Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For subsequent entries, see index.
Now we are focusing on a broadly cast Argument from Evil, or as I prefer to call it, Argument from Indifference. And Marshall is here responding to my laying out of that case in my sixth reply.
That the Evidence Points to God (VI)
by Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.
Responding now to Dr. Carrier’s first argument for atheism, I’ll begin by noting the philosophical intemperance of his assertion that there is “no evidence” for God in either cosmology or the “pleasures of experience.” As I pointed out in my opening entry, “evidence” simply means a fact or phenomenon that makes a hypothesis more or less probable than it would be in the absence of that fact or phenomenon. On this definition, it should be clear that there is at least some evidence on both sides of the question. Indeed, this is the case with most if not all significant issues people debate.
One may not find various pieces of evidence compelling, or one may think that the preponderance of evidence, or even the overwhelming weight of evidence, lies on a certain side; but to say that there is no evidence whatsoever on the other side of the question is a narrow-minded and unscholarly position.
Consider that another way of stating Dr. Carrier’s claim would be that the evidence for atheism could not be stronger than it is. But suppose that five years from now physicists were to discover powerful evidence that the cosmos is in fact past-eternal, or that the appearance of fine-tuning in the cosmos was illusory. Such developments would obviously constitute additional pieces of evidence for atheism. But then it follows that the current state of cosmology and cosmogony provides at least some evidence for theism.
As stated in my opening entry, if we found ourselves living on a planet resembling the surface of the moon instead of the striking beauty of the earth, this would obviously count as some evidence for atheism. Similarly, if we lived in a world without beautiful poetry, without great literature, without stunning music like Bach and Beethoven, without the thrill of romantic love and the joy of friendship, without delicious cuisine, fine wine, or the refreshment of a cold, crisp beer—any judicious thinker, any man with common sense, should recognize that this would strengthen the case for atheism and weaken the case for theism. But then the converse applies: that the existence of such things constitutes at least some evidence for theism.
I turn then to Dr. Carrier’s first argument for atheism, which is that the world as we experience it is exactly the kind of place we should expect to find if there were no God. Dr. Carrier lists 10 disagreeable features of the world that he finds to be incompatible with the existence of God:
- Natural evils (tsunamis, diseases, etc.) that plague human and animal life.
- We do not see frequent divine intervention to oppose or punish human evil.
- Most of the universe is inhospitable to life.
- Life on earth has developed through a long process of evolution “plagued by random mistakes.”
- Human minds are hampered by physical brains instead of being purely spiritual.
- People frequently make errors in their reasoning.
- Human moral systems have slowly (albeit progressively) developed.
- The world’s great religious books have done nothing to further the development of human morality; on the contrary, they have impeded it.
- The world’s great religious leaders have endorsed various human evils such as slavery.
- All cultures and nations have not always had the same moral, political, medical, scientific and technological knowledge that makes human life more happy and comfortable.
According to Dr. Carrier then, if God existed, there would be no natural evils; or at least, natural evils would not affect human and animal life. God would frequently intervene to stop evildoers in their tracks—say by paralyzing them or knocking them backwards with an invisible force; or, failing this, he would frequently punish them in obvious ways—say by striking them down with lightning or inflicting a disease, or (for lesser crimes) making their hair fall out or their noses grow like Pinocchio’s, or an ugly blemish to temporarily appear on their bodies.
Life would be common all over the universe. Rational agents would exist as Cartesian “ghosts in the machine;” and these agents would all be clear, intelligent thinkers. The world’s great religious leaders would not make mistakes in their moral reasoning.
Finally, God would have equipped mankind from the beginning with a gigantic textbook containing perfect moral principles, application of those principles to a broad variety of specific ethical cases, a delineation of the ideal political system, and whatever medical, technological and scientific knowledge is necessary for the basic comfort and happiness of mankind. Moreover, God would make sure that everyone knew this textbook was divine, and he would ensure that cultural diversity never got in the way of people following this divine textbook.
Such is the ideal world according to Dr. Carrier: the world he would give us if he were God.
In subsequent entries I will have more to say about Carrier-world. I imagine certain readers have already discerned some disagreeable, or at least questionable, aspects of it—certainly from an aesthetic point of view. Its childlike qualities are also notable. Indeed, in certain respects it sounds like the kind of a world a man of science would be extremely dissatisfied with. The demand for spirit-minds is quite humorous coming from an atheist. The claim of #8 is historically false.
With respect to the features of the present world that are disagreeable, Dr. Carrier needs to show why it’s unlikely that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting these evils to exist. With regard to human suffering this is clearly questionable, for there is more human evil in the world than natural evil, and therefore, what natural evil exists is perfectly compatible with divine justice.
