This year Macmillan produced a peer reviewed collection of position papers between atheists and theists titled Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy (2019), in which I contributed several chapters. Like most academic monographs these days it’s outrageously priced and thus inaccessible to almost every human being on earth [though see comment below]. But if you can’t spring for the price, you can get ahold of a copy on loan through your local public library or (if you have one) your university or seminary library—if they don’t already have a copy, talk to the reference librarian about how to arrange an interlibrary loan. You can then read or reference the content, even xerox any chapters that interest you.

Its table of contents is available at Gale. Topics covered include, for both theism and atheism: definitions and methods, and the logic and rationality of either view; “religious experience” and “faith and revelation”; miracles; religious diversity as a problem in need of explanation; “causation” and “principles of sufficient reason” (e.g. cosmological arguments); explaining abstract objects; various forms of the fine tuning argument; what human history and human nature evinces either way; moral theory (of course) and questions about the meaning of life; whether either view is truly compatible with or supported by science; “theories of religion” (how one explains religions and their origin and evolution); “prudential/pragmatic arguments” (e.g. Pascal’s Wager and the like); and a closing section on how all the above coheres to a cumulative case either way. Authors are numerous; mostly professors of various subjects, some renowned.

The book’s overall description there accurately states:

A peer-reviewed, academic volume that has two separate editors in chief, with their respective editorial boards. The atheism side is led by Graham Oppy (Australian philosopher, Monash University). The theism side is led by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. (American philosopher, Fordham University) and includes Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers.

The two editorial boards worked together to identify twenty key topics in philosophical debates regarding arguments for and against the existence of God (e.g., Religious Experience, Miracles, Our Universe, Human Beings, Science and Religion, etc.). The single volume is split into forty total topics. The format is such that an author taking the side of theism, for example, composes a chapter on a topic, followed by an atheism author covering the same topic.

The title presents complex philosophical counter perspectives in a lucid manner. It grapples with issues that have occupied philosophers for more than two millennia. These include the sufficiency/insufficiency of an empirical explanation for the existence of the universe; the capacity/incapacity of the empirical sciences to draw conclusions about a possible infinite being; the validity/invalidity of philosophical arguments regarding the existence of an infinite being; various notions of infinity; the “problem of evil,” and so on.

There are lots of really cool entries in this volume; even many theist entries are of interest for their quality, bibliography, and concisely outlining of theistic positions on various subjects. And even when face-palmingly bad, a given entry is still the best you’ll likely find on the subject anywhere, well representing how theists or atheists really do think.

However, none of us saw the other side’s entries, so no entry in this volume responds to any other. They merely present their position. So in a three-part series I’ll discuss my contributions, now in comparison with my theistic counterparts. Although to see my full arguments you will still have to consult the original sections as I wrote them.

Today I’ll start with the “Doxastic Foundations” section. Next I’ll cover the section on “Miracles.” Then a later relevant subsection on “Science.”

Doxastic Foundations

Half this chapter was written by Ali Hasan of the University of Iowa and I did the rest, writing under the auspices of the Secular Academy. The description of our section reads:

This chapter centers around the question of whether theism is rational. We begin by discussing different theories of rationality, and introducing some importantly related epistemic concepts and controversies. We then consider the possible sources of rational belief in God and argue that even if these provide some positive support, the fact of religious disagreement defeats the rationality of theism.

The parallel section for theism, written by Paul Moser of Loyola University, describes itself as:

This chapter focuses on some epistemic concepts and their bearing on theism. It considers the nature of belief both as assent and as a disposition involving trust. It also characterizes foundational evidence of God’s reality in terms of divine self-manifestation in human moral conscience, whereby a unique kind of agapē-conviction can arise.

Moser mostly goes into what “belief” and “evidence” and “knowledge” and “truth” mean; then goes into what it should take to warrant believing something.

Moser’s Doxastic Position

Moser’s section includes an extensive critique of “reformed epistemology,” which is refreshing coming from a theist these days. But Moser’s solution to the problem of Divine Hiddenness is not any better, being the diametric opposite of Plantinga’s (and even Saint Paul’s, contradicting for example Romans 1:18-32):

[I]n cases where some people are not ready to handle divine self-manifestation in a cooperative manner, God would withhold self-manifestation for their benefit. This would be a kind of redemptive divine hiding, and it would falsify the view that occurrent evidence for God’s reality is uniformly possessed by all people or always possessed by all people.

