Two Debates

There have been two very recent debates between high-profile Christians and scientifically-minded opponents.

I'm not that interested in the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye the Science Guy debate, as Ham's creationist views have no credibility whatsoever. It would be interesting to see what approach Bill took. Some reviews have been positive, others not so.

I'm much more interested in the William L. Craig vs. Sean Carroll debate. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be video available for it yet. [ETA: Video now available here.] WLC is infamous in atheist circles for "winning" most of his debates. ("Winning" is of course very subjective in informal debates like these, but when the folks on the opposing side think you won, you probably won.) Carroll is not only a cosmology expert, he is one of the most philosophically astute scientists I know of - he's light-years ahead of Lawrence Krauss or Jerry Coyne, in my opinion. So Carroll is probably the ideal opponent for WLC. Props to WLC for taking on Carroll on his home turf: cosmology. This was either very brave or very stupid of him.

Carroll's own views on the debate are here. (I don't see any comments on it on Craig's website yet.) I think it's not just atheistic bias to assume that, where they disagree on the cosmology, the cosmology expert is probably right.

One new thing I learned from Sean's comments: Some cosmologies have a Boltzmann Brain problem and others don't. That's something I'll have to learn more about.

Craig has employed modern cosmology extensively in the past, both in debates and in his published papers. I was glad to see that Sean brought up the big problem with this: some cosmological models have an infinite past. Others don't. None of these models is considered established physics. So cosmology tells us nothing (yet!) about whether the universe had a beginning or not.

I really like Sean's five responses to the fine tuning argument - especially his #2, which is basically the same as my Fine Tuning Argument for Naturalism. Craig apparently had no response to this point.

There's been a lot of discussion about whether these debates are a good idea or not, from the point of view of promoting science and rational thought, much of it focussed on whose resume will be enhanced and whose pockets will be filled. From the purely intellectual point of view, I'm all for them. It's true that debates are a poor format for getting to the truth, but they're a great format for exposing folks to ideas  they might not have encountered otherwise.

Victor, Meet Ken

Victor Reppert's blog, Dangerous Idea, has been on my blogroll for a while. I try to look for blogs that express the theist's viewpoint in an intelligent manner, and Reppert is a Christian who has some philosophical acumen and whose  arguments have often seemed worthy of consideration. Recently, though, his posts have been declining in both length and quality. Now he has hit a new low. Here's a recent post, in its entirety:

Atheists often make the claim that the burden of proof lies with the believer, not the unbeliever. They would ask whether you can prove that the nonexistence of anything. Rather, it should be up to the person who makes the positive claim to provide proof, not the people trying to prove a negative. 

However, there are many things that are invisible that I might have trouble proving. Let's take electrons,  for example. I've never seen one myself. Many people believe in them simply on the authority of scientists. People also believe in God, even though they can't see God, because they take his existence on the basis of authorities. What's the difference?

Here's the difference, Victor: anyone who disbelieves the authorities can repeat the experiments on their own. Electrons, you say? How about the Millikan oil drop experiment, the Compton effect, the q/m experiment, the Franck-Hertz experiment? How about examining the fine structure of hydrogen? If you're unsure about electrons, try one of these experiments and see what you get. I've done several of them myself, and can vouch for the results.

Of course it's up to the person making the claim to provide the proof. And scientists have done that - and published their results - and repeated those demonstrations again and again for generations of students.

Please tell me, Victor, how do I go about repeating the results of the religious "authorities"? 

You can go to a Chinese physicist, a Russian physicist, a South African physicist, a Brazilian physicist, an Australian physicist, and ask them the charge of the electron, and they will all give you the same answer.

If I go to a Hindu religious authority, a Muslim  religious authority, a Roman Catholic religious authority, a Sikh religious authority, a Buddhist religious authority, and a Shinto religious authority, will they give me the same answer to my religious questions?

Whole industries now rely on our understanding of electrons. Every time you make a phone call, watch TV, or type a blog post, you are effectively performing an experiment that confirms the properties of electrons.  We trust that understanding enough to stake our very lives on it, every time we get on a plane, train, or automobile.

What discoveries or declarations of religious authorities are so reliable that people all over the world stake their lives on them?




"What's the difference," you ask?

One word: EVIDENCE

Assumptions, Assumptions

So, I pointed out my FTAN (Fine Tuning Argument for Naturalism) to Alexander Pruss of Prosblogion, who was kind enough to respond in the comments of his post on fine tuning vs. the problem of evil. Alexander is not just some random blogger. All the folks at Prosblogion are Genuine Sophisticated Theologians - philosophy professors, no less. So, I was glad to get the opinion of an expert on my version of the fine tuning argument. Here's what he wrote (in part, I think I am fairly representing his responses with my excerpts here, but see the original post for his full remarks):

The FTA needs an assumption that there is a significant value to a universe that with very few exceptions, if any, follows orderly and elegant mathematical laws of nature. Such an assumption is compatible with miracles.

Now, this is exactly the sort of thing I was complaining about in my Purple Pachyderm post, and that Carl Sagan was complaining about in his Dragon in the Garage, and so on. For any argument against the existence of God, the theist simply introduces an arbitrary and unfounded assumption in answer.

