Category: Atheism

Dualists Usually Aren’t Quite Dual

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, PhilosophyLeave a comment

Dualists are people who believe that reality as we experience it is fundamentally different from reality as it actually is, which we can’t know (that is, we can’t know reality as it actually is). In the west this was popular before Socrates and after Descartes. A familiar example of modern dualists are Materialists who believe that there is nothing besides matter and therefore there is no such thing as free will. When it comes to actually living, they basically just shrug their shoulders and make decisions anyway because we experience free will, even if in reality it’s a complete illusion. (They’re wrong about this, of course, but I’m not going to bother with any further disclaimers to that effect; I trust you, dear reader, to supply the rest yourself.)

And there’s a curious thing about dualists: they usually believe that there is some link between reality as it actually is and the world of perception which we (supposedly) can’t escape. Most of them are more 1.95ists than true dualists. What’s significant about this is that this link is a source of power: it’s possible to use this link to modify the underlying reality in ways that affect the world of perception.

To keep with the example of Materialists (which New Atheists almost universally are), they believe that things like love, loyalty, curiosity, wonder, awe, compassion and so on are all the epiphenomena (that is, an accidental manifestation, analogous to a symptom) of base instincts which we have because they resulted in our ancestors producing us. This is not to say that the epiphenomena are themselves necessarily of any value, but the instincts which produce them must have been of some evolutionary benefit. To try to interact with these epiphenomena may be unavoidable, but it is not very likely to accomplish much since none of them are real. By contrast, there does exist an ability to probe reality. It’s limited, difficult, and tentative; and its name is science. The point is not, of course, to improve the evolutionary benefit. Just as evolution does not “care” about the individual, the individual does not care about evolution. The point is to understand the mechanisms which evolution produced in order to change those mechanisms into ones which are more convenient. A good example of this is anti-depressant medications. (Or perhaps it would be if anti-depressants were more effective.)

Even those who suffer greatly from clinical depression are often hesitant to take anti-depressant medications because psychoactive drugs are terrifying. There is of course the possibility that they won’t work in dangerous ways—there are anti-depressants whose common side-effects include frequent thoughts of suicide—but the biggest fear is that the anti-depressants would work but turn the person into somebody else. This is not really a concern for the materialist because who he is is a mere epiphenomenon, and its only value is in being happy. If the medication changes him, all that was lost was an illusion anyway. (I should note that when this is practical rather than theoretical, Materialists may well be hesitant because they know on some level that Materialism isn’t true.)

This is why Materialism goes so well with recreational drug use. Caution is of course still warranted for the heavy-duty drugs like cocaine and heroin which can destroy one’s life, but it is very compatible with non-addictive drugs like marijuana, LSD, and endorphin stimulation through promiscuous sex. The main reason to avoid these safer drugs is that they falsify one’s sense of the world and take one further away from reality and hence from the true source of happiness. They’re not just wastes of time but counter-productive because they distort one’s view of reality and pull one further away from the truth. Of course a single, low-dosage usage of such drugs is not likely to have much of an effect (ignoring quality control issues) and I don’t mean to suggest that a person who’s had a single puff on a reefer stick is doomed and bereft of hope. But this is the effect of such drugs; they are chemical lies which take a person further away from sanctity and therefore from happiness.

The situation is radically different for a Materialist, however. First, they start off massively disconnected from reality, so within their worldview their connection to itreality (more-or-less) can’t be diminished. Second, there is no real happiness which is possible, so there is nothing to lose by telling oneself pleasing lies. Happiness is itself just an accidental manifestation of underlying chemical processes in the brain, and all high-level explanations which we have for happiness are illusions, so messing with the chemistry of the brain to produce happiness is not only more reliable, it is in fact more real. Not that being more real is a virtue for the Materialist, but the argument—using drugs recreationally divorces the user from reality—will not even make sense to a Materialist.

This is, incidentally, why one runs into the oddity of the evangelical atheist. If God is dead then clearly nothing matters. Even if nothing matters in theory, however, human beings don’t cease to be human beings merely because they believe they are only flesh robots, and as Aristotle observed all men desire to be happy. The significant difference in effectiveness between trying to achieve happiness by dealing with the world according to its epiphenomena (duty, honor, morality, etc) and dealing with it as it is (scientific fun drugs) is so stark that they are moved by pity to try to spread the word to live according to the latter and not the former.

Science, Magic, and Technology

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy3 Comments

There is an interesting observation made, I believe, by Isaac Asimov:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This has been applied many times in science fiction to produce some form of techno-mage, but what’s more interesting is that the origins of modern science were in magic, specifically in astrology and alchemy. The goals of science were the same as that of magic: to control the natural elements. If you really study the history, it’s not even clear how to distinguish modern science from renaissance magic; in many ways the only real dividing line is success. There is some truth to the idea that alchemists whose techniques worked got called chemists to distinguish them from the alchemists whose ideas didn’t work. This is by no means a complete picture, because there was also at the same time natural philosophy, i.e. the desire to learn how the natural world worked purely for the sake of knowledge.

Natural philosophy has existed since the Greeks—Aristotle did no little amount of it—but it especially flourished in the renaissance with the development of optics which allowed for the creation of microscopes and telescopes. Probably more than anything else this marked the shift towards what we think of as modern science. As Edward Feser argues, the hallmark of modern science is viewing nature as a hostile witness. The ancients and medievals looked at the empirical evidence which nature gave, but they tended to trust it. Modern science tends to assume that nature is a liar. Probably more than any other single cause, being able to look at nature on scales we could not before and seeing that it looked different resulted in this shift towards distrusting nature. Some people feel a sense of wonder when looking through a microscope, but many people feel a sense of betrayal.

Another significant historical event was when the makers of technology started using the knowledge of natural philosophy in order to make better technology. This may sound strange to modern ears, who are used to thinking of technology as applied science, but in fact technological advancements very rarely rely on any new information about how the world works which was gained by disinterested researchers who published their results for the sake of curiosity. Technology mostly advances by trial and error modifying existing technology, and especially by trial and error on materials and techniques. In fact, no small amount of science has consisted of investigating why technology actually works.

But sometimes technology really does follow fairly directly from basic scientific research. One of the great examples is radio waves, which were discovered because the Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism predicted that they existed. Another of the great examples of technology following from basic scientific research is the atomic bomb.

I suspect that these as well as other, lesser, examples, helped to solidify the identification between science and engineering. And I don’t want to overstate the distinction. In some cases the views of the natural world brought about by science have certainly helped engineers to direct their investigations into suitable materials and designs for the technology they were creating. But counterfactuals are very difficult to consider well, and it is by no means clear that the material properties which were discovered by direct investigation but also explained by scientific theories would not have been discovered at roughly the same time, or perhaps only a little later.

However that would have gone, the association between science and technology is presently a very strong one, and I think that this is why Dawkinsian atheists so often announce an almost religious devotion to science. I’ve seen it expressed like this (not an exact quote):

Science has given us cars and smartphones, so I’m going to side with science.

Anyone who actually knows anything about orthodox Christianity knows that there is no antipathy between science and religion. Though it is important to note that I mean this in the sense of there being no antipathy between natural philosophy and religion. In this sense, Christianity has been a great friend to science, providing no small amount of the faith that he universe operates according to laws (i.e. that being a creature is has a nature) and that these laws are intelligible to human reason. Moreover, the world having been created by God, it is interesting, since to learn about creation is to learn about the creator. It is no accident that plenty of scientists have been Catholic priests. The world is a profoundly interesting place to a Christian.

But there is a sense in which the Dawkinsian atheist is right, because he doesn’t really care about natural philosophy. What he cares about is technology, and when he talks about science he really means the scheme of conquering nature and bending it to our will. And this is something towards which Christianity is sometimes antagonistic. Not really to the practice, since technology is mostly a legitimate extension of our role as stewards of nature, but to the spirit. And it is antagonistic because this spirit is an idolatrous one.

