Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Atheism Is Irrational: Alvin Plantinga

Further to my report on the 2014 Mere Anglicanism Conference, I call your attention to a marvelous interview with Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga that appeared on Sunday's "The Stone" blog of the New York Times. Philosopher Garry Gutting of Notre Dame University conducts the interview, which is entitled: "Is Atheism Irrational"?

Prof. Plantinga gets right to the point:
In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.
To be an atheist, then, is to be irrational -- and naturally, atheists do not like having that pointed out one bit. If one claims to go by the actual evidence, then at best one can claim to be an agnostic (which is the real point of Dawkins' quote, even if Dawkins himself does not realize it).

Those whom one calls the "New Atheists" today -- Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and (the late) Christopher Hitchens -- are more properly described as anti-theists: they are militantly against the belief that there is a God. They have no positive belief of their own to uphold. Some claim  that "the physical world/universe is all there is -- there is nothing else" (à la Carl Sagan) is a positive belief -- until one points out that what is really meant by that statement is that there is no physical God in the Universe -- a statement with which (after the Resurrection, at any rate) theists would agree!

But let us return to Plantinga's interview, for there is much more to note. Asked about the evidence for God, Plantinga makes the point for which he is famous:
I should make clear first that I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.
In a series of books toward the end of the last century, Prof. Plantinga restored theistic philosophy to a respected academic discipline. His trilogy on Warranted Belief is probably the capstone of his achievement. Essentially, he showed that there are key beliefs which we all hold, but which cannot be shown to be true by any hard evidence: for example, the belief that solipsism (the idea that I am the only thing that exists, and that everyone -- and everything -- else are just the products of my imagination) is false, and that other minds do indeed exist in the world.

No one can give any evidence for the existence of other minds, yet belief in other minds is what enables us to function every day: it is warranted belief. Such a belief is opposed to what some call "blind faith" -- belief in something despite the evidence against it. But warranted belief is not evidentiary belief -- it is a different but equally valid kind of knowledge upon which we act every day, without thinking about the evidence for or against it.

Likewise, for Christians, belief in God is warranted if (for example) the Resurrection really happened. Not only that, but as humans made in God's own image (i.e., with the faculties of reason, language and the ability to build on past achievements and acquired knowledge), Christians respond to the sensus divinitatis in them, the "sense of the divine" that enables them to appreciate and know that God exists. The New Atheists spend all their energy fighting against that sense, and maintaining that man does it all by himself, thank you!

In the key part of the interview, Plantinga responds to the criticism (as many atheists and agnostics suppose it to be) that "the world is not perfect":
Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?

A.P.: I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.

Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.

I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.
Next, he slaps down the "God of the gaps" argument:
Some atheists seem to think that a sufficient reason for atheism is the fact (as they say) that we no longer need God to explain natural phenomena — lightning and thunder for example. We now have science.

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy. (And even so, the justified attitude would be agnosticism with respect to the moon, not a-moonism.) The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism.
And in the final part of the interview, Plantinga summarizes the argument that he lays out in his latest book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: that materialism (the belief that the material world is all there is, as in the Carl Sagan quote above) does indeed imply atheism, but that it is logically inconsistent with the accompanying belief in evolution -- that everything somehow evolved, over eons of time, from the random interactions of inanimate fundamental particles.

Why? Read the rest of the interview for the full, and fascinating, discussion (or better yet, get his book and read chapter 10). Here is just a brief taste:
First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle than Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.
But beliefs, he argues, are more than just material structures, because they have content to them, and because they lead to actions. (My thirst, for example, coupled with my belief that there is beer in the fridge, leads to my getting up and going to the fridge to get a beer.) And how does one represent content materially? Even if my belief about the beer in the refrigerator were false, it would still lead me to get up and go to get one, because of my belief -- regardless of whether it was true or false. Thus, the material structure of a belief is the same, whether a belief is in fact true or false.

But if evolution is true, then our beliefs have evolved over time. And evolution cares only about beliefs that promote our survival, i.e., beliefs that enable us to adapt to our environment. It does not ask that the beliefs be true, and does not even care if the beliefs are false. (Belief in phlogiston kept a lot of scientists fed and happy for quite some time.)

Any given belief of ours has a probability of being true, say, of 50-50. But it does not matter if we say that the probability is even greater, such as two-thirds, or 0.67. Because each of us holds, individually, thousands of beliefs. And the probability that materialistic evolution has led us to a collection of true beliefs over time is simply the product of their individual probabilities of being true: 0.67 x 0.67 x 0.67 x .... = 2/3 x 2/3 x 2/3 x .... = (2n/3n), where n equals the number of individual beliefs.

Would you like to know the value of the expression 21000/31000? All you have to do is plug it in at Wolfram Alpha: the answer is 8.1 x 10-177 -- that is, 0.00000...81 where the dots stand for another 172 zeros. And that's just for one thousand beliefs! (Moreover -- to answer one of the objections to Plantinga's argument -- the number is still low even if we assume that most of the beliefs held by an individual are not independent, but interdependent. Indeed, their interdependency would make the entire rickety structure more fragile, and more dependent on more of them being true than false.)

