to what must be real or not real at the broadest, most cosmic level. I can’t fathom what sorts of arguments or reasons one might have for thinking that N) is true. And I certainly can’t fathom being sure enough about those grounds to rest the weight of a belief in an almighty, supernatural creator on it. Would you be willing to flip a coin to decide if you have cancer? And then would you be willing to claim certainty about the result if the flip goes in favor of cancer. In general, rational people proportion the strength of their conviction that some conclusion is true to the strength and reliability of their evidence. To believe (or disbelieve) while disregarding the quality and quantity of the evidence one has is the paradigm example of irrational.

I’m no expert of matters of probability, but here are a few more thoughts that occur to me here. On objectivist accounts of probability, the way one would gather the relevant evidence to evaluate the probability of X happening giving conditions C is to look at lots and lots of cases where C occurs and then determine the rates at which X is the outcome. If X happens 90% of the time when C obtains, then predicting or postulating X in some instance of C is a really good bet. But we can’t do anything like that in the teleological argument cases above. We aren’t able to look at lots and lots of universes that either have a divine designer and don’t, and then compare the rates at which the designed universe are orderly and lawlike. If we had the data sets, we might be able to argue—in general, we have found that when a divine designer is responsible for creating a universe, that universe is orderly in 92% of cases. Furthermore, we find that in universes with no divine designer, the odds are less than 3% of order occurring. We find ourselves in an orderly universe. So, all other things being equal, we conclude that our orderly universe was most likely the handiwork of a divine designer. Or something like that. That’s all absurd, of course, because we do not have, nor we will ever be able to acquire, that sort of data about universes, order, and Gods.

On subjectivist Bayesian accounts of probability, like Swinburne and Collins are invoking, it is the information that one has and the prior beliefs that one brings to the table that leads one to make estimations of the likelihood of some hypothesis being true given some observations. Those prior beliefs and expectations, whether they are accurate or based on anything in reality, will generate some subjective expectations. Given your priors, you will find some outcomes to be quite surprising and some other outcomes to be quite predictable. On this account, a medieval doctor, if you can call them that, would be quite shocked and incredulous to find out that the plague is caused by a bacterial infection of yersenia pestis (instead of, say, an evil demon possession). Nevermind that he’d be dead wrong in this, on Bayes’ theorem, if I’m understanding this right, he’d find that hypothesis to be outlandishly improbable.

So on these estimations of probability, anything, no matter how improbable, irrational, or false it is, can turn out to be excedingly improbable. Probability here is a function of the information and expectations you have, not necessarily the facts.

Now back to N). We certainly can’t agree that N) is exceedingly probable on the basis of the previous account of probability. We don’t have the information we’d need for that. Can we even see the way clear to agree with Swinburne and Collins that N) is improbable on the subjectivist Bayesian account? I can’t really imagine non-question begging considerations that would lead me to agree here either.

Do you know what you believe about God and why? or Is the Genetic Fallacy a Fallacy?

2011-02-12T20:17:00.000-08:00

Despite recent developments in psychological research, there are a number of naïve assumptions that persist behind many of our arguments about religious claims.

The Genetic Fallacy: traditionally, it has been considered a fallacy to evaluate and/or reject a view on the basis of where it originated. That is, bringing up the causal, historical, psychological, social, or emotional account of the origin of a belief is not sufficient to reject it or show that holding it is ill-founded. If a woman believes some proposition and someone says, “You just believe that because you’re a woman,” it’s irrelevant to whether the view is true or justified. (For an excellent run down of fallacies see the entry in the IEP )

C.S. Lewis often bristled at the genetic attacks on his Christianity: “you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became to be so silly.” (God in the Dock)

Of course, Lewis is making a good point, and the Genetic Fallacy sure appears to be a fallacy. But now, with a lot more psychological research about belief formation and persistance available to us, it is legitimate to wonder if there are circumstances where we should not take a person’s avowals of why they believe some claim so seriously.

If it turns out that a person does not have the ready access to what they believe and why they believe it as Lewis and the more rationalistic philosophers thought, then the fallacy may not be so fallacious.

Introspectionism is the view that I know what I do and don’t believe. I know why I believe it. I know when I change my mind and why. And when I’m certain about it, then I really know it. A little more formally, we can characterize it as the view that I know my own mind better than I know anything else. It includes presumptions about

Cognitive Transparency: If it is in my mind, then it will be evident to me that it is.

Cognitive incorrigibility: I can’t be mistaken about what I take to be the contents of my own thoughts. If on introspection, I take X to be a content of my own mind, then it is true that X is one of my mental contents.

Belief access: If I believe it, then I am or I can become aware that I do, and the same for my disbeliefs.

Justification Access—I have privileged access to the reasons, evidence, or considerations that led to my believing what I do. My reasons for believing p will be incorrigible and transparent to me.

There is a substantial case to be made for anti-introspectionism in the psychology literature, however. Consider some studies:

Poll students about integrated busing. Put them in groups and have a confederate argue persuasively for the opposite view. Poll them again and their views change sharply. Ask them about the view they had originally and the revise it to match their new ones. They radically change their minds, and then change their memories of their former view, and hide the change from themselves. And none of the subjects believe that the discussion had had any effect in changing or modifying his position.

Ask subjects to tie two hanging cords together that are too far apart to reach between. Subjects are stumped. A researcher walks around the room and casually bats one cord to make it swing. Subjects figure it out within 45 seconds of the cue. But they confabulate an explanation for how they figured it out. "It just dawned on me." "It was the only thing left." "I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it."

People are less likely to help those in distress as the number of bystanders increases. Furthermore, they are unaware of the influence of these numbers; they persistently deny that they were influenced by the others present.

Give subjects a card with a smell sprayed on it. Prime them with the word, “Parmesan cheese” and they report liking it. Prime them with “Vomit” and they dislike it. Same smell.

Conduct a consumer survey by asking shoppers to evaluate which article of clothing is the best. The right most article is heavily over-chosen, no matter which item is there. But shoppers seem to have no idea that they have a bias for the right most. Almost all denied a right hand bias, and they confabulate answers about why the right one is the best.

Give subjects a placebo, tell them it will produce heart palpitations, breathing irregularities, tremors, and butterflies. Expose them to steadily increasing shocks. The pill subjects are subsequently able to endure 4 times a high amperage shocks than the ones who didn’t take the pill. Ask them why they were able to take a higher than average amount of shock and they make up a story that doesn’t involve the pill.

Show male subjects pictures of women, some with dilated eyes, some without. Ask them to rate the pictures for attractiveness. They show a strong preference for the women with dilated eyes. But they don’t know it. And they confabulate reasons about what they find attractive in the pictures.

Manipulate a subject’s moral views about some topic by having them write and deliver speeches against their own view. Later their views have shifted towards the contrary view. Ask them, and they insist that that was their view all along. It also turns out that they attributed the shifting view to God before and after without noticing the change.

Subjects who receive painful electric shocks during a learning task with no explanation will downplay the painfulness of the shocks more than if they have a reason. But none of the subjects realize that that’s what they are doing.

So what lessons can we draw from these sorts of studies? People are poor judges of: What they believe, what they feel, why they believe or feel it, when they change their minds, why they change their minds, who they find attractive, why they find them attractive.

Rather than having some privileged, incorrigible access to the private contents of my mind, I observe me and I theorize about what I am thinking, why I act, what motivates me in a way very similar to how I figure out what you think and why. And since I’m so close to the subject, I often do a poor, biased job of it. In many cases, someone else is in a better position to say what I think and why than I am.

What is the relevance of this sort of research for the question of belief in God? It shows that it is quite plausible that the real causes of belief in religious matters are not the conscious reflections or intellectual decisions that we may have thought. Believing in God, like believing in anything else, is not simply a matter of reflecting on the evidence, considering the reasons pro and con, weighing that evidence, and then willing or deciding to believe. That’s not typically how people arrive at belief. Believing, it turns out, is a much messier, more organic matter. And in many cases the influences that led to belief, the causes of belief, changes in belief, and even the beliefs themselves are not readily available or introspectible for the believer. It often feels like we are the best ones to say what is going on in our own heads, but that feeling is an illusion, as countless studies have shown.

Does analyzing the causes that lead to a person’s belief in God give us a reason to doubt that God is real? If we have conducted a thorough investigation of the various reasons or arguments that have been presented for the existence of God and found them wanting (we have), then it is perfectly legitimate to wonder about the causes of so much belief in the world, and to be less inclined to take those beliefs seriously. When I hear about the various exotic magical and metaphysical views that a villager from the jungles of Borneo has, or we hear about these people in the Amazon who have never had any contact with the outside world:

it’s no longer incumbent upon us to take their self-reported justifications for their religious beliefs as serious candidates for the truth. We have a pretty good idea about the historical, psychological, and cultural origins of these beliefs, and knowing where they came from, by itself, is a pretty good justification for thinking that they are false. Once we get clear on the genesis of modern theism, that knowledge is also a defeater that leads us to be highly skeptical.

A Simple Paradox Concerning God’s Goodness

2011-02-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

Here’s a short way to understand the problem with attributing goodness to God. There are vastly detailed issues in the background, but this rough sketch works to illustrate the point. (I am deliberately conflating acting and failures to act, and leaving some issues concerning duties to rescue in the background for clarity.)

In introductory moral theory discussions, we make four standard distinctions:

How should we understand the category of morally wrong actions? These are acts (and sometimes omissions or failures to act) where if you commit them, then you are deserving of moral blame and even punishment. Agents have a moral obligation to refrain from doing these. And people, the would be victims, have a right to not have these acts committed deliberately against them. Murder, rape, child abuse, etc. fall into the morally wrong category.

What acts are morally permissible? these are acts that a moral agent may do or refrain from doing without violating any duties. Committing them, or not, does not warrant any moral praise or blame. Having toast for breakfast is morally neutral this way, unless maybe you killed someone for the toast.

Which acts are morally obligatory? These are acts that an agent has a moral obligation or duty to perform. If he fails to do them, then he deserves moral blame. Failing to feed your kids, or ignoring a drowning person while there's a life preserver there on the dock that you could toss to him are examples. People have a right to receive these things from you.

Which acts are morally supererogatory? These are acts that you do not have a moral obligation to do. But if you do them, you deserve moral praise. People don't have a right to have you do these for them. You violate no moral duty by doing them or refraining. But we hold them in high moral esteem. When someone runs into a burning building to save a child, they are going above and beyond the call of duty. We praise them as heroes, but if he had not done the act, we would not find moral fault.

God, it is alleged, is good. He is morally just, infinitely good, or morally perfect. How can we understand this description in the light of the distinctions above? We typically have the highest moral praise for those individuals who make the greatest personal sacrifices in order to perform morally supererogatory acts. Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and many others are praised widely for their morally supererogatory acts.

God is alleged to be all powerful and all knowing too. So there will be no opportunities for supererogatory action that are unknown to him, or that are beyond his power to perform. Does God perform all of the supererogatory acts that we might expect from an infinitely good, all powerful, and all knowing being? The short answer appears to be no. There are countless supererogatory acts that God could have done that he has not done. There are countless supererogatory acts that God could have done but he did not do, but if a human had done them we would hold them in the highest moral esteem.

Does God perform all of those acts which we hold to be morally obligatory for moral agents? Again, the simple answer is no. There have been countless opportunities to perform actions that we would consider to be morally obligatory for moral agents, but the action was not performed. Again, God would not be limited by his power or knowledge in these cases.

Has God committed morally wrong actions? If God is the almighty creator of the universe, then there are countless instances where there was an event that God was either directly or indirectly causally responsible for that we would ordinarily identify as morally wrong. Consider the class of actions or omissions that we would identify as morally wrong if a moral agent had been present and had committed them or allowed them to happen. A person drowns by herself near a dock on a lake where a life vest sits on the dock. If a person had been standing next to the life vest and saw her drowning in the lake, but refrained from tossing the life vest to her, we would think of that failure to act as morally abhorrent. There are countless other events like these where it does not appear that God did what we would ordinarily have identified as the morally obligatory act. Therefore, it would appear that God has committed (or by omission allowed to happen) countless morally wrong events.

So it appears that God, if there is one, has failed to perform countless supererogatory acts that we would otherwise identify as morally praiseworthy. And God has apparently failed to do many of the actions that we would ordinarily consider to be morally obligatory and good. And God has apparently committed (or by omission allowed to happen) countless morally wrong actions or events.

Therefore, we cannot accept the allegation that God is good, or that there is any morally perfect, infinitely good, perfectly just being. There appears to be no such being. And if there is no morally perfect being, then there is no God.

As I said, this is only a rough sketch of an argument. A carefully constructed version that ties up all loose ends, and deals better with some of the oversimplification would be much longer and much more boring.