In other words, you don’t experience God’s presence because you aren’t worthy, aren’t “ready.” That’s why God has to “hide” all the evidence he exists. Those who are ready, the “chosen,” get to experience God directly, and that’s all the evidence they need to believe God exists. Or so Moser argues.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t have any merit epistemically or morally. It is not true in any other case, when someone’s improvement or safety depends on information, that we should “hide” that information from them merely because they might abuse, mock, or ignore it. There is therefore no rational case to be made that a moral or concerned God should behave in such an irresponsible way. Information is causal. You cannot act on information you do not have. And you cannot expect anyone to change their belief or behavior if they are never given the requisite information to do so. Whereas, by contrast, the absence of information is a causally compelling reason to disbelieve in God, producing exactly the opposite effect than such a God would have to intend. It’s therefore morally and epistemically irresponsible of any God to act that way.

It is equally irresponsible of God to design anyone’s mind or brain so as not to be causally affected by information in a rational way—the only kind of person who would not be moved to believe in God by actually good evidence, and thus the only kind of person who would not be “worthy” in Moser’s conception. Which means God is morally responsible for having rendered such people mentally incompetent. God would therefore be obligated by his own moral values to fix such people so they will be competent, and thus rationally respond to evidence—not punish with his negligence the very people whose “brain damage” he himself caused. Moser’s position thus can make no rational sense of the world or his own God.

Indeed, Moser’s rationalization doesn’t actually generate warranted belief even for those who purport to be chosen. “I feel God in my heart” is widely and demonstrably not a valid basis for believing that the felt god is real. The evidence quite clearly supports the opposite conclusion. So Moser has neither a rational defense of the absence of evidence for God, nor any rational evidence for God to offer us. Theism is pretty much done in, if that’s all he has, which is nil.

Moser’s chapter is mostly a bunch of theistic rigmarole, jargon with very little substance or even self-defeating substance. For example, we’re told:

If, by divine title, God is worthy of worship, then God would be inherently perfectly good, and thus the self-presentation of God’s personal character would include the self-manifestation of God’s perfectly good moral character. In using the term “God” as such a perfectionist title, we give it normative value without assuming that God exists. So we avoid begging a key question against people doubtful of God’s existence.

At no point is this “theistic eliminativism” corrected in Moser’s entry by reintroducing any evidence for any attributes that would make this God real. He just insists this God would be real. Somehow. In some sense. He never says. Moser could thus be accused of disguising in jargon what is essentially the claim that God is merely an idea we have in our heads regarding what is morally perfect—an idea that emotionally affects us, changes by time and culture, and bears no demonstrable relation to anything external to us (other than in artifacts of human culture). He is thus all but redefining God as “each individual’s own cultivated and enculturated moral conscience.” Not a superhuman being, not the Creator, not even a person.

Most theists would be horrified. Moser only escapes being convicted of being an atheist pretending at being a theist by just asserting he’s not. But whether atheist or theist, he’s still just circularly presuming one single moral standard (some modern reinterpretation of the mythical “Abrahamic” morality) in order to prove the superiority (and hence “divinity”) of that standard…by reference to that same standard! A vicious circle more worthy of a Medieval scholastic than a 21st century intellectual. This is just atrocious philosophy. It’s an arbitrary cultural imperialism substituted for divine command theory, and as such suffers all the same defects.

At best Moser tries to maintain some notion of God that is more than mere human conscience by purporting to offer a better explanation than neuroscience and psychology and anthropology and sociology already have for why people experience a moral conscience. Because he reduces evidence for God to the question, when confronted with the phenomena of a moral conscience, “Why am I now having this experience, rather than no experience at all or some other experience?” But other than insisting God is “a superhuman agent” external to the human mind (but never saying what its properties are or how moral emotions ever evince them), Moser never says what the difference would even be between the answer to his question being “God” and the answer being “cultural and other learned self-evaluators encoded in the various well-documented moral reasoning circuits of the brain.” All evidence points to the latter. None to any external supernatural force.

Like all bad philosophers, Moser is writing about a well-studied subfield of science that crosses multiple disciplines that have amassed a great deal of knowledge about human moral reasoning and its origin, phenomenology, and development, and yet he clearly did not study any of it and knows nothing whatever of the established science of the subject. Since science is just philosophy with good data, shit philosophy is doing philosophy in complete ignorance of the relevant science. Moser is basically offering a new scientific theory to explain some phenomena of human experience, and not only doing no science whatever to test his theory, he ignores all the science already refuting his theory.