Plantinga concludes:
So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.
That logical conclusion, however, is sadly not the end of the story. For the interview garnered some 980 comments (before they were closed). Reading them is an education in why Plantinga's point is true: just because we are evolved does not mean that we are rational. Most of them are from atheists who deny that they hold any belief -- they insist that they just refuse to believe there is a God, and that the burden is therefore on those who claim that He exists. But that just begs the question of what they do believe -- e.g., in evolution, in materialism, and so on -- beliefs which are just as irrational as the belief they claim to be rational in rejecting.

I will let a metaphysical G. K. Chesterton have the last word (because he never really said it):
A man who won't believe in God will believe in anything.







23 comments:

  1. Fantastic piece, Allan! Plantinga is great, and I love the Chesterton quote at the end. I'm going to include a link to think at my post "The Atheist's Fallacious Argument" at Just Genesis. I wish I had been able to attend that conference.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I’m a Christian, and I realize Dr. Plantinga is a widely esteemed philosopher, but I’m with the atheists on this one. The arguments he sketches here are unconvincing and seem utterly disconnected from the life of faith as most Christians experience it; it’s difficult to see what possible point or purpose they achieve (in this forum especially) beyond inciting the ire of non-Christians who understandably bristle at being labeled “irrational.”

    In my experience, philosophy is an effective means of cultivating atheism, but cultivating religious faith requires a different set of cultural practices and cognitive capacities, ones more closely allied to intuition, emotion, and imagination than ratiocination (I thank God and evolution that our minds are capable of all these!).

    The real question is which path one decides to pursue, and why. In my experience, good people choose differently, and end up at very different places – and remain good people.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Iggy, thank you for that comment. You may have misinterpreted Prof. Plantinga's purpose: he was asked to respond to what is wrong with the arguments of the New Atheists, and not to give his own reasons for warranted belief in Christianity (though he did mention the fine-tuning argument in a paragraph I did not excerpt). The book whose review I linked is his full-length, definitive argument for why belief in Christianity is rational. Admittedly, that is different from why one would want to be Christian in the first place -- where the life of faith that you mention plays a huge role.

    Also please note: he did not call atheists themselves "irrational"; it is just atheism in the sense of claiming to know as a matter of fact there is no God which cannot be defended rationally. Atheism in the sense of anti-theism is not a philosophical belief, and the bulk of the article is Plantinga showing why their arguments against theism do not hold water.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the response. I take your point.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This view of atheism is a strawman. Atheists don't claim to be 100% certain there is no god. Even Dawkins admits he is a 6 out 7 on his agnostic scale (mostly certain no god exists).

    One cannot prove a negative. It is incumbent on the person making the existence claim to establish proof of existence. Atheists treat a god or gods the same way Christians treat the existence of leprechauns or Zeus.

    "No one can give any evidence for the existence of other minds". What does this mean? Neuroscientists can certainly provide evidence for the existence of minds. Damaging the brain results in reduced faculties of the mind.

    A large part of this article attempts to define "belief". There are beliefs with evidence and beliefs without evidence. Faith is belief without evidence. The term "sensus divinitatis" is a fancy term for a belief without evidence. One might have a "sensus divinitatis" that a cell phone was created by a god if one lived on an island their entire life. Yet we have plenty of evidence establishing that man created cell phones. The same scientific evidence is slowly being collected to explain the creation of life and the universe.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability#Dawkins.27_formulation

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alex S., thank you for providing a catalog of all the arguments used by the New Atheists. Let's take them one by one:

    "Atheists don't claim to be 100% certain there is no god. Even Dawkins admits he is a 6 out 7 on his agnostic scale (mostly certain no god exists)."

    If an atheist is uncertain whether God exists, to whatever degree, then he should call himself an agnostic. As I made clear in the post, so-called "atheists" who are simply opposed to theistic arguments are more properly called anti-theists. A true atheist would be the diametric opposite of a theist, who is convinced that God exists, on the basis of faith, evidence, or both. Your second paragraph is an anti-theistic argument, not an atheistic one.

    "Neuroscientists can certainly provide evidence for the existence of minds. Damaging the brain results in reduced faculties of the mind."

    Those neuroscientists, and the evidence for damaged faculties they adduce, are all just figments of the solipsist's imagination -- no one can "prove" to him otherwise. And we could damage his brain, but then we would simply prevent him from realizing that he's wrong, and we're right.

    "There are beliefs with evidence and beliefs without evidence. Faith is belief without evidence."

    No: belief without evidence is more properly called blind faith -- such as a belief that all Fridays the 13th are unlucky. Warranted faith is faith that is fully justified by other than objective evidence at hand -- such as your (and my) belief in the existence of other minds, or the faith of astronauts who willingly put themselves in a tiny capsule that is to take them to the moon without personally having verified all the preparatory steps and inspections that took place without them.

