Yesterday I asked YouTube what the “best argument for God” was; and I limited the results to those published within the last twelve months, and ranked them by view-counts (looking for the most viewed and thus most influential and thus most crucial to debunk). I skipped the ads and got a lot of impertinent hits, of course, but topping the real list was The BEST Argument for the Existence of God, a YouTube short posted by Ben Shapiro of his answer to that very question from an event Q&A he did a few years ago—so, evidently, even Ben thinks this is the best he’s got, even after years of it supposedly getting vetted by criticism (as any competent thinker would ensure before being this confident in it, given The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking). The Internet agrees, apparently: it has achieved in under twelve months almost six million views and 290,000 “likes” (YouTube Shorts doesn’t show the dislike count to the public).
This was immediately destroyed on Rationality Rules, whose video critique I highly recommend (it’s tight, accurate, thorough, informative, and easy to follow). And among the 28,000 comments on Shapirio’s clip are some gems of masterful mockery, all of which spot on, from “This isn’t an argument…it’s a word salad” to a quote jokingly attributed to Albert Einstein, “If you can’t convince them, confuse them” (that is actually better known as Truman’s Law). One even recapitulated Shapiro’s argument as: “I don’t know how this works, therefore God.” I couldn’t skim thousands of comments; but I found none positive. I suspect Shapiro’s private creator screen is showing him a woundingly high “dislike” count.
The reason I started this kick is my observation of late that god-apologetics appears to be in decline. There are either no new arguments, and none improved, or we get truly harebrained novelties. “The best” at least the videonet has to point to now are the likes of Ben Shapiro, one of the most inept intellectuals of our generation. Indeed, number two on my list of hits was some unintelligible rigmarole from Jordan Peterson, itself with nearly a million views, illustrative of how bad apologetics has gotten. Nothing else listed breached even a hundred thousand views. To be fair, when I dropped “best” from my search string, I did find two others that did, which I’ll write about in a coming article. But note that even Peterson’s top-rated argument doesn’t contain an argument; he just asserts a premise, that “the reason you find meaning in the service to others is that it is one step on the ladder to the divine,” which he never defends with any evidence. It’s of course bollocks.
Shapiro’s clip also lacks any actual argument in the proper sense (as you’ll see); but it at least purports to sound like an argument is being given.
Shapiro’s “Argument”
The clip shows an audience member asking Ben Shapiro “What is your favorite argument for God’s existence, and why?” Shapiro then uploaded the video with the title (sic) “The BEST Argument for the Existence of God,” so we know he didn’t just pick a fave argument on some other criterion (like the whackiest or most interesting); he means this is what he believes to be the BEST argument for God. When theists pick really, truly terrible arguments to be their “best,” that tells us they are too incompetent to have a reliable opinion on the existence of God. No competent thinker would call this a good argument, much less the “best.” That means you don’t even know what a good argument is. Instead you are readily convinced by bad arguments—which means your beliefs are probably false.
Hence this is what we get. For Shapiro’s reply, the one he posted as his “BEST” argument for God, goes as follows (this is unedited, verbatim; although the clip itself may have been edited, that was the work of Shapiro, so it’s evidently how he wants it to go):
My favorite argument for God’s existence is that I believe in free will.
Okay, the reason that I think this is an argument for God’s existence is because, if you believe that human beings are essentially just balls of meat wandering around aimlessly in the universe, a kind of Spinoza’s Stone that thinks that it was moving of its own accord but actually was thrown, if you believe that, and you don’t believe in free will, then there’s an internal coherence and logic to it.
If you believe that you have the ability to make independent choices, that you can actually supersede your own biological drives, and the environment around you—to any extent, even to the smallest extent—this means that you believe in something that can’t actually be proved by science, but that you are living every single day.
And the notion that you have that will, and not only that you have that will but that that will is capable of comprehending the universe around you, that your will is sort of, your ideas, your ability to comprehend the universe is a reflection of a reality, of an objective truth, that is out there, that says to me that there is a God, that there is a common source that stands behind that objective truth, and stands behind the mind that can comprehend that truth.
As Stephen Woodford of Rationality Rules put it in his concluding remarks (removing his evidencing soundbites from Shapiro):
To recap Ben’s favorite argument for God’s existence, his BEST argument for God’s existence, is that he believes in Libertarian Free Will. And after spending half his time setting up a reductio against non-Libertarian views, all while conflating non-Libertarian views with a form of Existential Nihilism, he dropped this completely. He did nothing with it.
From there he claims that if you believe in Libertarian Free Will, then you believe in something that can’t be scientifically proven. And of course he offered no justification for this claim.
And THEN he dropped free will altogether to claim that the existence of objective truth presupposes God.
Yeah. I’m…um…I’m not convinced. But to be fair, a large part of why I’m not convinced is because Ben didn’t give us any reason at all to buy any of his absurd views. … Why would you re-upload this?
That nails it in a nutshell. Shapiro has conflated several different arguments into an incoherent hash bordering on gibberish: the Free Will Argument, the Argument from Meaning, and the Argument from Reason. Charitably I will assume Shapiro is not so inept as to have intended that last as a deductive argument (better known as the Transcendental Argument, or just simply Presuppositionalism), rather than an inductive, C.S. Lewis-style Argument from Reason. But even still, he never completes a single one of these arguments—there is never at any actual point an argument in this clip.
As you’ll notice from my links in that last paragraph I’ve never analyzed the Free Will Argument here on my blog, so I’ll take this opportunity to do that, since Shapiro sort of claws at it ineptly, and what better occasion to lock it down? (Meanwhile, I have no interest in Presuppositionalism, not only because its proponents tend to be notorious bad-faith liars, illustrating what little worth that argument even has, but also because refuting the Argument from Reason already refutes Presuppositionalism, rendering it superfluous.)