With regard to the rest, how does Dr. Carrier know that God lacks morally sufficient reasons for arranging them as they are? He provides no arguments for showing that say, a divine justice operating in the tit-for-tat manner he desires would in fact make man a better, nobler species.
Other features of Carrier-world are clearly debatable from an aesthetic point of view, for example that life should be common instead of rare, or that the benefits of textbook instruction should override the beauty of gradual development. But again, Dr. Carrier provides no reasons why we should prefer his picture.
Perhaps these omissions are due to his desire to get all his arguments on the table at once, but he certainly owes us more explanation as to why his aesthetic and moral vision of the world is so much to be preferred.
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Such is Dr. Marshall’s response on the Argument from Indifference.
Continue on to Dr. Carrier’s reply.
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I haven’t gotten the impression that Dr. Carrier is positing any sort of ideal world. Where did that notion come from? I thought the debate was about the existence of god, not someone’s ideal world, “the world he would give us if he were God”. That’s quite a leap right there.
It seems you’re now assuming god exists out of rhetorical necessity. Dr. Carrier can speak for himself, obviously better than any commentator, but I have no need to know whether god “lacks morally sufficient reasons for arranging things”, or any other attribute, if the evidence points to god not existing. Why argue about it’s supposed attributes, or lack thereof, at that point?
You’ve hit on his key error here.
It’s a classic straw man via slippery slope fallacy. “Why, we can’t have better laws and police, because then we’d all be oppressed by a micro-managing police state!” “Why, we can’t stop lethal earthquakes, because then we’d all be so content with life we’d never learn to love anyone!” And other weird nonsense. It’s an irrational defense mechanism. Only someone who isn’t taking what I said seriously, and isn’t actually thinking their own responses through, would resort to such absurdism.
It betrays a key bias in Marshall’s position: he needs his god to be moral, and therefore must excuse away all evidence to the contrary, and incorrectly claim that doing so makes his moral god likely to exist.
Once you admit the only god that has any appreciable probability of being compatible with the evidence, is an evil or indifferent god, and therefore not one worthy of worship or obedience or really even attention, the fact that there is no reason to believe even that god exists becomes painfully apparent.
It is thus the need to believe a moral god exists, that blinds Marshall from seeing there really is no evidence for a god at all. Just as I’m sure he would admit there is no evidence for an evil or indifferent god. And yet the evidence for a moral god is worse. Ergo, a fortiori, no god likely exists.
Dr Carrier will surely address this in his response, but even a layman such as myself can see problems with this right out the gate.
To begin with, no evidence in a particular area does not entail no evidence at all. No evidence in cosmology or the pleasures of nature does not mean there is no evidence in any area whatsoever.
Furthermore, “there is no evidence of X” does not even remotely equate to “the case for [not-X] cannot possibly be stronger.” To use one of Carrier’s own examples, if I claim to own a nuclear missile, and there is no evidence that I do, it is still true that investigating my belongings and home would lower the probability that I own a nuclear missile. The odds that I own a nuclear missile can never be reduced to exactly zero, and thus additional evidence can always be added to reduce that probability further and further.
Thus all Marshall’s counterexamples of things that could strengthen the case for atheism are irrelevant. The fact that the evidence could be piled up further on one side of the equation does not mean that there must be something currently on the other side. One does not need to take away from one side of the scale to add to the other; one can simply add more from elsewhere.
(And given that Carrier backed up his “no evidence” statement with demonstrations of the lack of evidence, it is hardly “unscholarly” to make such a statement.)
Marshall says, “As I pointed out in my opening entry, ‘evidence’ simply means a fact or phenomenon that makes a hypothesis more or less probable than it would be in the absence of that fact or phenomenon”
That definition permits all sorts of dubious material to be counted as ‘evidence’: hearsay testimony, photoshopped pictures/videos and even deliberate lies.
I contend that anything that has been through a person’s brain cannot reliably be counted as worthwhile evidence.
Granted it may be impossible to completely eliminate subjectivity, nevertheless, we should strive to achieve objectivity.
This is approached in Scientific Method by insisting on shareable repeatable observations; such things are as close as we can get to ‘facts’.
The idea that natural evil is “divine justice” for human evil is absurd, given the arbitrary and excessive nature of such evils. They effect all, young and old, rich and (disproportionately) poor, generally good or generally evil. Did the baby in the refugee camp deserve to die of starvation from famine because the local African Warlord committed genocide? This leaving aside the idea that “human” evils aren’t just a sub-set of “natural” evils…
I’m also not sure that Carrier does imagine “divine justice” to be a hallmark of Carrier-World. Far better that the actions you feel warrant such justice simply never happened; that we were disinclined to act in such a fashion, that the scarcity and needs that drive us as a species to behave immorally were not in play. Alas, we are evolved to consume and grow, in an environment with only so much space and resource. On God, he is responsible for both of these facts, and so is not abdicated from the responsibility for human evil.