I am attempting to bring out into the light how severe the moral double standard is that we often apply to God. In our ordinary, daily affairs, we invoke a set of straight forward and clear criteria for what sorts of things are wrong, which things are heroic, and which things are morally good. But in our ideas of God we throw all of that out. God is required to do none of the things we normally expect moral agents to do. If he acts like the worst sort of negligent monster, again that is overlooked. In effect, none of our judgments about good and evil apply to God, but we insist: not only is God good, he’s the ultimate exemplar of moral perfection. Nevermind that he doesn’t do any of the things that morally praiseworthy people do.

Believers may respond by insisting that for God, whose moral perfection is so vastly beyond our fallible and sinful natures, goodness means something totally different. Yes, I have to agree. If God is good, then “good” doesn’t mean any of the things that I thought it did. In fact, it appears to mean what we usually intend when we say, “negligent,” “abhorrent,” “genocidal,” “abusive,” “repugnant,” or just plain “evil.”

There may also be this response from Christians, “But God has performed the ultimate of supererogatory acts; he has sacrificed his son for our sins, and offered us salvation from our evil natures,” or something to that effect. These “God really has done wonderful things for us,” replies will miss the point, I think. It doesn’t matter how great the deal from Jesus is, that doesn’t alter the moral status of the evil actions and failures to act. Think of it this way—if an abusive parent neglects, ignores, or worse, actively tortures his kid with diseases, famine, suffering, warfare, and so on, for decades, and then after countless evil actions have passed, gives the kid a million, or a billion dollars, a wonderful life, or whatever reward you like, does that actually change the wrongness of what went on before? Even if it’s infinite bliss for eternity in heaven, that doesn’t change what God was doing (or failing to do) while the neglect or abuse was happening. Settlement money is nice to get for the victims of priest child abuse, for example, but I’d bet that lots of them would have glad traded the settlement to have not had the abuse happen to them at all. Heaven won’t solve the problem I’m bringing out.

How can it not bother a person to confidently ascribe goodness to God without attaching any of the praise, blame, or responsibilities of being good that are essential to the notion in every other case?

The Defeasibility Test

2011-02-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

Ultimately in the back and forth of discussions about the existence of God, religion and the like, there is an important question that must be dealt with. For the believer, that question is, what is the relationship, as you see it, between reasoning about God and your belief in God? That is, is your belief in God more fundamental than your commitment to believe what reason and evidence indicates, or are you prepared, if the evidence demands it, to abandon your view of God as irrational? The question is of obvious importance because disagreement about God’s existence that is pursued in the form of a dialogue about reasons, justifications, and the evidence is actually done in bad faith if ultimately the believer doesn’t really care what the evidence is. If the believer places a higher premium on believing than anything else, including being reasonable about counter evidence, then he’s just engaging in sophistry when he engages in dialogue.

Here are some examples of famous theological writers who have ordered their priorities so that believing comes first and any other information, ideas, or evidence must conform to that belief or simply be rejected:

Nicholas Wolterstorff says,

“The religious beliefs of the Christian scholar ought to function as control beliefs within his devising and weighing of theories. . . . Since his fundamental commitment to following Christ ought to be decisively ultimate in his life, the rest of his life ought to be brought into harmony with it. As control, the belief-content of his authentic commitment ought to function both negatively and positively. Negatively, the Christian scholar ought to reject certain theories on the ground that they conflict or do not comport well with the belief-content of his authentic commitment.” (72 Reason Within the Bounds of Religion.)

Why is it that one must first run an evidential test on Scripture before one is justified in accepting it? Does this not fundamentally subordinate revelation to reason? What then is left of the authority of Scripture?

William Lane Craig insists that nothing could possibly counter indicate the truth of the Gospels because of a self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit in his heart than gives him knowledge independent of all questions of evidence.

Believing is somehow “self-authenticating” for them. It “carries its own evidence.” As they see it, it is a mistake to think that believing itself must be held to standards of evidence or rationality. Rather, our standards of evidence and rationality must answer to our belief in God.

On a similar note, we find this doctrinal statement at The Talbot School of Theology:

"The Bible, consisting of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, is the Word of God, a supernaturally given revelation from God Himself, concerning Himself, His being, nature, character, will and purposes; and concerning man, his nature, need and duty and destiny. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are without error or misstatement in their moral and spiritual teaching and record of historical facts. They are without error or defect of any kind." http://www.talbot.edu/about/biblical-inerrancy/

The infallibility of the Bible is their starting point. As an “educational” institution, this statement is a promise—whatever other ideas you may encounter, no matter what objections arise, and no matter what the evidence is, it must all conform to our picture of Biblical truth, or it will be flatly rejected. Bible first, reasoning and evidence second. We can contrast this approach with the fundamental principle of a liberal arts university where the free exchange of ideas, whatever they may be, is allowed and encouraged in order to achieve intellectual liberation from dogma. At an institute like Talbot, the goal is to propagate a preordained dogma despite the facts. At a real university, the purpose is to instill the critical reasoning skills and a methodology for rooting out error so that the seductive trap of dogmatism can be avoided.

There are many more believers who won’t be as forthright about their bottom line as Craig, Wolterstorff, and the Talbot School. But in practice, they are more deeply resolved to continue believing than they are to any principles of reasoning that might lead them to reconsider their theism. The epistemological term “defeater” has drifter over to these discussions through people like Plantinga, and believers will now sometimes say, even after hearing stark, and powerful objections to their positions that they have yet to hear anything that amounts to a defeater of the belief they started with. This sometimes amounts to code for, “I don’t value being intellectually responsible about the powerful argument you are making more than I value my continued believing in God, so I will continue believing as I started, unaffected.” At this point, of course, there’s really nothing left to be said. If someone is resolved to believe at all costs, then nothing else that any skeptic could say, no matter how thoughtful or persuasive can undermine that stubbornness. At this point, we should be prepared to conclude that someone has simply left the rational thought game and must be considered a lost cause.

Of course, as the dedicated Christian sees it, this kind of complete devotion to believing in God is an admirable thing. It shows that he is utterly committed and that he has subjugated every facet of his life. And our culture is full of references and allusions that seem to encourage this bizarrely backward belief structure. In our literature, movies, and stories, when someone stands by their principles and believes, no matter what, he’s a hero. But being skeptical or being prepared to change your mind when the evidence calls for it treated as failures of character, moral defects, and personal failures of courage and strength of will. I’ve long suspected that we elevate these behaviors in our books and movies as part of a nervous effort to fortify our own shrinking resolve to believe religious and superstitious silliness. If Bruce Willis retains his faith in humanity, or God, or whatever, then it soothes my quavering feelings about them in me. But I’m at a total loss to see how dedication or belief for its own sake is an admirable thing, particularly when the devotion is to something so patently misguided as vindictive, truculent, and capricious Iron Age creator deity. If believing it doesn’t make sense in the first place, then continuing to believe it no matter what the challenge is even worse. As they say, if it’s not worth doing, then it’s not worth doing well.

What the inversion of belief and reason really amounts to is a slavish devotion that runs so deep it robs a person of their autonomy, their self, and the only tool they have for discovering the truth: their reason. This is someone who values believing more than they value believing that which is supported by the evidence or reasons. What’s always baffling about this kind of believer is the question of how one could ever legitimately move into such a position. If you don’t already believe, then what possible means of access can there be? Aside from a psychotic break that just results in one’s believing, what could possibly lead a thoughtful, responsible adult from not believing that Jesus is the Lord to then believing that he is and then to the policy that the belief must be elevated in importance above everything else, including any of the appeals to reason or evidence that might have got you there.

Wolterstorff also says, “For he like everyone else ought to seek consistency, wholeness, and integrity in the body of his beliefs and commitments,” as long as all of those beliefs are brought into conformity with following Christ.

But one wonders why there is any concern about internal consistency and integrity once reason and responsiveness to evidence have been rejected in this manner. If the conspiracy theorist, who has rejected the most plausible interpretations of the evidence in favor of some far flung delusion, labors long and hard to get his fundamentally misguided picture of the world to be internally consistent, what possible difference does it make? Internal consistency is a game worth playing only if we are serious about getting our model of the world to anchor to reality. Consistency isn’t valuable for its own sake, it is only useful insofar as we are confident that the world itself is consistent, so our model of it must mirror that feature. But that’s just the start. If the model isn’t responsive to the constant input of new information, it’s worthless. But once we’ve enslaved ourselves to some obstinacy like those above, why should one care about consistency? Without the basic concern of making our belief structure about gods conform to reality and the evidence, there’s no motivation to pretend or pursue any such rules. It’s as if Wolterstorff is insisting that it’s only acceptable to cheat on one line of your taxes, but for the rest of the project one must be internally scrupulous with the bogus numbers that result.

What’s deeply disturbing about these admissions, besides their candor (Did he actually say that he’s only going to accept those accounts of history that conform to his preconceived religious commitments?), is their complete abandonment of the very rules that would render any of their beliefs justified. Once we elevate a religious belief to this status and declare that all other things we think or belief must conform to it, we’ve left the realm of sanity. The doctrine is believing you in this case, not the other way around.

Even from the inside of this strange position, this problem must be troubling. The most ardent believer of Wolterstorff’s type must acknowledge that there are many other people in the world who have drawn a similar line in the sand about their favored religious claims. That is, the Christian here will readily concur that were a Muslim or a fundamentalist Jew, or a Zoroastrian, or some other non-Christian to make a similar declaration, they would be mistaken. Others who claim a similar primacy for their religious views, where that view is incommensurate with the Christian one, must be mistaken because there is only one true Christian God and Jesus is his only son. So we must all acknowledge the possibility of error in this type of defense (if we can call it that) of a theistic belief. If it is possible to be mistaken then, what is the method whereby we can hope to separate the proposals that are misguided from the ones that are authentic? When you have the impulse to say, “All other beliefs, standards of evidence, and even reasoning itself must conform to my belief in God,” how do you know you’ve stumbled upon the right one, particularly when you know there are so many people around who have gotten it wrong by this route? What independent route to the belief in God do you have left available to you?

We might have said, “Well, I can know that my God is the one, authentic God because all of the evidence and a powerful set of carefully reasoned arguments shows it.” But of course, that defense isn’t available to people like Wolterstorff--they have denied that there is any need to defend their belief this way. The folks at Talbot can’t say on the one hand that the Bible is incorrigible, and when pressed for why, respond by insisting that the Bible says it is. So the problem is that once you abandon the one set of methods we have for error correction, you’re set adrift. What can be your criteria for preferring one religious scheme over another? More importantly, what’s to separate the view you prefer (unjustifiably) from delusions or insanity?

Consider the paradox this believer is now in. They assert: “Many people who subjugate their lives and their faculties of reasoning to their religious beliefs are misguided and wrong.” “Nevertheless, my reasoning must be subordinated to my Jesus ideology.”

Or, “I am unwilling to consider any reasoning that might challenge my Christian convictions. Other people who fail to do likewise are mistaken. But without any reasoning at my disposal, I am unable to explain or defend why they are mistaken.”

To their credit, these authors have put their cards on the table. They have been up front with their resolve to simply believe no matter what other considerations they encounter. But these admissions also make it clear that any rational discussion of justifications for their beliefs are pointless. Reasons do not matter to this sort of believer. Without any justification for their beliefs or their slavish dedication to them, and with their dogmatic refusal to reason about them, there’s no difference between what they are doing and getting swallowed up by a cult. They have left the rationality playing field. There’s no human mind left there, just dogma.

Unfortunately, the unsuspecting skeptic has often wandered into this trap in good faith, as it were, thinking that the point of having a discussion about God or Jesus or whatever was to figure out the truth, analyze reasons, possibly answer unanswered questions. But once we dig deeper, we see that this sort of believer does not have a similar view of things. There can only be their Biblical truth. So there’s nothing, even in principle that might dissuade him or lead him to change his mind. That is, there’s really no point for the skeptic to offer contrary ideas, criticisms, objections, or counter arguments. Unless those arguments conform to the believer’s prior convictions, they will be rejected no matter how great their merit. (There’s something nihilistic and cynical about this approach, particularly if the believer is not forthcoming about his bottom line.)

So in the spirit of John Loftus’ Outside Test for Faith, I propose a test. Before I or any other doubter, atheist, skeptic, or non-believer engages in a discussion about the reasons for and against God, the believer must look deep into his heart and mind and ask this question: Are there any considerations, arguments, evidence, or reasons, even hypothetically that could possibly lead me to change my mind about God? Is it even a remotely possible outcome that in carefully and thoughtfully reflecting on the broadest and most even body of evidence that I can grasp, that I would come to think that my current view about God is mistaken? That is to say, is my belief defeasible?

If the answer is no, then we’re done. There is nothing informative, constructive, or interesting to be found in your contribution to dialogue. Anything you have to say amounts to sophistry. We can’t take your input any more seriously than the lawyer who is a master of casuistry and who can provide rhetorically masterful defenses of every side of an issue. She’s not interested in the truth, only is scoring debate points or the construction of elaborate rhetorical castles (that float on air).

In all fairness, we must demand the same from skeptics, doubters, and atheists. They are just as guilty of conflict if they rail against religious beliefs for lacking rational justification, but in turn there are no possible considerations that could ever lead them to relinquish their doubts.