A Real Argument from Free Will
In a coherent Argument from Free Will (what Shapiro should have argued, if he really meant to present this argument), the reasoning goes like this:
- Libertarian free will exists.
- Atheism cannot explain libertarian free will but the existence of God can.
- Therefore God exists.
Like most apologetics, every single premise of this argument is bullshit, and is never proved by any sufficient logic or evidence. But it’s at least a coherent argument. If the premises are true, the conclusion is true. It’s valid. It just needs also to be sound. And to get it to be sound, you have to convincingly prove each premise is probably true. More inept (or dishonest) versions of the argument will “forget” they have to specify “Libertarian” (as in contra-causal) Free Will in the first premise, because otherwise, then, the existence of Compatibilist Free Will disproves the second premise. But all scientific evidence is against the existence of Libertarian Free Will (supporting instead Compatibilism), and there is no other evidence for it; so getting Premise 1 to be probable is essentially impossible on current information.
That alone kills the argument. But Premise 2 is also a lost cause. Because if we are supposing Premise 1, which is a bizarro science fiction world in which we have proved contra-causal powers exist in human decision-making, all bets are off as to what could be causing it! In a world where such a power even can exist, then it could have lots of non-divine causes, which would be no more bizarre than that power itself would be. Maybe free will is an accident of quantum mechanics, preserved by evolution because it’s useful (look at all the things we can do with it!). Maybe the laws of physics just randomly include, besides the laws we know, other laws whereby ethereal souls are caused to exist by physical structures of sufficient complexity (like brains), and it just is an inalienable property of them that they have contra-causal free will—and therefore the reason we observe we have free will is because only in such universes will there be such consciously aware observations in the first place (observational selection bias). I think both explanations are bollocks. But they are logically possible. Which is sufficient to prevent arguing Premise 2 must be probable. One could in theory gather evidence that shows, despite the availability of these possibilities, that Premise 2 is nevertheless still probable, but no such evidence exists. (Sad face.) And no, you can’t get there by pointing out that these explanations are ad hoc or bizarre—because, in fact, they are less so than God, so you’d be tanking your own case in the very attempt to make it.
So the Argument from Free Will is a crap argument. It’s such sheit in fact that it almost rates as the Worst Argument for God. And I only say “almost” because I know of truly ridiculous arguments (and yet others quite bad); but even theists tend to steer clear of this one because it’s so bad. If you Google around trying to find examples of the argument even being made, you’ll struggle to find one. Most hits will reflect the opposite tack (how free will as a concept contradicts theism, for example), or dig up only the common resort to free will as a defense against the Argument from Evil (pro tip: that doesn’t work). But Shapiro never even makes this argument in his clip. He starts to, then blips around into something else, never completing it. The other arguments that Shapiro jumbles in confusingly are better arguments, even if not really that great; but he doesn’t defend or finish any of them either.
Just for reference as we proceed, the Argument from Meaning goes:
- Meaning exists.
- Atheists cannot explain the existence of meaning but the existence of God can.
- Therefore God exists.
This suffers from the singular problem that any definition of Premise 1 that would be true renders Premise 2 false; while any definition of Premise 1 that would get Premise 2 to be true leaves Premise 1 false at worst, and still wholly unsupported at best (see my Bayesian Counter assessment of this argument, and my discussion in Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life).
Likewise the Argument from Reason goes:
- Human reason is reliable.
- Atheists cannot explain the reliability of human reason but the existence of God can.
- Therefore God exists.
Any defense of this becomes a nightmare of conflated ideas, where one struggles to even articulate what the first premise means, much less how the second premise is supposed to be true. But it’s at least a sophisticated argument that, like the Fine Tuning Argument, requires some study and thought to get at why it fails. Ultimately, Premise 2 not only can’t be established, but abundant scientific evidence has already solidly refuted it from multiple converging angles (see my Bayesian Counter for a summary, and my detailed study in The Argument from Reason).
There is a version (a sub-variant) of the Argument from Reason that uses free will as a premise, which derives from C.S. Lewis (from his book Miracles; an argument on which he was so thoroughly trounced in a debate by Elizabeth Anscombe that some reports imagined him crying after). It occurs to me that maybe (?) Shapiro was attempting a hopelessly garbled form of this argument. After all, Lewis is popular with apologists (despite being one of the worst philosophers in history, beating out even Ayn Rand for the title), and it would explain Shapiro’s confused juxtaposition of “free will” and our mind’s access to “objective reality,” and could even explain how this might somehow have linked up in Shapiro’s confused mind to the human comprehension of “meaning” or “purpose.”
That argument goes like this:
- Atheism entails our logical operations are performed by a deterministic machine (the brain).
- Logical operations performed by a deterministic machine can never be known to be valid.
- We know our logical operations are valid.
- Therefore God exists.
It’s valid. But it is, again, unsound.
One can of course challenge Premise 1. It’s basically the same error as plagues the generic Argument from Free Will I noted above: this Premise 1 is like Premise 1 in the Free Will Argument; it is not necessarily true, you still have to argue for it, and it could yet be false. But we generally are happy to grant this Premise 1, not because atheism logically entails it (it doesn’t), but because vast quantities of independent converging lines of evidence prove its consequent condition true: our logical operations are performed by a deterministic machine (the brain).
One could even challenge Premise 3. If Premise 2 is true then we could not non-circularly know Premise 3 to be true. In other words, it could well simply be that Premise 2 is correct and our belief that Premise 3 is true is simply, indeed, false—by C.S. Lewis’s own reasoning. It is a fallacy fallacy to claim that because our conclusions are reached by fallacy that they are therefore false. We could be deceived in our belief that naturalism is true and naturalism could still be true. And in fact by C.S. Lewis’s own model, we should even expect that to be the case. We therefore can’t get any evidence here for God. That would simply be a non sequitur. The argument in effect refutes itself.