The great difference between pagan worship and Christian worship is that Christian worship is an act of love, whereas pagan worship is a trade. Pagan deities gain something by being worshiped, and are willing to give benefits in exchange for it. This relationship is utterly obvious in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it is actually nowhere so obvious as when the Israelites worshiped the golden calf. For whatever reason this often seems to be taken to be a reversion to polytheism, where the golden calf is an alternative god to Yahweh. That is not what it is at all. If you read the text, after the Israelites gave up their gold and it was cast into the shape of a calf, they worshiped it and said:

Here is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.

The Israelites were not worshipping some new god, or some old god, but the same god who brought them out of Egypt. The problem was that they were worshiping him not as God, but as a god. That is, they were not entering into a covenant with him, but were trying to control him in order to get as much as they could out of him. Granted, as in all of paganism it was control through flattery, but at its root flattery has no regard for its object.

And this is the spirit which I think we can see in the people who say, “Science has given me the car and the iPhone, I will stick with Science.” They are pledging their allegiance to their god, because they hope it will continue to give them favors. And it is their intention to make sacrifices at its altars. This is where scientists become the (mostly unwitting) high priests of this religion; the masses do not ordinarily make sacrifices themselves, but give the sacrifices to the priests of the god to make sacrifice on their behalf. And so scientists are given money (i.e funded) as an offering.

To be clear, this is not the primary reason science gets funded. Dawkinsian atheists (and other worshipers of science) tend to be less powerful (and less numerous) than they imagine themselves. Still, this is, I think, how they view the world, except without the appropriate terminology because they look down on all other pagans.

And I think that it is largely this, and not the silly battles with fundamentalists and other young-earth creationists that result in their perception of a war between science and religion. There were other historical reasons for the belief in a war between science and religion, but I am coming to suspect that they had their historical time and then waned, and Dawkinsian atheism is resurrecting the battle for other reasons. They are idolaters, and they know Christianity is not friendly to idolatry. And idolaters always fear what will happen if their god does not get what it wants.

Authoritative Authorities

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, PhilosophyLeave a comment

In my previous post I mentioned that people will use science’s scheme of self-correction as a support of its authority, and that this is utterly confused. In fact, here’s what I said (yes, I’m quoting myself. Think of it as saving you the trouble of clicking on the link):

(It is a matter for another day that people take being wrong as one of the strengths of science, ignoring that a thing which may be wrong cannot be a logical authority, by definition.)

Today is that day.

Before getting into it, I need to qualify what I mean by an authority. There are multiple meanings to the phrase authority, and the most common one—someone such as a king, judge, etc. who should be obeyed and who enforces their will through force—isn’t relevant. I’m using the term “authority” as in the material logical fallacy, “appeal to authority”. Unfortunately, appeal to authority is often misunderstood because it would be much better named “appeal to a false authority”. A true authority, in the logical sense, is  anyone or anything which can be relied upon to only say things which are true. If you actually have one of those, it is not a fallacy to appeal to their statements.

A logical authority may of course remain silent; its defining characteristic is that if it says something, you may rely on the truth of what it says. These are of course hard to come by in this world of sin and woe, and you will find absolutely none which are universally agreed upon. That doesn’t mean anything, since you will find absolutely nothing which is universally agreed upon.

To give some examples of real authorities, Catholics hold that the bible, sacred tradition, the magisterium, and the pope when speaking ex cathedra are all authorities. God has guaranteed us that they will not lead us astray. Muslims hold that the Quran is an authority.

Not everyone believes there exists any authorities at all, of course. Buddhists don’t and neither (ostensibly) do Modern philosophers. If you insist on distinguishing Modern philosophers from Postmodernists, then Postmodernists don’t believe there exist any authorities either. In general, anyone who holds that truth is completely inaccessible will not believe in any authorities.

So we come to Science, and the curious thing is that science explicitly disqualifies itself as an authority. Everything in science is officially a guess which has so far not been disproved by all attempts which have so far been made to disprove it. And yet many people want to treat science as an authority. In some cases this is sheer cognitive dissonance, where people pick what they say on the basis of which argument they’re having at the moment, but in other cases there is an interesting sort of reasoning which is employed.

Both forms tend to piggy-back the bottom 99% of science on the success of (parts of) physics, chemistry, and to a lesser extent some parts of biology. This especially goes together with conflating science and engineering.

The first and stronger sort of argument used is that science may always be subject to disproof, but that after a sufficient amount of testing, any such disproof will be at the margins and not in the main part. The primary example of this is the move from Newtonian mechanics to Relativity, where the two differ by less than our ability to measure at most energies and speeds we normally interact with.

The problem with this argument is that there is relatively little of science to which it actually applies. Physics is rare in that most physicists study a relatively small of phenomena. There are less than two hundred types of atoms, and less than two dozen elementary particles, and apparently no more than three forces. So thousands of physicists all work on basically the same stuff. (It’s not literally the same stuff, of course; physicists carve out niches, but these are small niches, and often rely on the more common things in a way where they would be likely to detect errors.) This is simply not true of other fields in science. You can study polar bears all your life and never do anything which tells you about the mating habits of zebra fish. You can study glucose metabolism for five decades straight without even incidentally learning anything about how DNA replication is error-checked. You can spend ten lifetimes in psychology doing studies where you ask people to rate perceptions on a scale of 1 to 10 and never learn anything about anything at all.

The result is that in most fields outside of physics and (to a lesser extent) chemistry, theories are not being constantly tested and re-tested by most people’s work. In some of the fluffier fields like human nutrition and psychology—where controlled experiments are basically unethical and in some cases may not even be theoretically possible—they may not even be tested the first time.

The second and weaker argument is that science is the best that we have, and so we must treat it as an authority. This is very frequently simply outright wrong. In fields where performing controlled experiments is unethical, science consists of untested guesses where the people making the guesses had a strong financial and reputational incentive to make interesting guesses, as well as often a strong financial incentive to make guesses which justify government policies that the government would like to do anyway. But that only counts if the financial incentive is provided by tobacco companies or weightloss companies. Other financial incentives leave people morally pure because most scientists have them.

Actually, there is a third argument too, though it’s almost never stated explicitly. A lot of people work hard in science and believe that they’re doing good work, so it would be rude to doubt them. This is, basically, a form of weaponized politeness. The sad truth is that lots of scientists aren’t more honest than other people, lots of scientists aren’t smart, and lots of scientists are wasting their time. It’s mean to say that. Sometimes the truth hurts. It always sucks when honesty and politeness are enemies, but if a person prefers politeness to honesty, he’s a liar, and there’s nothing to be said to him except that he’s working to make the world a worse place and should stop.

Ultimately, of course, the real reason science is held to be an authority—as opposed to a potential source of truth which must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis because a scientific theory is only as good as the evidence behind it—is because this is a cultural thing. People need authorities in order to feel secure, and if they won’t believe in the right authorities they will believe in the wrong authorities.

Theoretical Empiricists

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, PhilosophyLeave a comment

If you go to the right places on the Internet it is fairly easy to come across Dawkinsian atheists who claim to be empiricists. They are not empiricists, of course—most haven’t done a single basic experiment themselves, let alone all of the basic experiments—but they will certainly claim to be, if not by name. When this is pointed out to them, they will take refuge in what might be called a collective empiricism: as long as someone has empirically verified it, and it is theoretically possible to empirically verify it again, that’s OK.