So before we can get down to the real issues, is your view defeasible?

Werewolves, Evil Demon Possessions, Reincarnation, and God

2011-01-31T22:39:00.000-08:00

In the past, I’ve argued for a connection between religious beliefs and other paranormal, supernatural and superstitious views. The connection is important for several reasons.

First, it is not an accident that as superstitiousness, supernaturalism, and paranormalism go up, education level goes down. When people are ignorant, silly spiritual view proliferate. As they get more education and understand more science, they abandon the primitive views that haunted them before. One implication is that the overall credibility of religious people, particularly the ancient founders of the major religious movements is significantly undermined. The fact that a religion arose from Iron Age peasants, by itself, does not refute it. But it castes doubts and raises the burden of proof if we are to take them seriously.

Secondly, folks within religious communities tend not to see their own views as on a continuum with other “strange” views. To believe in God, or the return of Jesus from the dead, or in the conversion of juice and crackers into flesh and blood, is one thing, they insist. But believing in hauntings, voodoo, or other paranormal phenomena is quite distinct. For those of us on the outside, however, the distinction is usually lost. It would appear that the only real difference between authentic supernatural claims and the silly unfounded superstitions of the natives is a matter of familiarity. It never seems weird when it’s what you’ve know your whole life.

Third, if a significant proportion of the population is more susceptible to anomalous experiences as the result of abnormal brain function, and I have argued that they are, then we’d expect those people, all other things being equal, to be more prone in general to supernatural beliefs. If you are experiencing strange visions, hearing voices, having fugue states, hallucinations, or other strange moments as a result of brain function, and if you lack the education and science background to know any better, then of course you are going to conclude that there are ghosts, spirits are visiting you, God is communicating with you, or that you’ve got psychic powers. What else could it be? Furthermore, if you don’t understand basic statistical reasoning, confirmation bias, hedging, wishful thinking, ignoring base rates, or a host of other fallacies, and if you are surrounded by religious believers who are applying heavy pressure for a particular religious explanation, then it will be very hard to you to reason your way clear. And if humans are biological predisposed towards religious belief by a Hyperactive Agency Detector Device, or some other means, then escaping the clutches of religious delusions will be that much harder. (It is not a surprise that it has taken so many centuries for even a small percentage of the population to escape.)

A new study in Psychopathology gives us more support for the connection:

The prevalence of delusion-like beliefs relative to sociocultural beliefs in the general population.

Pechey R, Halligan P.

School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.

Abstract

Background: Delusions are defined as false beliefs different from those that almost everyone else believes. The aim was to develop a new measure (the Cardiff Beliefs Questionnaire, CBQ) to establish the range and prevalence of delusion-like beliefs (DLB) and compare these to other types of beliefs in the general population. Sampling and Methods: A total of 1,000 participants completed the CBQ, which uniquely assesses a broader range of currently held beliefs [delusion-like (bizarre and non-bizarre), paranormal and religious and general political/social beliefs) using this large stratified sample. Results: Strong belief in 1 or more DLB was reported by 39% of the participants (91% reporting 'weak', 'moderate' or 'strong' belief in at least 1 DLB). Moreover, 25% endorsed at least 1 bizarre DLB (76% one or more at any strength). Endorsements of DLB were strongly correlated with paranormal and religious beliefs but not general political/social beliefs. Conclusions: Both bizarre and non-bizarre DLB are frequently found in the general population, lending support to the psychosis continuum account and need to revise key clinical criteria used to diagnose delusions. The good psychometric properties demonstrated by the CBQ indicate that this measure is a useful tool to investigate the wider continuum of beliefs held in the general population.

In less science speak, what Pechey and Halligan found, among other things, is that there is a strong correlation between being religious and other strange, delusional, bizarre, and paranormal beliefs. Never mind how they reconcile the combinations, the views that God is real, along with reincarnation, astrology, communications with the dead, evil demon possession, and black magic are rampant. That is, religious folks are more likely to have these other strange beliefs than non-religious folks. And people with bizarre paranormal beliefs are more likely to be religious.

Identifying the causal arrow here is tricky. It’s hard to know whether being religious makes one more favorable to strange paranormal beliefs, or the other way around, or if some third cause like our neural constitution is responsible for both propensities. I’d hesitate to sign on for any particular hypothesis at this stage, especially if it is a simple one. What is clear is that there are a lot of crazies out there, and they are crazier than you might have thought.

On a side note, if you were listening closely, you may have noticed a surprising revelation in my recent debates with Prof. Russell DiSilvestro. I have been pressing a more complicated version of this argument:

1. If you accept the resurrection of Jesus on historical grounds, then you must also accept a large number of other stories from history about paranormal events like real witchcraft at Salem and real black magic during the European Inquisitions.

2. But it isn’t reasonable to believe that there were real witches at Salem or real black magic during the Inquisitions.

3. Therefore, you should not accept the resurrection of Jesus on historical grounds.

There are a number of responses that believers have made to this argument, but much to my surprise, Prof. DiSilvestro bit the bullet and has conceded that there must have been real witches at Salem. And in the course of the debates he told many anecdotal accounts of strange, “unexplained,” and extraordinary things that Christians have seen such as word floating in the air, premonitions, spectral voices, and so on. For some people, the world is indeed a spooky place, teeming with supernatural forces and events.

Epiphenom, who brought this study to our attention, has done his usual excellent job of teasing out some interesting implications of the study: Most People are a Bit Crazy, and Believers are a Bit Crazier Than Most.

Going Nuclear

2011-01-19T14:20:00.000-08:00

Stephen Law has nicely put his finger on a common philosophical objection and mistake that gets lodged against atheists here: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2010/09/chapter-of-book-for-comments.html

During the Cold War, our strategy for “winning” was to resort to an option that would lay waste to everything: “Maybe we can’t win the war, but we’re willing to start a global thermonuclear holocaust and destroy all life on Earth to make sure that you don’t.” The global thermonuclear skeptic protests against atheism: “You can’t prove that there’s no God because we can’t prove anything. There is nothing we know with complete certainty, so there’s nothing we know.” or alternately, “There is nothing that we know with certainty, so it’s ok for me to go ahead and believe in God (or whatever I want.)”

So critics who go nuclear on the atheist fall into at least two groups. First, she might take the view that since absolute certainty that doesn’t admit of any doubts is required in order to know something, then both the theist who thinks he knows there is a God and the atheist who thinks there isn’t are mistaken. They’re both claiming to have something that cannot be had, so they’re both overstepping the boundaries. Theism and atheism involve a kind of hubris, ironically, or an illegitimate land grab. The only reasonable position, thinks the critic, since we can achieve the necessary level of certainty about so little is to withhold assent, be agnostic, and not claim to know either way. If these skeptical worries are extended further, then nihilism results. Most or all of our efforts to know or believe reasonably are stultified by an insurmountable burden of proof.

We are nihilists!!

Alternately, the nuclear critic might take this view. Since absolute certainty is required for knowledge, and since there is so little certainty, there is room for faith to take us to the conclusions that reason cannot support. Since nothing is known, in effect, it’s all faith. In this family of criticisms you often get the “atheism is just another form of religious faith” complaint. The criticism here is that ultimately no position can provide the necessary justification, so it amounts to believing despite a lack of justification or evidence at some point. And believing despite a lack of evidence, or even believing despite contrary evidence, is the consummate example of believing by faith. So the atheist, with all his pretense at being reasonable, applying skepticism to everything, and claiming to only believe what the evidence supports, is actually engaged in just as much a leap of faith as all the religious adherents he criticizes. Another variation on this theme would be the nuclear critic who seems to think that since all the other kids are doing it, including the atheist, then it’s ok for him to do it too. If not view can meet the burden of proof, then there can be nothing objectionable about his going ahead and believing in God. Radical skepticism paves the way for religious faith. On this account, it’s hard to see what the atheist might be doing wrong except claiming or presuming more certitude than is real or possible.

Time to defuse the nuclear bomb:

The nihilist skeptic is making several mistakes. First, even if this burden of proof issue is real, it’s not the atheist’s problem uniquely to solve. If it’s true that we have to have absolute, doubt-free certainty in order to know anything, then most or even all of the rest of what we think we know goes out the window. Since on radical skeptical scenarios like the Matrix, or Descartes’ Evil Demon hypothesis none of what we see or experience externally is real, then the only thing I may know is the fact of my own existence. And even that claim is predicated on this principle’s being true: all of the reports of my own thoughts, beliefs and subjective experiences that I have through introspection are veridical. I don’t know that there is a tree external to me, but I do know, through introspection, that I am thinking about and having tree like sensations. But there is a mountain of research now calling the veridicality of introspection into doubt. Start here for a survey and a few hundred references: Nisbett, Richard, and DeCamp Wilson, Timothy. Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes. So for the nihilist critic to through this global skeptical problem just at the atheist isn’t an objection to atheism at all. It’s demanding that the atheist solve a problem that, as formulated, isn’t solvable, and then the critic claims a questionable victory over atheism. He may feel satisfied that he’s shown the folly of atheism, but only at the cost of giving up everything. If you’ve burned the whole planet down to a cinder, there’s really nothing to claim victory over.

The nuclear nihilist has another problem made clear by G.E. Moore. Roughly, the principle that the whole objection is based upon is this: Knowledge is not possible unless one can acquire absolute, doubt free certainty. Call this the Certainty Principle (CP). In contrast, consider some alternative claims that we would ordinarily treat as knowledge: I have a right hand. My name is Matt McCormick. There is an external world full of objections that exist independent of my mind. Smoking causes cancer. And so on. Call these Ordinary Facts (OF). The crucial question for the nuclear nihilist is, what are the grounds, reasoning, evidence or considerations that lead you to adopt CP or think that it is true? And how is it that the considerations that lead you to CP are so powerful that they trump the considerations that would lead you to believe OF? Put another way, how is it that you know CP? Are you certain of it? Is that certainty beyond any doubt itself? The nuclear nihilist is saying, in effect, that once all the relevant considerations are made, the reasonableness of CP completely eclipses the reasonableness of OF. CP is better justified than OF, so we should abandon OF in favor of CP. Now that we’ve framed the skeptical hypothesis Moore’s way, it’s easy to see the answer. Given the choice of starting points between “There is nothing we know,” and “there are a great many things that we know,” there aren’t enough considerations that favor the former over the later. Faced with the principle, “If you don’t know it with absolute certainty, then you don’t know it,” and its implications, we should reconsider what led us to accept the principle instead of running off on the fool’s errand of trying to procure absolute certainty for everything we thought we knew.

The other problem here is that skeptic appears to be ignoring a significant literature that presents arguments that do exactly what he’s denying can be done: deductive atheology. We now have thousands of carefully constructed analyses of the properties of God that conclude that no being with X property, or X and Y properties can exist because X or the combination of X and Y are logically, conceptually at odds with each other. See the sections of Single and Multiple Property Disproofs in my Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Atheism for starters. Also see The Impossibility of God, eds. Martin and Monnier.

Also see Theodore Drange’s Incompatible Properties Arguments: A Survey. And see a number of Patrick Grim’s articles on omniscience such as “Against Omniscience: The Case from Essential Indexicals,”

Or “Truth, Omniscience, and the Knower,” Or there is this exchange between Grim and Plantinga “Truth, Omniscience, and Cantorian Arguments: An Exchange.” Even if you find some of these arguments inconclusive, it is important to note that they are alleging to do that which has been pronounced impossible by the nuclear nihilist. It would be premature of him to simple decree that no such argument has or will ever succeed in showing that God is impossible. So we can’t really take him seriously.

The rejoinder at this point might be: “But even if those arguments show that some notions of God are incoherent, they can’t prove that there’s no God at all, or that all gods are impossible.” But now it appears that the goal posts are being moved. Arguably, if a being isn’t omniscient, then that being isn’t God. If the properties that we can coherently attribute to something can’t achieve a minimal amount of greatness, then we shouldn’t be labeling the lesser sorts of beings as “God.” Think of “God” as a title, like heavy weight boxing champion of the universe. It’s a placeholder for a certain kind of great entity. The being that fills it should be powerful, knowledgeable, and good in their greatest or maximal instantiation. If the greatest sort of thing that can exist falls far short of that minimal greatness, that lesser being doesn’t become God. If omnipotence is incoherent, or if it is impossible to be both all merciful and all just, or if moral perfection is impossible, then it would appear that nothing worthy of the name God can exist. Retreating to other, lesser characterizations and then clutching at hope that one of those might pan out doesn’t salvage God. Even worse, the possibility of some other, lesser beings existing out there certainly doesn’t undermine the atheism that results from reflecting on deductive atheological arguments. If I consider the long list of DA arguments and then (tentatively) conclude that there appears to be no description of a being that is on the one hand, sufficiently great to be worthy of the title “God,” and on the other hand, logically, conceptually, and internally coherent, the nuclear nihilist can hardly criticize my conclusion. The justification for atheism isn’t undercut by the charge that there may be other lesser (but not worthy of the title “God”) entities out there.