    "The term "sensus divinitatis" is a fancy term for a belief without evidence. One might have a "sensus divinitatis" that a cell phone was created by a god if one lived on an island their entire life. Yet we have plenty of evidence establishing that man created cell phones."

    You misunderstand completely what a Christian understands from being made in God's image. The kind of "god" who would create a cell phone has not made any of us in his image, and would be unworthy of worship.

    "The same scientific evidence is slowly being collected to explain the creation of life and the universe."

    This is the "God of the gaps" notion, which Plantinga and all Christians reject. God is not inside the universe, disappearing like the grin of the Cheshire cat as science makes more and more advances. God is outside, beyond and before the universe, and his existence a priori is independent of whatever science discovers, or could discover.

    You might want to read more of Prof. Plantinga -- he grows on you.


    ReplyDelete
  7. wow, what a treat to read this wonderful apologetic after the disheartening horror on the money wasted on lawsuits by TEC (thanks for all you work). It is good for the soul to read such a thing! Thanks so much.
    As a lawyer would you reflect on the idea of "reasonable doubt" and sufficient cause for believing God exists. My own position is that atheists demand proof which is unreasonable to expect.
    Also the argument that evil in the world "proves" there is no God assumes the reality of good and evil, with little basis for making that assertion (if the materialist world is all there is). Appreciate you!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you, Jeff Marx, for commenting here. The existence or non-existence of God cannot be "proved" by reason/logic -- that is why theists who demand atheists prove that God does not exist, and atheists who demand theists to prove His existence, are each barking up the wrong tree. There is evidence that goes both ways, and one of my theses on this blog is that the more advanced science gets, the more evidence it accumulates to show that the Resurrection really happened -- and hence that God exists. (Check out my posts on the Shroud and similar topics at this page.)

    Alvin Plantinga developed his concept of "warranted belief" to get around the evidence arguments. It works like this: you don't have to talk about "reasonable doubt" or the strength of evidence when it comes to faith in God. For if Jesus was in fact who he said he was, and the Resurrection thus happened, then faith in God is warranted by that very possibility, and you don't have to defend it. In a sense, you are taking up Pascal on his wager: if you are right in your belief, you will be rewarded with eternal life, and if you're wrong, you will never know it. (However, as we Christians all know, belief in God has to be more than just placing a bet -- faith has to be lived and acted upon in your life to make it genuine.)

    ReplyDelete
  9. First things first, atheism isn’t a positive belief that there is no god. It’s a rejection of theism. Agnosticism isn’t a middle-ground between belief and disbelief. Agnosticism and gnosticism address the epistemological question of knowledge. Atheism addresses belief. Belief and knowledge aren’t the same thing -- see here: http://www.youtube.com/v/uFJeQ25-aY4

    “No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.”

    And I would agree: we don’t know if the number of stars in the universe is an even or odd one. But Christians (and other theists) claim knowledge through faith, divine revelation, or simple statement-as-fact. In that analogy, it is the theist who claims to know there are an even number of stars, and atheists are claiming “I don’t know (agnosticism), but I don’t believe (atheism) it must be even”.

    There are several other things to take issue with, but I’ll end the bit on material structures. The mind is a complex thing. Somehow, through nerves connecting to each other, we get a representation of the world around us. Our senses convey their information to our brains. As Alex S pointed out, neuroscience can show how changes to the brain affect one’s perception of the world and one’s self. Our brains help us make sense of the world, otherwise we’d die (like believing that jumping from a cliff won’t kill us).

    “Any given belief of ours has a probability of being true, say, of 50-50.”

    No. That’s not how probability works. The probability that I have a dime in my pocket is closer to 50-50 (it still isn’t), than say, the probability that I have a 1913 Liberty Head nickel in my pocket.

    Ignoring that, your argument is that if our thoughts are the result of material substance (and it is—I encourage you to look into just how much we know about the brain and the way physical trauma and chemicals can affect it), then

    “And the probability that materialistic evolution has led us to a collection of true beliefs over time is simply the product of their individual probabilities of being true.”

    No it’s not. Just because we evolved to think in a certain way doesn’t make how we think true, or that our thoughts are necessarily always true. Those individuals with minds that believe what they are told, such as “Don’t swim in that river, there are crocodiles” or “Don’t eat that plant, you’ll get sick” are far more likely to survive, regardless if there really are crocs in the river or that particular plant is dangerous. And those who survive likely pass on these traits. Animals that are more skittish of movement in the bushes are more likely to survive than those who take the time to see if it was wind or a predator.

    We learn to trust what our senses tell us. Yes, they can be fooled, and often are. But ignoring the circumstantial evidence that they give us is folly, and results in getting nowhere together. If you want to jump neck-deep into solipsism and live on the assumption that the only thing you can know is that you exist, then good luck trying to survive.

    “But that just begs the question of what [atheists] do believe.”