Really, what Lewis has done is snuck in a fallacious Appeal to Emotion here, to the effect of: “It would be horrifying if Premise 3 is false; horrifying things can’t be true (they just can’t!); therefore Premise 3 must be true.” The same problem capsizes the Argument from Free Will, since it really just plays on an emotional fear that something is true (“Shit! Then we’re all just Spinoza Stones! Nooooo! That can’t be! That’s impossssibble!”) and uses that as evidence it must not be true—which is not how reality works. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of thinking Lewis was afraid of: deterministic reasoning that doesn’t track logical reality, yet fools its operator into thinking it does. It is no accident that this folly characterizes godist thinking, not atheist. They are wrong and don’t even know it because none of their “logical operations” are actually sound; yet those fallacious operations continue to convince them that they are. Their belief in God is therefore false because of causal determinism. Ouch.
But the real problem is with this argument’s Premise 2: that simply isn’t even true. It’s actually quite easy to find out if a deterministic logical operation is getting you correct conclusions about the outside world: just interact with the outside world! In most cases you’ll know right quick if your logic is working or not; and in the remaining cases, if you maintain the effort, you’ll eventually find out. This is in fact how we fixed all our shit logic. Natural human reason is not reliable (which actually refutes any notion of God—he’d have built us better; indeed that’s the very premise the Argument of Reason is depending on!), but it’s also not completely un-reliable—it’s a jumble of ad hoc half-measures, which were good enough that, eventually, when we turned them toward the very question of reliability, we were able to invent software patches that fixed these firmware defects (and hence, after hundreds of thousands of years fumbling around with a bad product, we got formal mathematics and logics, and critical thinking and the scientific method). The way we found out that these software patches we ourselves invented were better than our naturally installed hardware was by testing their effectiveness against each other in contact with the external world. One got vastly better results than the other. And there is just no plausible way to get that difference in outcome by chance (see, again, The Argument from Reason; and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience).
In reality, you would never want what Lewis wanted. Logically sound reasoning must be deterministic. One set of premises should always only get you one and the same conclusion. Any system that worked differently than that would be less reliable, not more. Dumping “contra-causal free will” into a logical process could only destroy logic, resulting in its repeatedly spinning into failure. The same is therefore also true in moral reasoning: dumping “contra-causal free will” into any rational moral deliberation could only destroy its reliability, resulting in its repeatedly spinning into failure. If you want to reliably act on your reasons, knowledge, and character, the last thing you want is Libertarian Free Will! (And if you don’t get this, I’ve gone over it a dozen times.)
Analysis of Shapiro’s “Argument”
Okay. Now you’ve seen how all that works. Let’s now look at what Shapiro attempted to argue. Step one is to diagram its logic:
- Conclusion to be demonstrated: My favorite [i.e. “the BEST”] argument for God’s existence is that I believe in free will.
- Fact offered in demonstration: Because, if you believe that human beings are essentially just balls of meat wandering around aimlessly in the universe, a kind of Spinoza’s Stone that thinks that it was moving of its own accord but actually was thrown, if you believe that, and you don’t believe in free will, then there’s an internal coherence and logic to it.
Which we can formulate as:
- I believe in free will.
- It’s logical and coherent to not believe in free will.
- Therefore, God exists.
This is not valid and thus not even an argument. But nothing said in Premise 2 has any impact on the truth of Premise 1 anyway, except even to slightly undermine it. Because Shapiro just admitted that holding the opposite belief to his own is logical and coherent. And in fact that’s all he has said on the point—and all he will say. He never gets around to presenting an argument for his belief being more probably true than this one. So we have a premise asserted on no basis. Typical apologetics. He’s just saying “I believe in free will, therefore God exists,” which is a non sequitur. It’s like saying “I believe the earth is flat, therefore John Wick exists.” Not a good start.
One can maybe fuzzily see an implied-but-never-asserted Fallacy of Appeal to Emotion here, whereby somehow we are supposed to react with “bad feelings” toward descriptions of us as “balls of meat wandering around aimlessly” who merely “think” they are moving of their own accord, and because of those “bad feelings” we are supposed to “pooh pooh” this otherwise admittedly “logical and coherent” conclusion. That’s the most Shapiro ever offers as an argument—yet he never states this argument; and it’s fallacious anyway! Facts don’t care about your feelings. So how you “feel” about being “balls of meat wandering around aimlessly” who merely “think” they are moving of their own accord has no bearing on whether that’s what in fact you are. In short, Shapiro never defends the belief that he claims is a premise that gets him somehow to God.
And that’s just from a logical analysis. Factually, Shapiro is also in the shitter. In empirical fact, we are not “just balls of meat” (which is why Brad Pitt can survive a trip to Paris but not through a meat grinder) and we are not “wandering around aimlessly,” but quite conspicuously (unlike thrown stones) we can reason out what to do and do it—pursuing, uhem, aims. Shapiro is lost here (rather typically for a God-apologist) in a modo hoc fallacy (see Sense and Goodness without God, index), the belief that we are “just” one thing and not another, when in fact we are both (Brad Pitt in Paris has properties quite physically different from Brad Pitt at the other end of a meat grinder, even if both are composed of all the same atoms or even cells). Shapiro has also engaged an equivocation fallacy between being determined and being aimless. Indeed, aims are themselves causes, so his equivocation is even self-contradictory. It is logically impossible to simultaneously act in pursuit of aims and act uncaused. Hence his falling for the fallacy of Spinoza’s Stone only illustrates his incompetence (see Jack Call’s retort).