One more problem for the nuclear nihilist: rejecting atheism because it fails to pass the Certainty Principle invokes a double standard. I suspect that the nuclear nihilist has artificially raised the burden of proof just for those arguments he wants to defeat, but he doesn’t really take it seriously for everything else he believes. He believes, along with Moore, that he has a right hand and a left hand, that Barack Obama is the president, and that smoking causes cancer. Beyond the debate with the atheist, his words and his behavior betray him. The vast majority of what he accepts and acts upon in his life fall far short of meeting the outrageous burden of proof, but he takes all of that to be known, reasonable, true, and justified. It would never occur to him to doubt that benzene is carcinogenic were we to put a beaker full of it in front of him and ask him to drink it. Dennett’s apt description here is that we are playing tennis and the critic lowers the net when he serves, but when I try to volley back he raises it as high as possible. (Then he claims victory when I can’t get the ball back over the net.)

This post is running long, so I'll deal with the nuclear advocate of faith in the next post.

Are We Proving the Negative Yet? Lecture in Berkeley.

2011-01-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

I'll be speaking to the East Bay Atheists in Berkeley tomorrow (January 16) at 2:00 in the Berkeley Main Library, 3rd Floor Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St.

Here's the write up for the East Bay Atheists about the lecture.

I'll be giving an updated version of the "Are We Proving the Negative Yet?" lecture. Here are the slides.

Please come if you're in the area.

More Disastrous Effects of Adding God Into Our Moral Decisions

2011-01-12T20:51:00.000-08:00

Being moral is hard. Trying to sort out and prioritize the most ethically salient features of a complicated decision and then make a choice is filled with ambiguity. And when the stakes are high, the complexities and ambiguities amplify our apprehension. So it's no wonder that so many people derive comfort from the idea that God can see through the fog and provide us with clear and certain moral answers. The problem, of course, is that he doesn't. Believers are notorious for cherry picking the passages from the Bible, edicts from the Pope, or other divine sanctions that suit them while ignoring the ones that don't give them the answers they want. Even worse, we broadcast more of our own moral sentiments onto God than we do other people, in part because what God wants is so murky.
See http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/illusion-of-moral-guidance-from-god.html.

Also see: "Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs." Epley N, Converse BA, DElbosc A, Montelone GA, and Cacioppa JT. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19955414

Other research has also shown that we are prone to change our minds about moral matters when we are forced to consider the opposing viewpoint or alternatives, but we frequently conceal that shift in attitude from ourselves and insist that the view we changed to was the one we had all along. Combine that tendency with our predisposition to attribute more of our own views to God, and you create idiosyncratic, and capricious decision makers who invoke God as their authority.

It turns out that that combination is just as scary as it sounds. Here's a recent study about the effects of scriptural violence on aggression by Brad J. Bushman, Robert D. Ridge, Enny Das, Colin W. Key, and Gregory L. Busath.

"When God Sanctions Killing: The Effects of Scriptural Violence on Aggression," Psychological Science, Vol. 18, Number 3. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2007/bushman.cfm

ABSTRACT—Violent people often claim that God sanctions their actions. In two studies, participants read a violent passage said to come from either the Bible or an ancient scroll. For half the participants, the passage said that God sanctioned the violence. Next, participants competed with an ostensible partner on a task in which the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones (the aggression measure). Study 1 involved Brigham Young University students; 99% believed in God and in the Bible. Study 2 involved Vrije Universiteit–Amsterdam students; 50% believed in God, and 27% believed in the Bible. In Study 1, aggression increased when the passage was from the Bible or mentioned God. In Study 2, aggression increased when the passage mentioned God, especially among participants who believed in God and in the Bible. These results suggest that scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers.

So now consider the combined point of all three threads of research. 1) We project more of our own views onto God than others who we know more about. 2) We can be easily induced to change our minds about moral matters and then we hide the shift from ourselves. And 3) when people think that God sanctions violence, they become more aggressive themselves. That is, adding God to the considerations in moral matters would appear to make things worse because we don't actually know what God wants, but we endow him with our own views, but when the un-moored views inevitably shift around, God provides us with a sort of carte blanche endorsement of whatever they morph into. And adding God into the story exacerbates our aggressive and violent proclivities. And you thought violent video games were bad.

The Evolution of Hating Atheists

2011-01-11T21:55:00.000-08:00

The fierceness, passion, dedication, and doggedness of many people’s attachment to their religious beliefs cries out for some sort of biological/evolutionary explanation. Now evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers are more at liberty to talk about such theses openly in part because of the path that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Boyer, and Atran have forged. And the thesis that religiousness has an evolutionary foundation has become quite commonplace and widely accepted, at least among academics. What also strikes me is the soft-heartedness or affection for religiousness that still comes out in people who are otherwise very clear-headed, skeptical, and objective. Good examples of this can be seen in some of the panel discussions from the Beyond Belief conference in 2006 on Science, Reason, Religion, and Survival.

What is striking is the reception that Dawkins, and Harris, among others, get when they make a number of thoughtful, calm, and reasonable criticisms of religious believing, faith and the like. A number of outstanding scholars in their fields respond with hesitation, restraint, and criticism. But what’s striking is not that their criticisms are astute critiques of the arguments that Harris and Dawkins offer. The vast majority of the panelists and even the people in the audience seem to agree that religious believing is a childish fantasy with no basis in reality. What they seem to be more critical of is not flaws in the atheistic arguments, but of the fact that the atheists are openly arguing against religious believing. They are more critical of engaging in religious criticism than anything else. Many of the respondents just don’t like it that Harris and Dawkins are openly, and publicly being critical of religion and arguing that believing in God is not reasonable, even though they themselves are similarly critical in private and agree that it is unreasonable.

This uneasiness about criticizing religious belief erupts in a number of ways. One comment that atheists commonly get is surprisingly patronizing, even condescending: “But people need their religious beliefs in order to get by. It’s cruel of you to want to rob them of something that while false and silly, gives them so much comfort.” The masses are too foolish and psychologically fragile to be able to handle their lives without religious delusions, so it would be better for everyone if we just let them persist in their happy mistake. It’s not that the atheist is wrong, per se, it’s just that he’s messing with something that shouldn’t be messed with.

I think a similar manifestation of this soft heartedness for religious believing can be seen in the rancorous reviews of the popular atheist books and speakers. Despite its being utterly irrelevant to the point at hand, critics are preoccupied with what they take to be a strident, hostile, angry tone or approach in atheist authors. (I’ve commented on this before: Don’t Like My Tone, Am I Being Rude). If one were to read a stack of reviews of the prominent atheist books and try to generalize about the most common and pointed criticism, it would appear that the worst thing they are doing is openly disliking religiousness to the point of anger and frustration. (If that’s the most substantial response that an atheist’s arguments are getting, then she’s doing something right in my book.) Take a look at this recent interview with Sam Harris by an ABC Nightline reporter. Notice that Harris is calm and reasonable. He never raises his voice. He has a sense of humor. And he’s clearly very smart. If you turned the sound off, it would never occur to you that he's angry, frustrated, or rancorous. But also notice that in almost every sentence, the reporter’s discomfort (and disagreement) with Harris is manifest with the inclusion of descriptors like “angry,” “inflammatory,” “infamous,” “fierce,” “harsh,” and “negative.”

The very existence of people like Harris causes discomfort; we can’t not voice our disapproval, no matter how committed we might be to the principles of reason or journalism. Even interviews with Osama Bin Laden were conducted with less sneer and backhanded criticism.

A number of social and historical explanations for this affection for religiousness, even among those who aren’t particularly religious (and who should know better), suggest themselves, and I’ve commented on them before. But I can’t help but speculate about the possible biological origins of it. The fact that so many people are so religious, and that even those people who aren’t religious work so hard to construct so many convoluted arguments for why religiousness is a good thing, screams out for a biological explanation.

So here’s an exercise. If there was a strong tendency or disposition towards a certain set of behaviors that had been written deep into our psyches by evolutionary history, what would it look like in our day to day lives. A candidate springs to mind: a mother’s fierce or dedicated determination to protect the interests and safety of her children. Pretty clearly, the disposition to aggressively defend and protect the welfare of one’s children in a species like ours where raising our offspring requires such a substantial effort would be selected for. (There are other, more shotgun like strategies like the sea turtle who lays hundreds of eggs and then leaves them to fend for themselves. Lay enough eggs and maybe a few of them will survive long enough to have babies themselves.) Let’s assume then, for the sake of argument, that evolution did install a powerful mothering urge in us to foster our rare offspring up to the point at least where they can have babies of their own. If we have that, then how would that manifest itself aside from the obvious ways of a mother protecting, feeding, and caring for her young? It seems quite plausible that the rest of us, whether we are mothers or not, would be deeply sympathetic with a mother’s love. We’d look upon it with affection, nostalgia, encouragement, sympathy, and honor. Manifestations of it would strike us as beautiful, moving, and worthy of praise. We’d all be less likely to be critical of it, even when a mother’s love goes too far. When a television reporter interviews that mother of a known serial killer and she still insists that Ted or Henry is good boy who is innocent, we let it slide. She’s mistaken and misguided, but we understand and are sympathetic It would be rude, or harsh, or just impolite somehow to call her out on her mistake.

In general, if evolution has left us with a strong disposition towards it, our ability to think clearly, objectively, and with detachment about it would be compromised. We’d be less able and likely to see the flaws in it, and we’d be quick to praise, or encourage it. Our whole set of cognitive skills would be handicapped in its favor. And on the flip side, consider how difficult it is to think clearly and objectively about a pedophile. The intense negative emotional and pre-rational reactions we have to it make it that much more difficult to be reasonable in our reactions. The pedophile who complains about some real injustice in the judicial system, for example, can hardly find a sympathetic ear.

So now we can see the point about religious belief in this diversion. If we love religiousness the way we love motherhood, and a substantial part of our love for both has evolutionary roots, then how would you expect people to behave about religion? You’d expect to see just the sort of inflamed, offended, passionate, and zealous reactions that we see when Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett do their thing. You’d expect them to be hated or at least disliked and criticized, even by the people who aren’t particularly religious. You’d expect to see a great deal of resistance to what they are doing, even if there’s not much substance to their objections.

A deep dislike for homosexuality is similarly widespread, and there’s a similar absence of any real reasons for objecting to it. Most people’s first reaction is that being gay is just flat wrong—it fills them with revulsion. And these negative feelings about it come long before they can offer any thoughtful reasons. (See Stephen Pinker’s piece about the evolutionary origins of those feelings of revulsion and their connection to morality.) If religiousness evolved in us, then what the atheist is coming up against when she’s trying to talk someone out of it is much deeper and more profound than mere reasoning. The atheist is striking a sensitive and raw nerve that millions of years deep in our natures, and, predictably, the reactions are visceral, irrational, and passionate.

The Divine Attributes: The State of the Discussion

2011-01-01T11:31:00.000-08:00

Readers here will know that I do not hold a sanguine view about the prospects for a description of God that 1) outlines being who is worthy of a suitably religious attitude, 2) conforms, even in the roughest way, with the historical accounts that have been given of God by Christianity and other religions, 3) gives a list of properties that themselves are each coherently formed and understood, 4) gives a list of properties that are consistent with each other, and 5) conforms, even in the roughest way, with what we now know about the physical universe through physics, cosmology and biology. That is to say that we don't have, nor is there forthcoming, any account of God that makes sense along a number of vectors. Explaining and defending each of these theses is, of course, a complicated matter, but I have been doing it across a multitude of posts, lectures, and published works.

Ex-Apologist (whose blog I highly recommend) has brought our attention to a recent article by Nicholas Everitt called The Divine Attributes. Everitt has written a well received book called The Non-Existence of God that I also recommend for those interested in a fairly straight forward analysis, using standard analytical philosophical techniques, of the arguments for and against the existence of God. Here's Everitt's abstract:

"Focusing on God’s essential attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, being eternal and omnipresent, being a creator and sustainer, and being a person, I examine how far recent discussion has been able to provide for each of these divine attributes a consistent interpretation. I also consider brieﬂy whether the attributes are compatible with each other."

It looks like Everitt's overview of the recent literature, perhaps coupled with my overview of "Deductive Atheology" in the Atheism entry of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy would give one a good comprehensive picture of where philosophy of religion is today.

Then, in his summary, Everitt makes this comment:

"The divine attributes thus present a number of intriguing philosophical problems: problems with ﬁnding self-consistent accounts of each of the attributes, with ensuring that the accounts form a self-consistent set, and with reconciling the attributes with other seeming facts of human experience (divine omniscience and human freedom, divine goodness and widespread underserved suffering, etc). Is it possible to formulate a version of theism which can simply sidestep these problems?