Being a retreat this isn’t well thought out, of course. Why should the bare theoretical possibility of an experiment being run again make human testimony about a previous experiment more believable? Still, that’s really a minor point; this new version doesn’t do what they want it to, anyway. They are hoping to divide knowledge up into reliable knowledge and everything else. It doesn’t do anything like that; their “knowledge” is just as unreliable as every other form of knowledge they denigrate, except for the kinds it’s less reliable than. What it does do is codify the reductionism which they practice. They want life to be simple, and so they rule out, as a simple matter of choice, types of knowledge which they don’t want to deal with. In practice, those are most types of knowledge. Ironically, given the high respect in which most such people hold mathematical physics, this includes mathematics.

What they are really trying to limit knowledge is the substitute for knowledge proposed by Kant. Basically, come up with a theory and then test it against experience. According to this concept of knowledge, nothing is actually known. Things are guessed at, and the best you can do is feel reasonably confident in your guesses when applying them to the parts of life in which you have tested them before.

The curious thing about this is that not even Kant tried to limit knowledge to this; he only limited knowledge of real things to this. That is, of things which exist. He fully recognized the universal validity of logic and reason; all he doubted was noesis, that is, perception of reality. Being the end of Modern Philosophy, he doubted that the senses could be trusted at all, and so the mind could not know anything which existed outside of it. But things which do not exist, such as hypothetical statements like the theorems of mathematics, he still thought fully knowable.

The Dawkinsian reductionists have eliminated this as well. They take somewhat seriously C.S. Lewis’s argument that if reason is the product of blind material processes, there can be no reason to trust it. (They probably didn’t actually hear his version of it; the problem is fairly obvious with only a moment’s thought. Unfortunately Lewis’s conclusion was that Dawkinsian evolution is self-refuting, which is not true. Dawkinsian evolution may be true, and if it is, it is intellectual suicide, but it is not self-contradictory.)

Given this semi-radical skepticism, the modern materialist is actually abjuring all knowledge. He doesn’t deny it, he merely disavows it. He’s uninterested. He will proceed with what amounts to a betting scheme, taking the Kantian approach as simply his preferred method for dealing with what may well be an irrational universe. Trouble emerges because—having no use for it—he redefines the word “reason” to mean this sort of bet, and “reasonable” to mean betting in the same manner as him. Thus anyone who makes any sort of real knowledge claim is “irrational”. The most common knowledge claim to excite this sort of opprobrium is to claim to know that God exists, probably mainly for practical reasons—Dawkinsian Atheists tend to strongly dislike traditional morality, which they associate with Christianity for mostly historical reasons—but also because God is known entirely through means which the Dawkinsian Atheist rejects (reason and testimony).

This phenomenon also gives rise to some very strange results when applied to mathematics, which the Dawkinsian Atheist must accept, despite his obvious rejection of it, because Physics (the field of study) is dependent upon mathematics. The compromise which this sort of extreme skeptic tends to employ is absurd in the abstract, but fits with his adopted approach to life: he tests mathematical theorems experimentally. I recently saw a rather striking example of this when just such an atheist offered to experimentally prove that 2 + 2 = 4 using apples. It’s really beside the point that such a demonstration would fail using sub-atomic particles if two are electrons and two positrons; it’s actually most interesting that he doesn’t understand that 2 + 2 = 4 by definition. There are actually several definitions of the Natural Numbers, but the most common is using the piano axioms. Briefly: suppose there’s something, call it one. Suppose there’s a next number after it, call that two. Suppose there’s a next number after that, call it three. And so on. Addition is defined by succession, so 2 + 2 is 4 because the number after the number after two is called four. No other possibility is conceivable, because this is simply the definition of the successor of the successor of 2. But this is not really a thinkable thought for the Dawkinsian atheist, so he’s stuck offering to do demonstrations with apples.

Actually, he’s not quite stuck doing that; he can also ridicule people for doubting. “If you don’t think that 2 + 2 = 4, the IRS would like to talk with you,” he says, and smirks in derision. He’s not interested in the definitions of the numbers, or of what additional actually is; all he cares about is practical results, because he has disavowed knowledge in favor of a betting scheme. And he can’t know that he’s betting his soul, because he doesn’t believe he has one. Pray for them.

Incidentally, these people correspond fairly well with the men Aristotle described as wanting to be horses. Each man, as a rational creature, has a duty to the truth: to seek it out and to know it as far as it has been given to him to do. These men find that unpleasant; they wish to do only the simpler tasks of caring for the body. They want the wail of Ecclesiastes to be true: they want man to be only the cleverest of the beasts that crawls the earth. Pray for them.

The Terrible Effects of Sola Fide

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, PhilosophyLeave a comment

I have called protestantism proto-atheism largely because the denial of reason which you find with people like Martin Luther (who famously said that reason was the devil’s whore) and John Calvin (whose doctrine of the total depravity of man makes reason at best unattainable for men) sets it on that course. However, I have recently realized that there is another way in which protestantism is proto-atheism, embedded in what the doctrine of Sola Fide often becomes. (I would like to emphasize that I am talking about protestantism and not protestants, many of whom share little in common with Martin Luther and have a healthy respect for reason.)

According to Peter Kreeft, there is a way in which the doctrine of Sola Fide is in fact compatible with orthodox Christianity (it’s towards the end of that video if you’re looking for it). I have grave doubts that this expansive and non-obvious meaning of Sola Fide was what Martin Luther meant but since he’s dead that’s purely a question between him and God. What is relevant to us, however, is that a great many evangelicals and fundamentalists (and some other protestants) are quite sure that this orthodox interpretation is wrong. They hold that all that is needed to get into heaven is for a person to believe that Jesus is the son of God and died for their sins. Often this takes the form of “accepting Jesus into your life” by saying a prayer where you formally accept Jesus as your personal lord and savior. Often (but not always) it involves some feeling of “knowing that you are saved”. To distinguish this from possible other versions of Faith Alone, I will refer to this version as Belief Alone.

One of the problems which immediately crops up with salvation by belief alone—if you think about it for more than a few seconds—is that after people die and come to meet God face-to-face on the day of judgment, everyone will believe. (As the saying goes, Satan believes.) It is, therefore, not possible that there is anything operative in belief that contributes to or makes up part of the substance of salvation. Worse, since most evangelicals and fundamentalists seem to conceive of heaven and hell as two alternative rooms, one with a party one with far too many sharp things in the hands of unpleasant creatures with odd senses of humor, and in no way think of salvation as any sort of improvement from an imperfect state to a perfect state, belief during life can only be a criteria like how having all six colors of pie piece allows you to attempt to win the game in Trivial Pursuit. It is a purely arbitrary rule.

The only possible purpose of this arbitrary rule—if entry into the infinite party room being only for people wearing the wristband of belief has any purpose at all—is to function as a test of obedience. But, the question must be asked: obedience to whom?

Now this is where the rejection of reason (more formally, fideism) comes up again. If evangelicals and fundamentalists (etc) believed in natural theology, i.e. reason’s ability to approach God, this test of obedience would be very harsh, but it would at least be a test of obedience to God, because a natural man unaided by divine revelation through miracle can still learn of God through reason and thus such belief could—by a great stretch of the imagination—be some sort of test of the individual’s worth. How it can be a meaningful concept for a fallen creature to merit salvation is still something that would need to be explained, but there would at least be some hope for how salvation through belief alone would not be completely self-contradictory (not to mention completely evil).

But when you add in fideism, it is not possible for one to use reason to arrive at the truth. The ticket into the party room thus consists of belief in something one has no reason to believe. Whatever the person proposing this idea may say about asking you to have faith in God, what he is really doing is asking you to have faith in him. Moreover, because—according to him—you cannot know who God is, it cannot be God in whom you believe. You cannot believe in what you cannot know. The end result is that this is nothing other than a demand that you obey the person who is making the demand of you.

As I understand it in the typical case the one making the demand is a person’s parent, but since the demand did not originate with them—they are just passing it on—this really ends up being a demand for absolute fealty to a person’s society. This leads to atheism in two ways.