But that’s all moot really, because Shapiro still has not made any argument at all. He has strung together a bunch of claims (all dubious, and none defended). But he has made no argument from those claims to any conclusion. The most we can perceive is an affective fallacy: he wants his false claims to make us feel a certain way, and for us to believe a certain thing because of how we feel. But even that he never connects to “God.” So that’s a shit argument, twice over. And yet he still doesn’t actually even articulate this as his argument—nor anything as his argument. There is no argument.
Shapiro’s next sentence just continues the same implied but fallacious non-argument:
- Fact offered in demonstration: If you believe that you have the ability to make independent choices, that you can actually supersede your own biological drives, and the environment around you—to any extent, even to the smallest extent—this means that you believe in something that can’t actually be proved by science, but that you are living every single day.
Which we can formulate as:
- You believe in free will.
- Your belief in free will can’t be proved by science.
- Therefore, God exists.
Still invalid. Also false. If Libertarian Free Will existed, it most definitely could be proved by science; and if it can’t be proved by science, it certainly can’t be proved by unmethodological appeals to personal experience—science routinely finds that unmethodological appeals to personal experience often turn out to be false. Thus the fact that science has found nothing of the kind, but quite the opposite, kills Premise 2 here. Science has in fact proved that we can “make independent choices and supersede our own biological drives and the environment around us,” without the magical power Shapiro is talking about, but instead using only straightforward Compatibilist Free Will. But since he never logically connects Premise 2 to the Conclusion anyway, who cares?
There simply isn’t any claim here that adds to the non sequitur he already just attempted. This is just a continuation of the “Feelings” fallacy. “The ability to make independent choices and supersede mere biological drives and the influences of my environment? Yay!! I like that! Therefore I must have specifically Libertarian Free Will!” There is no logical argument here either. He has not explained how our feelings about this make it true, or how this (or anything) entails specifically Libertarian Free Will.
It’s also a fail on the facts just as before: you do not need Libertarian Free Will to have the “ability to make independent choices and supersede mere biological drives and the influences of your environment.” Compatibilist Free Will does all that for you, and that’s by definition compatible with causal determinism. Because we can run logical operations, we can evaluate the relative importance of biological drives and different options and influences, and choose critically among them—all deterministically, which is fine: as I explained, logic, and therefore rational thought, must always be deterministic! To make an argument here, Shapiro needs to get around this defeater. Yet he doesn’t show any sign of even knowing he has to. He doesn’t seem to even know that Compatibilism exists! Yet (as Rationality Rules pointed out) it’s the dominant position of all professional philosophers today.
Shapiro then drops this—an argument he never completed or made any sense of (we’re never told why a mere belief in any kind of free will leads to God, much less why any particular thing he’s calling “free will” does exist, nor are we given any evidence that his specific belief is true)—and then convolutedly tumbles into a completely different argument whose opening premises he never set up (nor in this clip ever will):
- Fact offered in demonstration: The notion that you have that will, and not only that you have that will but that that will is capable of comprehending the universe around you, that your will, is sort of, your ideas, your ability to comprehend the universe is a reflection of a reality, of an objective truth, that is out there…
- Conclusion to be demonstrated: …that says to me that there is a God.
It’s hard to even parse the grammar of this sentence. Word salad, just as one commenter said.
The best we can do to diagram his logic:
- You have free will.
- You can comprehend an external reality.
- Therefore, God exists.
Nothing valid here either. It’s just random premises stacked atop a conclusion, with no connection sewn between them. He basically is saying here that “the notion” (his and his audience’s “belief”) that they have some particular kind of free will (that he never defined or defended as true) “sort of” (in some unspecified sense) is or causes or is needed for or relates in some way to (?) “your ability to comprehend that the universe is a reflection of a reality,” and “that says to me that there is a God.”
Shapiro never explains by what argument “that says to me that there is a God.” There is again no argument here. And the “conclusion to be demonstrated” has now mysteriously changed mid-answer from “God exists because I believe in free will” to “God exists because I have an ability to comprehend that the universe is a reflection of a reality.” So he has dropped free will, indeed even mid-sentence, and now is saying his “favorite” (and thus “BEST”) argument for God is “Objective reality exists and I can learn things about it; therefore God exists.” But he never explains what this argument is either. By what argument does he get from the premise (“Objective reality exists and I can learn things about it”) to the conclusion (that “God exists”)? And how did free will get him there? What does having free will have to do with having an “ability to comprehend that the universe is a reflection of a reality”? He never says.
One might think he does in his next and closing line, “that there is a common source that stands behind that objective truth, and stands behind the mind that can comprehend that truth,” but nope. That is not a separate sentence but simply an expansion of his conclusion “that there is a God.” He is simply defining (unpacking) what he means by “God,” which is some “common source that stands behind that objective truth, and stands behind the mind that can comprehend that truth.” He never explains how, or why he or anyone is supposed to believe this. Nor does he connect this with anything prior (or even any more specific properties of God—like, “is an intelligent agent” or “still exists”).
There is no argument for how free will is supposed to prove this, or how our ability to comprehend an external reality is supposed to prove this, or what either of those things even have to do with each other—because you can have one of those things without the other. Libertarian Free Will can exist without an ability to comprehend reality; and an ability to comprehend reality can exist without Libertarian Free Will. So what we need is an argument that the one needs the other, and an argument that the most dubious of those (Libertarian Free Will) even exists at all. And still we don’t get to God. So now we need another argument that somehow gets from “we have these things” to “therefore probably there is a God.”
But there are no arguments in Shapiro’s shambles of a reply. So this can’t even logically possibly be the “BEST” argument for God; it’s not even an argument for God. Its like holding up a spoon and shouting, “Behold! John Wick exists!” And hundreds of thousands of stone-cold fools are, like, “Yes! Preach, brother!!” This is what has become of belief in God.