Suppose we start with the bare thought of God as a being who is worthy of worship. Suppose also that we think that to be worthy of worship, a being must have a right to our allegiance, and be worthy of our love, admiration, and veneration. It is surely some such concept of worship-worthiness which has led most of those who have worshiped supernatural beings to do so. Perhaps such a god needs to be powerful – but why omnipotent? Perhaps knowledgeable – but why omniscient? Perhaps good – but why perfectly
so? Perhaps long-lasting – but why eternal? It is not as if there is any overwhelming Biblical warrant for the traditional attributions.This way of thinking of divinity has the merit, from the point of view of an impartial
uncommitted inquirer, of sidestepping the philosophical problems which the traditional attributes bring, while yet retaining the idea of worship-worthy supernatural beings. But it is not a route which has proved appealing to many theists in their reﬂections on the nature of the being who is the object of their worship."

My off the cuff reaction to this (I haven't had the time to give the whole article a careful read) is that it is surely possible to give a coherent description of a being possessing some degree of power, knowledge, and goodness (we are such beings, afterall), but the resulting account will suffer from new problems:

1) Do we have any real arguments or evidence to think this sort of scaled down being exists? The goal, afterall, is not to just give a coherent description of God at all costs. The goal is form a reasonable set of beliefs about what's true, what sorts of things are real, and what sort of position we have in the universe historically, metaphysically, and morally. Unless there are some substantial reasons forthcoming to think that such a being is not merely possible but real, the long list of utter failures by the smartest humans in history to render believing in God reasonable sets the prima facie burden of proof very high. A perpetual motion machine, or gnomes may be possible, but it is fair for us to set the bar very high before we accept them as actual.

2) I think the prospects for such a scaled down account of God giving us a being that is suitably "worship-worthy" are very dim. In 1948, J.M. Findlay gave us a very persuasive argument in "Can God's Existence be Disproved?" that no thing short of a full blown omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being will be worthy of the title "God," and the failures of the ontological argument show that there is no such being. (I will have to read up in Everitt to get clear on what he thinks about a Findlay style approach.) The point: If there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being, then there is no being that should be called "God." And other lesser notions of semi-powerful, semi-knowledgeable, and semi-good beings are philosophically and religiously irrelevant and uninteresting.

3) It is the practice among careful, respectful, and thoughtful analytic philosophers who find some fatal flaw in an argument for the existence of God to leave every possible avenue of redress open to the theist to save some face and salvage some new, re-engineered account of God from the wreckage. Not being as careful, respectful, and maybe thoughtful as they are, I am inclined to draw sweeping conclusions from the repeated failures of these exercises in logical and philosophical gymnastics. See Are We Proving the Negative Yet? and Perpetual Motion Machines and an Argument Against Agnosticism for a couple of examples of my rash, overgeneralizing. Many billions of people believe. Many billions more have believed in history. The widespread consensus among our best experts on the topic, philosophers of religion, is that to date, none of our best efforts to construct a justification for believing have succeeded. Even worse, as Everitt's summary of the discussion of divine attributes shows, we don't even have a clear, coherent, or non-controversial account of what properties God would have, even if he was real. And that's despite devoting centuries of our hardest thinking to the project.

It's time for sensible people to see the larger implications of those failures. We've done our due diligence. The failure of a couple of philosophical inquiries into arguments for X to produce viable grounds for believing X should just be understood as limited failures of those arguments. The failures of ALL of our attempts, by millions of people over the course of thousands of years to produce acceptable grounds for believing X suggests that something else is at work here than just a failure of creativity or limited resources. (See The Santa Principle).

4 in 10 Americans are still Young Earth Creationists/Evolution Deniers; No Change in Attitude in 30 Years.

2010-12-19T21:18:00.000-08:00

The latest Gallup poll confirms the dismal news. About 40% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within 10,000 years. About 38% believe that humans evolved but God guided the process. And a mere 16% believe that humans evolved without God’s involvement.

Some other results, many of which have been discussed here before: Education is positively correlated with belief in evolution. A whopping 47% of those with a high school education or less are young Earth Creationists, while 74% of those with a post graduate education believe that humans evolved on their own or with God’s guidance. Most Americans believe in God, with about 85% of them claiming a religious identity. And the percentages of people subscribing to evolution only, evolution with God, and young Earth creationism have remained relatively stable since 1982.

A few thoughts. First, what the strikingly high number of YECs and their low levels of education should illustrate to us is that our backsliding scientifically, culturally, and historically into some modern form of a dark age is not uninformed alarmism. Humans have a powerful and dangerous urge to be religious. Couple that longing with ignorance and scientific illiteracy and their minds can be overtaken by the most farfetched and bizarre religious fantasies. Part of the blame for these stagnant and dismal numbers lies with science educators and their failure to adequately confront superstition, ignorance, and tribalism. I’ll speculate about the pressures that seem to be contributing to their timidity.

The notions of religious freedom, freedom of belief, and religious identity in the United States have become curiously warped. Legally and morally we want to insure that everyone is able to pursue the religious traditions of their choosing, and to be able to freely affiliate themselves with any religious ideology. But somehow those concerns have morphed into a sense of entitlement on the part of the religious to adopt any half-baked, bizarre religious view they like without any concern for justification, evidence or the truth. Religious belief is all too often treated as a matter of personal taste or preference as if we’re picking from the smorgasbord at Shoney’s Big Boy. There appears to be no reckoning for what you believe other than you want to believe it. Whether or not it’s true, supported by the evidence, or there’s are reasons to believe it are strange, ill-formed concerns. “It’s a free country; I can believe what I want to.”

Any challenges to these beliefs, no matter how outrageous they are, are taken as affronts. It’s offensive to even ask, “Why would you think THAT is true?” Many of seem to think that nothing else is required of us that the mere fact that we choose to believe it. And if anyone presses them for more than that, then they are accused of being angry, strident, hateful, and intolerant.

As I have argued here before, religious freedom should be considered the right to be unrestricted in your investigation of various religious ideas. You should be able to read what books you want, say what you choose, and assemble with people of your choosing. But your freedom of religion does not absolve you of the general requirement on all of us to be reasonable and seek after the truth.

Nor does it absolve you of your social, moral, and political responsibilities to the rest of us. Our fates are intertwined. Religious beliefs inform who my neighbor votes for, who she elects to the school board, which bond measures she supports, how she educates her children (and mine), who she wants to go to war with, who she wants to make peace with, who she’s willing to execute, which laws she supports, and what sort of society she contributes to. If a sufficiently large percentage of our population has their good sense eclipsed by Iron Age religious nonsense, we’re all put at risk.

I think that the only way that so many Americans can continue to believe something as patently false as YEC is that the people entrusted to teach them are either too ignorant, or too timid to hold the bar where it should be.

Here, again, are the facts. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that these are as well confirmed by science at this point as the existence of oxygen:

Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, the universe went from a state of infinite curvature and energy to a rapidly expanding chaotic state, the Big Bang. During the first pico and nano seconds of this period of rapid expansion, the types and behavior of particles that existed rapidly changed as the energy levels dropped. Within a few nanoseconds, the kinds of matter and the way they act settled into, more or less, the sorts of material constituents we find today. Matter continued to expand and eventually, several billion years later, gravitational pull congregates clumps of it together to form stars. Some of these stars are of sufficient mass to ultimately collapse on themselves, explode outward and spray new types of elements formed in their cores out into space. That matter eventually coalesces into smaller stars, planets and moons like our own.

The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. (We can find ancient rocks older than 3.5 billion years on all of the continents, and some crystals have been found that are thought to be 4.3 billion years old.[1]) Life in the form of the simplest, self-replicating molecules occurs on Earth around 4 billion years ago. Natural selection and random mutations lead to the evolution of more and more life forms, many of them of increasing levels of complexity. The dinosaurs emerge from this process. The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods range from about 208 million years ago to 65 million years ago. Placental mammals arise about 54 million years ago.

Modern humans (homo sapiens) originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, 60 million years after the dinosaurs have gone extinct. A variety of early hominid groups vie for survival until all related lines except homo sapiens are extinct.

In 2009, Lady Gaga releases her first album.

Religious Belief as Evolutionary By-Product

2010-12-12T20:49:00.000-08:00

One of the most important areas of research in evolutionary psychology now is the possibility that evolutionary circumstances actually selected for a propensity towards certain false beliefs. That is, more and more research is presenting us with evidence that natural selection built us to have some false beliefs. It turns out that in the right sorts of circumstances, some false beliefs may have provided early hominids with survival advantages.

The ubiquity of religious belief, and the long list of peculiar cognitive behaviors surrounding it, suggest that it should be on that list of evolved misbeliefs.

Daniel Dennett and Ryan McKay give a thorough overview and analysis of the latest research into these questions in The Evolution of Misbelief from Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Then a long list of prestigious scholars respond to their arguments.

Dennett and McKay argue that of all of evidence that has been presented for evolved misbeliefs, the case for positive illusions about oneself and ones close to you is the strongest.

"The evidence indicates that there is a widespread tendency for most people to see themselves as better than most others on a range of dimensions. This is the “better-than-average effect” (Alicke 1985) – individuals, on the average, judge themselves to be more intelligent, honest, persistent, original, friendly, and reliable than the average person. Most college students tend to believe that they will have a longer-than-average lifespan, while most college instructors believe that they are better than-average teachers (Cross 1977).Most people also tend to believe that their driving skills are better than average – even those who have been hospitalised for accidents (see, e.g., McKenna et al. 1991; Williams 2003). In fact, most people view themselves as better than average on almost any dimension that is both subjective and socially desirable (Myers 2002). Indeed, with exquisite irony, most people even see themselves as less prone to such self-serving distortions than others (Friedrich 1996; Pronin et al. 2002; Pronin 2004)."

Researchers have argued that these biases produce false beliefs that are the result of the proper evolved functioning of our cognitive faculties.

Religious belief, one might think, is prime for this sort of explanation. But Dennett and McKay contend that the consensus now is that the propensity towards religious belief is the by-product, not the direct result, of evolutionary pressures. It may be the result of a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, selection pressures against cheating, or selection for cooperation in social settings.

Read the article for the state of the art on research on these topics. And here's a small portion of their bibliography, mostly the portion focusing on religious beliefs:

Atran, S. & Norenzayan, A. (2004) Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27: 713–70.

Atran, S. (2004) In Gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press.

Barrett, J. L. (2000) Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):29–34.

Bering, J. M. & Johnson, D. D. P. (2005) “O Lord ... you perceive my thoughts from afar”: Recursiveness and the evolution of supernatural agency. Journal of Cognition and Culture 5(1/2):118–42.

Bering, J. M. (2002) The existential theory of mind. Review of General Psychology 6:3–24.

Bering, J. M. (2006) The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29:453–98.

Bloom, P. (2004) Descartes’ baby: How child development explains what makes us human. Arrow Books.

Bloom, P. (2005) Is God an accident? Atlantic Monthly 296:105–12.

Bloom, P. (2007) Religion is natural. Developmental Science 10(1):147–51.

Boyer, P. (1994) The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion. University of California Press.

Boyer, P. (2001) Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.

Boyer, P. (2003) Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3):119–24

Boyer, P. (2008a) Evolutionary economics of mental time travel. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(6):219–24.

Boyer, P. (2008b) Religion: Bound to believe? Nature 455(23):1038–39.

Bushman, B. J., Ridge, R. D., Das, E., Key, C. W. & Busath, G. L. (2007) When God sanctions killing: Effect of scriptural violence on aggression. Psychological Science 18(3):204–207

Guthrie, S. E. (1993) Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.

Hinde, R. A. (1999) Why gods persist: A scientiﬁc approach to religion. Routledge.

Johnson, D. D. P. & Bering, J. M. (2006) Hand of God, mind of man: Punishment and cognition in the evolution of cooperation. Evolutionary Psychology 4:219–33.

Johnson, D. D. P. & Kru¨ ger, O. (2004) The good of wrath: Supernatural punishment and the evolution of cooperation. Political Theology 5(2):159–76.

Johnson, D. D. P. (2005) God’s punishment and public goods: A test of the supernatural punishment hypothesis in 186 world cultures. Human Nature 16(4):410–46.

Johnson, D. D. P. (2008) Gods of war: The adaptive logic of religious conﬂict. In: The evolution of religion: Studies, theories, and critiques, ed. J. Bulbulia, R.

Johnson, D. D. P. (2009) The error of God: Error management theory, religion, and the evolution of cooperation. In: Games, groups, and the global good, ed. S. A. Levin, pp. 169–180. Springer.

Kelemen, D. (2004) Are children “intuitive theists”? Psychological Science 15:295–301.

Norenzayan, A. & Shariff, A. F. (2008) The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science 322:58–62.

Norenzayan, A. (in press) Why we believe: Religion as a human universal. In: Human morality and sociality: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives, ed. H. Hogh-Oleson. Palgrave/Macmillan.

Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1(4):515–26.

Randolph-Seng, B. & Nielsen,M. E. (2007) Honesty: One effect of primed religious representations. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 17(4):303–15.

Randolph-Seng, B. & Nielsen,M. E. (2008) Is God really watching you? A response to Shariff and Norenzayan (2007). The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 18(2):119–22.