The first is that this demand is so unreasonable that a reasonable person will utterly reject it. This is why so many of the people who come to the Catholic church from fundamentalism or evangelicalism do so by way of atheism. It is also why modern atheists so often seem like fundamentalists who have simply switched their holy book from the bible which they interpret in light of popular books about it to their high school biology textbook which they interpret in light of popular books about it. (I mean that last part metaphorically, not literally.)

The other way that salvation by belief alone leads to atheism is that it is a form of idolatry. Idolatry is worshiping a created thing in place of the creator, and in this case the created thing is the society. Idolatry is a matter of fealty, i.e. priority, but not necessarily of belief, so this is not simply atheism by name, if it often seems to look like it in practice. What leads it to become avowed atheism is the existence of a another society which the person wishes to be a part of. Sometimes it’s another sub-culture. Often it’s the larger culture of the society in which the fundamentalist/evangelical lives. Whatever it is, this sets up a conflict, and if the other culture wins, a strong rejection of the idol becomes necessary, because it is a jealous idol. Since its official belief in God is part of that idol, it will become rejected when the idol does. The attitude of total fealty to society may not, however, and I believe that this is where we get most of our evangelical atheists from. They have transferred their complete devotion from fundamentalist/evangelical society onto whatever new society they identify with, and will attack believing in God with the same ferocity that they used to attack not believing in God. And their theological knowledge will not have improved from the transition.

The Argument From Design

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy1 Comment

Until 150 years ago, or so, the argument for God’s existence from design was probably one of the more commonly understood arguments of natural theology. (Natural theology consists of the things we can say about God by the light of our own reason and nature, in contrast to revealed theology, which are the things God has told us about himself.) After the rise of NeoDarwinism (by which term I refer to the Dawkinsian creation myth and not the scientific theory of evolution), the argument from design is still intuitively understood by many people, but it has generally become misunderstood formally. If you were to ask an atheist on the level of Richard Dawkins—who is among the best of the worst atheists—what the argument from design was, if you lucked into a calm and concise one you’d get something like this:

If you look at the natural world, many things in it are very simple, like rocks, but many of the things in it are far more complex than can reasonably be supposed to be assembled by blind chance. Things like plants and especially animals are too complex to be an accident, and so they must have been created by an intelligence more complex than they are. Since we, too, are part of the natural world, there must be something more intelligent than us which made us, and that thing is God.

This is not at all the classical argument from design, such as you can find in the Summa Theologica, though I will grant you that you can find something like it from young-earth creationists. It is, fundamentally, a god of the gaps argument. God of the gaps arguments are more repugnant to orthodox Christians than to atheists because they are an insult to God: they claim to show that God exists because the natural world doesn’t work and needs to be constantly fixed. This is a relatively new idea; it really only makes sense in the context of modern mathematical physics. Before that attempt to fit the workings of the universe into the human head, no one ever supposed that the universe didn’t actually work.

(At least next to nobody. There is probably some ancient Greek philosopher who argued that, because for pretty much any argument there is an ancient Greek philosopher who argued it. And technically (original) Buddhism is based on the idea that the universe doesn’t work, but at a higher and qualitatively different level than what I’m talking about here. Also, Buddhism is fundamentally atheistic. Since it holds that everything is an illusion, it holds that its gods are not real, and it certainly denies any uncreated creator. It’s much more akin to the zero-energy hypothesis.)

The classical argument from design is not based on probabilities and certainly does not depend on the idea that natural things do not fit together. It in fact contradicts the idea that the unfolding of nature couldn’t have been according to a natural process precisely because it argues from the fact that natural processes actually work. A fundamentally broken world would undermine the classical argument from design. So, without further introduction, here is a version of the classic argument from design (my words):

If you look at the world, it exists imperfectly according to a rational hierarchy of being. Things at lower levels work together to the advantage of better things, and these better things in turn order and improve the lower things. Quarks work together to form protons and neutrons. Protons, neutrons and electrons work together to form atoms. Atoms work together to form molecules. Molecules work together to form bodies. These bodies include plants, which turn sunlight into food, and animals, which eat the food the plants make. Some animals keep the other animals from over-eating the plant food. Other animals spread the seeds of the plants, as well as nutrients which the plants need. There are also less clever and more clever animals, with a rational animal at the apex, who directs the lower animals as well as the plants toward a harmonious function.  In all of this there is a rational order where the parts fit into each other and work together to create a good whole. This rational design reflects and points to a rational mind which orders the natural world according to the good. Any such rational mind which is itself a part of nature, such as a super-intelligent space alien or a little-g god or extra-cosmic aliens in a universe that created our big bang, or whatever, would themselves be a higher step in this rational order, since they are a part of it by virtue of shared time and causality. There must, therefore, be some rational mind which is not part of it, which stands utterly apart from it, like how Shakespeare stands apart from Hamlet or the characters in The Mousetrap (the play within the play). This rational mind which is utterly apart from all of the rational creation with a shared causality is what all men call God.

(Where the natural world varies from the rational order, this constitutes is a rebellion of the rationally ordered creature against its creator, possibly very indirectly since things are supposed to receive their rational ordering according to the other things within their shared hierarchy. Thus we clearly live within a fallen world, but that means we live within a rationally ordered world that has partially broken, not within an irrational world that doesn’t work at all.)

To see the difference between this world and an irrational world, consider how any of the components could have gone wrong. Suppose up quarks weren’t compatible with down quarks: we’d have neither protons nor neutrons, and consequently neither atoms nor molecules nor bodies nor plants nor animals. All there would be is a vast sea of sub-atomic particles without any interesting organization. (And please bear in mind I’m only saying that world would be irrational; I’m not saying anything about how likely or unlikely it is—its probability is utterly irrelevant.) Or suppose electrons couldn’t orbit an atomic nucleus: the result would be an ever-dispersing gas of particles fleeing from each other since nothing held them together. And again, I don’t care whether that possible world is more or less likely than ours, I only care that it would be far less interesting, because that is just another way of saying it would not be rationally ordered. What interests us is intelligible order—no one is fascinated by noise.

The same can be seen if we look at evolution. Dawkinsian atheists love to talk about how order emerges from chaos because of simple rules, in this case the simple rule being natural selection. This is fair enough so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far because mere order is not the same thing as rational order. In science fiction one encounters stories of nan0bot catastrophes where self-replicating nanobots which can use their environment for raw materials get out of control and turn the entire world into unimaginably many copies of themselves. This is called the grey goo scenario. But we in fact already have self-replicating nanobots which can use their environment for raw materials. They’re called bacteria. So why isn’t there a bacteria-goo scenario, where some bacteria hit on the winning combination of genes/proteins and turned everything into a copy of itself? A single species that has smashed all others is very compatible with survival of the fittest. (Yes, I know that survival of the fittest is only an approximation of the biological theory of evolution, but the more proper theory doesn’t differ in this regard.) Perhaps domination might be bad for the bacteria, but that downside could only emerge once they’ve wiped everything else out, at which point there would be no other species left to balance things out again. This also applies to other layers in the hierarchy of being. Why aren’t all plants poisonous? It would not be hard for a plant to have eliminated the first herbivore, and to have made a herbivore-free world. If wolves ate every last prey animal, they would starve to death, but only after they ate the last one. Then there would be neither predator nor prey and just an animal-free world left. (And it’s no answer to say that the changes happen so gradually that balance is always maintained because we know that evolution often happens very quickly. The gradual accumulation of changes is more a just-so story for children than it is a description of how evolution has typically worked, and certainly is not a description of how it can work.)