In response to “our logical operations are performed by a deterministic machine (the brain)”: brains are by no means deterministic.
Determinism requires that you can watch the system evolve from an initial state to some final state, and then reset the system back to the same initial state, then if you feed it the same inputs again you will get the same outputs and final state. In the case of brains, there is no way to put it back into the same initial state, so you can’t even ask whether they are deterministic.
Everyday life also contradicts the idea that brains are deterministic. Getting a usefully correct logical conclusion requires carefully checking the argument. If brains were deterministic, then there would be no need to check for errors because you would get the same errors every time.
Every step in the formation of a weather system is deterministic. Yet the weather can only be predicted probabilistically.
As for the notion that you would have to do an experiment to decide whether brains were “deterministic?” That’s like saying you can only study oak trees by watching the growth of an oak from acorn to lumber. But you can compare many, many oak trees at different stages of life.
It seems to me science, the discovery of how things are in nature, is not just lab reports of definitive experiments that refute a hypothesis. I’m not sure the world can be sufficiently described as a set of correlations between beginning and ending settings on instruments.
What Steve said is also correct, and reminds me to note that determinists in science admit the problem of prediction is twofold: we rarely know the initial conditions for things, so even when we know the deterministic physics of things we cannot predict outcomes the way you imagine. That’s an epistemic problem (our limited access to data), not an ontological problem (determinism doesn’t vanish the moment we can’t access the initial conditions of a system, as if the world obeyed our imaginations).
This is why it is still possible even quantum indeterminism is deterministic: we actually don’t know what’s going on down there to be sure it’s not just another level of statistical mechanics out of our view.
Determinism means when you have the conditions, the output is given. All physics entails this for macrosystems. The brain is a macrosystem, and certainly its reasoning circuits are.
Determinism does not require any epistemic status. It is an ontological claim. Not an epistemic one. So you don’t have to “be able to watch the whole system.” That has never had anything to do with determinism as a world model.
It’s also false that deterministic systems are always valid logical systems. A fallacy can be run as deterministically as a valid reasoning process. This is precisely Lewis’s point, and he’s not wrong about that. That’s why we have to test the systems we are running to know when they are running fallacies or valid operations (and hence why it took us hundreds of thousands of years to figure that out).
It’s also false that deterministic systems always run the same.
Your car does not work precisely the same ten years after it was bought; yet it is deterministic. Dice don’t roll the same number every time; yet they are deterministic. The weather does not always play out the same; yet that’s deterministic.
The human brain is a messy system. Its inputs constantly vary; indeed, as a strange loop, their outputs become new inputs every time, thus resetting the conditions. This is why proofreading is so hard: once you see a word on a page one way, your brain keeps painting it the one way, so you miss a typo no matter how many times you look at it, unless you change the physical setup, e.g. print the page and read it there, a new visual condition, then the typo might appear to you.
That systems run chaotically or randomly does not mean they are not deterministic. Nonlinear dynamics is still deterministic.
And the reason we know that is all that we have found about physics above the quantum scale. Determinism might break down below quantum scales (that isn’t epistemically certain), but brains do not operate below quantum scales.
Aggregate systems average out into deterministic systems because there are so many parts (vast orders of magnitudes of them), so the probability of a coordinated deviation from determinism is astronomically low and thus can never reasonably be expected to happen in our experience. Though it could happen on cosmic scales, hence the Big Bang could be one such outcome from a prior long-run universe; but no decision you ever make in your life will be.
Not sure if I asked or if someone else did but what the hell is this marriage between Peterson and Islam (and to some extent, Catholicism)? Isn’t a Jungian supposed to be a universalist and hence, his teachings supposed to be incompatible with any orthodox Abrahamic religion? I’ve seen videos of him dialoging with Dai (Islamic preachers) and Catholic bishops and can’t help but wonder why them and not some Gnostic or Setian or Wiccan?
Because Peterson shares the attitude of Neoconservatives who believe only popular opiates are effective or “appropriate.”
He might approve fringe religions if they agree to “play ball” (and act and become more like Judeo-Christianity). But generally too few people are Wiccans for Wicca to be of use to society or the state; it’s by that fact alone deviant (Plato would say it’s a violation of the societally-organizing Myth, to be policed not acquiesced to).
If you want to control Muslim populations, in this thinking, you have to do it through Islam—unless you think you can turn them Christian and get them into the Western mindset, which is the Neocon’s ultimate goal, but that becomes merely a practical question (if it can’t be accomplished, next best is manipulating them through their accepted Myth).
Peterson I am sure would also say Christianity is the “best” Myth, the closest to the Platonic Ideal of a “best myth,” and therefore also that closely related religions like Islam and Judaism are not far behind. I also think it just makes him look cool to run interfaith dialog with “the most popular religions.” That makes him popular. Which is probably his primary life goal.
As to trying to predict Peterson’s ideology from its Jungian basis, you should give up that project. Peterson has no coherent worldview and only is a Jungian when he wants to be; he also never gets any ideology right, least of all Jung’s, because he’s a lazy and shallow thinker. This general tenor of him is just what I demonstrate with extensive evidence in That Jordan Peterson Is a Crank: A Handy Guide.
To echo Richard here, Peterson’s political project which clearly eclipsed his professional work and his ethical responsibilities as an educator and academic way back when he at least bordered on academic fraud by claiming one could use personality data to predict crime (an utter garbage position) won’t allow it. Peterson may be incoherent a lot of the time, but he actually is really good at finding his tribe and his coding. Gnostic, Setian, Wiccan… too much left-wing coding, too much potential for matriarchal energy or rebellious ideas. He’s definitely not going to address Satanists. He’s so deep into his belief in fundamental metaphysically-rooted hierarchy that he couldn’t even accept an actually Darwinian (as oppposed to Spencerian), let alone Krotpotkinian, concept of biology.