Randolph-Seng, B. (2009) Nonconscious vigilance: Preconscious control over the inﬂuence of subliminal priming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Texas Tech University. [BR-S]

Rappaport, R. A. (1999) Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. Cambridge University Press.

Rossano, M. J. (2007) Supernaturalizing social life: Religion and the evolution of human cooperation. Human Nature 18:272–94.

Shariff, A. F. & Norenzayan, A. (2007) God is watching you: Priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game. Psychological Science 18(9):803–809.

Sosis, C. Genet, R. Genet, E. Harris & K. Wyman, pp. 111–117. Collins Foundation Press.

Sosis, R. & Alcorta, C. (2003) Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology 12:264–74.

Sosis, R. & Bressler, E. R. (2003) Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research 37(2):211–39.

Sosis, R. (2000) Religion and intragroup cooperation: Preliminary results of a comparative analysis of utopian communities. Cross-Cultural Research 34(1):77–88.

Sosis, R. (2003) Why aren’t we all Hutterites? Human Nature 14(2):91–127. [JB]

Sosis, R. (2004) The adaptive value of religious ritual. American Scientist 92:166–72.

Sosis, R. (2005) Does religion promote trust? The role of signaling, reputation, and punishment. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 1(1):1–30.

Wilson, D. S. (2002) Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion and the nature of society. University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, D. S. (2005) Testing major evolutionary hypotheses about religion with a random sample. Human Nature 16(4):382–409.

Teaching Atheism

2010-12-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

The topic of teaching courses on atheism has come up over at John Loftus' blog Debunking Christianity.

My course has come up. And the question of indoctrination vs. liberal arts teaching has invoked some confusions (and ire).

So here's a slightly dressed up version of some comments I've posted over there.

I've taught one of the few university level courses about atheism in the country. Syllabus and readings here:

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mccormickm/AtheismSyllabus.htm

The difference between what we do at a typical accredited liberal arts university and what they do at Bible colleges where they are cranking out so many bogus Ph.D's in bible studies is that we study and discuss the works without any prior presumption that they are correct. My students are reading Plantinga and Craig right along with Martin, Flew, and Hume, and we critically analyze all of their arguments. The irony is that since we are reading so many atheist works, I end up playing devil's advocate, as it were, and arguing the position of the Christian or theist. Here, by contrast, is the mission statement from the Talbot Theology school at Biola:

"Talbot School of Theology is committed to biblical inerrancy. By biblical inerrancy, we mean that the Bible is without errors of any kind in its original manuscripts. Biblical inerrancy is an essential part of our ministry training and helps define our view of biblical authority."

By contrast, my course asks questions, consideration objections, develops critical evaluations, and explores with no ideological presumptions or dogmatism:

"In this course we will consider a range of important philosophical contributions on the topic of atheism. It will also consider a number of responses and criticisms from the theistic camp, and then the range of responses open to the atheist. We will consider the tension between science and religion. We will address questions such as: Does science motivate atheism? Is religious faith compatible with science? Can science give us positive evidence for the non-existence of God?"

My purpose in teaching philosophy classes is the liberation of the intellect and the development of critical reasoning capacities. Their purpose is the propagation of a particular ideology, whether it is correct or not, regardless of the evidence. That distinction is vital.

There's a potential misunderstanding in the way we're talking about "defending" a view here. When I teach the problem of evil, first I present a challenging statement of the problem. Then I explain and defend John Hick's soul building theodicy at great length. That produces a great deal of discussion. Then I present some powerful criticisms of that view. So in the course of an hour, I'll end up "defending" three different, contrary positions. I don't pretend to give the final answer to the issue, nor do I claim to have settled the question. The net effect of all of this back and forth is to 1) show students that the problem is not easily dealt with or dismissed, 2) educate them about various important responses that have been given, and 3) get them to develop more thoughtful and sophisticated ideas about it. In the end, I don't really care if they come out as theists or atheists. I've got enough confidence in their intellectual capacities and the power of liberal arts education ideals to let them work it out for themselves. I measure progress in terms of intellectual development, not in adherence to an ideology. The purpose of a religiously based education is to foster and entrench a particular set of conclusions or beliefs. The goal of religious education, if you can call it that, is to propagate beliefs. What sermons from the pulpit and classes in religious education seek is a world where more people believe a particular set of ideas. The methods or approaches to achieving that state are secondary, as long as the result is more of those beliefs.

The proper goal of a liberal arts education, and of science education, is to develop critical methods for figuring out which conclusions are most reasonable to believe. This is the fundamental mistake that so many people make when they try to conflate science as a kind of religious faith. The essential goal of religious institutions is to subjugate minds and promote a particular set of beliefs, regardless of the facts or the contrary evidence. The essence of science is the application of a set of methods for best gathering and evaluating evidence in order to draw the most reasonable conclusions, whatever they may be.

For some students, if they suspect that the instructor is not a believer, the unfortunate reality is that they will be immediately suspicious of your motives and your integrity. Many of my students haven't ever heard an argument for atheism before and they've come to expect that being an atheist just means you are an amoral nihilist intent on destroying their faith. There's also a growing body of research about people's tendency to simply become more entrenched in bad religious ideas when they encounter powerful counter evidence and arguments. The ironic and perverse result of exposing many people to contrary views, at least in the short run, is that they just dig in deeper and become more adamant about their original views. See this study, for instance: http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/would-anything-change-your-mind.html

Batson didn't study the long term effects here, and I don't know if there is any research to support this, but my guess is that even if people get more dogmatic in the short run, the long term effect is liberalize and soften their attitudes. My philosophy of religion students have an online discussion group. For an interesting read, see what they're saying here about what they think they've learning this semester. (This is not prompted by me in any way--they post whatever questions or ideas they want to.)

http://groups.google.com/group/religioncsus/browse_thread/thread/34c7d7db59186470?hl=en

or here:

http://groups.google.com/group/religioncsus/browse_thread/thread/a3b270b43238303a?hl=en

Atheists and nonbelievers are a tiny minority in an ocean of belief. I think one of the most important things that an atheist can do outside of the classroom is to be an exemplar of thoughtful, careful reasoning. We've got to patiently and repeatedly explain the various problems with God beliefs because religious thinking has such a stranglehold on the culture and people's personal lives. The vast majority of people have never even heard a thoughtful argument in favor of atheism; they don't know what it is, or what reasons might lead one to think it is true. What little information they are getting about it is distorted and maligned through religious sources and it's tainted with emotional and moral animosity. As you can see from my students' comments, many of them had no idea that there are atheists out there who are reasonable and who aren't axe-wielding, homicidal maniacs. Since there are so many of them and so few of us, and their information is so poor, we’re stuck having to explain over and over and over what the basics are. The additional challenge is that religion has often actively undermined the capacities in them that would allow them to think critically and objectively about religion.

What some atheists need to be doing is comparable to what many gays have done--educating, living by example, and presenting themselves and their ideas out of the closet as a viable alternative. But I do think there is room and need for more militant voices too. The civil rights movement needed both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. We need both Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.

Here's a big question: which should be more important to us fundamentally: A) believing that there is no God and promoting that viewpoint, or B) believing those conclusions that appear to be supported by our best efforts at broad, balanced evidence gathering and objective critical analysis? The latter project might well lead a reasonable person to conclude that God exists, but I submit that it's still more important to pursue B) than A). And THAT'S the difference between what I'm doing when I'm teaching atheism and what they are doing in seminaries, bible colleges, and other religion factories.

Evolution, Theology, and Pseudo-Profundity

2010-12-03T14:21:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting lecture given by Daniel Dennett about the way that religious ideas take hold of our minds. As with many things he says, I think he's right on the money with much of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_9w8JougLQ

Naturalism and the A Priori

2010-12-02T21:21:00.000-08:00

Developments in epistemology over the last 100 years have shifted the ground under the feet of philosophers of religion, including many fighting the good fight for atheism. In particular, the a priori aint what it used to be. Once upon a time, philosophers thought that a priori reasoning provided us with the strongest, and most compelling forms of arguments in natural theology and atheology. But after Godel, Carnap, Quine, and many others, a priori knowledge has taken on a decidedly conventionalist flavor.

I've been reading an article by Penelope Maddy called Naturalism and the A Priori that is very interesting. While her topic is not proofs or disproofs of God, much of what she has to say about naturalism and the epistemological foundations is directly relevant. A couple of choice paragraphs:

To describe naturalistic philosophy in general. Quine appeals to a favourite image:

Neurath has likened science to a boat which if we are to rebuild it. we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. (Quine 1960: 3) The naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory as a going concern. He tentatively believes all of it, but believes also that some unidentified portions are wrong. He tries to improve, clarify, and understand the system from within. He is the busy sailor adrift on Neurath's boat. (Quine 1975: 72)

For the naturalist, there is no higher perspective, where transcendental or other extra-scientific considerations hold sway. The naturalist operates 'from the point of view of our own science, which is the only point of view I can offer' (Quine 1981b: 181).

A similar rejection of the transcendental level is found in Arthur Fine's 'natural ontological attitude', or NOA?l The context here is the realism-anti-realism debates of the late 1970s and early 1980s, exemplified, for example, by Putnam's attack on 'metaphysical realism' and van Fraassen's agnosticism about unobservables. As Fine understands it, the impulse towards realism is actually based in 'homely' beliefs, which, he says,

I will put it in the first person. I certainly trust the evidence of my senses, on the whole, with regard to the existence and features of everyday objects. And I have similar confidence in the system of 'check, double-check, check, triple-check' of scientific investigation, as well as the other safeguards built into the institutions of science. So, if the scientists tell me that there really are molecules, and atoms, and y/J particles, and, who knows maybe even quarks, then so be it. (Fine 1986: 126-7)

From this point of view, we can ask after the relations between humans, as described in psychology, physiology, linguistics, etc., and the world, as described in physics, chemistry, geology, etc., and draw conclusions about the relations between sentences and the world, an investigation that may result in a correspondence theory of truth or a deflationary theory of truth or some other theory of truth or no theory of truth at all, depending how things go. But however they go, this theory will be just one part of our overall scientific theory of the world.

On these matters, Putnam and van Fraassen agree with the NOAer [someone who adopts a Natural Ontological Attitude], but they don't stop here; each, in his own way, goes beyond science, to a higher level. There Putnam distinguishes metaphysical realism, which adds to NOA's core an extra scientific correspondence theory of truth, and internal realism, which adds to the same core a Peircean analysis of truth as warranted assertability in the ideal limit. Focused on the problem of ontology rather than truth, van Fraassen adds an extra level of epistemological analysis where we must abstain from belief in molecules and atoms and electrons, despite our acceptance of these same entities for scientific purposes, Here the holder of our homely beliefs will be tempted to object that atoms really do exist, thus embodying Kant's 'incautious.. listener', faced with 'a question. . . absurd in itself', who then gives 'an answer where none is required' (A58/B82-3): he wants to insist on the reality of atoms, but all the genuine scientific evidence, though accepted at the lower level, has been ruled out of bounds at the higher level; the frustrated Scientific Realist ends by stomping his foot. Fine's proposal is that we rest with the natural ontological attitude and resist the temptation to engage in extra-scientific debate.

To subject our naturalism to the same challenge put to both Kant and Carnap, we should ask: is naturalism itself a scientific thesis? I think the right answer to this question is that naturalism is not a thesis at all, but an approach. The naturalistic philosopher is the Neurathian sailor, working within science to understand, clarify, and improve science; she will treat philosophical questions on a par with other scientific questions, insofar as this is possible; faced with first philosophical demands-that is, questions and solutions that require extra-scientific methods-she will respond with befuddlement, for she knows no such methods; from her scientific perspective, she is sceptical that there are such methods, but she has no a priori argument that there are such methods, but she has no a priori argument that there are none; until such methods are explained and justified, she will simply set aside the challenges of first philosophy and get on with her naturalistic business. Naturalism contrasts with both Kantianism and Carnpianism in forgoing any 'higher-level' considerations.

Wow.

The F Word

2010-10-19T11:06:00.000-07:00

I'm speaking at the SacFAN--Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists, and Nonbelievers--meeting tonight at 7:00 pm. Details here: Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists and Nonbelievers

My topic is "The F Word: An Atheist's Guide to Addressing Faith"

My Powerpoint slides are here: The F Word

I'll be writing up the lecture and posting it here shortly. Please come if you're in the area.

A Paradox for Christianity: Natural and Supernatural Religions

2010-10-11T13:02:00.000-07:00

Dedicated Christian believers will readily acknowledge that many human religions arise from natural, not supernatural sources. That is, while the Christian may think that his religion was founded on real, supernatural events, or the actions of a genuine supernatural being (God),he will accept that many of the world’s other religions like Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Zoroastrianism, and so, had natural origins. Those religions came about through human enthusiasm, hallucinations, historical contingencies, mistakes, mythologies, psychiatric disorders, social movements, faulty and revised memories, evangelism, or other naturally occurring phenomena. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these natural religions and contrast them to a bona fide supernatural religion that really does originate through the intentions, actions, miracles, or interventions of a divine being that has power and knowledge that transcends the merely natural world. And if the followers of a natural religion hold the view that their doctrines are from a supernatural source, they are mistaken. That is to say that they follow a false religion. Many Christians will be quite comfortable with calling these false religions. Other people who are more sensitive to issues of religious tolerance will be uncomfortable calling them false. But if we are being clear, everyone will have to acknowledge that some religions entail, require, or recommend that we accept many claims as true that are, strictly speaking, false.