Now once again, I’m not talking about what is more probable, but what is more rationally ordered. (That is why it’s irrelevant that one species could balance out against another’s recently gained advantage; that’s only a question of probability.) A world in which a super-bacteria ate everything else and so was the only thing left (and then died off if it wasn’t an autotroph) would be very orderly, but its extreme homogeneity would not be a rational hierarchy. It would be just as complex as the world we live in, since it would have just as many moving pieces, but it would be far less interesting. And as the way that every foreign animal introduced into Florida seems to kill off the native species shows, evolution does not of its nature tend to produce a more interesting world. It won’t for the same reason that the history of warfare shows weapons all converging on the same basic designs: optimizing for one thing rarely has more than one solution.

Now, the reason why probability does eventually enter the discussion is that for any configuration of matter, it is always possible that it got that way by sheer accident (“randomly”), and so a world organized according to a rational hierarchy of being must, of necessity, look like a possible accidental outcome of blind matter. (This is less true if one recognizes the existence of free will, but since people wish to entertain the notion that free will might actually be an illusion, the similarity is unavoidable.) Thus one must ask of a thing that is organized according to a rational hierarchy: how likely is this to really just be a pure accident rather than what it appears to be? But please note that this question is utterly different from a god-of-the-gaps argument. We are not asking whether this world could work without God. We’re asking whether this world that looks like it was made by God could in fact be an accidental similarity only. We’re asking whether the portrait of a man we’re looking at might have been the result of a canvas and some tubes of paint falling off of a table and the resulting mess just happened to look like a skillful portrait of the man. That could have happened; the right colors could have been on the table, and the dog might have carried the tubes of paint off back to its bed to chew on them. An excellent portrait of a man is not impossible without a painter. But between a skilled painter and a freak accident, my money is on the painter.

That being said, this is why the argument from contingency is much stronger than the argument from design: the argument from contingency shows that it is absolutely impossible that there is no God. This is also why Dawkinsian atheists value evolutionary anecdotes so much—vivid stories capture the imagination and make the whole thing seem more plausible. It’s also why Dawkins spends so much time angrily sneering. His alternative is to say, “Come on, guys, it’s not technically impossible!” and that would be poor salesmanship.

In closing, I would like to show the version of this argument which you can find in the Summa Theologica:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

There is a great difference of expression between my version of the argument and Saint Thomas’ version, but they mean roughly the same thing. Most of the differences arise from a very different standard education. We are not taught about goodness or what the relationship between different types of beings is, and very little about intelligence and less about rationality, so in a modern context such things must be explained at length, whereas in Saint Thomas’s time, anyone with even a tiny bit of education was familiar with those concepts. Our scientific knowledge, by contrast is far more advanced. Everyone has heard of protons and neutrons and electrons, and most people have heard of quarks.

Addendum

There are two addenda which I should discuss briefly: the weak anthropic principle and the infinite multiverse.

The weak anthropic principle is, roughly, “if the universe weren’t configured in its present way, we wouldn’t be asking why it was configured this way.” Typically its phrasing is adapted to the needs of the moment, but it always means as little. Probably the strongest statement of it—and this isn’t saying much—it is technically possible that our evaluation of a thing is influenced by having grown up in a world where that thing having happened. Usually it’s said in a way to suggest that our evaluation most likely was so influenced, but this is pure showmanship, without any admixture of a reason to believe it’s true. “I believe it, so you should too if you want my respect,” intimates the Dawkinsian atheist, as if any self-respecting person wouldn’t question his life choices if a Dawkinsian atheist did respect him.

The infinite multiverse hypothesis family of hypothesis that claim, essentially, that every possible world exists in a parallel universe. Basically, take Occam’s Razor and reverse it: unnecessarily multiply entities. I think that this originated with the question of why our physical constants (the charge of basic particles, the gravitational constant, etc) were the way that they were, and so one answer proposed—presumably by someone who read too much science fiction—was that every possible world happened, and we’re just in one that turned out to produce life. How anyone gets past the instant destruction of science, I can’t imagine. If every possible world happens, then there are an infinite number of worlds where all scientific experiments came up with their results by accident. There are infinite number of worlds where some spiky demon-monster with amazing nano-technology to keep you alive whips you in a pit of fire until the heat-death of those universes for not believing in Jack T. Chick tracts. And so on. And there is precisely no way to tell which of these parallel universes you are in. Since there are infinitely many of the bad universes, there isn’t even a way to tell how likely any of these bad universes is. And all of this is relatively obvious with a few seconds of thinking about it, which should tell you how seriously any of the proponents of the infinite multiverse hypothesis actually take the idea.

Awful Authorities

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy3 Comments

I was reading an article by Richard Dawkins about why there is almost certainly no God. It’s impressive in how aggressively he misunderstands the subject matter, but it’s even more impressive how much he misunderstands what people have said about it. The way that he casually assumes he completely understands scholastic terminology—as if the scholastic philosophers like Aquinas were writing in conversational English—is a masterwork of arrogant stupidity, to be sure, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It would also be interesting to consider Dawkins as a Martin Luther Lite—Martin Luther was both supremely arrogant and not very bright—but at the moment I’m more interested in the people who accept Dawkins as an authority on religious matters. (I mean authority in the logical sense; to accept his characterization of an opponent’s arguments instead of reading those arguments in full in their original context is to accept Dawkins as an authority in this sense.)

To anyone capable of understanding brilliant thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, Richard Dawkins is notable only for how utterly average he is. To put it colloquially, as a philosopher, he’d probably make an OK—but not great—bricklayer. An intelligent atheist who has studied philosophy and religion would be embarrassed by Richard Dawkins. So why do so many people respect and follow him?

The answer lies, I think, in how varying intelligence levels relate to intelligibility. This is especially observable in how people of varying intelligence levels follow arguments. Logical arguments for non-trivial things are very rarely made with every step in the argument being stated explicitly. It would take far too long, and explicitly stating connections between statements which are obvious makes an explanation seem dull, plodding, and even insulting. But which connections are obvious and which need to be stated explicitly depends on both the intelligence and the knowledge of the person trying to follow the argument. (For brevity, I will concentrate on the intelligence side of that, though the reality is more complicated because of the knowledge dimension, but the generalization from intelligence to intelligence-and-knowledge is relatively straight-forward.)

While explaining steps in an argument which are obvious to the reader can make the argument ponderous and boring, omitting steps which the reader cannot supply will make the argument entirely unintelligible. People can’t explain something at a higher level of intelligence than what they possess and most people will naturally explain an argument at the level of detail which they don’t find ponderous.  Now, while I think that intelligence is distributed among the population more like a poisson distribution than a bell curve, even if it is a bell curve, the inability to read (by lack of mental capacity, not whether one has been taught) forms a lower-level cutoff even to a bell curve, so either way, there is a large fraction of the population which is towards the effective bottom of the intelligence scale.

Given all of this, the most natural thing in the world is for people popular among people of average intelligence to be very slightly above them in intelligence. The slight edge will give them things to explain, but being very close means that (without much effort) their explanations will be intelligible. It is of course possible for a more intelligent person to condescend (in the etymological sense of the world—to come down and be with) to his less intelligent brethren; G.K. Chesterton is a great example of this because he was both  brilliant and quite popular. Still, the gift to understand people unlike oneself is relatively rare, as is the gift of being a good writer, and these two together with the willingness to expend the energy to condescend are rarer still. Still, it does happen, and so popularity does not give us any ability to predict the intelligence of the popular person.

But this does make Richard Dawkins’ popularity intelligible. A person who is in no position to judge whether Dawkins is right about religion will get the pleasure of being presented an intelligible thing, which can be convincing if it is in no way thought about. The less intelligent a person is, the more effort it takes to think about whether new information is congruent with what else is known about the world, making it especially unlikely for a person of average intelligence to think about whether Dawkins’ explanation is not only self-consistent but also consistent with the rest of the world.

Thus what Dawkins is doing may be regarded as a sort of unintentional seduction. His poor understanding has some explanatory power which is made very intelligible by it having been assembled specifically to appeal to an average intellect (his). It is then explained in a very intelligible way because he explains it at the ideal pace for a person of average intellect to understand it (i.e. at the pace he would want to read it).