It’s particularly funny because he could almost certainly identify right-wing alliances (e.g. some Odinists) if he wanted to. But the thing is that right-wingers are incredibly heavily into respectability politics. Fringe religions aren’t respectable. Fashies who pick alt spiritualities are doing so to try to make them retroactively fashionable again.
It also ties into Peterson’s own particular interpretation of the schema and archetypes. It reminds me of when Cerebus went off the deep end into misogyny. Peterson expressly identifies the feminine as the source of chaos. He can pretend to be objective all he wants, but he is such an emotionally charged figure that he is totally incapable of looking at a metaphysical scheme with things he doesn’t like in them and try to understand them as functional.
I’ll add to Fred’s points: as I hinted, the mere fact that Wicca (for example) “isn’t popular” is to Peterson evidence it is false. He associates truth with success, not evidence (his two-part debate with Sam Harris was literally all about that strange position, which is ironic because Peterson rails against Postmodernism, yet I have never seen anyone as fiercely defend Postmodernist epistemology as Peterson).
You’re nowhere near the first person to make that observation, Richard (as I’m sure you know), that Peterson is ironically incredibly postmodern in his worldview and approach. Even the entire Jungian armchair reasoning approach that he uses is indistinguishable from New Agers. His approach to truth is in practice really is “Many ways of knowing” and all sorts of other postmodern concepts. I find it so funny how you can take half of what Peterson says and find someone who is indistinguishable from, variously, Rorty, Chopra or Derrida (and even has some in common with Adorno and Horkheimer, though he doesn’t have their critical lens nor Foucault’s ability to actually pose interesting questions)… and then the other half is all just warmed-over lazy reactionary garbage.
I will grant it to the postmodernists that it does seem that their approach is fundamentally impossible for conservatives to actually espouse. They may use it, but to admit relativity, to admit a distinction between little t and Big T truth, anything like that? It fundamentally seems to be poison to their worldview. It actually serves as a pretty good litmus test, a good proxy question, to see if someone is deeply reactionary, a rationalist liberal or leftist, or a postmodernist: Ask them to describe postmodernism and what their opinion is, and then listen if you hear dogwhistles.
Hilariously, of course, his own position is increasingly untenable and unpopular. This is yet another one of the funny things about how conservative ideology is so deeply emotionally motivated. They really do believe that truth means success, so when they are being marginalized, they need to fight back, because they actually have contempt for truth and just want what they believe to be true. Hence The Card Says Moops and all sorts of other postmodern conservative tactics. It’s also funny to see people like Peterson who clearly are somewhere on Plato’s spectrum (i.e. of wanting to defend mysticism as an ideology to control the masses) struggling to recognize that if their belief system isn’t actually true that then its success is not an indication of truth but just of utility… but again, they’re postmodernists without the spine.
Off topic but I also noticed a similar marriage between Trad Catholics and Muslims with the red pill community: “alphas” still don’t understand yet that the whole no fap November and opposition to porn are a trojan horse from the Trad Catholic and Islamic communities. To me, the two are virtually identical since every post I see on social media from a Trad Catholic or YouTube Dai (on sex issues) looks identical to what I see online from self-appointed gurus like Alpha M and other “red pill”/alpha types. I actually thought the whole idea was to turn heterosexual men gay by gaslighting beautiful women online and in our relationships (telling men they are “simps” for holding their girlfriend’s bags at the mall or buying your love interest flowers, for instance. It’s like they’re literally grooming heterosexual men to become indifferent to women and cause actual conflict between men and women). I know the word “grooming” has strong knee-jerk reactions but in this case I think it may be warranted.
I think it’s just an overlap of common interests, not a psy op.
I watched the Manosphere develop in the last twenty years, particularly in the atheist community (I’ve even written about it over the years), even as it began its first rifts there, so I saw the organic way it went from stage to stage, and how conflicts and alliances arose.
What I saw was like Christianity’s endless schisming into sects who hate each other: they all share only one thing, the cultural construct of patriarchy activated by grievance, which becomes organized misogyny (and a defense of “traditional masculinity”). And just as Christian sects can sometimes ally, so can these sects, though usually they hate each other. Yet they preach a lot of the same things.
They are very ignorant of history and anthropology (indeed even willingly so, like “lost cause” Southerners or “Hitler wasn’t really that bad” Germans), and so are simply unaware (or emotionally unwilling to admit) that what they mean by “traditional masculinity” was a Christian construct, albeit built on top of other Western components (really, anthropology suggests, “landed capitalist” components, as what sexism tracks across the ethnographic record is not geography but economics—all “control women and control sex” ideologies are rooted in land-owning as a society-organizer: see my discussion of that in Is 90% of All EvoPsych False?).
What they believe instead is like what Shapiro and Peterson and other cultural neolibs and neocons believe: that Christianity was successful precisely because it tapped more accurately into evolutionary truths about human biology; and therefore (manosphere atheists argue) we can still chuck all the bullshit parts and keep what it got right, which includes patriarchal misogyny, homophobia, authoritarianism, and the like.
This grew into a dedicated wing of the atheism movement. They certainly aren’t crypto-Catholics. But they are ideological misogynists colonized by dead Christian thought.
The end result is that they come up with a lot of the same ideas; because when it comes to those ideas, they are starting from a shared place: ideological misogyny.
That said, there is a sub-wing even of these that are collaborators, as they are in the tip of the circle of the Venn diagram that includes neolibs and neocons who believe in the necessity of cultural Christianity (“it’s false but we need it”), and even cultural Islam as a “next best thing” when Muslims can’t be converted to either Christianity or atheism.