So I pointed out that in a universe with any miracles at all, my FTAN would still work. For instance, on an earth that was too close to its sun for life to exist, God could prevent the excess radiation from reaching earth, thus allowing life to exist. The exception to energy conservation would be localized, satisfying the "few exceptions" assumption.

Alex responded:

Leibniz argued against Newton/Clarke that it would be inappropriate for God to rely on on-going miracles for the ordinary operation of the universe.
One way to defend this is to say that God has reason to avoid miracles. This reason can be overridden, of course.

OK, so now we have a new assumption: that miracles should not be on-going. Dragon in the garage once again.

 Unfortunately for Alex, this new assumption still doesn't answer the objection. Even with one-time miracles, there will still be infinitely more possible life-containing universes if there is an omnipotent God than if there is not. One example I pointed out was if the laws of chemistry don't allow for chemical evolution of life, but do allow for the existence of life. Then a single miraculous intervention by God could get life started. But there are infinitely many ways God could make this intervention, so there are infinitely many more possible life-containing worlds under the theistic assumption. So my FTAN still works.

Also, this new assumption flies in the face of an argument that theists have been making for centuries:  that it takes God's on-going miraculous intervention to sustain the universe. Here, for example, is Pope John Paul II discussing proofs of God's existence  (emphasis added):

Without such a supreme Cause, the world and every movement in it would remain "unexplained" and "inexplicable", and our intelligence would not be satisfied. The human mind can receive a response to its questions only by admitting a Being who has created the world with all its dynamism. and who continues to maintain it in existence. 

The theist wants to have it both ways. On-going miracles? Proof of God! No on-going miracles? That's proof of God, too!


Alex answered:

• 1. Dougherty and Poston in the paper I linked to argue that one can't consistently run both the FTA and ID-type biological design arguments. Your point is similar, though not the same.
• 2. I think both your and their point is somewhat weakened, but not destroyed, on the supposition that God would have good reason to minimize the number of miracles, subject to other desiderata.
• 3. But in any case, I think many of the proponents of the FTA would say that a number of the constants going into the FTA are such that not only need the values be "just right" (tough making sense of that rigorously, but there is an intuition there that many theists and non-theists find compelling) for life to begin, but for life to persist.

In (2) Alex is saying, I think, that God would prefer to create a life-containing universe without using miracles rather than one that requires miracles.Yet another new assumption. But Alex recognizes that that even this assumption does not "destroy" my point.

Anyway, isn't God supposed to want us to know about him? Wouldn't these miracles be evidence of a God? So why would God want to avoid them?

In (3), Alex is just saying that you can run the FTA (for God) on those parameters that allow life to persist. But this is irrelevant to my argument, which takes precisely the fine-tuned nature of those parameters as an argument against God.

So I have to say, I'm not too impressed with the Sophisticated Theologian's response to my counter-argument. Of course, with enough additional assumptions you can neutralize any argument. But the very need to make those logical contortions reveals how weak the theist's position is.

Space elephants! Space elephants!

 Can you prove there is no god?

From the point of view of argument, it seems like a big mistake to take on the task of disproving the existence of God. After all, if someone is making the claim that there is a God, then the burden of proof is on them. Also, I don't think it's possible to disprove the existence of God any more than it is possible to prove it.

Still, there are very many people who believe in God, and so we atheists are often in the position of explaining why we don't think that a god of some particular description is at all likely or possible. The inevitable response from the theist is that my argument doesn't apply, because God is some sort of special exception.

Take, for instance, the claim that God is a person. Most Christians, at least, are committed to this claim. (Worse, they are committed to the claim that God is three persons, though only one being, something that seems incoherent on the face of it, and even sillier when they say in addition that God is "simple". But let's not go there....) What is a person, though? We usually think of a person as a being possessed of  intelligence, capable of thinking and reacting in complex ways. But God is supposed to be somehow outside of time, so she can't react to anything. Nor can she have thoughts in the sense we do: a succession of mental states that relate to a person's situation at a particular time.

And what is intelligence but the ability to process information in complex ways? But God, being omniscient, can never receive any new information, and, being outside of time, cannot process anything: a process is something that takes place over time.

So how does the theist respond to these challenges? Ed Feser has helpfully given examples in some recent posts.  He agrees that God canot have the same sort of consciousness as we do:

There’s nothing it’s “like” to be God if we mean by that a certain kind of stream of thoughts and conscious experiences, like ours but (say) more vivid and encompassing a perceptual awareness of every part of the world at once.

But, he says, God's intelligence is "analogous" to ours.

OK, sure - if by "analogous" you mean "utterly and completely different from." God doesn't have perceptions, or mental images, or thoughts, or emotions, God can't gain new knowledge of anything, or change Her mind. God is, in fact, incapable of pretty much everything we associate with personhood.

So is God less than a person? Of course not!