    You seem to be suggesting that if we don’t accept your god, then what do we replace it with. When someone has a malignant tumor removed, they don’t “replace” the tumor with something. Atheism is a simple answer to one question. I reject theistic belief because there is not enough evidence to justify it. As to what I believe…probably a lot of what you and other theists do. I tend not to believe things with little evidence, and I take each claim one at a time. Your Chesterton quote is simply wrong; I don’t believe anything. I believe something only when there’s good reason to do so. A better quote might be:

    A man who won’t believe in checking into things first will believe anything.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. STA, thanks for coming here to debate the post. I welcome all who are minded to have a good discussion. But I cannot let some of your misreadings of what Plantinga argued pass without rebuttal.

      As usual, the terminology that Plantinga uses trips people up. You say at the outset: "First things first, atheism isn’t a positive belief that there is no god. It’s a rejection of theism." Fine and dandy, but then you are not an "atheist" as Plantinga uses that term, you are an anti-theist.

      Do you see the difference? One who simply doesn't like / isn't convinced by / rejects the arguments/evidence for God, and who devotes his time to finding faults / shooting holes in those arguments is an anti-theist. But a person who is positively convinced that the physical world is all that there is -- i.e., that God doesn't exist -- is an atheist. The word is derived from classical Greek, where "a-" is the prefix of negation: "not"; "theos" = "God", and "ism" = "belief". So it is not helpful to confuse the meaning by asserting that "atheism isn't a positive belief that there is no God." Indeed, it is: the word itself literally means "not-God-belief".

      Next, you say: "Agnosticism isn’t a middle-ground between belief and disbelief. Agnosticism and gnosticism address the epistemological question of knowledge." Neither I nor Plantinga said it that way, but let's look at it from the Greek roots again. There is the prefix of negation again ("a-"), so agnosticism is the denial of something. That something is "gnosis" -- meaning "knowledge" -- but personal knowledge, not objective, scientific knowledge (like the difference between kennen and wissen in German, or connaître and savoir in French); plus the "ism" = "belief" suffix. So, literally again, "agnosticism" = "not-personal knowledge-belief." It is the belief that there is not enough personal knowledge for that person to say that God either does or does not exist. It is not "between belief and unbelief", as you say, because it is a sincerely held belief.

      Next, you misread Plantinga when you argue: "In that analogy, it is the theist who claims to know there are an even number of stars, and atheists are claiming 'I don’t know (agnosticism), but I don’t believe (atheism) it must be even'." Not so: the point of the evenism / oddism dichotomy is that there cannot be strong evidence for either view, while theists believe that they have convincing grounds for their belief in God. Every rational person should be an agnostic when it comes to asserting that the number of stars in the universe is odd, as opposed to being even; at the same time, every mathematician will tell you that it is absolutely certain that the number of stars is one or the other.

      Plantinga says: "But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism." And that is the point he is making with his analogy: there is a similar lack of evidence for "even-star-ism", or "odd-star-ism". But as we Christians will tell you (see my posts linked on this page), there is an abundance of evidence that God exists, that the Bible is true, that Jesus was the Son of God, and that he rose from the dead. (You just don't believe it -- I understand; it's no problem. We can still debate.)

      I'll continue my reply to your other points in a separate comment.


      Delete
    2. You next take issue with this: "“Any given belief of ours has a probability of being true, say, of 50-50.'

      "No. That’s not how probability works. The probability that I have a dime in my pocket is closer to 50-50 (it still isn’t), than say, the probability that I have a 1913 Liberty Head nickel in my pocket."

      That misunderstands the argument. The word "say" in the original sentence you quote was meant to signal that the choice of "50-50" for the probable truth-value of any given belief that one holds is not exact, but an estimate, or an average between 1 and 0. That you have a dime in your pocket (if you are in the habit of carrying change) is probably 50-50 true (or perhaps a little greater) on any given day. But unless you are a rare coin collector who does not care about how he keeps his coins, your second statement has no rational possibility of being anywhere near 0.5.

      And Plantinga is not talking about beliefs which are irrational. He is talking about the beliefs which we actually believe in -- and which we content ourselves with by thinking that they are rational (for who would like to think himself irrational?). All of those beliefs (we like to think) are more likely true than not, so have a value of say, 2/3 or whatever value you think best reflects your confidence in your being a rational person with rational beliefs.

      You seem to take issue with Plantinga's conclusion that there is no probable basis on which to rely on our reasoning faculty, if it evolved from inanimate matter as pure evolutionists contend, but then you actually agree with him: you say, for instance, "Just because we evolved to think in a certain way doesn’t make how we think true, or that our thoughts are necessarily always true." That is exactly Plantinga's point! You assert it empirically; he uses a probabilistic argument, but you arrive at the same place. Evolution, exactly as you point out, favors those who adapt to what their reasoning faculty tells them is out there -- it may be true or false; evolution doesn't care.