That circle is not full of ideological misogynists, only one part is, and that part does slightly overlap the cultural theism circle. So not all the cultural Christianity advocates are ideological misogynists, and not all atheists who are ideological misogynists are cultural Christianity advocates. But there is a wing of each group that meets in the middle.
Also, you are not wrong to adapt the terminology of grooming. Many an ideological movement uses psychological grooming techniques (sometimes we just out and call them cults). For an example of an exploration of one aspect of this (the pipeline from the liberal-but-manosphere-curious to full-blown right-wing reactionary fascism) see Three Arrows, How to Fall Down the Anti-SJW Rabbit Hole.
To add onto Richard’s experiences, which I overwhelmingly have shared:
1) Like most reactionaries, if they were to become either honest about their own actual shared motives or about their history, they would cease to be reactionaries. Finding a way of making their extreme anger-driven faux-grievance psychology seem acceptable rather than maladaptive is critical. How a particular person does so varies.
2) The dovetailing with other conservative ideology is so deep as to actually undermine some of their own points. For example, I engaged with a racist MRA who had been selling race IQ arguments. I pointed out that women had higher IQs, and that those IQs had grown which actually proved (by his own logic) that their on-average-superior cognitive abilities had been artificially depressed. Suddenly he was rejecting the IQ data, rejecting Flynn and making all sorts of excuses to get to what he needed for his misogyny. But he had only gotten into that position because he had also been sold racism. (And, no, the manospherian is not wholly racist, or transphobic, or homophobic, or reactionary… just overwhelmingly so to huge comorbidity).
3) Dan Arrows’ video is awesome, and he’s not the only person to make the observation. Plenty of people in the TERF/extreme transphobe movements, for example, have noted cultic behavior in their conscription, social isolation, and so forth.
4) A huge amount of the problem does indeed come from a cult of tradition. But it is always important to remember that the reactionary does not care about tradition , not really. That’s a fig leaf. I’ve asked many Nazis how much they’re doing to stoo the actual loss of many European languages and cultures, like Welsh and other smaller languages in the UK.
Not one has ever even given a shit. It is about protecting an identity that is wholly modern . The reactionary is always picking and choosing their mythologized version of the past. Yes, that includes artificially elevating the past… but it also means ignoring the good stuff, even good stuff that is actually not inconsistent with their values but is just against their particular version of the myth. The cult of tradition is a belief that some tradition, somewhere, has figured everything out, so you just need to sample from the right traditions. It’s obviously farcical when put directly, and yet Peterson has essentially suggested it. One has to wonder when precisely in history the famously flexible, adaptive process of cultural creation came up with the last answer to the last question, especially answers to questions they couldn’t have even envisaged like “How do we design a human Internet?” and “How do we keep AI from exacerbating social crises?”
That’s a good point about the grooming pipeline from transphobia to right-wing fascism.
For a video touching on that, see Shaun’s JK Rowling’s New Friends (though a review of Rowling’s actual prior neoliberal politics is valuable as well: starts halfway in to his video on Harry Potter).
“Preserving Welsh”
From what I have seen online, white ethno-centrists are obsessed with Nordic deities but don’t care about the Indo-European gods that half of Europe worshipped for thousands of years (Odin, according to wiki, wasn’t worshipped until after Christianity got started).
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/08/oldest-known-reference-to-norse-god-odin-found-in-danish-treasure-trove
So, some of these Norse gods are younger than Christianity yet a lot of people like Varg act like our European ancestors thousands of years ago worshipped them. The only deities I can think of that would qualify would be the ones that made it into the Rig Veda and Avesta. Also, I talk to a neo-pagan from the Czech Republic and she had never heard the term “Indo-European”, though she’s not a scholar so that’s understandable.
I also don’t understand this fetish with the Latin Mass among Trad Catholics. Couldn’t one take the anti-Modernist oath excepting the Latin part? Part of the reason Catholics were viewed with suspicion, though not the main reason, is due to the fact that services were not in English (even the black slaves after the first few years began singing in English).
Side note: I agree with Trads that a lot of modern movies suck, but where I disagree is that anyone alive in the early 2000s knows that romantic comedy and teen movies (American Pie 3) weren’t pleasant viewing either.
Hindsight Bias: we only remember the good stuff from the past (people forget the 99% of movies and shows made since talkies to the 1980s that were crap). If you don’t realize this bias is operating, you will have a distorted understanding of not only the past, but also the present.
Indo-European: that’s actually a language family. One can apply it to cultural diffusion that followed linguistic (they do go together a lot, but not always), but only with caution.
But for instance Zeus is really Zdeus i.e. Deus i.e. simply “God.” Allah has a similar trajectory. The words are actually the same. This can be traced all the way into reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as Deywos, i.e. Deus, i.e. simply “God” (root: “bright sky” and thus, by extension, “bright sky entity”). Often in the plural (monotheism is extremely recent in human history, and by ethnographic count, extremely rare; its popularity is merely distorted by the unrelated success of certain global empires).
In Norse, it went from Deywos to Teywos to Tywaz to Tyros to Tyr, the oldest Norse god of record. Still calendrically honored today as Tuesday. But Odin is probably pre-Christian—just not specifically the elaborate version of his myth necessarily, but he is identified with shamanic ecstatic practice (the name means “Lord of Frenzy”), and so conceivably long predates any human written record.
The racist obsession I don’t understand, apart from the obvious reasons that they wouldn’t acknowledge (this all comes from early 20th century Nazi romanticists who picked themselves to be the master race and thus Germano-Slavic history became sacrosanct in a way that only makes sense in their biased internal logic).
In terms of recorded (actually recorded, not merely postulated) deities, the oldest are Egyptian. Only second after that, Mesopotamian. Third, Chinese. China of course is part of the Sino-Tibetan language-culture group, not Indo-European. But also, of course, gods long predate the written record in nearly every culture, so privileging the ones lucky enough to get written down and preserved in that form is itself arbitrary. If we went by iconography and not writing, the most ancient recorded God is a goddess, corresponding to no known deity today.