Similarly, to say that it is a mistake to try to grasp the divine intellect by modeling it on our thought processes does not entail that God is less than “personal” in the sense that we are personal (as contrasted with impersonal objects and forces like stones and gravity).  Rather, God is more than personal, in that everyday sense of “personal.” His intellect is not inferior to our conscious thought processes (as a stone, gravity, or even the unconscious informational states of a computer are to that extent inferior to our conscious states) but on the contrary beyond and higher than them, just as divine power is beyond and higher than the relatively trivial capacities in created things that we characterize as “powers.” 

Oh, I see: our poor human personhood is but a pale shadow of Her perfect Personhood.

The only thing that can be said about arguments like these is that they are so clearly born of desperation, so clearly instances of equivocation and special pleading, that they hardly require a response. Any more than the Purple Plutonian Pachyderm.

Sensus Elephantiasis

I have to apologize that posting has been so slow of late. Sometimes real life intervenes.

The argument from "sensus elephantiasis," refers, of course, to Plantinga's claim to have a sensus divinitatis, a direct sense of the divine. I previously called this "the worst philosophical argument ever."  Commenter Garren pointed out that there definitely are differences in people's perceptive abilities: if 99% of us were blind, the 1% would seem to have an amazing ability unavailable to the rest.

I can't fault the logical point here. Yet, it seems to me, by now we pretty much have agreement on what powers people possess and what powers they don't. Sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste, proprioception, yes. ESP, telekinesis, channeling, no. Any claim to further powers would seem to carry a large burden of proof.

Garren goes on to point out that the hypothetical blind scientists would easily devise tests to see whether the strange faculty of "sight" corresponded to the real world - i.e., did their perceptions agree with what could be sensed via the "normal" senses of touch, hearing, etc.? Religious claims of special senses fail the corresponding tests rather spectacularly: people differ greatly on the number, attributes, and powers, of gods.

Commenter c emerson has a response to my purple pachyderm argument at his own blog, Random Walk: first part, second part, third part.

The Purple Pachyderm Argument

Pachydermist: I believe there are purple space elephants living on the planet Pluto.*

Apachydermist: Um, OK, what evidence do you have for that belief?

Pachydermist: I have the ability to sense them directly. Whenever I feel a tingling in my left little toe, I know that these elephants exist. I call this my sensus elephantiasis, because everything sounds more impressive in Latin.

Apachydermist: And you feel this tingling...?

Pachydermist: All the time.

Apachydermist: Riiight....

Pachydermist: Well, can you prove that there aren't any purple Plutonian pachyderms?

Apachydermist: I know I'm going to regret this, but here goes. Let's start off with the easy stuff. There can't be any elephants living on Pluto, because Pluto has no air and elephants need air to breathe.

Pachydermist: Ah, but you don't understand. These are space elephants, they don't need air to breathe.

Apachydermist: Well, they wouldn't have anything to eat or drink on Pluto.

Pachydermist: Space elephants! Space elephants! They don't need any stinkin' food or water!

Apachydermist: OK, but look: if these things don't eat or drink or breathe air, and they're not related to Earth elephants by descent or ancestry (how would they have gotten to Pluto from Earth, or vice versa?) then they can't in any meaningful sense be elephants, can they? I mean, if these things are so utterly different from anything we know as an elephant, then there's no sense in calling them elephants.

Pachydermist: Ah, but these are the true, essential elephants. Our Earth elephants are but a pale shadow of their perfect pachydermic nature.

Apachydermist: And you learned all of this from a tingling in your toe?

Pachydermist: Yes, and through pure logic.

Apachydermist: Uh, right, logic. I knew I was going to regret this. Well, just to prove you wrong, I'm going to build a spaceship and travel to Pluto and search for these elephants.

Pachydermist: OK, sure, but it won't do any good.

Apachydermist: Huh? Why not?

Pachydermist: You see, these space elephants are invisible.

Apachydermist: Invisible? You said they were purple!

Pachydermist: Yes, but they are the essence of true purple. The color we know as purple on Earth....

Apachydermist:  ... is but a pale shadow, yeah OK I get it. But I'll make a huge cordon across the entire planet and corral the elephants...

Pachydermist: Sorry, they're not only invisible, they're intangible, too.

Apachydermist:  Intangible, too? What are they made out of?

Pachydermist: An immaterial substance.

Apachydermist:  Immaterial substance? It seems to me that translates as "immaterial material", or "substance which has no substance." I think I've finally found something we can agree on. Your pachyderms are oxymoronic!

Pachydermist: Actually, they're very smart. They have a level of intelligence compared to which human intelligence is just ....

Apachydermist:  (Exits stage left, shaking his head sadly.)

Very silly, I know. But these are the same arguments  theists use against atheists, as I will demonstrate over the next few posts. I don't know when I'll get to those posts, so in the meantime, you can try to guess whose arguments I'm thinking of. Have at it!

* Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet, but a dwarf planet is a planet, too, right? So no complaints about "Pluto is no longer a planet! Aaaugh!"

Reason Rally Redux

I made it down in the drizzle to the great atheistic coming-out. I was surprised by the gender balance; a Washington Post article said at least half the attenders were women. Ethnically, it was overwhelmingly white, though black atheists were there and visible (there was a Black Atheist booth in the tent).

The highlights for me were: Tim Minchin, consistently funny and incisive. How he can cram a complex philosophical idea into two lines of poetry I don't know. And Nate Phelps, son of Westboro Baptist preacher and hate-mongerer Fred Phelps. To me, this was the emotional core of the meeting. Nate talked about his pain growing up in that environment, and the struggles he had breaking free of it, and his sadness to see his family there and the gulf between them.

Dawkins gave a good speech, as usual, but ended with a disturbing call for atheists to ridicule religion. Ridicule can certainly be an effective rhetorical technique, and I enjoy me some PZ as much as the next atheist. But ridicule is no part of rationalism. At a Reason Rally, we should have been talking about how to use reason more effectively, not how to circumvent it with cheap rhetorical tricks.

I live near DC but have been avoiding big rallies like this for many years: they seem to bring out the worst in people. This one was different. It had (for the most part) a very positive feel; a celebration of reason and science, and an opportunity to be surrounded by people who draw their wonder and joy from the real world.

Rock Bottom In Philosophical Argument

In a NYT article, Alvin Plantinga declares

“I think there is such a thing as a sensus divinitatis, and in some people it doesn’t work properly,” he said, referring to the innate sense of the divine that Calvin believed all human beings possess. “So if you think of rationality as normal cognitive function, yes, there is something irrational about that kind of stance.” 

 This has to be the worst philosophical argument ever. "You are a defective human being, so you cannot see the evidence I see." Can there be any clearer declaration that the speaker is lacking any serious argument and flailing desperately than to say that I have a special secret knowledge that my opponent lacks?

And this guy is supposed to be the top Christian philosopher of our time?

Blogroll Update

I've been wanting to get more religious sites into the blogroll for balance. I just added two. Atheists ought to confront the best counter-arguments available, and both of these writers are intelligent, informed, and Christian. It's too easy to stay inside the atheist echo chamber - you need to get out and challenge your assumptions regularly.

Victor Reppert writes the Dangerous Idea blog. He is friends with one of the philosophers at the excellent Secular Outpost blog, and they have been having a respectful back-and-forth for some time.

Professor of philosophy Edward Feser is more confrontational, as can be seen in his recent exchanges with atheist philosopher Stephen Law and scientist Jerry Coyne. Personally, I am turned off when the epithets start flying - I would much rather read a respectful exchange than one laced with invective on both sides. Still, Feser is very smart and very well-read, and I find that his criticisms are usually fair and on point. His own brand of AT philosophy ("Aristotelico-Thomism", nothing to do with the Appalachian Trail unfortunately) seems a curious relic from the distant past. By my triangulation principle, I have avoided reading his books so far, but I may eventually do it just to understand where he's coming from. Feser is a former atheist, proving that not all smart people move in the "correct" direction....

I also trimmed a few previous blogs. Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (funny, but not at all serious), Common Sense Atheism (Luke has turned his attention to Less Wrong and Facing the Singularity), and The Busybody (a religion blog that rarely deals with religion).

What, No Tooth Fairy?

When I started reading Oppy, I was interested in two things: (1) what he considered good arguments from the atheist side, and (2) what he thought was wrong or unconvincing about atheistic arguments. In contrast to Swinburne, Oppy sets a high standard for a good argument: he is only interested in arguments that are, or ought to be, rationally compelling to someone of the opposite persuasion. And he doesn't think any theistic arguments are compelling, so that saves half my work.

Oppy has strangely little to say about atheistic arguments. He spends a section (3.9) considering Quentin Smith's atheological argument from cosmology. (I don't think Smith's suggestion holds up from the point of view of physics, and Oppy doesn't think it holds up philosophically.) He has a whole chapter on arguments from evil. (I don't find these interesting or convincing, so I'm going to skip them.) And he addresses some general atheological arguments in his opening chapter in a discussion of agnosticism, and (350 pages later!) includes a discussion of Clifford's Principle in his conclusion. Also, in the first chapter, he deals with the Evil God arguments like the one used by Stephen Law in his recent debate with William Lane Craig. Apart from these, he only mentions atheological arguments in passing.

(Oppy states at the beginning of the book that he's not going to consider arguments that claim the very concept of an OCMOG is incoherent. He's saving these for another book.)

So there's no discussion at all of what I think is the strongest point in favor of atheism - what I think of as the Tooth Fairy Argument. The closest he comes to it when he addresses some general principles that the atheist might try to call on in those first and last chapters. Let's take a look.

The atheist might appeal to the principle that

in the absence of any positive evidence for the existence of x's, one is rationally required to believe that there are no x's.

 Oppy claims that this principle is refuted by the lottery paradox. He asks us to consider a lottery in which an infinite number of tickets are sold, and only one ticket wins.

If I believe of each ticket that it won't win, then I shall be obliged to conclude that no ticket will win - that is, I will be obliged to believe something false.

According to Oppy, the existence of god(s) is like the lottery: we know that some existence proposition must be true, but since there are infinitely many such propositions (no god, god 1, god 2, etc) there is only an infinitesimal chance of any one of them being true. So the agnostic is justified in rejecting the "no god" hypothesis along with all the others.

Now, this is a very strange argument for Oppy to make, because it relies on making probability statements about an infinite set of possibilities. The problem is simply not mathematically well-defined. Elsewhere (in his chapter on fine tuning) Oppy shows himself to have a very sophisticated understanding of the difficulties of such statements. But here, without batting an eye, he allows the agnostic to cite the lottery paradox as if it were unproblematic.

He concludes his one-paragraph discussion like this:

Thus, for example, although there is no good reason to think that there are currently intelligent beings inhabiting the fifth planet of the Vega system, the correct view to have is simply that this claim is a very unlikely one.

 That is, (complete) lack of evidence is not enough to make us disbelieve in something, it is only enough to make that something very unlikely. 

I think this is correct in a strictly logical sense, as far as it goes. But I also think it doesn't go far enough. It's not just that we are lacking in evidence for a god, it's that we have positive reasons to believe that something like a god can't possibly exist. Rather than "intelligent life on Vega 5," the analogy should be "purple elephants on the planet Pluto." We know elephants can't exist on Pluto, because mammals need food, oxygen, and liquid water, and none of that is available there.

Likewise for gods. It's not just that we're lacking evidence for them: we have good reason to think that intelligence requires a complex neural system (or something like it - as in a computer). The evidence is both experimental and theoretical. Experimentally, all known intelligent beings have complex neural systems. And theoretically, the ability to process information requires some such system.

But according to theists, God doesn't have any neurons. He doesn't have a material body at all. In fact, the OCMOG has no moving parts. How then, can God be intelligent?

Gods are as unlikely as purple Plutonian pachyderms.

Why Change Your Mind?

Suppose I have some belief. Under what circumstances should I change it?

A common atheist response is that we should reject any belief for which we don't have evidence.  Graham Oppy calls this "Clifford's principle." Oppy thinks it's untenable.

Oppy starts off his book with a discusion of beliefs and their formation and revision. He approves of Harman's Principle of Conservatism:

One is justified in continuing to fully accept something in the absence of special reason not to.

Specifically, Harman says I shouldn't change my mind simply because my belief is not adequately justified (denial of the Principle of Negative Undermining). But I should change my mind if I have positive reasons for thinking my belief is no good (the Principle of Positive Undermining).

Oppy doesn't go into great detail on these principles, but I think what he is getting at is something like the following. We each have a complex network of interlocking beliefs. Many of these beliefs have never been critically examined (by me), and hence aren't adequately justified. For example, I believe Minsk is a city in Russia. I have never been to Russia, let alone Minsk, nor have I ever met anyone from there. I probably learned about Minsk from a book or a casual conversation, or possibly in school. According to Oppy, I should go on believing this, even though I do not have adequate justification. If someone comes along and says, "Minsk isn't in Russia, you idiot, it's the capital of Belarus!" or if I bother to look it up in an atlas, then I have reason to change my belief.

Most of our beliefs are like this. I believe a squirrel is a mammal, even though I have never seen one suckle its young. I believe water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, even though I have never performed an experiment to prove this. I believe my father was born in Philadelphia, even though I have never seen his birth certificate. And so forth.

In this view, the atheist who says, "I never believe anything unless I have evidence for it" is saying something profoundly stupid. Such a principle would require a retreat to near total skepticism.

Oppy's position here is a sophisticated version of the religionist who says, "But you have faith, too!" And I think he's right. If "faith" means "belief without adequate supporting reasons," then we all have to have faith. Life is simply too short to completely, or even adequately, examine all of our beliefs.

This helps us understand why so many people have irrational beliefs, and why they are so hard to change. It is actually better (in an evolutionary sense) to continue to believe unsupported things than to jettison too many beliefs and be paralyzed into inaction. It may be that something like the Principle of Conservatism is built into our psychological makeup to prevent this kind of paralysis.

Arguing About Gods

Graham Oppy's book, Arguing About Gods, is an odd one. Oppy, an atheist, says his aim is to survey the arguments for and against the existence of an "orthodoxly conceived monotheistic god," which I'm going to call OCMOG for short. He says right at the outset that he thinks it is not irrational to be theist, agnostic, or atheist. Not surprisingly, by the end of the book he has concluded that there are no really convincing arguments either for or against OCMOG.

Oppy spends most of the book on arguments for OCMOG. These he ably dismantles. (Anyone planning on debating William Lane Craig ought to memorize this book.) Why, then, does he think it is not irrational for a theist to remain theist or an agnostic to remain agnostic? The basic idea is that people start from different "priors" and have access to different evidence, so it is by no means surprising that they will come to different, and even incompatible, beliefs. And they can do so in a completely rational manner. (Not that they always do, of course.)

A rational agent will persist with the views she has until she is shown that she can improve her view by changing it.

So the question for the atheist is whether he has arguments that are rationally compelling to the theist, just as the question for the theist is whether he has arguments that are rationally compelling to the atheist. And Oppy thinks the answer is "no."

Although I agree that people can differ without being irrational, and I am willing to entertain the idea that that might even be true about the existence of God, I think Oppy sets the bar for rationality too low. I wonder if he would insist that astrology believers, UFO enthusiasts, and Bigfoot hunters make no mistakes of rationality.

PZ Myers Comes Out

As a Quaker!

Hee, hee!

Fine Tuning Supports Naturalism

Garren's comments on the previous post got me thinking more about fine tuning. There are lots of reasons to dislike fine tuning arguments for God, but it occurred to me that we can turn the fine tuning argument around and show how it actually supports naturalism, not theism. Let me explain.

The usual fine tuning argument goes like this: Our universe is governed by natural laws that involve certain numerical parameters - the cosmological constant, the strength of the nuclear force, etc. Some of these parameters must lie in a very narrow range in order for life to exist:

PU = Possible Universes
FTU = Fine-Tuned Universes

So, given a naturalistic hypothesis (N) and general background knowledge (K), the probability of a fine-tuned universe is small:

P(FTU|N&K) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU)  << 1

On the other hand, given the theistic hypothesis (T), we would expect the universe to be suitable for life: P(FTU|T&K) is not small, or at least not as small as P(FTU|N&K).

One of the (many) problems with this argument is that we can't assert that the probability is given by the ratio of the areas without making many additional assumptions: that the values of parameters 1 and 2 are randomly chosen from the space of all parameters, for instance. But that's not the objection I want to pursue. Rather, I want to point out that the probability envisioned in the fine tuning argument is a sort of prior probability that ignores some of our background information: namely, the fact that life actually exists. That is, we have to take (K) to mean "general background knowledge not including the knowledge that life exists."

But we actually do know that life exists (L), and it is perfectly legitimate to include this knowledge along with our other background knowledge. If we add this knowledge back in, then trivially P(FTU|N&K&L) = 1: under the naturalistic hypothesis, the only way that life can exist is for the universe to have parameters that allow the existence of life.

But that is not true if God exists! Indeed, under theism, there is no reason to expect that the universe will be fine-tuned.

Remember that God is, by hypothesis, omnipotent. That means that God could  have caused life to arise by miraculous means, even in a universe that was not fine-tuned. Say, for example, that the universe had a value of the cosmological constant that caused it to expand too fast for galaxies to form. God could have prevented a galaxy-sized region from expanding in order to allow our Milky Way to form. Or God could have inserted a pre-made galaxy. Or he could have inserted an additional force that operated only within our galaxy and that countered the effects of the expansion. Or any number of other possibilities, because God can do anything.

So, under theism, the diagram looks like this:

That is, the probability of a fine-tuned universe under the theistic hypothesis is:

P(FTU|N&K&L) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU)  << 1

Conclusion: given that we know that life exists, the probability of discovering we are living in a universe with parameters fine-tuned for life is much higher under the naturalistic hypothesis than under the theistic hypothesis.

What Kind of Atheist Are You?

Roman Catholic philosopher Edward Feser asks what attitudes we atheists take toward religion. Usefully, he separates out the theoretical and practical sides of religion.

As far as the theoretical side - that is, the questions of religious beliefs - he sees three types of attitudes the non-religious might take:

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all.  It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.

2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations.  But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it.  Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.

3. Religious belief is still intellectually defensible today, but not as defensible as atheism.  An intelligent and well-informed person could be persuaded by the arguments presented by the most sophisticated contemporary proponents of a religion, but the arguments of atheists are at the end of the day more plausible.

And as far as religious practice is concerned: rituals, morality, and (I would add) community, he likewise sees three possibilities:

A. Religious practice is mostly or entirely contemptible and something we would all be well rid of.  The ritual side of religion is just crude and pointless superstition.  Religious morality, where it differs from secular morality, is sheer bigotry.  Even where certain moral principles associated with a particular religion have value, their association with the religion is merely an accident of history.  Moreover, such principles tend to be distorted by the religious context.  They certainly do not in any way depend on religion for their justification.

B. Religious practice has a certain admirable gravitas and it is possible that its ritual and moral aspects fulfill a real human need for some people.  We can treat it respectfully, the way an anthropologist might treat the practices of a culture he is studying.  But it does not fulfill any universal human need, and the most intelligent, well educated, and morally sophisticated human beings certainly have no need for it.  

C. Religious practice fulfills a truly universal or nearly universal human need, but unfortunately it has no rational foundation and its metaphysical presuppositions are probably false.  This is a tragedy, for the loss of religious belief will make human life shallower and in other ways leave a gaping void in our lives which cannot plausibly be filled by anything else.  It may even have grave social consequences.  But it is something we must find a way to live with, for atheism is intellectually unavoidable.

Feser plausibly sees P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne as A1 type atheists. But, he says, to hold this position, one must

...think it plausible that the greatest minds of entire civilizations -- Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, et al. -- had for millennia been defending theoretical and practical positions that were not merely mistaken but were in fact nothing more than sheer bigotry and superstition...

 On the theoretical side, I would put myself solidly in category 2. I can't imagine how intelligent, educated people today still cling to religion. Actually, I can imagine it, because I used to be one of them. But I find it hard to believe that after looking at all the arguments and evaluating them honestly, someone would conclude that, yes, an invisible person in the sky is more plausible than not.

On the practical question, I place myself somewhere between B and C. I think religion does address fundamental human needs, but I think it does it very imperfectly, and I don't see why we need to introduce supernatural entities to address those needs. (Some of the "greatest minds" Feser mentions didn't see a need for supernatural entities, either: Lao Tze and Buddha, for instance.)

Also, I don't think it's a tragedy that religion is false - I think we can get along fine without it. Maybe even better - but we will have to work on replacing religious institutions with non-religious institutions that address those same needs. We don't have those structures yet.

(Cross posted on Think Atheist.) 

Out of the Mouths of Babes

My four-year-old is in a Christian Montessori preschool. I had concerns about this choice of school, but having met the staff and talked to them about their approach to religion, agreed to it. They don't do indoctrination; they talk about the parables of Jesus and try to draw out the kids on what they think they mean. Also, the school has a wonderful approach to conflict resolution: seeing a 10-year old boy bring a "peace rose" to a classmate almost brought tears to my eyes when I thought about my own elementary school experience.

But they do talk about Jesus, and this leads to some interesting conversations with my son while I drive him back and forth to school.

"Dad, is Jesus real?"

"Yes, he really lived."

"Then how come he could do things other people can't do?"

Good question, I thought. I told him that people sometimes make up stories about real people. He wanted to know what parts of the story I thought were made up. I mentioned walking on water and the resurrection.

"Dad, maybe Jesus was a zombie."

I think he's going to be OK.

(Cross posted on Think Atheist.)

Doing It Wrong

A curious debate-by-blog has been spinning itself out, between some atheists who claim that modern genetic evidence conclusively rules out the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the defenders of the faith. I'm all for atheists calling out the religious when their beliefs are contradicted by scientific evidence. It seems to me that this sort of debate didn't happen much during the last century: atheists pretty much ignored religious dogma and stuck to promoting knowledge of science (evolution, especially). So I was very interested in the current exchange. However, Jerry Coyne of Why Evolution is True seems hell-bent on showing us how not to go about it.

It began, more or less, with Jerry's comments on some media reports about evangelical Christians who have been attempting to address the issue of the scientific evidence and its implications for Christian doctrines, especially the existence of an actual Adam and Eve. Jerry correctly points out that "... the scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible."

But then Coyne goes on to poke fun at the evangelicals' attempts to address the scientific evidence. Now, I don't choose to spend my time poking fun at other people's beliefs, but I don't have a problem with others who wish to do so - I enjoy my daily dose of PZ as much as the next atheist. But I live in a country in which close to half of the citizens reject evolution. I think the message shouldn't be "Gee, look at those silly Christians struggling to fit their religious beliefs around scientific evidence." Instead, it should be "Hooray! You've finally admitted that Adam and Eve are mythical! Now go tell all your coreligionists, please."

From there things went downhill.

Michael Flynn responded to Jerry by noting that Roman Catholic theology, at least, doesn't require belief in a literal interpretation of "the mythos of Adam and Eve." He suggests a scenario in which Adam was just one of many ancestors of modern humans - one who also happened to be a common ancestor of everyone living today. In the National Catholic Register,  Mark Shea applauded Flynn, and Edward Feser on his blog took the same tack.

Coyne fired back. His response is a good illustration of how an intelligent person can make fundamental mistakes when he goes outside of his area of expertise. A glance at any recent introduction to the Bible would have shown him that modern Biblical scholars recognize that the Bible is composed of a diversity of sources and is written in a variety of genres: history, poetry, myth, etc. For many, the Genesis story is a myth of origins, not a historical account. It should have been obvious, at any rate, that anyone who accepts the evolutionary account of human origins - as Roman Catholics now do - cannot also take the Genesis account literally.

Instead of congratulating them for recognizing the validity of evolutionary science, Coyne goes on the offensive, saying they are misinterpreting their Bible and "making stuff up" in order to reconcile it with their beliefs.

And if the language is figurative (and there’s no indication that it is: Shea simply realizes that the story [is] wrong in light of modern science), how does he know the event is real?

So, Jerry, you're now an expert on Biblical language?

Here, he falls into a common atheist error: telling Christians how they should interpret the Bible, and then telling them why that interpretation doesn't make any sense.  You're never going to get anywhere that way!

Fundamentally, I agree with Jerry's point: these theologians are scrambling to reconcile their beliefs with the scientific evidence, and it doesn't make a pretty fit. But at least they're making the attempt - in contrast to so many believers who simply stick their heads in the sand, ignore all the science, and claim the Earth is 6000 years old. In fighting to keep real science in the schools, it is the latter, not the former, we need to worry about.

Finally, and unforgivably,  Jerry fudges on the science. Flynn pointed out, correctly, that the question of a single couple that is ancestral to all modern humans is completely different than the question of mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosome Adam. The most recent common ancestor of all currently living humans (MRCA) lived astonishingly recently, according to current models: around 2000-5000 years ago. Flynn, et. al., are supposing a picture in which Biblical Adam and Eve are ancestors of the whole of current humanity, though not the sole ancestors, so it is the MRCA that is relevant. Rather than admit that they are right about the biology, Jerry simply ignores all this.

(On the other hand, Flynn and Feser both talk a lot of garbage about the evolution of "sapience": I wish Jerry had spent his considerable resources ripping them a new one on that point.)

I like Jerry's blog, and I agree with him most of the time. But the thought of uninformed atheists expounding the true meaning of the Bible makes my skin crawl. Please stick to the biology, Jerry, and leave the Bible interpretation to those who know something about it.

Theists and Atheists Agree...

Alexander Pruss of Prosblogion seems to have found an argument that theistic and atheistic philosophers agree on. From the comments:

So it looks like there are a number of people who have published on this, and all the papers that I've so far looked at basically agree that the following are not all true:
1. Evolution occurred pretty much as science describes it.
2. Naturalism is true.
3. Moral realism is true.
4. We have moral knowledge.

I don't understand all the arguments that lead up to this conclusion well enough to know whether to agree with it or not, but it's rather a fascinating conclusion if true.

Alexander, being a theist and a moral realist, naturally takes (3) and (4) to be true, and so concludes that either (1) or (2) is false - he then opts for naturalism being false.

I don't know enough about the whole realism/anti-realism debate to have a firm position, but I'm leaning anti-realist at the moment, so the argument doesn't present a real problem for me. But it seems to be a real problem for someone like Sam Harris, who is a naturalist and a moral realist. I don't think he would want to deny (4), either. From what I understand, he thinks that science can discover moral truths. So I wonder how Sam would respond to this argument.

But then, Sam thinks that discussions of metaethics and deontology only add to the amount of boredom in the world, so probably he wouldn't bother.

God and the Big Bang

I used to wonder why Christians didn't make a big deal of the Big Bang. After all, it was at least one case of a "prediction" of Christianity that had been confirmed by science. Or so I thought at the time.

I found that, on the contrary, many Christians disbelieved the whole Big Bang idea and adamantly opposed it. Strange.

More recently, I have come to realize that the Big Bang is not actually a theory of how the universe began; rather, it is a theory of how the universe has changed over time. It is astounding that we can now describe the history of the universe back to 13.7 billion years ago, when it looked dramatically different than it does today. But if you try to push back further, then we have every reason to believe that our theories break down, and no reason to trust their predictions beyond a certain point.

The idea that the universe began in a singularity, which was also the beginning of time itself, is really no part of the Big Bang model (though it continues to appear in popular presentations of the theory).

This point is made in a well-thought-out paper by Hans Halvorson and Helge Kragh. (Hat tip: ex-apologist) They make a lot of other good points, too, and the whole thing is worth a read, but I was particularly struck by one thing. They ask what would happen to the theist's argument for God from the Big Bang if the theory were disproven. Would the failure of the Big Bang undermine theism? Of course not! Even if we knew the universe existed prior to the (moment we refer to as the) Big Bang, the theist could claim that God had created the universe at an earlier time, or that God had created an eternally existing universe. Then they say:

The point is that insofar as the failure of the big-bang model would not undermine theism, so the success of the big-bang model does not support theism.

This, I think, is a very important point. And it is one that is devastating for many of the conventional arguments for God.

The basic principle is this: if X is evidence for God, then ~X ("not X", the negation of X) must be evidence against God. Or to put it another way, if X and ~X are equally consistent with the God hypothesis, then neither of them can provide an argument for God.

Swinburne, for example, claims that the constancy of physics across time and space is evidence for God. Why does an electron here on earth have the exact same mass, charge, and spin as an electron in a distant galaxy? This constancy calls out for an explanation (says Swinburne) - and the explanation is God.

But suppose that one of the many experiments looking for changes in the fundamental constants was successful. Suppose, for instance, that we found the electron's charge was changing over time. Would Swinburne take this as evidence against God? I suspect he would not. But if the God hypothesis is equally consistent with constant electric charge or changing electric charge, then constant charge cannot be evidence for God.

On a larger scale, theists often ask what is the origin of natural laws themselves. But if regularity in the operation of nature is evidence for God, then lack of regularity - randomness - in its operation must be evidence against God. And quantum mechanics shows that, at the most basic level, nature is random and unpredictable. So quantum mechanics is evidence against God!

I don't really think that quantum mechanics is a good argument against God. By the same token, I don't think the regularity of physical laws, or the constancy of particular physical parameters, or the Big Bang singularity (if there was one),  are evidence for God. 

Atheists Need Better Nicknames

Thanks to the incomparable Rebecca Watson, I recently learned of a new argument for the existence of God due to Christian YouTube personality Venom Fang X. And I immediately thought, "Wow. I wish I'd thought of the the name Venom Fang X."

I mean, just look at the pathetic atheist nicknames out there:

• Paul Z. "P.Z." Myers
• Hemant "Friendly Atheist" Mehta
• Jen "Blag Hag" McCreight
• Luke "Lukeprog" Muehlhauser
• John W. "John W." Loftus

Come on, folks! We can't compete with Venom Fang X with nicknames like these! Let's get those atheist brains in gear and come up with some good names! (But "Skepchick" is pretty cool, you've got to admit.)