This is revealed when Moser naively thinks “skeptics will suggest that my present experience of being morally convicted in conscience could be just a dream or an illusion.” No. No one says that. Read the science. It is neither dream nor illusion. It’s emotional reasoning. It’s information processing involving multiple areas of the brain, partly inborn and partly molded by enculturation and experience, mostly during child development, but also through later encounters with new ways of thinking and the causal effects of increased self-reflective reasoning. It can be improved and perfected. But no God has ever helped with that. Humans have always been left to do it on their own. And we don’t say this “could be” the case. We are saying it probably is the case, because all the scientific evidence supports no other conclusion. Science already refuted Moser’s God decades ago; science that Moser completely ignores and knows nothing about. (See The Real Basis of a Moral World.)

This irrational defense of theism is key to unlocking the whole truth revealed by this book: when it comes to theism, it’s all irrational, all uninformed, all the way down.

Hasan & Carrier’s Doxastic Position

Without even having seen Moser’s chapter, ex-Muslim professor of philosophy Ali Hasan already nails the point from the start:

[Our] main argument is that any justification we might have for theism is defeated by evidence available to us, especially evidence of the unreliability of religious belief-forming practices. This defeats the rationality of not only traditional monotheism but any specific religious doctrine or specific belief in supernatural or divine reality.

He’s right. Theism is only “defensible” when you leave evidence out; put that omitted evidence back in, and theism is always refuted, no matter what argument for God you put forward. This is true of Moser’s psychological theory of moral conscience: put all that science has found out about that back in, and his theory is not merely reduced to a competing possibility, it’s outright refuted, being reduced to an absurd improbability—like Young Earth Creationism and all other pseudoscientific nonsense Christians put forward, including Moser’s “a magical space wizard causes my emotional experiences.”

But more importantly, Hasan’s second point is the more telling: it is not merely that evidence refutes every argument for theism; it’s the fact that the very methods theists use to justify theism are always irrational that demonstrates theism is probably false. Because true beliefs don’t require irrational defenses. But more to the point, irrational defenses can never produce true beliefs (except by unrecognizable accident—which is why, being unrecognizable, accidental knowledge can never produce warranted belief). That makes theism inherently irrational.

We see this glaringly in Moser’s case when he thinks his own armchair ruminations about his own emotions can produce reliable scientific knowledge about human psychology and sociology. His method is inherently irrational. Human beings invented science precisely because that methodology, the very methodology science replaced, was inherently irrational. And here we are, in the 21st century, watching a theist base his beliefs on it!

Hasan valuably surveys rational epistemologies, and then also “reformed epistemology,” pointing out how it is itself irrational, but also dismissing it in the end as irrelevant even if it were rational, because it is still subject to defeaters, which exist aplenty, and therefore it still cannot rescue belief in God. “Reformed epistemology” in practice simply becomes an irrational excuse to ignore all the evidence against the existence of God. It is thus “irrational theism” par excellence. Hence the fact that “reformed epistemology” is even needed already convicts theism of being irrational.

Hasan focuses on the example of religious diversity (particularly as it refutes reliance on reformed epistemology to justify any belief), and the fact that the “sources of knowledge” theists claim for God (like intuition) are unreliable. I then take up the mantle with a major second example of that latter point: the Argument from Scripture. My section is titled “Does the Testimony of Sacred Scriptures from the Religions of the World Favor (Mono)theism or Atheism?” (pp. 127-34).

I survey the matter from many angles, including a section on how scriptures always fail every test of reliability (and thus no real “Scriptures” even exist to cite as evidence); a section on how all defenses of scripture are irrational (e.g. no miraculous prophecies have been verified; no claims to miraculous scientific knowledge in scripture are true); a section on the scientific explanations of how people come to believe “scriptural authority” can be a reliable source of knowledge when obviously it is not; and a closing section on hermeneutics, in which I compare various Christian and Muslim and other hermeneutic traditions to demonstrate they are merely just doing human literary analysis, often poor or irrational or ahistorical analysis at that, which cannot rescue any “Scriptures” as divine. I even use my own past conversion story and devout faith in Taoism and Taoist scriptures as an example of all these points, just as Hasan used his previous experience with Islam.