Your assumption that people who exist in our world would be unhappy in an ideal world is ignoring the fact that the ideal world would necessarily contain different people (or at least the people themselves would have different thoughts, desires and actions). The scientist of Carrier-World would be happy with Carrier-World, because Carrier-World is an ideal world which maximises the happiness of each individual towards the global maximum of happiness. That the things which occupy many scientists of our world are things which are/result in great evil (natural or otherwise) is not a good reason to assume that those same scientists are glad such evil exists.
Wishing that the world was in such a form that we as individuals would not exist in that world is not an outlandish concept. I’m sure we all wish that the Holocaust had never happened, even if the knock-on of that event is the world which spawned us. We are inescapably tied to the evils of the past, but that doesn’t mean we should be glad of them, or ignore our responsibility in preventing future evils.
The fact that we (as individuals) can only exist in the universe we are in should not lead anyone to consider God a likely candidate for the creator/curator of our universe, and does not invalidate the thought experiment of an “ideal” world that would be in place given certain assumptions about the nature of God.
On the moral sufficiency argument, this always seems to me to be a double-edged sword; that is, in order for moral sufficiency to be an acceptable benchmark, we have to limit God’s power such that he is only exactly powerful enough to actualise the universe we happen to live in, making naturalistic arguments for his existence circular and adding an ad-hoc assumption to God (the limit of his power) in order for him to fit the evidence. We must also conclude that any conception of God that raises him above the standards of moral outcomes in the universe is not a realistic concept. The Christian God is one such concept, so far as I can see.
So the first two paragraphs, at best, could cause Dr. Carrier to revise his wording to “no GOOD evidence” exists for God. Or, “no evidence exists that points exclusively to God.” While that might be a true semantic concession, it makes no real difference to the debate at hand.
The third paragraph is odd. Dee points out the inherent flaws in the logic above. But also, those with expertise in the related fields ALREADY consider fine-tuning to be illusory. That’s why outside of apologists it is generally prefixed with “apparent” fine-tuning.
The fourth paragraph literally begs the question. The argument from fitness presented in Dr. Marshall’s opening does not establish that beauty (in any aesthetic form) supports a God. He attempts to say it is some inverse of the problem of evil, but that’s false. The problem of evil ONLY functions as a rebuttal to an omni-God (that includes omni-benevolence). But the converse isn’t true. An omni-God does not inherently predict beauty, nor does the lack of such a god preclude it. Thus beauty can add evidence to neither side (this seems a furthering of the misunderstandings about evidence above). Evil, as a moral feature, has direct connection with a perfectly moral (omni-benevolent) God. Beauty is not a similar feature, as it is not limited to moral content nor directly entailed in any omni-property.
As for the rest, I’m not sure Dr. Marshall offered a counter point at all. He says some of Carrier’s points would lead to an unsatisfying world, which is a fallacious argument from consequences. He says Carrier must wholly refute that God might have morally sufficient reason for allowing evil, but that’s wrong. Dr. Carrier already laid out a probabilistic case that ad-hoc reasoning (like God might have a moral reason for evil) only compounds the probability on the other side, especially where there is nothing in evidence to support the ad-hoc hypothesis. Indeed, presuming there MIGHT be a reason for God to allow evil is confusing possibility with probability.
There doesn’t seem to be a logical or evidence based counter to any of Dr. Carrier’s opening on his argument from indifference… just Dr. Marshall’s personal feelings on the subjects.
WOLLIS: if we found ourselves living on a planit resembling the surfis’v the moon insted’v the striking buty the Urth
Surely we wudn’t find ourselvs AT ALL. ther wud be no surfis, no we, no moon.
Since ther wud be no jesus tu inceiv / start the univurs
ther wud be no singularity no space no time, no wher, no when.
Had God not creatid the univurs, his ixistuns wudn’t be affectid, ‘v cors.
When you have a correspondent who argues with a straight face, “if we lived in a world without beautiful poetry, without great literature, without stunning music like Bach and Beethoven, without the thrill of romantic love and the joy of friendship, without delicious cuisine, fine wine, or the refreshment of a cold, crisp beer—any judicious thinker, any man with common sense, should recognize that this would strengthen the case for atheism and weaken the case for theism. But then the converse applies: that the existence of such things constitutes at least some evidence for theism.”, you do not have an honest correspondent.
This has been and seems destined only to ever be a waste of your time and energy.
“Similarly, if we lived in a world without beautiful poetry, without great literature, without stunning music like Bach and Beethoven, without the thrill of romantic love and the joy of friendship, without delicious cuisine, fine wine, or the refreshment of a cold, crisp beer”
Dr. Marshall, for every good thing you listed there is a bad thing attached to it. We live in a positive/negative world. There’s good and bad to every situation that occurs.