      But we supposedly rational humans actually do care whether the conclusions we reach are true or not (that's why we're having this debate!). And Plantinga's point is that you cannot have both evolution and materialism. because the latter plus the former guarantees the non-reliability of our reasoning faculty. So -- to take his point to his final conclusion -- the evolutionary materialist has no good basis upon which to conclude that his claims about evolution or materialism are true (as opposed to being simply well-adapted).

      Finally, you write: "You seem to be suggesting that if we don’t accept your god, then what do we replace it with. When someone has a malignant tumor removed, they don’t 'replace' the tumor with something." The analogy is inapt: you obviously never had the "tumor" in you to begin with, while I do not consider it a "tumor", and so would never remove it or replace it. It is only in your eyes that my (warranted) Christian belief is a "tumor."

      Well, chacun à son goût. Nevertheless, a belief that there is no Santa Claus is still a belief -- that Santa Claus does not exist. It is futile to say that atheism is not a belief, as I showed in my earlier comment -- if you want to claim that it isn't, then leave off the "ism" which signifies that it is, and call yourself an "a-the[os]", that is, an anti-theist. What's so bad about that? I'm an antidisestablishmentarian, if it comes to that.

      (To be concluded in the next comment.)

      Delete
  10. Regarding the final quote, you say:

    "I tend not to believe things with little evidence, and I take each claim one at a time. Your Chesterton quote is simply wrong; I don’t believe anything." We all like to think that we believe only those things for which there is more than a little evidence; you and I differ on the quality of the evidence. I find it astonishing and amazing that DNA analytical techniques developed only in the 20th century would prove the virgin birth of Jesus Christ; no doubt your reaction is otherwise. But that's fine, as I say -- chacun à son goût.

    Nevertheless, I cannot help but point out that you misquoted my quote of the metaphysical Chesterton. I very carefully did not write that "the man who won't believe in God will believe anything"; I said " ... will believe in anything." You, as you admit, do believe in a number of things. And those things, it would appear, are anything supported by what you take as evidence -- except just not belief in God. Touché.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I want to first thank you for actually posting my reply – I all-to-often find that theists’ blogs with comment-approvals end up not wanting to post arguments against them. And thanks for taking the time to reply to me as well.

    Now then, let’s go bottom up, shall we?

    On the Chesterton quote, you are belittling me because I believe in things based on evidence? I don’t understand how you are using that quote to show my position is wrong or silly. In what things should we believe in, then? Also, “believe” and “believe in” might have different meanings for you, but they don’t for me, and quibbling over them is asinine.

    “…you and I differ on the quality of the evidence”

    That’s right. I don’t accept so-called evidence that can’t stand up to scrutiny. Science is not a to-each-his-own method. We end up being right (or close to right) more often when we don’t accept our “own evidence”, but the actual objective evidence as it stands. The highest quality of evidence is grounded in observations or inferences of observations rather than gut feelings and books. One doesn’t start from a position and then seek evidence to support his views, but rather, follows the evidence to wherever it may lead. Being a lawyer might have skewed your view a bit on the matters of truth, for in a court the truth is merely what you can get others to accept so that your side can win. (I’m generalizing here, please don’t berate me with your smug French quips :oP)

    Again with the terms. I don’t care what you want to label me. At times I am anti-theistic; I don’t think much good can come from theism. Label me humanist, secularist, heretic, agnostic, atheist…it depends on the matter at hand. I’m an atheist (a = no or not, theist = a belief in a god; thus no-belief-in-a-god) with respect for the god you’re most likely arguing for, given your descriptions on this blog. I also am an agnostic about that god…I don’t know whether or not it exists in some form either physical or meta-, but I don’t believe your claims that it does.

    Huxley himself didn’t coin the term to mean as you suggest. But again, redefine words all you want to; atheist does not mean a positive belief that there is/are no god(s). If I make the claim that I have a two-dollar bill in my pocket, you can either believe me or not. You don’t know if I do or not, but do you believe that I do? If you say no, you’re not claiming there is no two-dollar bill in my pocket, you’re simply rejecting my claim that there is. I know it may seem like that’s impossible, but use your mind (however immaterial it may be). If you said, “there is no two-dollar bill in your pocket, STA” then that’s a positive claim, and something we can test.

    “…a belief that there is no Santa Claus is still a belief -- that Santa Claus does not exist. It is futile to say that atheism is not a belief…”

    Exactly my point. The atheist doesn’t have a belief that there is no God; the atheist doesn’t believe the theism. It also depends on the god in question – I can say I believe that god, as defined by a striped invisible blue orangutan that lives in the center of Saturn, does not exist.

    But once more, it doesn’t matter what you want to label or re-label those of us who don’t accept your claims that a god exists. I’m more interested in focusing on the actual beliefs themselves, regardless of labels.

    Getting long…I’ll continue in another comment.

    ReplyDelete
  12. (cont…)
    So moving on…

    “The analogy is inapt: you obviously never had the "tumor" in you to begin with, while I do not consider it a "tumor", and so would never remove it or replace it.”

    Your reading of my analogy is inapt. I’m not likening the tumor with your theism (however, that is a fun way of thinking about it). When something is removed from you, such as a tumor, you don’t replace it with something else. It’s just gone. Now, I know you’re quick to scream that I never was a True Christian™, and we can have discussions on my past if you deem it necessary. Perhaps on my blog: thesmalltownatheist.blogspot.com

    “you cannot have both evolution and materialism. because the latter plus the former guarantees the non-reliability of our reasoning faculty”

    Either you don’t understand evolution or you don’t understand materialism. I’m more inclined to think it the former, as a lot of theists don’t. I’ve already dealt with this above, but I’ll reiterate. The fact is that, yes, our senses can be unreliable. It is therefore imperative that we use some sort of method by which we can test our senses against themselves and against those of others to determine the likelihood of an idea being an actual representation of the world around us. And that’s exactly what the scientific method does. It’s the best tool we’ve found for weeding out the incorrect things we think, and for honing what we do think in a more reliable way.

    Not to mention, if you’re going to stick to the idea that your (Immaterial? Metaphysical? I still don’t know how you view it) mind is unreliable and therefore can’t possibly know truth, then how can you be so sure it’s reliable with regard to your specific brand of theism?

    The fact of the matter is that I don’t think you have a good grasp of how the scientific method works (try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcavPAFiG14) and how we know what we know. Not to sound patronizing, but you should take some time and read the advancements we’ve made with regard to biology, physics, astronomy, and medicine to name a few. You’ll see that we don’t make assumptions based on the non-reliability of our reasoning faculties, but rather, we put those assumptions through a battery of tests in a self-correcting method that has yielded such fruits as those that we are communicating through right now.

    QED? No. Touché? No, too douchy. How about just, Thanks.

    -STA

    ReplyDelete
  13. STA, you are welcome to keep commenting here -- as long as you stay away from the ad hominem remarks ( "asinine"; "Being a lawyer might have skewed your view ... ; etc.) I can see that you are a bit defensive coming here; rest assured, you will not be "belittled". (The quasi-Chesteron quote does not 'belittle' you; it simply points out the fact (as I noted) that you believe in anything which you see as supported by scientific evidence -- just as long as it's not belief in God. I pointed you to a detailed blog post on the objective, DNA analysis connecting two independently preserved pieces of cloth which are attributed to the crucifixion of Christ, and amazingly also establishing that Jesus did not have an earthly father. You rant on about believing only what science establishes, but ignore what the Italian geneticists discovered about the blood on both the Shroud and on the Sudarium.

    You see, because God does exist for many people, science is not the end of the matter: it has nothing to say about that which it cannot observe or measure, yet you come here as an atheistic scientist and promptly proclaim there is no God because there is no scientific evidence for his existence! Of course there is no direct scientific evidence, because science excludes the supernatural, and God is supernatural by definition.

    Yet the scientific evidence that has accumulated in the last 120 years has tended to reinforce what the Bible tells us, and not the reverse. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Bible still told us (as it always had) that the universe had a beginning -- with the Creator. So science discounted that; Einstein in 1915 believed that the universe was stable, and had always been that way.

    Then along comes the evidence for the Big Bang, and what do scientists do? They at first disbelieve it, and ridicule it (by giving its name, for example).

    We both seem to agree that minds on their own are unreliable -- yours because it evolved randomly from inanimate matter; mine, because though God-given, it became corrupted through the Fall (which was a real genetic event, by the way, and not some metaphorical tragedy). However, you assert that the reliability of your mind's conclusions is assured because it follows and respects the scientific method. Well, who "discovered" that? It is not a scientific statement to say that science only discovers what is true -- that is a metaphysical claim which is made outside of science. What science can discover is whether observations through standard-method experiment agree or not with the current theory -- and when they no longer do so, the theory is replaced (was it a "tumor" before that? only kidding ;>). Scientific theories are never absolutely true, because science can recognize no absolutes.

    But theists can, because God is the absolute, and the only absolute. He is Truth per se, and cannot lie. We, as fallen mortals, manage to screw up his message, and frequently. That does not mean, however, that we have to abandon trying to discover his absolute message.

    Peace and blessings, STA -- I have learned from you, and I hope you have had a comparable experience here.

    ReplyDelete
  14. “…you believe in anything which you see as supported by scientific evidence -- just as long as it's not belief in God.”

    No. If God were to have any sort of scientific evidence, I’d believe. I’m willing to change my mind, given a strong reason to. But appeals to the supernatural as self-evident, and flat-faced claims that “theists can [recognize absolutes] because God” aren’t strong reasons.

    If you are truly interested in maintaining your stance, I’d suggest boldly looking at the opposition to your claims. A lot of what you’ve said already has been refuted (or at least, talked about) by your opposition, and clarifications have been made to, “old chestnuts”. Like when theists make incorrect assumptions about evolution, and that those ideas correct, yet still parade them about like they’re morsels of wit or argument-killers.

    “because God does exist for many people, science is not the end of the matter”

    That’s exactly my point. God exists for people wherein God isn’t the conclusion from evidence, but a given at the start.