In the end my conclusion is in accord with plain observation:

[E]very religion claims a completely different set of communications, and none can demonstrate any better access to the truth of the matter than any other. All contain the same errors and ignorance possessed by the authors when they wrote them. None contains any superhuman knowledge.

And:

This conclusion holds not only for all known scriptures but for all other special sources of knowledge claimed for theism. By contrast, secular methods of advancing and improving human knowledge (such as science, mathematics, logic, rational-empirical history, criminal forensics and jurisprudence, and evidential and analytical philosophy) have all proven themselves more objectively reliable than any competing alternatives, and have made continual and considerable progress in helping and mastering both ourselves and the world. Theism therefore has no epistemic footing capable of adding to or challenging the knowledge gained by these other methods. And that fact is itself evidence against theism.

Lebens vs. Shook on Religious Experience

Our section is then followed by competing sections on Religious Experience, which relate to everything discussed on both sides of our issue. But the theist section on that by Samuel Lebens of the University of Haifa in Israel (which is really just an extended attempt to critique Schellenberg’s renowned defense of the Argument from Divine Hiddenness) is historically and scientifically ignorant, and bases its every essential conclusion on premises dependent on that ignorance. Once again, defending theism by leaving evidence out. Hence theism is irrational.

For example, Lebens seriously argues that theistic experience achieves intersubjective agreement, and thus is as reliable as all other forms of experience (such as of the existence of a book I am holding; his actual example), because “Most God-experiences, in present times, are of a monotheistic God.” This is astonishingly laughable for two reasons:

  • It is already an equivocation fallacy producing a fallacy of false analogy: the word “most” in that sentence approaches nowhere near the same frequency with respect to “my holding a book in my hand” upon which the reliability of the latter kind of experience is established, and thus the analogy isn’t even statistically valid. There are still so many polytheistic religious experiences even today as to void the reliability of “experiencing gods” as a source of information.
  • But even apart from that obvious fallacy (and fallacious arguments are already by definition irrational), his premise is historically ignorant: that most experiences today are monotheistic is only because most religions widely practiced today are monotheistic (or henotheistic or equivalent); but that is a very recent cultural phenomenon in human history. For most of human history, which spans over six thousand years (and probably most of human existence, which spans over a hundred thousand years), this was not the case and most religious experiences were polytheistic. Which refutes Lebens’s entire premise. The evidence, the actual evidence, evinces cultural change, not the reliability of “religious experience” as a source of knowledge. To the contrary, human history refutes that conclusion.

Thus we see Lebens defending theism with irrationality: fallacious reasoning and empirical ignorance. It’s even a double fallacy here, of course, as he goes on to dismiss the fact that all these monotheistic religious experiences also wildly differ from each other in nontrivial ways, and match extant cultural assumptions rather than any supernatural access to new information, which is not only itself evidence against theism, but which in fact convicts the entire process as unreliable, placing it more akin to cultural, sensory, or cognitive illusions than any trustworthy access to reality. We have no reason to trust this stuff and every reason to distrust it.

Lebens’s whole chapter, which is full of similar illogicalities and failures to include dispositive evidence, is thus itself evidence that theism is irrational. By contrast, the competing section by John Shook of Bowie State University, is scientifically informed and logically coherent, and even very generous and fair to theism’s side on the issue. Nevertheless, Shook rightly concludes:

[A]ll these people [having religious experiences, i.e. REs] cannot all be entirely correct, unless humanity has encountered innumerable gods (the polytheism problem), or REs are hosting gods entirely within experience (the subjectivism problem). Theism must reject both destinations. Therefore, a…theologian must…claim, ‘Many people have what they think are direct REs with seemingly self-verifying features, but most of them are mistaken about what their REs are like’. [But t]his is simply another unjustified claim.

In the end, scientific explanations of religious experience simply work better, by explaining more things with fewer assumptions, than any theism can. It is therefore irrational to prefer any theism’s explanation, any more in the matter of religious experience than in the history of the earth or the prospect of a disembodied soul, or any other matter where religion attempts to contradict science, without any scientific evidence with which to do so.

To read further on these matters, I recommend you get ahold of a copy of this tome and read our articles in full, and follow up through our bibliographies. Next I’ll discuss the section I contributed to on miracles. But the general take-away here that will continue to appear again and again as I continue this series: theism is irrational. And we know it’s irrational because it can only be maintained through irrational methods, most particularly that of omitting evidence and relying on fallacies of reason.

Continue on to Part 2

Discover more from Richard Carrier Blogs

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading