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
A small typo (causally):
“the absence of information is a casually compelling reason to disbelieve in God”
Thanks! Fixed.
Rational, informed, and powerful.
Any discussion of mysticism?
Some. But scattered and thin and mostly dismissive (even from the theists). No dedicated chapter.
I think you may be being a bit uncharitable to Lebens.
Let’s grant that human knowledge tends to converge, over time and on average, on the truth. I think by and large that’s a proposition you and I would both accept. Even if quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, evolution, etc. were wrong and we actually lived in some creationist universe, we would still actually know more even by virtue of having created these (now counter-factual) models of reality. Even if just by blind luck and trial-and-error, the more data we have, the more likely we can find a fit.
Let’s further say that there’s a God but that that God is somehow inscrutable. (Obviously this is the problem with Lebens’ reasoning, that no theist god has a reason to be inscrutable).
Then it would make sense that, over time, there would be convergence on god attributes. The fact that people were polytheist or animist in the past is moot, just as the fact that most people in the past accepted the flat earth and it took education to understand why the Earth is round is moot. Today, people are increasingly monotheist compared to the past, which would (under this argument) be evidence of monotheism: as we eliminate superstition and error, this picture emerges. Moreover, one can argue that the picture of the god as this kind of transcendent thing continues to converge.
Of course, I’m guessing Lebens doesn’t concede that there’s other ways of explaining the same data that are at the very least more parsimonious and in reality match the data better: that the apparent convergence of God theories is due to factors such as colonialism, forced conversion, and the increasingly small space within which a God can operate and the increasing vastness of the universe both of which make a bearded guy in the sky or just outside the solar system seem childishly irrational. In other words, God theories are getting more similar because the gerrymandering it takes to beat objections can by necessity only go so many directions. Lebens would have to exclude that explanation. Since that approach explains the actual variance we see on the ground, it’s not a surprise that he (seemingly) doesn’t.
The convergence argument only works when a rational method is involved and multiple methods converge on the same conclusion. Otherwise all we observe is convergent cultural evolution, not convergent discovery of reality. But in the monotheism case we don’t even have that.
There has only ever been one monotheism really (apart from a few failed examples), Judaism, which evolved into Christianity, which evolved into Islam, so it’s all just one religion, not several that were arrived at independently; and Judaism has been explicitly cultural (if you aren’t born a Jew, you almost certainly won’t experience the Jewish God, which tells us this is a cultural phenomenon and not access to objective reality).
Unless you wish to insist that Islam is the truest religion, as it has been what the sequence was converging on (it is the “most advanced” religion by your analogy), the very existence of Christianity and Islam prove monotheism has not been accessed by any objective perception but merely cultural evolution and in their case imperialism (military and economic) which has spread those faiths and destroyed and displaced others. Not by rational converging methods. But by irrational, diverging methods and the employment of coercion and economic and military dominance.
The continued existence of Hindu and other traditional polytheisms only further proves this point. So there is no rational basis for saying “the world has been conquered by a singular and highly diverging monotheism, therefore monotheism is more likely true.” It bears no analogy to any progress in scientific or technological or historical knowledge. And so can borrow no glory from them.
Agreed, by and large. I just think one can steelman the argument to try to make a (false) analogy to the convergence onto scientific ideas.
I think Hinduism complicates the matter slightly, since one can characterize various strands of Hinduism as pantheistic or henotheistic rather than polytheistic (Brahman incorporating lesser gods etc.) Of course, even that a) ignores the reality that colonialism and cultural exchange with Islam has led to impacts on Hinduism and b) requires an interpretation of Hinduism that ignores that it’s a complicated religion that has changed massively over time. And even if one grants all that ground to the theist, that still confirms your point: the two ostensibly monotheistic traditions in the world are vastly different, with one being “monotheistic” only if one ignores the difference between an all-encompassing deity with lesser deities below them and an all-encompassing deity that may or may not have lesser servitor angels, and with very little in common in any other area of their cosmologies.
Of course, if we’re being that generous, a counter-argument would be to point to, say, Afro-Caribbean syncretic faiths, many of which bring back animistic and polytheistic elements alongside monotheistic ones. Those faiths are much more recent (with Rastafarianism being less than two hundred years old), so should we accept that they had it the most right? And, of course, if there is a convergence of thought, then the increasing ascendancy of the nones and of atheists and agnostics would be a strong argument that that is actually the truth, since they’re on the leading edge of being informed and critical about religion.
As for Islam being “the most advanced religion”: I think the argument would be less that the most recent idea is correct as it would be that the most advanced idea is correct, so to speak. That is, maybe Islam’s strands of thought that had God as being even more abstract were correct, and then after European colonialism had the best of Islamic thought they could in turn acquire an even-more advanced understanding of God. Just like science, then, religious development wouldn’t be about the recency of the idea (otherwise we would embrace quantum panpsychism, phrenology, etc.), but rather its degree of development… which, as you correctly note, then requires us to ask about rational methods.
And that all points to another ugly part of this argument: it’s deeply colonialist. Lebens is, even after being incredibly charitable to him, pretending that we can think of cultural change in a unidirectional progressive fashion and just ignore the way that historical happenstance and outright violence dictated the debate. Christianity and Islam didn’t gain their quantity of adherents because of a free exchange of ideas. They gained them, to a large degree, by force and economic pressure. And even today, religions do a lot to prevent their ideas from being discussed and challenged. What would have happened if, instead, no gods were ever foisted onto people through conquest and all religious ideas were debated publicly? I don’t think even Lebens could reasonably argue that theism would be the clear victor.
The only data you offered for whether an idea was advanced, was whether it was recent. Do you see the problem here?
You can’t escape “Islam is the most advanced religion” unless you come up with some way to tell which religions are getting closer to the truth. Which you have no noncircular argument for. You can’t use “most recent.” And you can’t use any other biased or circular presumption. So what you get is nothing; no reason to believe recent cultural evolution has any connection to external reality.
That’s why this line of argumentation is irrational.
And indeed, as you conclude, Lebens is basically covertly using imperialism as an argument for theism: because the most successful empires were infected with the same monotheistic religion (just different sects thereof) and thus spread their cultural presumptions farthest, we are supposed to conclude that therefore those cultural presumptions are more likely “true.” When that’s a non sequitur. Even if one were to try and argue something like “monotheism as an idea makes a culture more successful at deploying imperialism as a dominance strategy,” you still don’t get “monotheism is true.” All you get is “the idea of monotheism is useful for imperialists.”
I can’t speak for Lebens, and one of the problems with the entire argument is that no one proposes a methodology for how you can sort false spiritual claims from true ones, but I would guess that Lebens would argue that a monotheistic spirituality is more advanced as it more accurately understands the universe and the attribute of God, not when it’s more recent. One would presume that would mean a more nuanced, philosophically rooted analysis. It’s only on average that truth will converge. (Moreover, I think there may be a reification problem in saying that “Islam” is more recent. Yes, obviously true, but “Islam” isn’t one thing nor is Christianity. If one removes that assumption, then the most recent edition of Christianity or Judaism or whatever could be the most advanced. Or, heck, maybe Sufism or some other ostensibly more enlightened approach in Islam; or maybe Sikhism, given that it’s a syncretic faith that seems even more pantheist).
The problem comes back to the intersection of epistemology and truth. We can tell when scientific theories are getting better not only by greater predictive accuracy and greater concordance with what seems to be the real world but also greater parsimony, better metaphysical grounding, etc. etc. We explain more of the world better. Lebens’ argument would predict that more advanced spirituality would have the same kind of improvements. But Lebens doesn’t have any metric aside from increasing intersubjective agreement. It’s particularly funny that that’s almost a postmodern stance, that truth is in effect constructed out of intersubjectivity.
The reason that Lebens’ argument makes some sense to me, even as it’s a terrible argument for the existence of God, is that I do see that, over time, religions do seem to converge on responses to critics. You yourself note how much more sophisticated Christian apologetics are. But that’s just a sense of an increasingly gerrymandered God and religion. The better explanation for Lebens’ observed phenomena, and I’m curious if he even tries to respond to this, is that there are of course only so many excuses you can use to maintain a supernatural worldview, so it’s no surprise that over time people either adopt similar excuses or just give up on being rational.
That’s a circular argument. It presumes without basis that the criteria for “advanced” happen to be the same criteria that define monotheism. “Monotheism is more advanced because any theology approaching monotheism is more advanced.” That’s not rational.
It’s also not the argument Lebens made.
“Religions converge in their apologetics” also does not argue for any religions being true. To the contrary all it demonstrates is that logic always corners people in the same place. People have cornered themselves in monotheism now solely because of imperialism (no one will have their back if they retreat to polytheism; social pressure, not epistemic facts, are thus deciding the positions people are taking).
By analogy, the various versions of Judaism that have spread across the planet now (including Christianity and Islam) are converging slowly on old earth creationism because young earth creationism is increasingly indefensible; but this is only possible because social support arises for the move, making it possible. In no way does this mean old earth creationism is true or even one whit more probable. All it means is that’s where the social space allows believers to run.
Convergence is only epistemically valid as a criterion when multiple different methods converge on a common conclusion (and do so in a logically valid way, so as not to be subject to social manipulation). Not when different peoples under common cultural influence start to share common cultural beliefs. The latter is never a reliable indicator of reality. Quite the reverse in fact.
This is seen again and again in many other areas of presumed folk knowledge, such as worldwide racist and sexist ideologies, which converge due to cultural diffusion on the same false beliefs about races and genders and sexes, yet are actually diverging from factual reality with respect to all three.
Another example is anti-semitism, which embraces the same lore and conspiracy theories regardless of background, e.g. Muslim, atheist, Christian, socialist, capitalist, they all converge on the same false beliefs about Jews. This occurs only in social systems that “have their back” (hence they must congregate with like-minded bigots; the wider society is rejecting them), but that’s exactly the same model as monotheism, where the wider society has the monotheist’s back, and thus allows monotheist “escape routes” from criticism (but not polytheist ones). Not too long ago, anti-semitism enjoyed the same widespread social support (with catastrophic consequences). Likewise racism and sexism. Eventually the same will happen to monotheism (e.g. with the rise of atheism in Western countries, an effect now even starting to occur in the U.S.). It will be increasingly abandoned and marginalized. This pattern in no way argues for monotheism being true.
Why is it that people can’t rationalize in their minds that it’s not possible to rise from the dead and float off to heaven? And that a god doesn’t talk to you from a burning bush and carve out commandments on a stone tablet for you. That donkeys don’t talk. And with all the miseries of the world why would anyone think that “God is great all the time.” Ad infinitum. It seems to me nonsense of that sort would be all anyone needs to know to poo-poo the bible and theism. That’s the realization I came to long ago.
The thing that trips people up is that these things are not literally impossible, just extraordinarily improbable. And the human brain is built with a cognitive bias that has a hard time distinguishing between “possible” and “probable,” particularly as it uses proxy criteria to raise an idea from one to the other, e.g. if a respected authority says X is true, then X “feels” probable in a way it didn’t before, simply because X being “possible” feels close to probable, and all one needed was some “evidence” to put it over the bar, and our brains just did not evolve naturally good ideas of what actually counts as evidence or how to properly weigh evidence. Likewise (and this is today the more common) when one “needs” X to be true, the same effect happens, the possible starts to feel probable again. And so on.
It actually takes very difficult critical thinking skills installed as a “software patch” to correct for these naturally inborn errors of judgment. Most people are never taught those skills, are often even taught to be afraid of those skills, and even those who do have the skills, are disinclined to use them when the results may be uncomfortable or “dangerous” (e.g. resulting in social conflict and ostracization, confronting one’s own failures and inadequacies as a reasoner which no one likes to think of themselves, and so on).
The existence of god hinges on a mere logical possibility, nothing more. That’s literally all theists have. They can’t base the existence of god on statistical probability, otherwise they would have nothing to defend.
One of the best ways, for street epistemologists anyway, to refute theism is to point out logical possibility is not the same thing as statistical probability. Explain to them why this is so. This also defeats agnosticism btw, since there are no highly probable arguments for god. The only real option for rational well-informed agents is atheism.
Mario, that there “are no highly probable arguments for god” is a positive claim that you bear the burden of evidence to prove. Which hopefully is a burden you’ve already met and this is the only reason the burden now lays on theists. This is what I am saying. Stop ignoring what I am saying.
Where is this coming from? I’m not ignoring what you’re saying. As a matter of fact, I agree.
Dr. Carrier says: “these things are not literally impossible”
I’m wondering how you mean this to the examples I listed. “it’s not possible to rise from the dead and float off to heaven” How is that not impossible? I know that you say with Bayesian reasoning that nothing is 100% impossible (hope I’m saying that right). So is that what you’re referring to with this and the other examples I listed? Thanks.
I don’t think you understand what the word “impossible” means. Or else you have a defective epistemology that assumes you are omniscient and infallible. Either way, you need to catch up here. Read my article How Not to Be a Doofus. It’s obviously not directed at you, but does address the errors you seem to be making about how epistemic probability works, and how fallibility in knowledge must be accounted for.
If something is not literally logically impossible, there is always a nonzero probability it’s true. Because there is always a nonzero probability you are mistaken or have been misled about your premises. That nonzero probability can be absurdly small. And with the examples you list, surely is. But it can never be zero. Thus such things can never literally be impossible. They can only be impossible in a loose, figurative sense, in which they are actually possible but so improbable we can go about reaching conclusions as if they were impossible.
P.S. And BTW, to be clear, that’s simply at the level of epistemic knowledge. Before we even get to physics (whose truth is always just a matter of probability and thus always has a nonzero probability of being false), and yet even in physics, resurrection and floating into space literally have a nonzero probability of occurring even on current physics owing to quantum mechanical uncertainty. The probability is just absurdly small. So we reject it not because it’s impossible even on current physics, but because it’s not probable enough to believe.
That nonzero probability is then increased by the probability we are even wrong about the physics: e.g. it may be that superbeings and magic and so on really do exist; it may be that advanced technological aliens are actually in orbit and did these things; it may be that Jesus received CPR and used a hot air balloon; and so on—every one of which has a small nonzero probability that adds to the others for the total nonzero probability such things really happened, which sum probability is surely still absurdly small, but still not zero, and larger than the probability of any single one of them.
Dr. Carrier, for two days I have attempted to increase my donation to your Patreon account without success. Patreon offers no viable solution to assist access to my Patreon account. Is there another way I can make donations to you for each blog posting? Thank you for considering my request. Tom Staly
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Hi, Dr. Carrier. I have a question about theism and rationality. You’ve made it very clear that you don’t think theism is rational. I’m pretty sure I’d agree. But interestingly enough, there are quite a lot of atheists that disagree. For example, Cosmic Skeptic. And another by the name of Counter Apologist.
Here’s a quote from the latter for context:
And so, he thinks theism can be rational, even if he doesn’t agree with it. Cosmic Skeptic has said something similar in his video about what he thinks atheists should stop saying.
My 1st question is: where do you think atheists like this are going wrong, if at all? When we say that theism is rational or irrational, what does that actually mean?
My 2nd (and very related) question is: in your view, what does it actually mean for a person to be rationally justified in believing something?
I can’t speak to anything either fellow has said. One single quote isn’t enough to judge from, and what you quote doesn’t actually say what you are saying anyway (maybe it does when read in context?). So all I can speak to is what you just said here.
I think there is a confusion you are making between what is possible, and what is actual. It’s certainly possible for someone to have ended up in a situation where they rationally believe something false. Imagine someone raised on a cult compound from birth with no access to the internet or any outside information. But this simply doesn’t describe hardly anyone in actual reality.
Moreover, your quote makes no mention of god or “belief in god” tout court. It closes simply with reference to “persons acceptance of an argument I find unsound.” Note: “an” argument (not an entire basis for belief, just a single argument) and “unsound” (a word that can mean either an argument that is valid but unsound, or an argument that is both invalid and unsound).
So, as stated, obviously, lots of people might believe “one” argument whose structure is logically valid but whose premises are false (or not established), and that would be rational if (a) their false belief in those premises were (somehow) also rationally formed and (b) it was logically validly the case that that one argument defeated all opposing arguments for the resulting belief. It’s just in actual reality, the conjunction of (a) and (b) almost never happens. So why talk about it?
In reality, almost all believers in God are so because of entirely the opposite reasons: they depend on fallacious, not valid, arguments (which is irrational by definition); and even what valid arguments they may yet still include, still depend on premises only believed in for (again) fallacious (ergo, irrational) reasons. So in actual practice, almost all theists are irrational. What’s “possible” is irrelevant at that point.
See Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof and Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed.
Or for specific examples: the fact that all best-selling defenses of God are demonstrably irrational, verifies that most theism is irrational (as otherwise they wouldn’t be best-selling), hence see Timothy Keller: Dishonest Reasons for God and Plantinga’s ‘Two Dozen or So’ Arguments for God and so on.
Thanks for the reply, Dr. Carrier. You’re right that I should have provided more context for the quote, but I just want to clarify that it was in the context of the atheist/theist debate.
While I do think that the point about best-selling books is a good point, I do have some reservations about it given that a lot of best-selling atheist books are far from high quality themselves. The God Delusion would be a prime example, although I suppose that one could argue that books like that are the exception? There are of course atheist books that are quite successful and also rather good, like John Loftus’ various anthologies that you’ve contributed to, but I worry that you and I saying things like that might possibly be the result of in-group bias (although I don’t think it is). Just my two-cents.
Just to clarify, your take is that theists are irrational because theism is irrational, which itself is irrational because the arguments it relies on are either invalid or contain false/unproven premises?
I take it that this means any belief in a similar situation would also be irrational. And an irrational person simply means a person who has irrational beliefs?
Hope I’ve understood. And if you’re wondering why I’m asking these questions, I just thought it would be useful since in the Great Debate and in life in general, we typically use this kind of language A LOT, so I just thought it would be useful to actually clarify what we mean by these things.
I think you are applying different standards of quality here. The God Delusion suffers only from being overly simplistic, not for lying or fundamentally fallacious or factless reasoning. Thus what I am talking about in best-selling Christian apologetics books is not present in best-selling atheist books. So the analogy does not hold.
Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s true anyway that atheists are uniformly more rational than theists. They can be just as prone to irrational belief-forming and worldview-building. Just peruse Dawkins’ social media account. Escaping religion is simply escaping one false belief system. That does not require, and thus does not entail, having a comprehensively sound epistemology. Whereas having a comprehensively sound epistemology, does entail atheism (Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof and Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them).
As to the distinction between when a person is irrational and when a belief is: all people probably have some irrational beliefs. What makes a person characteristically irrational, and thus “an irrational person,” is when their entire core belief system is irrational, and they have been exposed to enough information revealing that fact, such that the only remaining explanation for why they maintain that belief-system is their irrationality.
Irrational people are also characterized by being immune to evidence and reason, i.e. they don’t change beliefs no matter what evidence is presented them. This is not peculiar to theists; but there are few theists who are actually characteristically rational (and those few are all far on the liberal side of theology), whereas this is more common a state among atheists (since rationality entails atheism; it just doesn’t work the other way around, i.e. atheism does not entail rationality).
Of course most people are apatheists, they simply haven’t examined and aren’t all that interested in whether there really is a god or any particular religion is true, so we can’t assess their rationality by their position on religion. All we can talk about in that dimension are theists who are presented ample evidence their core worldview is false and yet reject it; only irrationality, not ignorance, can explain that.
Fair enough. Looking forward to the next post. Thanks.
Although, on the point about being characteristically irrational: would that make someone like William Lane Craig characteristically irrational under your definition? His core belief system (theism) is irrational, and being a philosopher and renowned apologist who’s been in countless debates and engaged with plenty of atheist push-back and correction, one could argue that he has been exposed to enough information revealing the fact that his beliefs are irrational. So, what exactly would that make him? I personally struggle to call WLC an irrational person, even though I think he’s being irrational on the issue of theism and other related issues.
Though, you said that it had to be one’s ENTIRE core belief system, so maybe it wouldn’t apply to him since it’s not his whole belief system that’s flawed, only a sizable portion. What do you think?
Since William Lane Craig lies so frequently, it is not possible to ascertain the real reason he does or believes or says anything he does, or even what he really believes (vs. what he wants people to think he believes). So his rationality is not ultimately assessable.
Although I should add, it sounds like you are confusing being smart or clever, with being rational. Those aren’t the same thing.
Really, really smart and clever people can be pervasively irrational; indeed, it’s easier to be irrational if you are, because the smarter and cleverer you are, the easier it is for you to rationalize irrational things.
Rationality refers specifically to the consistency with which one avoids fallacious reasoning in one’s core reasoning. The more one does that, the more rational a person they are. By this metric, none of Craig’s apologetics is rational, because it all relies on a persistent use of fallacious reasoning. He’s just smart enough to bury every fallacy somewhere hard to find, like a shell game.
For example, he Kalam is strictly valid, but unsound because it depends on bogus premises; Craig thus can bury the fallacies in the non-syllogistic word salads by which he arrives at those premises. And so he does. But I suspect he is well aware of this fact; his pervasive dishonesty establishes he has some other motive in this game than presenting rational arguments for anything. And he may have a rational reason for doing that, or not. Who knows? He’ll never say. Like any competent Plato’s Guardian, he’ll never even admit to doing it, much less tell us why.
Hi, Dr. Carrier. Just watched an interesting debate about the Argument from Divine Hiddenness between Justin Schieber (atheist) and Blake Giunta (Christian). For what it’s worth, I think Giunta is one of the better (or at least more honest) apologists out there, and I found his objections to the ADH were considerably better than the usual objections that are put forth (nonsense like “evidence is coercive” or “there’s no such thing as non-resistant nonbelievers”).