    You go on to claim that the Big Bang was foretold in the Bible, as though it’s a proof for legitimacy. If it claimed water is wet, would that make talking donkeys and zombies real? The same book that supposedly foretells the Big Bang states that plants grew without sunlight, and all animals were vegetarians.

    Not only that, but after-the-fact statements that “he stretches out the heavens” is proof of the Big Bang pales in comparison to the idea that that somehow proves YOUR version of a deity. There are literally thousands of creation stories involving gods that can be vaguely tied to reality. For example, take the Boshongo, a Bantu tribe of Central Africa. In the beginning there was only darkness, water, and the great god Bumba. One day Bumba, in pain from a stomach ache, vomited up the sun. The sun dried up some of the water, leaving land. Still in pain, Bumba vomited up the moon, the stars, and then some animals: the leopard, the crocodile, the turtle, and, finally, some men.

    Well, the sun dries up water, so Bumba must exist, right? At least, all stories of Bumba must be true, huh?

    Riding the coattails of science is intellectually dishonest. We used to think gods explained thunder and lightening. Had we not questioned, we’d still think so.

    We’re getting into a variety of topics, so to avoid a Gish-gallop on either of our parts, I suggest we narrow our conversation. I’m not going to get into the shroud; read here to see why: http://skepdic.com/shroud.html

    (By the way, an ad hominem isn’t just a mean thing to say to someone; it’s an attempt to refute another solely biased on the personal attack. Thus, saying, “water is wet, jackass” isn’t an ad hominem. Stating a certain way of thinking is asinine wasn’t ad hominem, but I’ll accept the shot at your law degree was one, however. My apologies.)

    -STA

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. “If God were to have any sort of scientific evidence, I’d believe …” But your actions belie your words. I pointed you to a scientific discussion of the amazing evidence linking the Shroud, the Sudarium, the resurrection and the virgin birth of Jesus, and you won’t even take a look at it. Instead, you respond with a link to a site that uses totally obsolete arguments (e.g., the discredited analysis of Walter McCrone to prove there is no blood on the cloth) to claim the Shroud is a medieval forgery. Well, the Sudarium has a documented history going back to ca. 800 (which your site again treats erroneously) — so how can the Shroud not have existed before 1343 and yet have the exact same bloodstains, in the exact same pattern, as the Sudarium? (And they are bloodstains, otherwise they never would have yielded to a DNA analysis.) And what do you do with the overwhelming historical evidence for the empty tomb? All other hypotheses to explain it, except that Jesus actually resurrected, fall short of fitting the facts we know. So don’t tell me you’re interested in “evidence” for God’s truth, because as I say, your responses say otherwise.

      You also attempt to divert my point about the Bible, again by misquoting me and by dragging in red herrings. I did not write that the Bible “foretold” the Big Bang; it obviously did not, because the Bible was written billions and billions of years after the Big Bang. It simply pointed to the universe’s having a beginning long before science came to that same realization. Your citing erroneous interpretations of other verses in Genesis and Paul detracts not one whit from my point. And your citation to Bumba is, if I may return a compliment, asinine. The thing that differs the Hebrew/Christian God from all other gods is that he is above, beyond and outside of his creation, not a part of it. Your god Bumba is right there alongside the things he creates, and is neither immaterial nor eternal, but obviously capable of getting sick to his stomach.

      You won’t get far here saying that Plantinga’s arguments against evolution as a complete explanation have all been refuted many times before. They haven’t — I’ve read Plantinga, while you have not, so you have no basis for your claim. And have you also read Thomas Nagel on the same point? No? I thought so. The epistemological underpinnings of evolution are crumbling as you dawdle among old, comfortable justifications that can no longer stand up to rigorous argument.

      “Riding the coattails of science …” Well, Newton, Galileo, Bacon, Kepler and all the early greats of science wouldn’t have seen it that way. They did science because they were comfortable with the notion of a creator God who ordered all things, so that scientific investigation was therefore possible — they saw science as riding on God’s coattails. Your inversion has it exactly backwards.

      Delete
    2. In the end, STA, you handicap yourself by your a priori beliefs, just as you think I do. But I have a much greater degree of intellectual freedom. My belief in the God of the Bible rests on the plain logic that if Jesus was in fact who he said he was, then my belief in him and what he said is fully warranted. If Jesus was wrong, then as Paul himself says, we Christians are the most to be pitied. But since Paul had a personal encounter with the risen Christ, then I’ll add his evidence to the heap. I keep looking for evidence that absolutely refutes God’s existence, and after a lifetime of searching, have found only the opposite. For all your flailing, you haven’t shown me any such negative evidence either.

      Delete
  15. I decline to publish STA's parting shot on this thread. Ordinarily I am happy to give opponents free reign as long as they stay within guidelines, but it turns out that STA is just interested in promoting his own blog rather than really engaging in debate. As you can see from what I did publish above, he repeatedly refuses to answer my points, to read the subject-matter of this post, or to refrain from baiting and taunting. In other words, he was acting just like a troll, trying to roil things up to boost page views at his own blog, and so I decline to assist him further.