How many false, natural religions are there in the world? Even if he is a dedicated adherent to one he believes is of supernatural origin, a reasonable believer will have to acknowledge that there have been thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of them. For most believers in a particular religious tradition, the vast majority of other religious traditions have natural origins and are therefore false. Even if there is a God, it is obvious that human history spawns great numbers of false, natural religions. Countless religious ideas spring from human social and mental life, then some catch on and become the start of a whole religious movement. Thus far, even the deeply committed Christian should concur with all of my premises. But now I’d like to explain what I take to be a devastating problem for the Christian in reconciling the view that his or her personal religious views are authentic while so many others are false. The question that should be deeply troubling to the Christian from the inside is this: why would the one true God who sought to establish the only real religion bury, confound, obscure, or hide it in the midst of so many other false, natural religions?

Here’s what I mean: Christianity has relatively inauspicious origins. What we have today is a very small number of copies of writings that were written decades and even centuries after Jesus is alleged to have preached, been executed, and the returned from the dead. Two hundred years or so after the alleged events, the modern Bible was sifted from thousands of early writings that gave very different accounts of Jesus and Christian principles. A very long and complicated process with unreliable nodes of transmission provides us with claims of highly dubious origins. Numerous doubts accumulate at the beginning with the alleged eye witnesses, then the stories are repeated an unknown number of times by an unknown number of people before they are written down by a small group of unknown authors. They these stories are copied and finally the Bible we know is culled from thousands of other written works. At each stage of transmission, we should have several worries about the fidelity of the process that accumulate and amplify by the time the Christian stories get to us. I’ve discussed these layers of doubts and their cumulative, amplifying effect in many early posts.

The people engaged in the creation and transmission of these early ideas would have been subject to all of the same natural phenomena that affected the foundations of all of the false religions in the world: psychosis, bereavement hallucinations, the Asch effect, source amnesia, superstition, false supernaturalism, Iron Age ignorance, paranormalism, confirmation bias, fabrication, hedging, revised memories, poor eyewitness abilities, propaganda, spin, mythological influences, heightened paranormal expectations, suggestibility, the lack of the scientific method, gullibility, and so on. At the very least, the Christian must acknowledge that these phenomena are real, and that they very frequently are responsible for spawning other religious movements. Even if Christianity is truly of a supernatural origin, and none of these doubt amplifying factors affected its formation, they would have been close at hand, and their presence obscures and undermines our ready acceptance of it. We know that these phenomena affect people and that they spawn religious movements. And we have very little reliable information about the origins of Christianity that might convince us that they were not a factor.

So the question for the Christian is, why did your God make your religion indistinguishable from all the natural religions in so many of these ways? The puzzle is made worse by the facts that, by your own reckoning, your God has the power, the knowledge, the intention, and the will to make himself and real supernatural origins of the Christian religion evident to all humans. In fact, by your own reckoning, he is going to hold every human in history morally and epistemically culpable if they do not acknowledge the real supernatural origin of Christianity by condemning them to an eternity of unimaginable torture. Yet despite having the ability, knowledge, and desire to transcend above all of the false, natural religions, he does not.

The embedding of the one, true religion—Christianity—within human history in a fashion that makes it look like so many false religions should create deeply troubling cognitive dissonance for the believing Christian. The simple and inescapable answer is that Christianity isn’t the one, true supernatural religion. Your religion is a natural religion, just like all of the others. And now you’ve been right to brink of accepting the conclusion. You already acknowledge that the vast majority of religions in history arose by misguided, natural avenues. And you can see that the origins of Christianity resembles those false religions in many salient ways. You have to acknowledge that we have very little, reliable information about the origins of Christianity. And you can see that God, if he were real, and if he had the power and character that you have imputed him, would have done it differently. He could have and would have done it better. All that remains is for you is to abandon the wild gyrations and rationalizations that are typically attempted to escape this dilemma to explain God’s hiddenness. The simple and obvious solution is that Christianity is a natural religion.

Video: Debates on the Resurrection, Salem, and Miracles

2010-09-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

We now have videos of all three recent debates between me and Asst. Prof. Russell DiSilvestro:

Debate 1 video: Jesus and the Salem Witch Trials
   McCormick slides, Debate 1
   DiSilvestro slides, Debate 1

Debate 2 video: Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus
   McCormick slides, Debate 2.
   DiSilvestro slides, Debate 2.

Debate 3 video: Does God Want Us to Believe in Miracles?
   McCormick slides, Debate 3.
   DiSilvestro slides, Debate 3.

Thanks to Russell for doing the debates, and thanks to David Corner and Christina Bellon for filming.

Summary: In the first debate, I argued that the same epistemic standards that lead us to reject the occurrence of real witchcraft at Salem, if we are being consistent, should lead us to reject the historical argument for the resurrection. In fact, by any fair measure of quantity and quality, we have far more and far better evidence for real witchcraft at Salem. So a fortiori the case against the real resurrection is that much worse. People can respond to this argument three ways: 1. they can accept the implication for Jerusalem and conclude that we don't have sufficient evidence for anything supernatural in either case. 2. They can argue that there are important differences between Salem and Jerusalem that justify accepting the former and rejecting the latter. or 3. they can bite the bullet and accept that there was real witchcraft at Salem and a real resurrection at Jerusalem.

Much to my surprise, Prof. DiSilvestro has taken this last position. It's hard for me to think that he's not just caught up in the grip of an ideology, but he seems to think that it's not that unreasonable to conclude that the women at Salem really were witches. And, he argues, there are many other instances of magic, miracles, and other supernatural events in our ordinary lives. This seems like the least reasonable alternative of the three options to me--some of my colleagues have pressed for 2. for some interesting reasons. But there you have it. I take Russell's embracing of that option to be, more or less, a reductio of his view. And I can't imagine how someone could hear what was said and not conclude that I won that round of the debate, whatever "won" means in these contexts.

Russell also presented his historical argument for the resurrection. Roughly the structure is something like:
There are facts: Jesus was killed and buried. The tomb was found empty. The followers of Jesus reported having Jesus appear to them afterwards. There are several possible natural explanations for these facts like hallucinations, the wrong tomb, etc. And there is the possibility that he really was resurrected. There are problems with all of these naturalistic explanations because they don't cohere with what the Gospels say or some things we think we know about the early Christians. So the only remaining conclusion is that Jesus was really resurrected.

I have several responses to this sort of argument, but probably the easiest thing to point out is that the argument that I give in debate 2 gives us a number of very strong reasons to doubt the so-called "facts" that Russell is citing. So I'd reject his first premise. There are several other nit picky or technical problems with the rest of this argument, but it would be boring to delve into those here.

In the second debate, I presented the evidence from Lourdes that shows that humans are very, very unreliable sources of testimony about miracles. And I presented a lot of other evidence from empirical psychology that shows why we should reduce our estimation of the reliability of the people who conveyed the resurrection story across the centuries to us. When all of these reasons to doubt are in place, it forces us to acknowledge that we cannot reasonably conclude that the resurrection didn't really happen.

Again, I think Russell's replies here were quite weak. He spent some time arguing that just because we have reasons to think that generally human miracle testimony is very unreliable, we shouldn't conclude that this particular case (the resurrection) is unreliable. I didn't understand this argument, because as I see it, that's exactly what all of these reasons to doubt miracle testimony do--they should reduce our confidence in them. That doesn't imply that resurrection didn't happen, but I have given a lot of reasons for thinking that we don't have enough reliable evidence to believe it.

One of the interesting ironies of the position that I am taking here is this: I can grant for the sake of argument that the resurrection really did happen. The problem is that it has been mired and obscured in an epistemic context that forces us to write it off. Even if it did happen, we should look at the sketchy evidence and the doubt raising facts of the history of the evidence and conclude that it is not reasonable to believe. Russell also gave a number of contemporary anecdotal miracles stories that, as far as I could tell, illustrated just the sorts of psychological worries that I was trying to raise. Again, I don't think I understood his point here.

In debate 3, I presented a number of ways in which the alleged Christian miracles could have and should have been better if God intended us to believe on their basis. The evidence for the resurrection could have been far better than it is. So since it is so poor, and since it looks just the way you would expect it to if the Christian religion arose from natural sources instead of supernatural ones, then we must conclude that God doesn't really want us to believe in them. That is, let's assume that what the Christians are saying is right and that God does want us to believe in the resurrection on the basis of the evidence that we have. I argue that even from the inside, this whole scheme doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense that God wants us to believe the historical evidence because if he did, he would have made it so much better.

This puts Russell and many other Christians into a bind. They need to argue on the one hand, as Russell did on day 1, that the available evidence should lead us to think that the resurrection was real. Russell argued that a real resurrection was the best available explanation given all the facts. But then they need to explain why it is that the evidence isn't any better than it is given that God is all powerful and all knowing. It certainly can't be the case that God wasn't able to make his existence or the resurrection known to us. So the historical Christian is trapped trying to argue both that the evidence is just enough and compelling as it is, and that God has good reasons for not making it any clearer, or more evident to us. If they argue that God is leaving room for love, or faith, or mystery, or choice by remaining hidden, as it were, then they are undermining the original argument that the historical evidence demands that we accept the resurrection. You can't have it both ways.
My own take here was that Russell was thoroughly caught on the horns of this dilemma and that his efforts to have it both ways in debate 3 are very poor. He also gave a number of other anecdotal miracle stories from books and people he knows. I think these were intended to show that either real miracles do happen all the time, or that sometimes when a miracle does happen, even when it is obvious, we still reject it. But the cases were things like trees getting struck by lightening or people rescued from floods. I didn't understand how they were to the point at all given that we were debating whether or not we have sufficient historical evidence to justify believing in the resurrection.

Please watch the videos and judge for yourselves which arguments are most compelling. I'd love to hear your conclusions and your reasons.

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Slides: Believing the Resurrection

2010-09-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

I have my Powerpoint slides for all three debates (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Sept. 20-22) up here:

Jesus and Salem
It's often argued that it is reasonable to believe in the resurrection of Jesus because of the historical evidence in its favor. That's a mistake. We have a mountain of comparable evidence, much more actually, that there were real witches at Salem, Mass in the 1690s. We should reject the resurrection for the same reasons we don't think the Salem Witches were real.

Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus
We can see from cases like the (false) believers at Lourdes and others that humans are really, really unreliable when they report miracles. Furthermore, the early Christians would have been highly disposed to believe supernatural claims about Jesus, they were ignorant of a wide range of psychological facts about humans and their religiousness, and the Jesus story has been filtered through a long process with the goal of promoting belief. I argue that these layers of doubt undermine the output--the resurrection story we now have. And we should not believe it.

Does God Want Us to Believe Miracles?
It's clear that the Christian miracles, when viewed from a distance are really crummy miracles. An all powerful, all knowing, and all good God with the various goals that Christianity has attributed to him could have and would have done a much better job. Here's a number of ways to perform better miracles, for God's next attempt. The argument: 1. If God had sought to ground Christianity on the New Testament miracles, we would expect them to be much better in several ways. 2. Since they are so poor, we have to conclude that God did not or does not want us to believe on their basis. So that suggests that Christianity is based on a grand mistake.

How's that for three days work?

Three Debates: The Resurrection and Christian Miracles

2010-09-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

Russell DiSilvestro (a colleague in my Philosophy Department) and I are going to do a series of debates about the resurrection at CSUS (California State University, Sacramento--where our dept. is) next week, Monday through Wednesday. Here's the run down:

Debate 1: The Resurrection: Jesus and the Salem Witch Trials

Monday, Sept. 20, Hinde Auditorium, Student Union, 3:00-4:15:

McCormick: The resurrection has frequently been supported by appeals to the quantity and quality of historical evidence that we have, primarily from the Bible. But by a parallel argument, we should believe that there were really witches with magical powers at Salem, Mass. where we have evidence of greater quantity and quality. Therefore, by the standards we already employ, we should reject the resurrection.

DiSilvestro: Salem and Jerusalem are disanalogous in ways that make the latter stronger than the former. But in any event, the evidential case for a real resurrection at Jerusalem is strong enough to conclude that it happened. If this implies that the evidential case for real witches at Salem is strong enough to conclude that there were some, so be it. The obstacles to believing in real witches are not as impregnable as they seem.

Debate 2: Miracles and Probability from Lourdes to Lazarus

Tuesday, Sept. 21, Hinde Auditorium, Student Union, 3:00-4:15

McCormick: Large numbers of alleged miraces at Lourdes, France and elsewhere that have turned out to be mistaken have shown us that miracle testimony is very unreliable. These cases and other considerations reduce our confidence in testimony about the resurrection to the point that we must reject it.