This suggests that the best way to counter it is by presenting arguments which are similarly maximally intelligible to people of average intelligence. This is quite distinct from the strongest arguments against Dawkins’ position, and this is why I am leary about relying too heavily on cosmological arguments. They are incredibly powerful, but they are not simple. They rely on things like understanding that there cannot be an actual infinite regress. I love the argument from contingency, and in fact when I teach The Catholic Moral System in RCIA that is my starting point precisely because we can learn so much about God from it. But if people don’t always perfectly follow it, still, when I speak about the conclusions like God existing outside of time and space, or that God is perfectly happy and doesn’t need us, or that God’s relationship to us is one of pure gift from Him to us with no reciprocity, it works for them to take my word for it that this is catholic dogma, or even to recognize the truths as true once stated as the verbal formulation of something already intuitively known. They wouldn’t be in the Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults if they didn’t already believe the faith is true, or at least very strongly suspect it (people are welcome to use RCIA to learn more about the faith and drop out if they think it was a mistake).

When it comes to people who are skeptical about the faith, I think that they will generally need something which they can not only accept, but something which they can fully recognize as true. For that reason, I don’t think that the argument from contingency (or other cosmological arguments) are the ideal way to go in arguing with most atheists. A much more intuitive argument is the argument from design, but since one of the pillars of Dawkinsian atheism is a creation myth based on the scientific theory of evolution plus a little astronomy, the argument from design is much less effective than it should be.

(I should mention that I’m not talking about a god of the gaps argument like you find supported by people like Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box. Rather, I mean that if you look at the world, it is imperfect but in the main rationally ordered according to a hierarchy of being. A hierarchy implies that there is something at the top. More colloquially: the universe looks like a work of art, and art implies an artist.)

Since this very natural proof for God is no longer very effective, I think that a better approach would be to argue from morality. This is an argument which is not yet well developed. Atheists generally dismiss the version of it which runs, “why would you be good if you weren’t afraid of going to hell”, and indeed this is not a great argument, though the way that the atheists dismiss it is worse. “I don’t need God to be good,” Christopher Hitchens famously said, and it would have sounded better if it wasn’t coming from a drunkard who abandoned the mother of his children to take up with another woman. But in any event this misses the point, because no one ever asked atheists how they will do something moral if they happen to feel like doing it, but why they would do it even if they don’t feel like doing it. I’ve never yet heard an answer to that question, except a few indignant yet half-hearted attempts to prove that everyone feels like doing the right thing in all cases. (Except the mentally ill, who should be medically treated, of course.)

That being said, despite the weakness of the atheist answer to even a childish argument from morality, I think that a more adult form of it would be vastly better. In particular, the fact that we recognize morality at all means that the world matters. The existence of morality proves that the world is real and not reducible to the meaningless arrangement of sub-atomic particles that New Atheists would have us believe. The New Atheists have a number of just-so stories to explain away morality as post-hoc rationalizations for instinctual behavior, but that’s obviously not true, and in general I don’t think that these arguments could persuade even a child. Work is needed, to be sure, to explain how morality is necessarily tied to God, but I suspect if done well this line of argumentation is more likely to be persuasive to the sort of person who finds Dawkins credible on religion.

The Problem With Know-Nothing Atheism

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Rhetoric, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A little while ago I wrote a post about The Problem With Agnostic Atheism. That was a more philosophical approach to the subject. This post is going to be basically the same thing, but from a rhetorical, rather than philosophical, perspective. Agnostic atheism is not really a philosophical position; one meets it almost exclusively as rhetoric. The purpose of this post, then, is to provide some rhetorical tools for meeting it. Accordingly, I’m going to refer to it, in this essay, as know-nothing atheism.

To save you the trouble of following the link above just to get a definition, here’s the position I mean by know-nothing atheism, in the sort of reasonable-sounding language used to pretty it up:

There is insufficient evidence to prove the existence of God, and the default in the absence of evidence that a thing exists is to assume it does not, so until such evidence exists I’m going to go with the default position that God does not exist.

This is a reasonably adequate translation of its use in practice:

I don’t care about whether there’s a God, so I’m not going to consider the question unless you can make me.

Just a word of warning, know-nothing atheists generally combine a great deal of arrogant confidence with incredibly thin skin. Because their position is one of refusing to think, they will never see any parallels between what you’re saying and what they said; they will call you arrogant the moment you counter their confidence with your own confidence, and they will call you mean if you counter their claims that you are mentally defective with claims that they are the one who is mentally defective. It’s like arguing with a ten year old because in many ways it is; this is a position held by people who have refused to grow up, so they behave like they have refused to grow up. Complete with the certainty that not only do they know everything and those who disagree with them are idiots, but that they’re unappreciated geniuses suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. (Individuals will vary, of course.)

If you want to see this in action, to verify it for themselves, just test them out. Here is a hypothetical exchange:

Atheist: The burden of proof is on the person making a positive claim.

Theist: Does France exist?

Atheist: Of course.

Theist: What evidence do you have that France exists?

Atheist: You can go there and see for yourself.

Theist: That isn’t evidence, that is a suggestion for how to get evidence—supposing France actually exists, as you claim—at great effort and expense on my part. [At this point the theist could say, “If that counts, then just commit suicide and you’ll go to hell and that will prove I’m right.” but I recommend against it, as it will just confuse the poor atheist.] Just as I thought, you don’t have any evidence.

Atheist: I don’t have the time for nonsense. I don’t need to show you the evidence that France exists, go do look it up for yourself. We’re talking about whether God exists.

If you’re doing this on Twitter, you’ll probably get a number of epithets insulting your intelligence and honesty added in. But the key thing is that they clearly don’t believe in the standard, think anything they don’t understand—no matter how clear—is nonsense, and get upset with you if you try to actually explain what you mean rather than just bowing down to their superior intellects.

The whole goal of the know-nothing atheist is to try to get you to fight on his terms. In particular, he wants to make himself the jury for the argument. This may be tempting to give into, since a person sincerely inquiring into the truth must receive it according to their present understanding. However, the know-nothing atheist is not pursuing truth. He’s only after a rhetorical victory. (This can be an unpleasant conclusion to come to, because we would like to believe that everyone is acting in good faith, and moreover it is bad manners to accuse someone of acting in bad faith, but in real life people do act in bad faith, and pretending otherwise helps no one. I do recommend always coming to this conclusion reluctantly, because there is always the danger of dismissing someone honestly seeking the truth, which can do great harm.)

Because the know-nothing atheist is only after rhetorical victory, it is a complete mistake to allow him to set himself up as the jury who must be convinced. When he tries to do this, a strong counter is to shift the argument to whether he’s arguing in good faith. Since he’s not, this is a weak position for him. To give an example:

Atheist: what is your evidence that God exists?

Theist: To know what book to recommend you, I’ll need to know whether you want a philosophical approach or more of a practical, common-sense approach.

Atheist: I’m not going to read a book. I want to know what *your* evidence is.

Theist: What sort of evidence would you accept as proof for God, if I could produce it for you?

Atheist: Stop evading. The truth is you don’t have any evidence and you know it.

Theist: I have plenty of evidence. What evidence do you have that you’re capable of understanding it?

Now, at this point, the atheist is very likely to go one of several routes:

  • They will take this as a personal insult and claim it’s evidence you have nothing.
  • They will claim that you’re evading.
  • They will just repeat their demand for evidence like they’re a broken record.
  • They will make some weird epistemological claim like evidence doesn’t need to be understood, because evidence directly points to the thing it’s evidence for.