    What one can conclude about this discussion is that anti-theists like STA have nothing positive to offer -- they want only to shoot holes in theists' positions, but they have no complete and positive construct of their own to advance. They challenge theists to "prove" their case, yet they refuse to allow anything but scientific evidence for such a proof.

    That arbitrary restriction means they have rigged the game: since science deals only with the material, physical world that it can objectively measure in any laboratory using standard methods, so-called scientific evidence cannot establish the existence of God, because He is the essence of the non-physical and non-material. And finding no such evidence for Him, they loudly trumpet that "Absence of evidence is evidence of absence" -- a logical non-sequitur if ever there was one.

    They themselves thus make it impossible to debate them -- STA could not be bothered even to look at the scientific evidence I cited to him, but clung, brainwashed, to his arbitrary position that "science" had proved the Shroud of Turin a forgery. So, farewell from these pages, STA: remain in your narrow canyon, refusing to look straight up -- for all the good it will do you. We Christians will continue to pray for God to lift the hardening of your hearts, and to grant you the eternal blessings of His grace.

    ReplyDelete
  16. I understand Plantinga's point that evolution may favour useful illusions rather than truth. But how does this not undermine the true belief found in the world's monotheisms? Surely monotheism is one of the most immediate examples of a belief about the world that does not have a strong, obvious truth to it. Yet the persistence of religions throughout the history of man attests to the usefulness of religious thought (for example in consecrating a group of people). Christians are hit just as hard as atheists by Plantinga's point because both groups worship truth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, Luke -- thanks for your comment here. Plantinga actually puts Christianity into a different class of beliefs, as I explained in answer to a comment by Jeff Marx above:

      "Alvin Plantinga developed his concept of 'warranted belief' to get around the evidence arguments. It works like this: you don't have to talk about 'reasonable doubt' or the strength of evidence when it comes to faith in God. For if Jesus was in fact who he said he was, and the Resurrection thus happened, then faith in God is warranted by that very possibility, and you don't have to defend it. In a sense, you are taking up Pascal on his wager: if you are right in your belief, you will be rewarded with eternal life, and if you're wrong, you will never know it. (However, as we Christians all know, belief in God has to be more than just placing a bet -- faith has to be lived and acted upon in your life to make it genuine.)"

      Monotheism (the Trinitarian version) is a core tenet of Christianity; you can't profess Christianity if you don't believe in monotheism. And like Christianity itself, belief in monotheism is warranted, in Plantinga's sense, simply because it is part of Christ's teachings, and if Christ was who he said he was, then you stand to gain eternal life by believing and following those teachings. There is abundant evidence to support that Christ rose to life again after he was crucified, and appeared to (and profoundly changed and inspired) his followers, but you don't have to lean on that evidence for your warranted belief, because it's not a matter for rational decision, but faith.

      Science is always ready to accept a better explanation once there is sufficient evidence. Christianity doesn't work as science does, because Christianity starts out with the truth -- the truth that is eternal and unchanging. God's truth is not "testable" in a laboratory -- (perhaps) in part because God does not want belief in Him to be purely a matter of scientific demonstration, but one of true faith in response to his unfathomable love for us.

      Delete
    2. Thanks very much for your response. I like the concept of warranted belief; despite Newton's efforts to understand God through science, the existence of God can't be proven as a scientific theory, so to believe in the truth of God requires a 'stupefying of reason' achieved by submission to God and Church and reference to Pascal's wager if a (relatively weak) reason is still required.

      However, belief in Jesus's resurrection as a historical event goes beyond faith, and should be as testable as any other resurrection claim (Robert M. Price's book "The Incredible Shrinking Son Of Man" is one example of testing this). So we might still end up dabbling with evidence to believe the specific truth claim of Christianity. Although, once again with the claim "the Bible says so" alongside warranted belief, we may free ourselves of this problem. This exposes the truth that there will never be sufficient reason for belief - it's only via stupefying reason that we can really believe.

      Finally, another point on Plantinga, evolution and materialism. I presume no one is debating that science is the best method humans have for understanding the workings of the physical world. The biologist E.O. Wilson, in his 1978 book "On Human Nature", classes scientific materialism as a "mythology" that belongs with traditional religion and Marxism. He has the honesty to see that scientific materialism is a faith that starts out with an untestable truth claim, like Christianity. Wilson also has the honesty to realise scientific materialism lacks the appeal of traditional religion. The main difference between the two is that scientific materialists can investigate whether traditional religion is the product of evolution without undermining their own faith.

      Delete
    3. Very good points, Luke. Thank you for sharing them here. Robert Price, I trust you realize, has an agenda at one with the Jesus Seminar, and has to be taken with a grain of salt. For me, the Shroud of Turin is more than enough evidence that Jesus was who he said he was -- see my post on that topic here.

      Delete