Archive for the ‘religion’ Category
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part 6, intentional states
mind of god, exclusive pic
Dr Craig’s next argument is that his god is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness in the world. This is a weird one, and I can only assume that he’s put his best forces in the vanguard in the hope of blowing the opposition out of the water, and that these rather piddling forces in the rear weren’t really meant to be exposed to the light of reason, and were just added to give a scarey sense of bulk or weight to the Doctor’s position. Never mind the quality, feel the width, as they say.
Dr Craig starts by ‘informing’ us that ‘philosophers are puzzled’ by states of intentionality. He doesn’t tell us which philosophers, but the clear intimation is that all philosophers are puzzled in this way – and by the way, this is a very typical piece of deceptiveness from Dr Craig, and your sceptical antennae should be stretched to their outermost limits by offhand remarks such as these. Dr Craig’s presentation here is very thin, but he’s trying, I think to convince you that philosophers are baffled by the non-materiality of intentionality or consciousness generally, and this is a massive misrepresentation of a complex area in the philosophy of mind. It’s true that there’s a lot of interesting debate, and has been for some decades, on the explanation of consciousness in material terms, but there are virtually no philosophers who consider that intentional states are without material cause. That’s to say, that you could have an intentional state without a brain – or something like it, such as a super-computer of some sort. Dr Craig makes the absurd claim that he can think about things, or of things, but a physical object cannot. But I see Dr Craig as a physical object, albeit one with intentions and consciousness. Dr Craig seems to want to make a distinction between objects and conscious subjects, but he doesn’t make this explicit in his rather clumsy argument. I have no difficulty with this distinction, seeing him, as I see myself, and my cat, as both object and conscious subject. In other words I see consciousness as necessarily embodied. Now, what the term ’embodied’ means is really too complex to be gone into here, but I would strongly argue that, while philosophers debate the connection between consciousness and embodiment, and are perhaps especially interested in what embodiment entails, I don’t know of any who are interested in considering consciousness as entirely non-material.
Dr Craig claims that Dr Rosenberg, an atheist, takes the view that ‘there really are no intentional states’, and that ‘we never really think about anything’. I’m not familiar with Dr Rosenberg’s views, but to say that I suspect they’ve been vastly over-simplified and misrepresented by Dr Craig’s characterization of them would be too weak a statement by far. Furthermore Craig claims that Rosenberg’s views, whatever they are, represent atheism. This is nonsense. Philosophers hold vastly different views on the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, including the view that there is no hard problem. The vast majority of philosophers who debate these issues are, in fact, atheists.
Dr Craig ends this fifth point with another formal argument, which, for the readers’ convenience, I’ll put here.
1. If God did not exist, intentional states of consciousness would not exist.
2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist.
3 Therefore God exists.
However, this argument is so paltry and pathetic that it isn’t worth commenting on further, except perhaps to say that it doesn’t deserve to be called an argument.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part 5, the fine-tuning argument
gee thanks, goddie – and can you help me win my soccer game on saturday?
Dr Craig’s fifth argument is the well-known fine-tuning argument. Once again I should point out that when Dr Craig brings up these science-related topics it isn’t from a fascination with science itself – indeed Dr Craig likes to use the term ‘scientism’ when he refers to science other than when he’s using it to support his obsession. He uses science solely to mine and manipulate it to convince himself and others that there’s a warrant for a supernatural agent who has a personal love for him. So you should always consider his use of science with that in mind. And you should ask yourself, too, why is it that the physicists and cosmologists and mathematicians of the world, the people who work on a daily basis with the so-called laws of nature and the physical constraints of the universe, are by and large so completely lacking in belief in a personal deity? This is a sub-population that is more atheistic than any other sub-group on the planet. How does Dr Craig account for this? Madness, badness, indoctrination? How is it that the greatest physicist, by general acclaim, of the twentieth century, Einstein, regularly described belief in a personal god as a form of childishness? Why is it that Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest mathematicians and logicians of all time, wrote, ‘I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue’? What is it with the Richard Feynmans, the Stephen Weinbergs, the Stephen Hawkings of this world that they’ve been so indifferent or hostile to the claims of religion? Perhaps Dr Craig should consider launching a wholesale attack on these disciplines, since they seem such a breeding ground for views so completely out of synch with his obsessions. How can they not know that all their researches and discoveries converge on the screamingly obvious fact that a loving human-focused supernatural being designed everything. What a bunch of blind fools.
The fine-tuning argument has been around for a long time despite its seeming ultra-modernity, though of course it gets updated in terms of constants and constraints. It’s of course, a rubbish argument like all the others. This universe wasn’t fine-tuned for anything. There was no tuner, as far as we know, and it would be impossible to predict what possibilities could emerge from the hugely complex and almost entirely unknown preconditions of the universe’s existence. Our universe will provide us with many many surprises long into the future, and I would not be surprised if those surprises include forms of life hitherto thought impossible, due to the ‘laws of nature’. Dr Craig claims that the various constraints and quantities that he talks about are independent of the laws of nature, which is a nonsense, as it’s only through our application of physical laws that we’ve been able to determine these quantities. So I don’t know what to make of his claim that these constraints aren’t physically necessary. The constraints exist as an essential part of the physical nature of this universe. The question of necessity or chance just doesn’t arise. These are the constraints we have to work with, and we find that, within these constraints, intelligent life is clearly possible, though perhaps very rare, though perhaps not so very rare as we once thought. I think we must all agree that we live in exciting times in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and extra-terrestrial life more generally. We’re homing in on the zones elsewhere that meet all the conditions for the emergence of life, and I believe we will find that life in time. Intelligent life, by our standards, will no doubt take longer.
Dr Craig says the odds of this universe being life-permitting are astronomically small. Some cosmologists agree, but they don’t then make any leaps to a supernatural cosmic designer. And I mean none of them do. It’s interesting that the cosmologist Alan Guth, to whom Dr Craig has already referred, believes that humans will one day be able to design new universes, no doubt with the help of quantum computers, and there are others who suggest that this may be how our universe came into being. All highly speculative stuff, and not particularly mainstream, but good fun, and worthy of reflection. Others, such as Stephen Hawking, have proposed a superposition of possible initial conditions for the universe which provides for an ‘inevitability’ of us finding ourselves in just this kind of life-sustaining universe at a later stage. It’s all to do with the manipulation of time-perception apparently. This hypothesis eliminates the need to posit a multiverse. There are many other hypotheses too, of course, including the multiverse, the bubble universe and others. It’s an exciting time for cosmology. Tough, but exciting, and far more interesting and rewarding than theology, I can promise you that. As students, I hope you continue to follow this stuff, for its own sake, not to mine it as confirmation for preconceived ideas.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part 4, on mathematics and gods
Now we come to the argument that God is the best explanation of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. My intuitive response to this – and of course I’m not a mathematician – is that mathematics appears to me to be be a kind of abstraction from, that’s to say a manipulation of, a play on and further development of, the regularities that exist in the world, and that if no such regularities existed, the world wouldn’t exist. Or at least would not be in any sense describable. For example, the most basic form of regularity required would be a binary contrast, describable in mathematical or logical terms as x and not x. The real world, though , offers far more opportunities for playing on and manipulating regularities than this. So many opportunities have been found in fact, and so many beautiful theorems have been developed from them over the centuries that mathematics has often been given a mystical, miraculous status. One thinks of the Pythagoreans in ancient times, and the mathematically-obsessed philosophers of the seventeenth century, such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. However, I think it’s fair to say that, historically, when mathematics has been raised to mystical heights, great problems have ensued. So I don’t see anything particularly miraculous in the fact that a tool for understanding the regularities of the world can be developed and manipulated to underpin theories which further deepen or extend that understanding.