DiSilvestro: Some of the differences between the miracle reports from Lourdes and the resurrection reports make the latter stronger than the former. But in any event, the resurrection reports have features that should lead us to accept them. Even if miracle reports are in general very unreliable, this should not lead us to doubting all miracle reports, and it should not lead us to doubting the resurrection reports in particular.

Debate 3: Does God Want Us to Believe in Miracles?

Wednesday, Sept. 22, Hinde Auditorium, Student Union, 3:00-4:15

McCormick: The evidence we have for the resurrection and other miracles is sketchy at best. It would be well within God’s power to produce compelling miracles. Since he has not done so, it must not be God’s intention for us to accept them.

DiSilvestro: There are several good reasons that God might have for allowing the available evidence for the resurrection to be just about what it is already, rather than more or less. When these reasons are carefully considered, it should lead us be very skeptical about—indeed, it should lead us to to reject--the claim that God does not intend for us to believe in the resurrection.

It should be a good set of discussions and it will be well attended judging by the early interest.

Russell and I have also been slated to be interviewed on Capitol Public Radio with Jeffrey Callison on Monday morning at 10:00. Tune in if you're interested. http://www.capradio.org/

There will be videos of the debates and we'll get them posted soon.

Learning from Hauser’s Mistakes

2010-08-25T16:46:00.001-07:00

A long standing debate between believers and non-believers over the status and nature of morality in a God-less world has been influenced in recent years by research that has shown that non-animals possess many more moral or proto-moral behaviors naturally than we once thought. If we are to listen to Hauser, De Waal, Pinker, Churchland, and a number of others, there’s a compelling case for the evolution of morality in humans. And that closes what appeared to be a gap in the naturalistic worldview as many believers see it.

But just recently, renowned Harvard psychology professor Marc Hauser has gotten into some trouble over questions about his research methods. In fact, he’s now been put on leave and there is an active investigation into some of his recent work. Apparently, Hauser was being less than scrupulous or at least over enthusiastic in his gathering and evaluating of data from monkeys intended to help the case for a cognitive continuity between us and them.

Hauser’s fall from grace, if you’ll pardon the expression, may seem like an opportunity for the non-naturalists about morality to gloat. But let me use the case to illustrate a different point in favor of the scientific and naturalistic approach to epistemological questions.

In Hauser’s lab, students and Hauser were observing rhesus monkeys to see if they recognized patterns played on a sound system. As is often done with human babies, the monkey is thought to have noticed a change in a pattern if it turns it head, stares longer, or exhibits some other new behavior when a pattern is violated with a new stimulus.

Hauser was one of the people responsible for observing the monkeys and recording whether they responded to the stimuli. The discrepancies came out when it was found that Hauser was reporting observations that supported his hypothesis that the monkeys could recognize patterns as well as human infants far more often than any of the other, more impartial, observers. When the tapes were watched carefully, and reviewed by objective parties, it became clear that Hauser was cooking the data: “the professor was reporting bogus data and how he aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or asked for verification.” More details here: http://chronicle.com/article/Document-Sheds-Light-on/123988/

Now Hauser has been found out, and many reporters who have pounced on the story have suggested that his misdeeds have cast doubts on the whole discipline. That last bit strikes me as irresponsible hyperbole—each study and each set of data, whether produced by Hauser’s lab or not, should be evaluated entirely on its own merits. Hauser’s misdeeds do not cast a pall on independent research with sound methods.

But what is important to note here, and the silver lining, I think, is that we are seeing science working. This is exactly what the diligent application of double blind controls, multiple trials, and repeatability are supposed to do in science. The point of science is to root mistakes and falsehoods out aggressively.

Science is no respecter of persons. It establishes nothing on the basis of authority, or reputation. Nor is it a source of dogma, or officially sanctioned doctrine. Everything should be continually subjected to the most stringent levels of skepticism we can muster because it is only after a hypothesis has been subjected to this process and survived that we can attach some degree of certainty or probability to it. Since we are so prone to exaggeration, enthusiasm, the allure of lucrative research grants, and just plain mistakes, we have to police ourselves.

And there we can see the inherent superiority of the scientific method for discovering truths about the world over traditional religious methods. Religions traditions are built around established truth claims that are beyond reproach. Certain doctrinal claims such as “God is real,” “Jesus Christ is the son of God,” or “God provides salvation to those who seek it,” are fixed within the known for believers. Of course, some doubts, some questioning are permitted, and even encouraged in some rare cases. But ultimately it is the set of alleged truth claims that are the foundation of the whole enterprise. If those turn out to be wrong, the entire edifice crashes down.

Science is not about a fixed body of truth claims, its essence is the application of a method that has proven to be the best one we have for attaching any degree of confidence to a claim about what is real in the world. Repeatability, openness, objectivity, impartiality, and critical scrutiny are the central principles, whereas all too often they are treated as vices in religious contexts. (Consider the internal policies regarding the treatment of child molestation cases in the Catholic Church for a poignant illustration here.)

For the believer, the Hauser case raises this penetrating question: is the environment I am in that ordinarily fosters believing--church, clergy, friends, and family-- one that encourages enough skepticism and objectivity to expose error in my religious beliefs? If I am wrong about God or my religion, am I in the sort of intellectual surroundings that would help me discover such a serious mistake? Or am I in an epistemic environment that would continue to foster belief in me no matter what the truth?

If your answer to that last question is “yes,” then you should decide on your priorities: Do I want to believe that which is justified and hence more likely to be true, or do I want to elevate the importance of dogma and doctrine over truth and reasonableness? Hauser can be grateful for the science’s keeping him on the straight and narrow.

Denialism

2010-07-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

In the latter half of the 20^th century, an important development in religious epistemology changed the sort of debate that theists and atheists have been having. This much was not new: for centuries, when believers were confronted with challenges, it has become common to simply deny that evidence, reason, logic, arguments, or justifications are relevant or applicable to something as marvelous and transcendent as God. That anti-intellectual and arational trend in religious circles has been tempered by a more sober view in natural theology that God’s existence and nature can be known and understood through reason and that successful arguments for God’s existence can be given.

But for many, including people who were once in the tradition, the natural theological project is dead. The vast majority of philosophers, even ones who believe, do not think that a successful argument for God’s existence can be given. Knowledge of God can be had by other less conventional methods, however. Plantinga and the reformed epistemologists now claim that they know God by way of an inner voice, a sensus divinitatus, or the “witness of the Holy Spirit,” that informs them of God directly, non-inferentially, and they say, the knowledge comes in a way that external appeals to evidence, reason, or empirical facts cannot undermine. The details need not concern us here.

What should concern all of us, theists and atheists alike, is a strong disposition in human beings to get caught up in an ideology that renders us incapable of reasoning clearly, particularly about that ideology itself. Beware of positions, like conspiracy theories, that build answers to why they don’t appear to be true into the essential claims of the ideology itself. We are organic beings, with kludgey equipment that is prone to go off the rails frequently. Given our fallible cognitive faculties, it is an enormous challenge to sustain any level of intellectual freedom and cognitive integrity. We’re more prone by our natures to get it wrong, and get it wrong in a big way, than to get it right.

One of the ways that an ideology infects our minds and consume us is by exploiting our propensity to explain away any counter evidence in order to hang onto views we are emotionally commited to. We’ve all seen it, of course, and we’ve all felt the urge to hold onto some pet idea even when it is clear that it’s a mistake.

But the nature of this impulse is coming into focus with recent efforts in empirical psychology. Geoffrey Munro of Towson University recently showed that when we are confronted with scientific, empirical evidence that challenges a position we favor, we are more likely to reject science altogether and claim that it cannot be employed to address questions of that type at all. The Scientific Impotence Excuse: Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts. Munro took test subjects with views about stereotypes, such as homosexuality. Subjects were tested beforehand to determine what views they held. Then they were given fake abstracts of scientific studies that purported to either prove or disconfirm the stereotype. So some studies indicated that homosexuals had a higher rate of mental illness, for example, while others indicated that their rate of mental illness was lower. Not surprisingly, the subjects who read abstracts that supported their preconceived views concluded that their views had been vindicated. But something remarkable happened with the the subjects who had their prior views challenged. Rather than acknowledge that they were mistaken and change their minds, these subjects were much more likely to conclude that proving (or disproving) the thesis simply couldn’t be done by science. They rejected science itself, rather than give up their cherished idea.

Contradictions, counter-indications, improbabilities bother us. They create cognitive dissonance. See The Forbidden Conclusion. Our minds need resolution to the conflict. One way (the poor way, in this case) is to just reject the source of information that is creating the dissonance. If scientific methods themselves are suspect, then there is less strain on my belief system when I continue to hold views that it rejects.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with seeking to have a more coherent, less contradictory worldview. Quite the contrary, we should all be doing more of that. But the model of reality that we construct in our heads should be as consonant and responsive to as many of the known facts as possible. One can have a highly internally consistent picture of reality that is detached from reality. But what we should be striving to do is to incorporate as much of what known into whatever worldview we adopt.

We can imagine some scheme whereby one of the subjects in the study might think their way out of the problem. “Sure, this authentic looking and authoritative sounding scientific study says that homosexuals have a lower rate of mental illness, but I know different from my own experience.” (Other studies have demonstrated how strong our tendency is to accept anecdotal and personal experience over abstract, scientific analyses. See Jonathan Baron's Thinking and Deciding. But what our subject has failed to realize is how unreliable reasoning about general epidemiological and stratitistical trends from personal and anecdotal evidence can be. Even if the scientific study is a fake, it’s methodology is superior to our subject’s method. So it should have lead him to reject his prior view, not science itself.

The application to religious belief is obvious. Sustaining the view that there is an invisible, undetectable, almighty, all knowing, and infinitely loving being who exists in another plain of reality from ours is incredibly difficult in an age where science has shown us so much and when naturalism has “won” as the theologians lament. Believing in God cannot be had easily or readily given the other things we know. So for many people who believe, the answer is to simply reject the source that is telling them different.

Recently in some of the debates about the resurrection, beleivers confronted me with the works of N.T. Wright, a Christian historical apologist. One of Wright’s theses is that the New Testament Jews simply could not have come up with the idea of a bodily resurrection on their own. The only way they would have ever produced the idea is if Jesus himself gave it to them by actually returning from the dead. Wright presents a masterful argument filled with historical arguments and citations. As long as the historical evidence appears to be in favor of his view, he’s eager to employ its methods. But deep within his works, the truth about his commitment to historical methods and the resurrection comes out. Ultimately when he is faced with serious historical challenges to making the case for the resurrection, Wright recommends that the real problem is the historical method and that we should put the belief in Jesus first.

“If we attempt to argue for the historical truth of the resurrection on standard historical grounds, have we not allowed historical method, perhaps including its hidden Enlightenment roots, to become lord, to set the bounds of what we know, rather than allowing God himself, Jesus himself, and indeed the resurrection itself, to establish not only what we know but how we can know it?” (Jesus' Resurrection and Christian Origins)

That is, since we know that Jesus was real, then we can be assured that the only acceptable historical methods for proving that Jesus was real must be ones that prove that he was real. If our historical methods do not produce the correct conclusion, then it must be the methods, not the conclusion that are wrong.

Wright gives us just one example of an academic scholar dressing the fallacy up to make it seem more presentable. Putting lipstick on the pig, as it were. The other instances of the comparable mistake in the religious rationalizations are countless.

The hazards of simply rejecting reality when it doesn’t suit our preferences should be equally obvious. The Munro study gives us a stern warning about the cognitive pitfalls we are prone to, and the application to religious cases shows us how seductive a supernatural ideology can be.

Frequently, people make the charge against atheism or science that it is some form of religious faith too. Perhaps they are thinking that if science is just as much an ideology, then there’s nothing so wrong with adopting an equally groundless religious one instead. That would be a mistake. But more important, what Munro and Wright show us is that there is a fundamental difference between science and religion that people are missing. The point of religiousness is to believe particular doctrinal claims. Believing is the whole point of religiousness as Wright’s drawing his line in the sand makes clear. But science is a method for acquiring beliefs that is neutral with regard to what they are. It tells us how to confirm or disconfirm what we think might be true. Much of what religious institutions strive to do is to implant belief and then equip us with the means to reject anything that would conflict with them. Preachers, priests, and rabbis cultivate believing of certain claims in their flocks. Their charges are in need of protection; they need their faith strengthened against doubts that would undermine them. Sermons, prayers, devotionals, and cermonies serve to fortify beliefs and behaviors in them that would not be sustained otherwise. Doubt, criticisms, and objections are the point of the scientific method. Finding reasons to reject a hypothesis makes it possible for us to make some provisional claims about what is true. Without some methodological procedure for vetting hypotheses and separating the good from the bad, we can’t claim to have any justification for them. The method of doubting is what justifies and keeps the floodgates of failed views closed.