Any of these responses are not too far from the end of the argument, because the atheist is being brought onto uncomfortable ground. They will try various rhetorical tricks, mostly accusations of ad-hominem fallacies and claims of having been insulted. You can explain that an ad-hominem fallacy is arguing that an argument is false because of some bad quality in the person putting forward the argument, it is not asking for evidence that the other person does not have a fault which renders them incapable of understanding argument. Mostly, though, I think that the best line is to just stick to the strong position, which amounts to asking, “What evidence do you have that you’re capable of understanding a reasonable argument?” If they can’t actually demonstrate this—and many people can’t; I’ve run into people who don’t know the difference between an assertion, an analogy, and an argument—then why you should spend time and effort trying to explain something to them is in fact a legitimate question. Most classes in school have prerequisites for a reason.

A slightly less confrontational tack to take—though I think a certain amount of blunt honesty is warranted; know-nothing atheists rarely want anything besides a confrontation and they’re hoping for the advantage of being the only person violating tea-time rules of politeness—is to shift the argument from burden of proof to duty to investigate. Basically this amounts to denying that you have an emotional investment in the other person’s holding any particular position. They want you to feel the need to convince them. Be clear you don’t feel that need. Basically, “I’m happy to help if you want recommendations for where to begin, but it’s your job to investigate the answers to the most important questions in life, not mine to do it for you.” To give an example dialog:

Atheist: Theism is irrational because there is no evidence for the existence of God.

Theist: There is plenty of evidence for the existence of God. You’re just defining evidence in an overly narrow way.

Atheist: if there was evidence, it wouldn’t be possible to deny that God exists.

Theist: anyone can deny anything if they want to. That’s a useless standard of evidence.

Atheist: do you deny science?

Theist: Do you affirm it? Even the parts that are wrong and will be contradicted by future discoveries?

Atheist: No, science is just the best method for finding the truth that we have.

Theist: leaving aside that you could only know that if you already had access to the truth to compare it to science, and further leaving aside the fact that “science” isn’t one thing nor do scientists only operate by one method, what you’ve said is that you don’t actually know anything. So the best we have are our guesses which seem to work?

Atheist: That’s right. Make a hypothesis, test it with evidence. That’s the best we can do.

Theist: But if the evidence confirms the hypothesis, you still don’t know that it’s right. Some evidence might come along later which contradicts it?

Atheist: of course. That’s the beauty of science—it’s self-correcting.

Theist: But if you need to make a decision, you will act as if the hypothesis is true?

Atheist: Yes. What would you do?

Theist: Actually, it would depend on how good the evidence is because evidence is not a binary yes/no thing, but that’s irrelevant. The point is that you will act as if a scientific hypothesis is true when you need to act, but outside of that case, you will hold that you don’t know anything because of course every theory might be contradicted by evidence which comes along later?

Atheist: Yes…

Theist: So you don’t know anything, you just have guesses which you are going to follow because you can’t think of anything better?

Atheist: I wouldn’t put it that way…

Theist: Of course not. That’s why I had to worm it out of you; it doesn’t sound very good without the poetic hand-waving to distract us from what you really mean. So that brings up the question: how are you any better than a horse? Horses have their guesses about the world that they will follow in default of some better guess, and don’t have any propositional knowledge which they affirm to be actually true.

Atheist: Why do you need to feel superior to other animals?

Theist: I don’t need to feel superior. The obvious fact that I am superior to a horse is evidence that your entire approach, which leaves you in the position of being no better than a horse, is wrong.

Atheist: Where is your evidence that you’re better than a horse?

Theist: I don’t argue with horses, which it is your contention to be no better than. Why should I argue with you?

Atheist: I can talk and a horse can’t.

Theist: But you have told me that what you say doesn’t mean anything more than a horse’s whinnies. Unless you’ve got some evidence that you’re more capable of rational understanding than a horse is, I can’t see why I should bother speaking with you any further. There are rational people whose words mean more than a horse’s whinnies with whom I could be speaking instead.

Atheist: !@#$ you.

Theist: I don’t believe in interspecies mating, but thanks for the offer.

Atheist: you’re just saying that because you’ve got nothing and you no it.

Theist: I’m saying that because I lack a minimally rational debating partner, and if I wanted to waste my time further, I could argue with the wall.

I’d just like to re-emphasize that this is a rhetorical approach, to be used in cases where someone is purely engaged in rhetoric, as distinct from honestly trying to find the truth. There is one other problem with a rhetorical approach like this: neutral observers will tend to blame one for using it, rather than for being maximally conciliatory. This is an odd reaction, and somewhat akin to the person who looks for his keys under a lamp-post despite having lost them in the dark because he won’t find them in the dark anyway. People who want peace at any price will often try to appeal to the person on the defensive, who is likely to be more reasonable precisely because they’re not the one initiating a rhetorical argument. I don’t think that there’s anything to be done about this besides when one is in the right being firm that one is. In any event the world seems to be getting less genteel, so I suspect that this will increasingly be less important.

The Problem with Agnostic Atheism

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

Going back at least as far as Bertrand Russell, there has been a strain of atheism which proponents call agnostic atheism, and a more literal English rendering might be know-nothing atheism. The most sympathetic rendering is something to the effect of:

There is insufficient evidence to prove the existence of God, and the default in the absence of evidence that a thing exists is to assume it does not, so until such evidence exists I’m going to go with the default position that God does not exist.

In practice it can be phrased more parsimoniously:

I assume that there’s no God, and I won’t defend that position.

Quite a bit of effort has gone into explaining why they won’t defend that position. There are all sorts of arguments about the “burden of proof”, which may or may not apply to any particular debate (where it is possible to have rules about who has the burden of proof), but this entirely misses a very significant point. Human beings, as rational creatures, have a duty to the truth. A man who does not seek the truth to the best of his ability is simply a failed human being.

The agnostic atheist takes a position which is basically a form of modified radical skepticism. Most of them are scientismists and consequently they—or at least the ones who’ve put any thought into it—take a position that reason works very slightly, enough that it is possible to use it where confirmation can be gotten by way of control. I.e. they will believe in technology. This is akin to the wife who will only believe that her husband loves her if he constantly buys her the expensive presents she wants but will not specify. She will believe in his love only if she can control it. Past this, all else depends too much on the use of reason to be believable.

The agnostic atheist is, to all appearances, in this basic position. Agnostic atheists mostly deny anything that they don’t want to believe in except that which no one but a devout skeptic would deny. Usually they’ll make a few exceptions for things like political beliefs, but will get angry with you if you point out the contradiction to them. Not impressive, but in itself nothing very remarkable. Plenty of people know little and think about their beliefs less.

But the curious thing about the agnostic atheist is that he thinks himself on the high end of functional, as a rational being, and expects the rest of us to take that view too. In fact, he has demonstrated nothing beyond his not suffering from catastrophic brain damage. He is not as non-functional as it is possible for a human being to be—especially when considered as a clever beast—but he hasn’t really demonstrated any of the higher function of a rational creature: to know. Worse, his banging on about the burden of proof highlights just how little appreciation he has for his duty to investigate. As a rational creature, it’s not our job to do his thinking for him, it’s his job to do his thinking for himself. His complaining loudly and vociferously that we haven’t done a sufficiently good job of doing his thinking for him only calls attention to how little of it he has done for himself.

This manifests further in how very little thought agnostic atheists ever seem to put into considering what the world is, according to their theory of it. Just ask them some time about any particular implications of their views, and they won’t know anything about it. Any of the obvious problems such as, “if there’s no meaning in life, why is murder (that you can get away with) bad?” Most of the time you’ll get some vapid response about not wanting to murder people, as if their lack of ambition is a solution to the general philosophical problem.

And there is something especially telling in the odd insistence which some agnostic atheists place on the idea that all babies are atheists. I think that this is a significant misunderstanding of both babies and knowledge, but it is at least true that babies do not propositionally affirm the existence of God, since they don’t propositionally affirm anything at all. But so what? How can anyone be proud of knowing no more than a baby does? It’s very rhetorically strange for an atheist to say, “Intelligent people might believe in God, and even partial idiots might believe in God, but complete idiots are all atheists!” But it does get to the point. They are claiming to be in a state which is not distinguishable from being an utter failure as a rational being. Which raises the question: are they?

The way to tell, of course, is to find out what they do believe in. What knowledge have they gained in however many decades they’ve been alive, so far? And if the answer is none—that they know nothing, that there are only bets that have generally worked for them reasonably well in the past, or there are sense experiences which they routinely anticipate, or whatever skeptical substitute for knowledge they might have—then perhaps they simply are failed human beings. If a person shirks their duty to learn about the world, they genuinely can avoid learning about it. They can achieve a sort of anthropoid approximation to a cow chewing its cud in its field, unaware of and uninterested in any of the important questions like:

  • what is good?
  • What is the relationship between goodness and happiness?
  • Why is there something rather than nothing?

The agnostic atheist is in a relatively unassailable position. He does not, in fact, know whether there is a God, and he is in fact assuming that there isn’t one. But he has achieved this unassailable position by a sort of intellectual suicide. He’s done just enough thinking to get to a place where he will never do any more thinking, and there he remains, loudly proclaiming that we should be impressed with him because he knows no more about the world than does an infant in its mother’s arms.

Whether it is possible for us to help him out of this position, and if so how on earth we are to do it, I have no idea. It may be impossible for man. It is all the more fortunate, then, that all things are possible for God. Pray for them.

Bad Philosophers

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

I recently read up on Russell’s Teapot. A super short version Russel gave was:

Nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice.

Upon further reading about it, I discovered that Russell was the first to formulate what might be called the Insufficient Evidence Argument against God’s existence. There are various wordy versions of it, but they can be sufficiently summarized as:

There isn’t enough evidence to prove God exists.

The clever thing about this argument, from the perspective of rhetoric, is that the only practical answer is “yes there is,” which is weak because it’s mere contradiction. A simple contradiction will end the conversation, and so it is generally bad form.

There is a more complex answer possible, but the problem is that it’s very complex. Specifically, it is possible to debate the standard of evidence. That is, to debate what is and what is not sufficient evidence to establish the truth of a proposition, such as, “God exists.” But while this is a viable line of argument, most people are simply not up to it. Whether it is too difficult for them, or they are simply not fitted to it by personality, this is solidly within the realm of epistemology, the branch of philosophy which studies knowledge. Now, as has been observed, if a man won’t do philosophy for himself, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a philosophy, it only means that he has a philosophy he hasn’t thought out for himself. The big question is, therefore, who has thought it out.

This brings me back to Bertrand Russell. Russell’s Teapot is a cleverly dressed up form of question begging. (I’m not sure what the name is for the practice of creating a clever metaphor in order to distract from the fact that you are begging the question; it’s basically asking somewhat to watch the straw man waving his hands while one begs the question.) The example discusses a proposition which no one ever had a reason to believe. This is a fair way of dismissing the Invisible Pink Unicorn, but has no relationship to historical religions. He’s using a fancy metaphor to distract from the fact that he’s refusing to consider the evidence for historical religions.

And the real problem I have is that Russell was certainly too well educated to have honestly claimed that there is no evidence for historical religions. Now, I do not know what the state of Bertrand Russell’s soul is; that gets to culpability for what he did, for which no one but God has sufficient knowledge. Certainly, I hope for Russell’s salvation as I hope for the salvation of all human beings. But it is possible to evaluate Russell’s actions, and I do not see any plausible case for him having been an honest man. This made me very suspicious of how he lived the rest of his life, in particular, I had the strong suspicion that he probably lived in conveniently immoral ways. So I looked up his biography on Wikipedia. (Not the most reliable source, to be sure, but it’s a start.)

So, after a little reading, it turned out that the man was an adulterer; he fathered children outside of both of his first two marriages. (I don’t know about his third marriage; I stopped reading at that point.) It would be silly to say that I was not shocked since I went into the article expecting to find something like that, but alas I did find something like that. Which got me to thinking about the relationship between atheism and immorality.

I am not, in general, sympathetic to the idea that atheists become atheists because they want to be immoral. First, it is not very true to my experience of atheists, some of whom are indeed as moral in their behavior as most religious people. Second, this is not very true to psychology. When someone wants to do something immoral, he will generally come up with some reasoning why this case is an exception to the general rule, he will not attempt to redefine morality. Bank robbers do not approve of stealing in general; at the very least they don’t approve of stealing from them or (typically) their families.

But Bertrand Russel was not an ordinary atheist; he was a very intelligent one. There are two main implications of that that are relevant to the present discussion, one contingent on the historical context of him being an university-educated Englishman born in 1872 and one contingent only on him being a fallen human being. In the first case, he lived at a time when there was still among the educated English some idea that they were at the dawning of the age of reason and that once God had been thrown off philosophy would be free to construct new and wonderful things that the age of superstition only hinted at. The second case concerns an odd mistake many people make with regard to the results of intelligence. It is often supposed that intelligent people are more likely to be correct than unintelligent people. It is true that they are more likely to understand things, certainly, but intelligence is not the same as wisdom, and intelligence does not guarantee a correct answer, only a complex answer. Intelligent people are quite likely to make mistakes. Indeed, their intelligence makes it more likely that they will be able to come up with convincing arguments for their mistakes. If you want a truly huge error, it actually requires an intelligent person to make it.

I will need to do more reading before I think it safe to conclude that Bertrand Russel was the father of the modern know-nothing atheism that talks about God as a sky-fairie. According to wikipedia he was influenced by David Hume, who didn’t really believe in knowledge (he said that all we thought of as knowledge was merely anticipated sense experience), so perhaps Hume was originated this line of thinking. I’ll need to do more investigation into Hume (I’ve only read about 30 pages or so of Hume’s work). But if Russell did inherit his know-nothing atheism, it is at least clear that he gave it a polished, modern expression it didn’t have before, and this brings me back to the question of morality and atheism.

For most atheists, I think that immorality is a side effect. Most will notice at some point that if God is dead, all things are permitted, and after all human nature isn’t good so there’s no real foundation for any sort of morality. Most atheists in my experience will wail about how morality doesn’t depend on God, and that they don’t need God to be good, but they then proceed to do approximately no moral philosophy of any kind except occasionally noting that some depravity which doesn’t cause bodily injury to anyone doesn’t cause bodily injury to anyone. In general if they don’t face temptation, they won’t give into it, and I suspect often enough how they were raised will even carry them through temptation. But their children tend to be in a bad place because they don’t raise their children the way that they were raised. (Why do so few people notice that degeneration tends to happen by generations? It’s right there in the word!)

I have a sneaking suspicion that this was not the case for Bertrand Russell, though. He was in the right time and place for God to have been in his way academically. God’s rules were in the way of where he wanted to put his genitals. And he was clever enough to come up with a convincing way to help him forget about God. This has the effect of simultaneously making that forgetfulness attractive because it proves his intelligence, but also significantly reduces the time and effort it takes to forget God. It is more tempting to do easy things than it is to do hard things. And once he came up with the clever arguments, people who were far less clever than he could use them. People often understand far more complicated things (especially when explained to them) which they couldn’t come up with on their own.

Worse for those repeating Russell’s arguments, the objections to an argument you understand but can’t make yourself are often unpersuasive because you (naturally enough) assume that the guy who came up with the argument could come up with a response, if he were around to do it. A person’s ability to see the brilliance of the one who made the argument he couldn’t have come up with himself supports regarding the creator of that argument as an authority. The less intelligent followers of someone like Russell have, in essence, little defense against him. This is (part of) why intelligent people have so much responsibility to use their intelligence well.