Eugene Wigner’s 1960 essay, ‘The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences’ is available online, and everyone should be encouraged to read it – though it doesn’t make for easy reading. I think it’s a little unfortunate that Wigner uses the word ‘miracle’ a number of times in the essay, but he certainly doesn’t refer at any time to a god. And while I would hesitate to interpret Wigner from my lay background, I’m not sure I agree with his view in the essay that, while elementary mathematical concepts derive directly from the perceived regularities of the actual world, more complex and abstract mathematical concepts don’t so derive, and yet can be applied with uncanny reliability, or if you like profitability, from our perspective, to that world, as is the case with much modern physics. If that were so, if the mathematical abstractions our minds create were completely removed from the world’s actual regularities, and yet just happened to apply to them to provide us with a richer and more developed view of our universe, then that would indeed be a ‘happy coincidence’. But abstraction doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Just as non-Euclidian geometry derives from the regularities of nature that Euclid strove to axiomise in a set of rules, and just as multi-dimensionality derives from the standard three-dimensional world of our experience, mathematical abstraction is always tied to some underlying actual regularity, however obscured by its overlay. The applicability of maths is not a happy coincidence (which isn’t to say all mathematical abstractions are applicable of course), but that is just because the world has regularity. Thus when we look at Dr Craig’s formal argument:
1. If God did not exist, the applicability of mathematics would be a happy coincidence.
2. The applicability of mathematics is not a happy coincidence.
3. Therefore God exists.
we see once again that the problem lies in the conditional statement – this time statement one. Our world has regularities, without which not. Mathematics is all about the play of regularities, so it isn’t coincidental that some mathematics has applicability. This is not mysterious, and it doesn’t imply anything about supernatural agency. Thus it isn’t reasonable to infer the existence of any god, let alone the human-obsessed, son-begetting god adhered to by Dr Craig.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part 3, ye olde cosmological argument
Dr Craig’s second argument is clearly related to his first. Indeed some of you might wonder – what’s the difference between the claim that a transcendent personal being explains the universe, and the claim that a transcendent personal being explains the origin of the universe. Well, I don’t think there’s much difference, but it does bring in temporal or time-related questions. Finiteness and infinity, eternality, beginnings and ends, and so forth. Dr Craig is obviously concerned to emphasize to us that the universe had an absolute beginning, as if that provides evidence for a transcendental personal being. He underlines that absolute beginning or origin by citing a 2003 paper by Borde, Guth and Vilenkin, which he claims proves, not only the absolute beginning of our universe, but of any multiverse our universe may have been part of. He further claims that a much more recent paper by Vilenkin concluded that all the evidence we have converges on the conclusion that the universe/multiverse did in fact have an absolute beginning.
Now before I look at the theological implications, if any, of that conclusion, let me look at Dr Craig’s take on the B-G-V theorem. Remember what I said earlier about Dr Craig’s inevitable distortions of science arising from his theological obsessions. The 2003 paper, available online, is relatively technical and has nothing whatever to say about the absolute beginning of the universe. In a conversation with the physicist Victor Stenger, Vilenkin, one of the principal authors of the paper, described Dr Craig’s use of this terminology regarding the paper as ‘raising some red flags’. Stenger asked Valenkin directly, ‘does your theorem prove the universe must have had a beginning.” He immediately replied: “No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating the universe was prior to some time.” Stenger also asked the Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll whether Dr Craig had any justification for his claim that the B-G-V theorem had anything valid to say about the beginning of the universe. This was his response:
“I think my answer would be fairly concise: no result derived on the basis of classical spacetime can be used to derive anything truly fundamental, since classical general relativity isn’t right. You need to quantize gravity. The BGV [Borde, Guth, Vilenkin] singularity theorem is certainly interesting and important, because it helps us understand where classical GR breaks down, but it doesn’t help us decide what to do when it breaks down.”
Now this is perhaps fairly abstruse stuff for the lay reader, and my reading up on this area reveals to me that these are live issues very much debated within cosmology, and in these debates there is nothing in the way of spillage into the metaphysical realms Dr Craig is so keen to leap into. Maybe cosmologists are just a timid and modest bunch, but they prefer to try to account for the mathematically calculable results of our inflationary universe through equations and formulae than to speculate about transcendent fatherly creators. There just seems to be no warrant, whether the universe is finally decided as finite in the past or not, for a non-evidence-based, non-material entity, somehow conscious, who created the universe with we humans front and centre of ‘his’ mind. That way, it seems to me, lies rampant anthropocentric egotism.
So let’s look at the formal argument with which Dr Craig ends his second point.
1. The universe began to exist.
2. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause.
3 Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause.
Again, the big problem is with the conditional in the second line. What is a ‘transcendent cause’? Certainly it isn’t anything that science can deal with. And science is just our best way of arriving at reliable knowledge about the world. Dr Craig often associates the term, ‘transcendent’ with ‘non-material’. But all causes that we know of are material. It makes little sense to talk about a non-material cause. And don’t think in terms of force or pressure, or energy waves or the like, because in scientific terms these are all quantifiable. material entities. Now you might think, ‘oh you’re just a narrow materialist’. Well, I don’t like labels, but if I had to accept one, I’d prefer to call myself a realist. In the search for reliable knowledge, we limit ourselves to material, quantifiable entities for very good reason. Because if we let in the so-called non-material, or the ‘transcendent’ or the ‘ineffable’, then we let in anything and everything that our imagination wills and that our heart desires. Why not a whole culture of billions of godlike creatures or minds working together to create the universe? Why not a female immortal, who created the universe by accident and has been indifferent to it ever since? Why not a giant cosmic computer created by the minds of a species far more advanced than ours, on a planet in a dimension not yet fathomed by our greatest minds? When you’re not limited by evidence, everything is possible, and that might be a good thing – it makes for great science fiction. But it doesn’t make faith in a traditional, male god, born in the deserts lands of the Caananite people a few thousand years ago, particularly reasonable to me.
And so we move to the third argument.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part two, in which LFS begins to warm to the topic
the most convenient term in the language
So here we have, in toto, Luigi Funesti-Sordido’s response to the challenge thrown down by William Lane Craig. It will be rather lengthy, so I’ve broken it up into parts in the hope of making the whole more easily digestible. I’m hoping too, to present the video of LFS’s response in the near future, but at the moment it’s tied up in a beautiful red ribbon of legal and contractual wrangling and other such wishful thinking. We shall see.
Luigi Funesti-Sordido: Well g’day ladies and gents and others, believers and unbelievers, agnostics and sceptics, the notionally curious and the curiously indifferent. Dr Craig has urged upon me a particular and onerous task, to refute his eight arguments for the existence of his pet monotheistic being, within the next twenty minutes. That’s about one refutation every two minutes or so, which considering that he didn’t click me an email about what exactly he was going to say, seems a bit rich. But, as the bishop said to the actress, I’m sure I can rise to the occasion. However, I’ve got some news for you. Forget the time limit, I’ll take as much time as I damn-well please, and you will all sit down and shut up, and take your medicine. The point being that putting forward a few points for the existence of Dr Craig’s weird little being doesn’t take long, while pointing out all the weaknesses or unlikelihoods of the arguments can take quite a while – even just to untangle what it is that Dr Craig’s on about. That’s not to say that it’ll take hours to demolish each of Dr Craig’s points, because some can be dealt with much more quickly than others, but I certainly don’t intend to make this a rushed job, for the simple reason that I want it to be comprehensive and as final as it can be. You will note, by the way, that the doors to this auditorium are locked from the outside, and there is no escape. You will note also that if you try to rise from your chairs, you will receive an electric shock, mild at first but gaining in strength as you seek to widen the distance between your buttocks or other body parts and the comfortable upholstery provided for your viewing and listening pleasure. I wish no-one any harm so if you have any heart problems I’d strongly advise you to keep still and keep comfortable, and above all, don’t panic.