To summarise, he had about 14 different objections to the ADH, but he conveniently organised them into 5 categories. For your convenience, I’ll briefly outline the first 3 (and ask about the other two some other time). In short, in Giunta’s view, God wants to form and maintain proper relationships with people. Even if God were to reveal himself to people, there are those who he knows will not maintain a proper relationship with him, and so he doesn’t reveal himself. Such people fall into one of three categories.
Category 1: Some nonbelievers, while not resistant to belief in God, are nevertheless resistant to a relationship with him (if they became theists, they may even become enemies of God, for example). In his foreknowledge, he would know that such people would immediately reject a relationship with him.
Category 2: Some nonbelievers, if they became believers in their current states, would form perpetually improper relationships with God. For example, they may never believe in or trust in God’s perfect goodness or moral judgements. Or they could become jealous of God. Or they could start to consider themselves an authority instead of or equal to God. Or they might simply obey him for selfish reasons, etc.
Category 3: Some nonbelievers may form proper relationships but then abandon it later in life, which God wouldn’t want as this would be analogous to a divorce (Giunta analogises the relationship between God and the believer as being similar to marriage).
Just wondering how you’d respond to this (IMO) steelmanned critique of the ADH. I bring this up because to my knowledge, you’re a fan of the ADH like I am, and you’ve used it in past books and articles. Hopefully this post is relevant enough.
In case you need it, here’s the link to the podcast of the debate/discussion on Unbelievable:
https://youtu.be/dEi8ciadhR8
This doesn’t explain why he doesn’t warn people (children especially) when they are about to be maimed, raped, or killed. Or why he doesn’t answer crucially important questions when asked, like whether it’s okay to be gay or whether states should legislate Christian beliefs, or which sect of which religion holds correct beliefs. Or why he tells Muslims different things than Mormons or Hindus. Or why he didn’t tell anyone about the proper morals or path to salvation for tens of thousands of years, until whenever he is supposed to have changed his mind about that (Sinai? Galilee? Mecca? Why no word to India? China? Japan? Australia? Mesoamerica? The Iroquois Nations?).
And so on.
Divine hiddenness is a pervasive and serious moral issue that can’t be answered with droll nonsense about God wanting to manage personal relationships. As excuses go, that’s actually insulting to all of humanity throughout history. And completely ignores the actual problem of divine hiddenness.
That’s even before we get to this being a possibiliter fallacy. Guinta doesn’t know any of this is true. He is just making it up to explain away the evidence. Without evidence that his beliefs and assertions about God’s thoughts, intentions, and behavior are true, his excuse actually reduces, it does not increase, the probability God exists. Because it adds more ad hoc suppositions for which there is no evidence; going the opposite direction of Ockham’s Razor.
By analogy, suppose I insisted no murderer is ever guilty, and all are unjustly incarcerated. And I argued this by saying that it just so happens that a God exists who arranges all of them to be framed—that God has this specific motive, and conveniently gerrymanders the evidence every single time to suit exactly the expectation of my hypothesis. Have I made my hypothesis more likely, or less likely, by positing things about the existence and motives of a God?
So Giunta’s argument fails both logically (it can’t even get the result he wants, because it’s made-up, not something he can show to be true), and in addressing any of the evidence (it ignores basically everything about divine hiddenness that renders a God’s existence improbable). This is typical of Christian apologetics: leave all pertinent evidence out, and then replace all arguments to probability with arguments to mere possibility.
If you wanted to beat this dead horse further, one could even point out that his psychology is wrong. It is literally impossible to form correct relationships with any person without correct information about and from that person. No information, warrants no beliefs. Which makes Giunta’s argument actually an argument for atheism: we should believe God does not exist, because according to Giunta, God wants us not to.
Of course, one might say that, according to Giunta, Islamofascists are correct to believe as they do, because God wants them to believe that too. After all, he isn’t correcting them by any means, and their inner belief is based on the same kind of information any other believer has. But atheists have objective evidence on their side, unlike Islamofascists and every other theist. Which God also has to be responsible for. So if God wants us to be evidence-based reasoners, he’s actually saying we should all be atheists, and that anyone who isn’t is the one God has selected for damnation precisely for their failure to think reliably. He is culling the herd by wiping out the dupes.
That this looks exactly like a Cartesian Demon (God has intentionally gerrymandered the world to look exactly like a world with no God in it) is grounds to doubt the hypothesis altogether. Because then the epistemic and ontological odds far favor the reason the world looks godless being that it is; far far over the vastly more elaborate hypothesis that it both looks like a godless universe and has a god in it. As the saying goes, “we have no need of that hypothesis.”