So, to the issues. I want first to make some general comments. Of Dr Craig’s eight arguments, five of them involve what appears to be up to date knowledge about the world, in terms of physics, cosmology, mathematics and the field of consciousness. This suggests that Dr Craig is a thoroughly modern and with-it, forward thinking philosopher. However, nothing could be further from the case. Anybody who has observed Dr Craig’s activities over the past several years, would, I think, be right to form the judgement that this is a man obsessed. In fact, I would go further and say, fanatically obsessed. It seems to me that Dr Craig’s sole purpose, his life’s work, his raison d’etre, is to pedal and promote his particular, peculiar and parochial brand of monotheism. Everything else he talks about, whether it be mathematics or morality, cosmology or consciousness, everything has to be bent and shaped and shoe-horned to fit with this peculiar, fanatical obsession. It follows from this, that nothing Dr Craig has to say about these various fields of activity and inquiry can be trusted. If you ask any expert in any of these fields how best to make a contribution, one thing you’re always likely to be told is to rid yourself, as far as you can, of preconceived notions. Keep an open mind. The two principals that drive science, to my mind, are curiosity and scepticism. Is that really the case? And what is the case? Does that argument really stack up? Can we find a better argument to fit the facts? Wow, here’s some new data, we’re going to have to rethink our basic assumptions, isn’t that exciting.
But these principles do not drive Dr Craig. He already knows the answers, all that remains for him is to convince the rest of the world. Students out there, be very wary of such individuals. Dr Craig doesn’t have the intellectual ingredients to make a good scientist. For a start, he doesn’t have a sceptical bone in his body. Imagine if Dr Craig’s dream came true, imagine if every debater capitulated before his watertight arguments, and not only that, after every debate, the whole audience ‘saw the light’ and converted in their thousands, and eventually millions, to his peculiar deity, with its father-part and its son-part and god knows what else? Where would science go then? What would happen to open and relentless questioning? I ask you to ponder that.
Dr Craig does seem to do well in these debates, and a lot of people try to put their finger on the reasons. They say he’s an ‘expert debater’ and that’s partly true, but I think the principal reason is his lack of scepticism, his absolute certainty about his position. This gives his talks something of a steamroller effect, a relentlessness which sceptics, accustomed to dealing with other sceptics, find difficult to handle. There’s also the fact of Dr Craig’s single-minded obsessionalism. This is his one and only topic, whereas his opponents – writers, academic philosophers and scientists in the main, have a much greater variety of interests and don’t, in general, spend a great deal of time thinking about their atheism.
The situation in this respect reminds me of that in Christine Garwood’s fascinating book ‘Flat Earth’. At the height of the Flat Earth belief in the nineteenth century, lecture halls in the US were regularly filled with people from all levels of society who had come to be discombobulated and entertained by the likes of flat-earth proponent ‘Prof’ Joe Holden, holding forth on the imbecilities of ‘global earth theory’, and using the language and theorems of mathematics, physics and astronomy to prove his point. In Britain at the same time, the notorious Parallax, another flat-earther, was challenging prominent scientists, including the Astronomer Royal, to debates on the matter. Another flat-earther of the time challenged no less a scientist than Alfred Russell Wallace to a test of the flat earth view against the global earth view, and according to a great many observers, actually won the contest. Of course, this is a footnote to history now, and I think the real test of Dr Craig’s position will also be how he is seen by posterity. For the fact is that Christianity is in retreat, in some places more rapidly than in others, but certainly in every western country on the planet. And this can hardly be attributed to ignorance.
Now to the first argument, and fortunately I have the gift of perfect recall, so I remember every detail of it. The best explanation of why something exists, rather than nothing, is a supernatural being. But what is a supernatural being? Not being bound by any rules of evidence, it could of course be anything you like. However, a lot of work done by anthropologists and psychologists into the supernatural beings worshipped and loved and feared and placated throughout the many cultures in the world and throughout history, and there have been many thousands of these beings, has found a number of traits in common. In particular, supernatural beings tend to be rather obsessed with us. In fact it almost seems to be that their very purpose is to protect us or punish us. This is clearly the case with Dr Craig’s god, and that should be seen as a big red flag.
To return to Dr Craig’s argument, he asks ‘What is the explanation of the universe?’ Take note of that question. It’s not ‘What is the cause of the universe?’ There’s quite a sizeable difference between those two questions, and I’ll come back to that. If you asked a bunch of cosmologists ‘What caused the universe?’ they might say- and I can only speculate of course – ‘you mean what caused the big bang’ and then they might, perhaps, find some consensus in saying, ‘well nothing caused the big bang, because causes always exist in time before their effects and time actually began with the big bang, so it makes no sense to speak of an antecedent cause, and if you think that’s a satisfying answer to us, you’re wrong, but that’s the best we can do, for now.’ Probably though, I’m underestimating these cosmologists, who would likely come out with something much more sophisticated-sounding. What none of them would say, I’m quite sure, is that the cause must be ‘a transcendent reality, beyond the material universe, whose existence is metaphysically necessary,’ which is what Dr Craig says. This reminds me of what Daniel Dennett says about Dr Craig, that he is able, with absolute equanimity, to pass from the most mundane to the most preposterous assertions in a heartbeat. So what is a transcendent reality, and why should it be metaphysically necessary? I think it’s an artifact of Dr Craig’s imagination, and it’s metaphysically necessary because that’s what Dr Craig desperately wants it to be.
Now let me return to the difference between ’cause’ and ‘explanation’, a word Dr Craig is fond of using. He says at the outset that his ‘god’, a metaphysically necessary transcendent being, is the best explanation of the universe’s existence, and he uses the analogy of the explanation for a ball found by the roadside. Now, the difference between an explanation and a cause seems to me to be that an explanation already assumes the existence of an agent, an ‘explainer’. Somebody, in this case maybe the owner of the ball, who can tell the story of how the ball came to be there. So, Dr Craig, argues, because the whole universe is just as much of a contingent object as a ball, it, too, must have a cosmic owner who can explain its being there. (This is of course why Dr Craig chose as his example a ball, and not, say, a large rock). Only, according to Dr Craig, whereas the ball’s owner/explainer is a contingent entity, like the ball itself, the universe’s owner/explainer must be a ‘transcendent, metaphysically necessary entity.’ To which one might be inclined to say ‘What the…? Where did that idea come from?’ Were I one of those blunt Aussie types, I might be tempted to reply ‘from out of the good doctor’s capacious arsehole’, but being much more civilized I should say that it reminds me of the old cartoon with the equations on the blackboard and the line ‘here a miracle happens’. I think Dr Craig needs to be a great deal more specific in that area.
In short, using the word ‘explanation’ to conjure up a transcendent, necessary explainer is nothing more than a semantic cheat. But I’m not finished with argument one yet. Let’s look more carefully at the argument form he presents:
1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being.
3. The universe is a contingent thing.
4 Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1,3).
5. Therefore the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being (from 2,4).
Now, this is a version of the age-old cosmological argument, which goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and which can be described in the briefest and most mocking terms as, something can’t come from nothing, therefore god. Arguments on both sides have been heaped up over the centuries, by Aquinas, by Leibniz, by Hume, by Kant, and by innumerable modern philosophers, and it’s unlikely any headway will ever be made, because it’s entirely speculative, or theological, and non-evidence based. The version of it presented here seems particularly weak and tenuous, because there just seems to be an almighty leap from the need for an explanation, supposing such a need is real, and the claim about a transcendent, personal being. In other words, the major problem lies in the conditional claim (2). I don’t find it at all reasonable, or even comprehensible to me, that the universe can be explained by a ‘transcendent’, that’s to say, non-material, personal being. Does this mean personal to me? That seems self-serving and egotistical. What else can be meant by personal? Personal to herself? (Let’s call her she – I’m really sick of male gods, please, please no more of them, please). That makes little sense. It seems to me that Dr Craig has thrown in the ‘personal’ term precisely to make the god our own little personal father-figure and protector. And let’s face it, Dr Craig’s god is very male. My response to that is in line with what Albert Einstein said many times. In his view, and in mine, belief in a personal god is simply a form of childishness.
I could say more, but it’s time to move on to argument two.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part one, in which WLC presents his case
Some years ago I did a wee post on William Lane Craig – to the effect that he was a pushover, more or less. Yet Craig keeps on debating, and claiming ‘victims’. It depends on who you speak to or read, but there’s no doubt that Craig has appeared to come off best in most of the innumerable, and same-ish debates he engages in with atheist academics and/or celebrities. There’s even a forum-type website here, which declares to the world ‘you are not qualified to debate WLC’ (unless you’ve been studying all that WLC has been studying for the last twenty-odd years). Oddly, though the writer also declares that WLC’s arguments aren’t that good, so WTF? (I just threw that in there to go with WLC).
So I’m going to prove this writer, Andrew, wrong, by debating WLC right now, and comprehensively thrashing him. I’m going to base WLC’s presentation on a recent debate he had, last month, with ‘the 13th most important atheist in the world’, Alex Rosenberg, whom I’d never heard of before listening to this debate. The debate, called, ‘Is faith in God reasonable?’ followed a format which seems to be of WLC’s devising, in which he always goes first and sets out five points, or six, or as in this case eight (it was a big event), which show why said faith is reasonable (the debate topic could be ‘does God exist?’ or variants thereof, and he could trot out the same six or eight points). He gets 20 minutes or so to do this, and finishes by saying something like – ‘these eight arguments must each be refuted for the opposition to be taken seriously’. And so the opposition, namely myself (under my esteemed alias Luigi Funesti-Sordido, founding Secretary of the Urbane Society of Sceptical Romantics) will have twenty minutes to refute these eight points, after which there are 12 minutes each for rebuttals, and five minutes each of summing up, then a Q and A session.
But that’s not how this debate will go. Stay tuned for the drama…
WLC makes his way to the podium and begins. I’ve presented his arguments here virtually as-is, with just a bit of editing-out of examples and recapitulations, etc. Go to the debate for the full version.
WLC : I believe that God’s existence best explains a wide range of the data of human experience. Let me mention eight.
First, God is the best explanation of why anything at all exists. Suppose you see a ball by the roadside and you wonder how it got there, and your mate says ‘don’t worry about it, it just exists, there’s no explanation for it’, you’d think this was crazy, and you’d think the same thing even if the ball was swollen up to the size of the universe. So what is the explanation of the universe? It can lie only in a transcendent reality, beyond the material universe, and this transcendent reality is metaphysically necessary in its existence. Now there’s surely only one way to get a contingent universe out of a necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is a personal agent who can freely choose to create a contingent reality. It therefore follows that the best explanation of the contingent universe is a transcendent, personal, being, that’s to say, God. In sum, 1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence. 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being. 3. The universe is a contingent thing. 4 Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1,3). 5. Therefore the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being (from 2,4).
Second, God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe. We have strong evidence that the universe isn’t eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning. In 2003, Borde, Guth and Valenkin were able to prove that any universe which has on average been in a state of cosmic expansion, cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary. What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the very early universe. Because we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, we can’t yet provide a physical description of the first split-second of the universe, but the B-G-V theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state, which may have characterized the early universe, cannot be eternal in the past, but must have had an absolute beginning. Even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called multiverse composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse itself must have had an absolute beginning. Of course, highly speculative scenarios, such as loop quantum gravity models, string models, even closed time-like curves have been proposed to try to avoid this absolute beginning. These models are fraught with problems, but the bottom line is that none of these models, even if true, succeeds in restoring an eternal past. Last spring at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the 70th birthday of Stephen Hawking, Valenkin delivered a paper entitled, ‘Did the Universe have a beginning?’, which surveyed current cosmology with respect to that question. He argued, and I quote, ‘none of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal. He concluded, ‘all the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning’. But then the inevitable question arises, why did the universe come into being, what brought the universe into existence? There must have been a transcendent cause which brought the universe into being. In summary, 1. The universe began to exist. 2. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause. 3 Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause. By the very nature of the case, that cause must be a transcendent, immaterial being. Now, there are only two possible things that can fit that description. Either an abstract object, like a number, or an unembodied mind or consciousness. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations. Therefore the cause of the universe is plausibly an unembodied mind or person, and thus we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal creator.
Third. God is the best explanation of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. Philosophers and scientists have puzzled over what physicist Eugene Wigner called, ‘the uncanny effectiveness of mathematics’. How is it that a mathematical theorist like Peter Higgs can sit down at his desk and predict through calculation the existence of a fundamental particle which experimentalists thirty years later after investing millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours are finally able to detect? Mathematics is the language of nature. But how is this to be explained? If mathematical objects are abstract entities, causally isolated from the universe, then the applicability of mathematics is in the words of philosopher of mathematics Penelope Maddy, ‘a happy coincidence’. On the other hand if mathematical objects are just useful fictions, how is it that nature is written in the language of these fictions? In his book Dr Rosenberg emphasizes that naturalism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences, but the naturalist has no explanation of the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world. By contrast the theist has a ready explanation. When God created the physical universe he designed it on the mathematical structure he had in mind. We can summarize this argument: 1. If God did not exist, the applicability of mathematics would be a happy coincidence. 2. The applicability of mathematics is not a happy coincidence. 3. Therefore God exists.
Fourth. God is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. In recent decades, scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the initial conditions of the big bang were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a precision and delicacy that literally defy human comprehension. Now there are three live explanatory options for this extraordinary fine-tuning. Physical necessity, chance, or design. Physical necessity is not, however, a plausible explanation because the finely tuned constants and quantities are independent of the laws of nature and therefore they are not physically necessary. So could the fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem with this explanation is that the odds of a life-permitting universe gotten by our laws of nature are so infinitesimal that they cannot be reasonably faced. Therefore the proponents of chance have been forced to postulate the existence of a world-ensemble of other universes, preferably infinite in number and randomly ordered so that life-permitting universes would appear by chance somewhere in the ensemble. Not only is this hypothesis to borrow Richard Dawkins’ phrase an ‘unparsimonious extravagance’, but, it faces an insuperable objection. By far, most of the observable universes in a world-ensemble would be worlds in which a single brain fluctuates into existence out of the vacuum and observes its otherwise empty world. Thus if our world were just a random member of a world-ensemble, we ought to be having observations like that. Since we don’t, that strongly disconfirms the world-ensemble hypothesis. So chance is also not a good explanation. It follows that design is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe, and thus the fine-tuning of the universe constitutes evidence for a cosmic designer.
Fifth. God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness in the world. Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality. Intentionality is the property of being about something, or of something. It signifies the object-directedness of our thoughts. For example I can think about my summer vacation, or I can think of my wife. No physical object has this sort of intentionality. A chair, or a stone, or a glob of tissue like the brain is not about, or ‘of’ something else, only mental states or states of consciousness are about other things. As a materialist, Dr Rosenberg recognizes this fact, and so concludes that on atheism there really are no intentional states. Dr Rosenberg boldly claims that we never really think about anything. But this seems incredible. Obviously, I am thinking about Dr Rosenberg’s argument. This seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of atheism. By contrast, on theism, because God is a mind, it’s hardly surprising that there should be finite minds. Thus intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. So we can argue 1. If God did not exist, intentional states of consciousness would not exist. 2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist. 3 Therefore God exists.
Sixth. God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties in the world. In moral experience we apprehend moral values and duties which impose themselves as objectively binding and true. For example, we all recognize that it’s wrong to walk into a school and to shoot little children and their teachers. On a naturalistic view however there’s nothing really wrong with this. Moral values are just the subjective by-product of biological evolution and social conditioning. Dr Rosenberg is brutally honest about the implications of his atheism. He writes ‘there’s no such thing as morally right or wrong, individual human life is meaningless and without ultimate moral value. We need to face the fact that nihilism is true.’ By contrast the theist grounds objective moral values in God and our moral duties in his commands. The theist thus has the explanatory resources which the atheist lacks to ground objective moral values and duties. Hence we may argue 1 objective moral values and duties exist 2 but if God did not exist, objective moral values and duties would not exist 3 therefore God exists.
seven. God is the best explanation of the historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth. Historians have reached something of a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place. He claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come., and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead. If Jesus did indeed rise from the dead, then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and thus evidence for the existence of God. Now I realize that most people think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just accept by faith, or not, but there are actually three facts recognized by the majority of historians, which I believe, are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus. Fact 1 On the Sunday after his crucifixion, Jesus’s tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. 2 On separate occasions different individuals and groups of people saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and 3 The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, despite having every predisposition to the contrary. The eminent British scholar N T Wright near the end of his 800-page study of the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection, concludes that the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus had been established to such a high degree of historical probability as to be ‘virtually certain, akin to the death of Caesar Augustus in AD 17 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70’. Naturalistic attempts to explain away these three great facts, like ‘the disciples stole the body’ or ‘Jesus wasn’t really dead’ have been universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. The simple fact is that there just is no plausible naturalistic explanation of these facts. And therefore it seems to me that the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. But that entails that God exists. Thus we have a good inductive argument to the existence of God based on the facts concerning the resurrection of Jesus.
Eight. God can be personally known and experienced. This isn’t really an argument for God’s existence, rather it’s the claim that you can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments, simply by personally experiencing him. Philosophers call beliefs like this ‘properly basic beliefs’. They aren’t based on some other beliefs, rather they’re part of the foundations of a person’s system of beliefs. Other properly basic beliefs would be belief in the reality of the past, or the existence of the external world. In the same way, belief in God is for those who seek him as properly basic, grounded in our experience of God. Now if this is so then there’s a danger that arguments for God could actually distract our attention from God himself. The Bible promises ‘draw near to God and he will draw near to you’. We mustn’t so concentrate on the external proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our own hearts. For those who listen, God becomes a personal reality in their lives.
In summary then we’ve seen eight respects in which God provides a better explanation of the world than naturalism. For all of these reasons I believe that belief in God is eminently reasonable. If [the ineffable Mr Funesti-Sordido] is to persuade us otherwise, he must first tear down all eight of the reasons I’ve presented, and then in their place erect a case of his own to show why belief in God is unreasonable. Unless and until he does that, I think we should agree that it is reasonable to believe in God.
After the voluminous applause dies away, the redoubtable Luigi Funesti-Sordido, Founding Secretary of the (new) USSR rises to the occasion, and changes the world….
is there any sex in heaven?
I’ve been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire off and on for years now, and still nowhere near finished, but today I was reading his account of the life of Mohammed and the rise of Islam. Gibbon makes an attempt to sympathetically explain Mohammed in both historical and religious terms, and tries to flesh out his metaphysics and his concept of the deity, the sort of stuff that tends to make my eyes glaze over – and my boredom and irritation are compounded by the fact that Gibbon never provides primary sources for his often idiosyncratic character sketches, anecdotes and interpretations.
However, I was mildly amused this time. As with Jesus, the portrait of Mohammed is – well, just a wee bit idealized:
According to the tradition of his companions, Mohammed was distinguished by the beauty of his person… They applauded his commanding presence, his majestic aspect, his piercing eye, his gracious smile, his flowing beard, his countenance that painted every sensation of the soul, and his gestures that enforced each expression of the tongue….
Gibbon goes on for a while in this style, describing the prophet’s modesty, his affability, his firmness, his support for the poor, his accommodation of the rich, his flowing speech, his courtesy, his universal benevolence etc etc. In short, if you’re religiously inclined but don’t want to be so conformist as to let Jesus into your heart, why not consider Mohammed? In fact he might be a better choice, since Jesus was pretty down on the rich (Matthew 19:24) and was rather less of an upholder of ‘family values’ than the prophet (despite the latter’s philandering), to put it mildly (Luke 2:41-51, 14:26, John 2:1-5, Matthew 23:9, to name just a few passages). But I don’t want to dwell on these characters – truth to tell I’ve always been a bit nervous of writing anything critical of Islam – because I want to focus on another passage in Gibbon, treating of the Islamic heaven. Myths of heaven and hell, and the judgment that consigns us to either region, are commonplace in the ancient world, and as with creation myths, it’s useful to trace connections and influences. Gibbon mentions the Koran often in his chapter on Mohammed and the Arabs, but it’s never clear whether his descriptions of their practices and beliefs derive directly from that book. So make that you will of Gibbon’s presentation and commentary here:
According as the shares of guilt or virtue shall preponderate, the sentence will be pronounced, and all, without distinction, will pass over the sharp and perilous bridge of the abyss, but the innocent, treading in the footsteps of Mohammed, will gloriously enter the gates of paradise, while the guilty will fall into the first and mildest of the seven hells. The term of expiation will vary from nine hundred to seven thousand years; but the prophet has judiciously promised that all his disciples, whatever may be their sins, shall be saved by their own faith and his intercession from eternal damnation. It is not surprising that superstition should act most powerfully on the fears of her votaries, since the human fancy can paint with more energy the misery than the bliss of a future life. With the two simple elements of darkness and fire, we create a sensation of pain, which may be aggravated to an infinite degree by the idea of endless duration. but the same idea operates with an opposite effect on the continuity of pleasure; and too much of our present enjoyments is obtained from the relief or the comparison of evil. it is natural enough that an Arabian prophet should dwell with rapture on the groves, the fountains, and the rivers of paradise; but instead of inspiring the blessed inhabitants with a liberal taste for harmony and science, conversation and friendship, he idly celebrates the pearls and diamonds, the robes of silk, palaces of marble, dishes of gold, rich wines, artificial dainties, numerous attendants, and the whole train of sensual and costly luxury which becomes insipid to the owner, even in the short period of this mortal life. Seventy-two houris, or black-eyed girls, of resplendent beauty, blooming youth, virgin purity, and exquisite sensibility will be created for the use of the meanest believer; a moment of pleasure will be prolonged to a thousand years; and his faculties will be increased a hundredfold to render him worthy of his felicity. Notwithstanding a vulgar prejudice, the gates of heaven will be open to both sexes, but Mohammed has not specified the male companions of the female elect, lest he should either alarm the jealousy of their former husbands or disturb their felicity by the suspicion of an everlasting marriage. this image of a carnal paradise has provoked the indignation, perhaps the envy, of the monks: they declaim against the impure religion of Mohammed; and his modest apologists are driven to the poor excuse of figures and allegories.
This is a lengthy passage, but it’s worth quoting, for what it reveals of Gibbon’s style as well as the Islamic view of heaven. ‘Superstition’ is a favourite word of his, trotted out whenever religion’s in question, yet in spite of these enlightenment values Gibbon was a staunch, church-going conservative, properly disdainful of the vulgar and the feminine (largely synonymous terms to his mind). His attitude towards religion was obviously complicated, shot through with continental influences and conservative family – and reputational – concerns. I suspect his view, at least publicly, would be that religion is the opiate of the masses, and a good thing too – and if he had to attend church regularly, to provide a good example to his more vulgar constituents (he was a Tory MP), as well as to placate his family, that was a small price to pay.
But what to make of this sensual – not to say sexual – paradise? The Islamic term is Jannah, and the Wikipedia account, drawn from various Koranic passages, makes no mention of 72 houris ‘of virgin purity’, and generally tends to downplay the sensual elements, probably for political reasons. Even so, the idea of excess – of food and clothing, perfume and jewellery, and ‘immortal youths’, makes it pretty clear what to expect up there. Of course Gibbon didn’t pluck those 72 virgins out of the air; according to Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, hadith 2562 of the Jami` at-Tirmidhi collection has this:
The least [reward] for the people of Heaven is 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome of pearls, aquamarine and ruby.
Of course, this stuff about 72 virgins was all over the place after the September 11 attacks, and Moslem sites sought to refute it, claiming the hadith to be a weak one, and pointing out the difference between wives and virgins (as if that mattered), but nobody seems to have noticed that this western interpretation of the hadith would have almost certainly derived from Gibbon.
Gibbon also points out that Mohammed’s disciples will enter paradise, as a result of their faith and in spite of whatever sins they may have committed. He doesn’t make clear whether he means a small discipleship, like the twelve of Jesus, or all believers, numbering hundreds of millions. In any case, presented in this bare fashion, this creates a serious moral dilemma, presented concisely by Matt Dillahunty on an episode of The Atheistic Experience. This is the dilemma between justice and mercy. As Dillahunty puts it, you can’t be absolutely just and totally merciful at the same time, because there is an inherent contradiction. To offer mercy and forgiveness and entry to paradise to believers, simply because they believe, no matter what their crimes, is incompatible, it seems, with any reasonable sense of justice, let alone absolute justice. And it presumably follows that if you don’t believe, no matter what your life has been, you’ll be debarred from heaven and will necessarily be eternally damned, there being no alternative.
Actually, though, because Jannah is written about in far more detail in the Quran that heaven is in the Bible, there may be a whiff of a response to the problem posed by Dillahunty. The response would be that Allah’s judgment is much more subtle and, of course, fair-minded, than a simple saved/damned dichotomy would suggest, for Jannah (heaven) and Jahannam (hell) are ‘streamed’, just like my old high school. Jannah has eight gates, and Jahannam seven, with each gate representing a different class of virtues, or vices, graded as to quality or lack thereof. It might be that simple unbelief, allied to good deeds, will get you into the least nasty of hell’s gates, which may be little worse than the meanest of heaven’s gates, especially if your unbelief is based on ignorance rather than wilfulness (and Allah knows all). According to one Islamic commentator, reflecting on whether Christians could ever get into heaven, ‘Though one must do good deeds and believe in God, salvation can only be attained through God’s judgement’. So the ultimate arbiter is ‘God’, who will decide not only whether the deeds are goodly enough to get into the top-graded gate, but also whether the god the believer believed in was the ‘rightest’ god. After all, the Christian believes in ‘God’ too, and, arguably, some Christians may believe in a god that, though they think of him as a Christian, is closer to the Koranic god than is the god in the head of some Islamic worshippers. So it wouldn’t be absurd to find Christians being ushered through one of the gates of Jannah, hastily brushing up on their Arabic and looking suitably bewildered.
But anyway I was supposed to be writing about sex in heaven, so I’m proving to be a bit of a disappointment there. And it depends on which heaven you’re talking about. Islamic heaven is as sexual as Mohammed seems to have been, while the Christian heaven is as sexless as Jesus. But it doesn’t matter, either way you’ll be blissed out, and the fact that we mostly think of bliss in sensual/sexual terms just shows how far we still are from attaining the transcendence of the Godhead. Ummmmm…
more cardinal sins
protesting too much
Lauryn Oates, an admirable woman in every way, has written an incisive little essay here, wishing the backward-facing hierarchs of the Catholic Church a hearty good riddance. Of course it’s all wishful thinking, of the kind all positive-thinking humanists indulge in, but you have to wonder why it is so many apparently educated, humane, intelligent people still cling to this awful institution. Is it force of habit? Is it fear of offending family and friends? Is it faith, whatever that may mean? Or is it, dare I say, profound intellectual analysis and reflection?
And let’s face it, the evidence of this institution’s awfulness is everywhere. Oates wrote her damning little piece before the latest scandal involving Keith O’Brien, the most senior Catholic clergyman in Britain no less, who has made admissions regarding sexual molestation accusations by a number of fellow priests. After all the focus, the relentless focus, on exploitative priests and cover-ups, we still find this sort of thing going on at the very top. However, O’Brien’s admission (it was feeble and vague – ‘I haven’t lived up to the standards expected of me’, and it’s unlikely anything further will be dragged out of him) is particularly devastating – and some illustrious figures would say, inevitable – because he was so rabidly homophobic in his pronouncements. So, now that his hypocrisy is revealed, the LGBT community is having a field day, and why not? (They recently named him their Bigot of the Year). I’ve just been acquainting myself with the many contemptible remarks this individual has made against homosexuality, and some interesting reflections on him, now that he stands exposed, so to speak. Some to the effect that he’s obviously a deeply troubled person who might be treated with compassion. The thing is, though, we can always find ways to more deeply understand, and even sympathise with, the behaviour of people who have done immense damage to others, but we always have to weigh the suffering they cause against the suffering they experience. And it seems to me obvious that O’Brian’s depredations, combined with his regular and lashing condemnations of the freely chosen sexual activities of others, from a position of exalted religious status, represents something pretty fundamentally disgusting and only partially mitigated by his own inner turmoil. Another mitigating factor, of course, is the gay orientation of many senior Catholic clergy, encouraged and cemented in their youth in seminaries the world over.
O’Brian has now been ‘retired’, and will take no further part in the Catholic Church, but he still retains his title of Cardinal, and he was planning to retire later this month anyway. There are those, though, who’ll be fighting to visit a more fitting punishment on the man, and I wish them well. The Church itself is to conduct an investigation into his activities, but I can’t take that seriously. The secular route is best, but it’s unclear as yet whether his behaviour has contravened the law. It may well be that he’ll end up being let off, if not exonerated, by the very liberal regime that he affects to despise.
a post about truth, knowledge and other heavy stuff
David Hume, still a cool dude
I’m just returning to blogging after a brief, disastrous spell of pretending to be a responsible teacher to young people in a field – transition to work – in which I have no expertise whatsoever. Fail, as the teens say. So it’s back to my irresponsible, unreliable, anti-authoritarian, perverse, ill-disciplined, reclusive, childishly dilettantish life of poverty and wafer-thin reflection on the dynamic world around me.
I note that, in my absence, my readership, small (but growing) though it ever was, has plummeted. So, time to pull the finger out, and to maybe occasionally have a go at communicating with others. Maybe.
I’ve been reading, among other things, a little book of ideas called Falling for Science, by Bernard Beckett, and I’ve found it both compelling and exasperating. My first impression was that it was going to be an attack on ‘scientism’, and that’s partially true, but it’s a bit more difficult to properly characterise it. Beckett is a novelist and maths-science educator, and the main purpose of his book appears to be an attempt to untangle science from story-telling and to explore the limits of science as ‘answer to everything’. Not that he’s anything but a hard-nosed science advocate, but he’s also fond of the Humean is-ought distinction – one that I’ve always been a bit dubious about. He’s actually very good at explaining stuff, and there’s a pretty good summary of Popper’s falsification thesis in chapter 3, as well as some stimulating story-telling, for example about how close some eighteenth century scientists, or proto-scientists, came to capturing the idea of natural selection, starting with Hume himself, who wrote:
Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out, much labour lost; many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world making.
Hume here plays dangerously, heretically, with the idea of time and infinity, and even a many-worlds hypothesis, but his key idea was the one that Darwin later had to battle for against the age-of-the-earth pronouncements of Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), that there might be time enough for ‘slow but continual improvement’ in the the evolution of worlds, and hence life. Then there was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who wrote this in 1753:
One could equally well say that the ape is of the family of man, that he is a degenerate man, that man and ape have a common origin; that in fact, all the families among plants as well as animals, have come from a single animal.
It’s striking, but Beckett presents an even more astute source, the mathematician and philosopher Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, who wrote, way back in 1751:
They would have owed their origin merely to some accidental formation in which the basic parts would not have preserved the arrangement present in their parents. Each degree of error would have created a new species, and from these repeated variations would have arisen the infinite diversity of animals that we see at the present day.
All of this is fascinating, and of course further evidence for the proposition that natural selection was a concept ripe for the picking by the mid nineteenth century, but I want to focus this post on what Beckett has to say about the debate, still raging, about evolution and its implications for the practice of religion.
Becckett’s broad argument is the familiar one that evolution isn’t incompatible with religious belief, and he seeks to distinguish between evolutionary theory and ‘evolutionism’, which he believes is a drawing of non-empirical conclusions from the empirical theory. The distinction he makes is a broad one between model and interpretation, with the latter being the story-telling, non-empirical, but nonetheless important, part.
Interestingly, Beckett starts his exploration of this issue with a mild version of a deconversion story, as someone brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition. This is interesting because I’ve recently been watching online deconversion videos that are truly harrowing and moving – young people brought up in close-knit more or less fundamentalist communities who, through an increasing unease about the truth-claims of their communities, have become alienated, isolated, suicidal and profoundly messed up. These of course are the stories of survivors – what of those who didn’t make it?
I mention this because it gripes me more than a little that Beckett’s argument against what he calls ‘evolutionists’ is that they’re wedded to a Platonic notion of truth. I find this argument completely spurious. First, I’m sceptical of hitching the notion of truth to some kind of Platonist idealism. To me, it’s an insult to those apostates who lost so much, in terms of family and community, in rejecting the false claims of Christianity. The author of Why I am no longer a Christian says at one crucial point in his video:
For the first time in my life I realised there was something more important to me than God, and that was truth, and for the first time in my life I learned that if I had to choose between God and truth, I would choose truth.
Compare Beckett’s remark toward the end of Falling for Science:
Unlike the Platonist I find no beauty in truth. Indeed I consider it an ugly word, a bludgeon wielded in battle by those who lack the social grace to back away. Yet all around us confident certainty abounds…
It seems the two here are at cross-purposes. The video author is making the point that living a lie, living in false consciousness as Sartre would say (remember him?) had come to be so painful to him that all his family and friends and the comfort and security they might offer, were no compensation – in fact their regular god-talk would’ve just added to his discomfort and misery. Beckett is talking about truth in a completely different way, as Truth with a capital, as the popes use it when they come out with their papal bull.
Beckett I think overplays his hand in coming out with this narrow and, I think, idiosyncratic way of treating truth. A shame, because he does have some useful things to say. In fact I agree with him about Truth, but not about truth. Truth isn’t an ugly word, but nor have I ever considered it beautiful in a Platonic sense – I’ve never been remotely sympathetic to Platonic idealism. Truth, rather, is a useful word, and even an essential one. Perhaps I can best explain that by avoiding, at least initially, the very word ‘truth’.
I’ve written before about how those twin drivers, curiosity and scepticism, move science forward. They’re also, I would argue, the drivers that drove our video author away from religious conviction. But you have to be curious and/or sceptical about something. As you can see in the deconversion video, the author began to explore the Bible critically and then to explore its authorship, and how Christianity, and Judaism before it, emerged from other religions. He also began to explore the psychology of religious belief. In other words, he was curious and sceptical about what was really going on within communities and in the individual minds of believers vis-a-vis religion, and how this all emerged and came together historically. It was a search for the truth. Not a search for certainty, but for a deeper understanding. And it is this search, this questing spirit, that drives science forward. A dissatisfaction with, or at least a doubt about, the answers so far given (scepticism) together with a push to know more, to understand more deeply (curiosity). You can talk about these forces towards knowing, and this questing drive towards a deeper understanding, without ever mentioning the word ‘truth’, but surely truth is what it’s all about.
To take an example I’ve often used, about my own initial exposure to religion via a Salvation Army Sunday School at the age of eight. Stepping into this world, having no religious background at all, and watching these adults, some of them uniformed, praying and singing naff songs (this was the mid-sixties and the Beatles were all over the airwaves – ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’ couldn’t really compare), and preaching about our heavenly father and maker and his love for us and how he was our lord and we worshipped him eternally and so on, I really thought, even at that age, that I’d entered into a madhouse, and I wanted no part of it. But I could also see that at least some of these people were otherwise normal, functioning people. So what was really going on here? Where did these ideas come from? What benefit were they deriving from this behaviour? Did they really believe in an invisible lord and master and protector, or were they just covering that particular, weird base just in case? Now you might think that an eight year old wouldn’t have the capacity to ask himself such questions, and I won’t pretend that I have a precise memory of my thoughts of the time, but I also think we tend to underestimate the sophistication of children’s thoughts, and my experience with children since then has confirmed that view. The point is that my curiosity and my scepticism were stimulated to the max. And even when we ask the basic question – wtf is going on here? – we’re talking about truth. We get an answer that fobs us off and we think, no no no, I want to know what’s really going on here. I want the truth, or at least something that makes sense. We don’t talk about the coherence theory of truth for nothing.
If you research the coherence theory of truth, and its ‘opponent’ the correspondence theory, you’ll have to grapple with propositions, truth conditions, entailment and the like, but broadly the coherence theory is about fitting things together in a most likely and coherent account. Young Earth Creationism, for example, is incoherent with respect to what we know of geology, cosmology and so much else, such as our tried and true methods of dating fossils. More controversially, the claim that the One True God, the Judeo-Christian one, is the creator of the world, is incoherent with respect to many things we’ve learned. We have cosmological theories about the origin of our planet, and of our solar system, and of our galaxy, and of our universe, which fit together and bear no resemblance to the Biblical account of creation. We also know that there have been many creator gods and creation myths, and that they all belong to an earlier, more speculative, pre-scientific era. And we know, or many of us know, that creator/protector gods who put humans at the pinnacle of their creation, and have a special interest in humans, are much more likely to be self-serving human fabrications than real existents. Our views on this are bolstered by our deeper understanding of a cosmos in which our planet is not at the centre, or anywhere near it, and our deeper understanding of a biosphere in which we are but a recently emerged life form clearly related to other life forms, on a planet in which life forms have come and gone with monotonous regularity.
All of this takes me back to what Beckett has to say on the evolution-religion battle, which he tends to portray as two groups of intransigent certainty-addicts head-butting each other. His attempt to find a pragmatic solution to this confrontation revolves around the distinction between model and interpretation, or theory (in its tight, scientific definition) and story. His argument is that ‘evolutionists’, as well as interested observers, often over-step the mark, moving from the truth of the evolutionary model, which is as empirically well-grounded as it can be, to the truth of their particular interpretation of that model, which has little or no grounding. For example, he quotes George Bernard Shaw on his personal response to the theory:
…when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration
Beckett is of course right in pointing out that there’s no warrant in the theory itself for this response, or for the very different remarks of Darwin – that there is grandeur in this way of thinking about life. These are of course perfectly legitimate personal responses, but they don’t follow in any logical sense from the theory.
What I’m not so convinced about is the claim that the model itself has no implications for religion, that only certain interpretations of the model have implications for certain interpretations of religion.
One of the problems is that, on the evolutionary side, certain facts provide real stumbling blocks for those religions (notably Judaism, Christianity and Islam) that stand or fall on a personal relationship between the creator god and his special beings or chosen people. We have a definite knowledge that we are a type of primate, that we share a common ancestry with chimps and bonobos, a slightly older common ancestry with gorillas, and further back with orang-utangs, and gibbons and so forth. The differences between us and other primates, though massive by any measure (other than genomic) are all explicable in purely material terms. This is model, not interpretation. Beckett is a bit cavalier in claiming that the religionist can say, ‘Ah, that’s how God did it’, for all this leaves her is an enfeebled, primum mobile-type deism. The Catholic Church, of course, steps over this mess by issuing the Truth that evolution is compatible with Catholic doctrine but nevertheless humans are their god’s special creatures – which is basically the same as saying, it’s compatible but incompatible. More serious and honest attempts have been made to rescue special creation from the evolutionary model, notably the book Finding Darwin’s God, by the highly-regarded biologist (and Catholic) Kenneth Miller, and although I haven’t read the book, I’ve read enough extracts from it and criticism of it to realize that it only highlights the difficulties of trying to effect such a rescue.
So I think evolution, the model itself, plays its part, along with other theories and models, whether geological, cosmological or psychological – with cognitive psychology allied to neurology having made great strides in recent years – in providing an increasingly coherent description of our world, a description which leaves no room for supernatural agency, especially not of the miraculously interceding kind. I agree with Beckett that accepting evolution doesn’t necessarily imply that you should love all the other critters on earth for being vaguely related to you, or that you should see them as competitors in the struggle for life. Yet I won’t let go of the idea that there are better interpretations of evolution and worse ones, and that the model itself, more thoroughly examined and more deeply understood, will help us towards those best interpretations.
I suspect that this is all a much more vexed question than Beckett allows it to be. It’s a well-known fact and ‘problem’ that sometimes researchers, often in the conclusions to their research papers, step aside, or forward, from the nuts and bolts of their experiments to consider the implications of their findings ‘for humanity’. They move from facts to interpretations or implications, from model to story, whatever. And critics and other scientists cringe, or criticize. Alternatively the researchers go the opposite way, refusing to speculate on implications, or playing them down as much as possible. In that case, informed and interested observers will inevitably step forward and make explicit those implications, or what they consider them to be. And the original researchers will cringe, and criticise. I think all this says something about human nature. I think Beckett is half onto this when he suggests replacing ‘truth’ in science with ‘usefulness’. It won’t do, because the curiosity and scepticism that drives science forward isn’t about usefulness, but about truth – ‘what’s really going on here?’ But it’s also human nature to look for implications, and applications, for any new piece of knowledge we’ve uncovered. Knowledge is power, but only if we apply it, surely. This is where fact and value, models and how we use them and what we draw from them, become difficult to disentangle – and my wondering question is – how important is it to disentangle them? Important, yes, but we should also be aware of what might seem obvious – that we pursue facts for value’s sake. We pursue knowledge in order to have greater control of our world. Why else? If we know what’s really going on, we feel in a better position to do something about it, to act, to decide, to fit what’s happening here into our larger world-view, thus refining and deepening it.
I’ve barely touched on a lot of complexities here, but I do feel that the frustrations felt by the PZ Myers and the Jerry Coynes of the world with the religious worldview, particularly vis-a-vis the world-dominating monotheisms, are seriously mischaracterised as dogmatic story-telling banging up against dogmatic story-telling. There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave it at that.
reflections on the video ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’ – part 2
ah am the greatest
According to our video’s author – and his account derives, via Karen Armstrong, from a plethora of Biblical, historical and anthropological scholars – the monotheistic god worshipped by Jews, Christians and Moslems came into being around 2,600 years ago.
Going back to the Enuma Elish, as described in the previous post, a text dating back some 3750 years, the creation myth described there involved Marduk, a powerful warrior-god (and ‘patron god’ of Babylon at the time of Hammurabi) who defeats Tiamat, a sea-dragon goddess, representative of chaos, and then leads the other gods in creating the world. The general form of that creation was edited into the book of Genesis when the Israelites found themselves exiles in Babylon more than a millennium later. There are other references, such as Isaiah 51:9 ‘Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?’ (ESV), and Job 26:12 ‘By his power he stilled the sea; by his understanding he shattered Rahab’. Note also Psalm 74:13 ‘You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters’, and Psalm 89:10 ‘You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm’. Fascinating glimpses into the earlier ‘life’ of the Biblical god. Yahweh appears to owe much to Marduk. Rahab may here refer to Tiamat, but there are other examples, from the neighbourhood, of creator gods first battling with sea monsters. In Egypt, Atum fought with Nehebkau, and in Canaan, Baal fought with Yam. Another, more famous sea monster, at least to us moderns, oft-mentioned in the Bible, is Leviathan:
On that day, the Lord will take a great sword, harsh and mighty, and will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the writhing serpent, and will kill the dragon that is in the sea. (Isaiah 27:1)
It isn’t known from where this monster derives. Anyway, on to the Canaanite influences. The ancient Canaanite port city of Ugarit, which reached its height between 1450 and 1200 BCE, has been excavated, and clay tablets found there reveal that the principal god of the region at that time was El or Il, the father of humanity, and husband of the goddess Ashirah. Baal was their son. In fact El is first mentioned a millennium before this on clay tablets from Ebla, a site near modern Aleppo. El Shaddai, mentioned in the Bible in association with Abraham, seems to be a Hebrew derivation of this god, also known as El Elyon. It’s all very complicated. Shaddai may mean mountain, but it’s also clearly connected to the Bronze age Amorite city of Shaddai, in northern Syria, on the Euphrates. This god of Abraham, linked to Mesopotamian mythology, connects forward to the Islamic god Allah, one of whose prophets is Ibrahim, a patriarch of the religion.
The name El Elyon regularly occurs early in the Torah in association with Abraham and later Jacob. Jacob ‘chooses’ this god as his ‘Elohim’, another Canaanite term meaning his primary god. At this time there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion of monotheism. In so-called ‘pagan’ religions it was common to worship a locally popular ‘patron’ god above others.
In Exodus, Yahweh replaces El Elyon as the god of the hour.. All of this raises questions as to he. ow early the earliest writers of the Bible were. With all the reworkings that appear to have taken place, those earliest authors may be forever lost to us. In fact most scholars are agreed that the majority of the Old Testament as we know it today was written as late as the 4th century BCE, with fragments dating back as far as the 8th century BCE, and other fragments more recently. I don’t intend to spend a lifetime untangling it all. As for the Torah in particular, the retreat of the so-called documentary hypothesis in recent years has left something of a vacuum in terms of coherent hypotheses of authorship, and the field seems to have become a highly erudite and arcane free-for-all.
Yahweh is first associated with the rescue of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt – a mythical tale. He is hailed as a warrior-god and becomes the hero and patron-god of the Israelites, much like Genghis Khan was to the Mongols, or Kim Il-sung to the North Koreans. Clearly, though, he was first among many, not yet the only possible god of monotheism. This helps to explain the vengefulness of Yahweh once the Israelites have taken over and tamed the so-called ‘promised land’. After this, they no longer have such need of a warrior god, and other gods, such as Baal and Ashirah, tempt them. According to our video author, in reaction to this slackening of devotion to Yahweh, a cult of ardent devotees, the Yahwists, sprang up, spurred on by the ‘troubles’ of the eighth century, when a divided Israelite kingdom (though in fact archaeological evidence suggests that Israel was a sparsely populated tribal region at this time, hardly a kingdom) was under threat from the Neo-Assyrian empire. Three of these Yahwist ‘prophets’, Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, railed to their fellow-Israelites about the importance of loyalty to Yahweh, displaying a fervour amounting almost to monotheism. Of course, this didn’t stop the Assyrian takeover, but their writings were preserved, and almost a century later, a Yahwist ‘king’, Josiah, presided over the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy during renovations of the temple. This book’s authenticity as a ‘discovery’ is questioned and it’s generally dated to Josiah’s reign. It’s in this book that the strict covenant to Yahweh is made – and the laws binding the Israelites to their god are established. Another step towards monotheism. It’s also argued (and I know too little of this to make an evaluation) that during this period, the early books of the Torah were rewritten, strengthening Yahweh’s role, and emphasising his violent opposition to other gods. Still, the ‘no other gods before me’ commandment indicates that we’re yet a way from monotheism. Scholars have used the term ‘monolatry’, a recognition of many gods but a preference for one, to represent this intermediate stage between polytheism and monotheism. Shortly after Josiah’s time, Jerusalem came under threat once more, this time from the Babylonians. Another Yahwist thunderer, Jeremiah, predicted the fall of Jerusalem and blamed Israelite complacency and lack of ardour for the patron god. The Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and the Israelites (actually only a minority of them) were sent into exile in Mesopotamia. It was out of this crushing defeat that a new, apparently comforting idea arose with ‘second Isaiah’, who wrote:
I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god (Isaiah 44:6).
And so monotheism was born at last.
So, is that about how it went, historically? Qui sait? I’m not a sceptic for nothing.