As for transphobia, I saw this thought experiment from an old job candidate at BGSU on his twitter recently, thought was interesting:
Sam is mentally incapable of forming concepts like “male, gender, etc.” at age 25, he is 1. male 2. female 3. trans 4. non-binary
Some people called him transphobic for the thought experiment itself which I thought was dumb (probably bots anyway). Moti Gorin (who came up with it) primarily does bioethics and lately has gotten into the trans issues.
Also, I wonder if pre-human hominids had anything approximating a religion.
I don’t get the thought experiment as described. Is there a link you can provide?
Bill:
The specifically-Nordic obsession almost certainly part of it, sure. And you’re definitely right about how they have to cynically rewrite history to make actually relatively-recent myths and somewhat-living traditions seem like they have the cult of tradition. But
a) That too is because of the total cynicism of the project: People with absolutely no real Nordic ancestry or connection have fetishized the Nords because they seem to be the whitest and one can then invoke the Nazis directly, and because Nordic mythology has seen a real resurgence in popularity (right now the biggest movie franchise on the planet has a space Viking and is only finally getting to its first quasi-Atlantean and its first Greek hero) and so they are picking and choosing what parts of European culture
b) Racists are heterogeneous, and some say that only the UK is white (really, I’ve seen that map posted by racists themselves) and others define other groups away (e.g. it’s a pretty massively inconvenient fact for the reactionary right that the very groups they elevate, the Germans and the Northern Europeans, have rejected such key parts of their identity, with the Germans being pacificistic to the point that it’s actually making it hard for them to exercise efficient leadership in supporting Ukraine and with the Nordic states being all as socialist as anything on the planet), so that’s not a full explanation
The point is that you can talk to a racist in the UK and they will not give two shits about the actual loss of any white culture in the UK. Ditto France. Ditto America. None of these people donate to museums, or heritage sites. None of them are fighting to maintain natural parks and maintain traditional biodiversity. Most of them are so deep on the specifically American conservative Kool-Aid that they will decry all that as woke big government SJW cuck nonsense. It’s only worse that they’re also cynical in what they mine.
What’s particularly funny is how much the alt-right in this way as with many others is a wholly modern phenomenon. There’s a great book, Ethnic Options, which points out how the civil rights movement brought ethnic consciousness back even to whites, and so a sort of menu-like attitude to heritage emerged among a group that had been so thoroughly deracialized earlier. This isn’t wholly a bad thing, necessarily (indeed, Waters is pretty measured and sympathetic). But the alt-right engage in it malignantly.
As far as cultural criticism goes in general: I disagree about the state of movies to some extent, but the point is that you, I and Richard can have a conversation about the relative merits of modern cinema versus previous generations, and modern art versus previous generations, without having some arbitrary woobie about degeneracy. We’re not angry at new stuff because it’s new. If we see some trend we dislike, it’s because we actually dislike it. I’d just say as far as the state of film that we still see absolute masterpieces (Everything Everywhere All At Once is just incredible) and really interesting ideas (I just finally saw Hardcore Henry and was surprised by how much I liked it). It’s just that film culture, like with everything else in the fully atomized attention economy, has broken up into countless sub-genres and sub-markets. So there’s going to be thirty things out there every year that pretty much anyone will really like (A24 just produces constant cerebral arthouse movies to the point that it’s itself a joke at this point). But then there will be thirty thousand things people don’t. Then you add in the fact that TV got really good and the breakdown of the lines between TV and cinema, and so now the talent has split between the two media.
What I will say in your defense is that cinema now has the same problem Steam has had for years. When you have a colossal selection, what matters is curation . And no one is really trying to crack that nut. For a while, in the world of video games Steam was the indie darling because they hit the sweet spot of just accessible enough without opening the floodgates. Then they opened the floodgates. Now it’s the Switch. The point is that it’s okay in theory to have ten million options… as long as you can actually find the options you’ll like. The only effective curation solution people have found is just straight up exclusion: “If it’s crap, it won’t be on our service”. That’s almost certainly because it’s the easiest solution. But someone will crack that nut, and then our sense of quality of options will improve a lot .
Richard –
re: “Logical operations performed by a deterministic machine can never be known to be valid” (your rendition of one of Lewis’ premises)
I don’t think this is one of Lewis’ premises at all.
Lewis’ premises are far more accurately stated as follows:
No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
If naturalism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no belief is rationally inferred (from 1 and 2).
We have good reason to accept naturalism only if it can be rationally inferred from good evidence.
Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, good reason to accept naturalism
In creating your own version of Lewis’ premises, you’re just setting up a straw man.
re: “It is a fallacy fallacy to claim that because our conclusions are reached by fallacy that they are therefore false.”
Lewis never says anything like that. In fact, he says “Even if thoughts are produced by irrational causes, still it might happen by mere accident that some of them were true—just as the black dog might, after all, have been really dangerous though the man’s reason for thinking it so was worthless”.
One again, you set up a straw man.
I’d read more of your stuff, but I see so much verbage, and too many straw men hidden in all the undergrowth.
Lewis’ premises are far more accurately stated as follows:
That’s my Premise 2.
That’s my Premise 1.
That’s my Premise 3.
Yes, he did. Because he is arguing to God.
He never says “Therefore we can’t know God exists either because we could be one of these unvalidatable machines just as untestably inferring God as Naturalism.”
Lewis was not a formal agnostic. He was the opposite. So he never allowed that the Premise of Naturalism could be true, and therefore (on his argument) even Theism cannot be rationally inferred.
Precisely as I point out.
“In a world where such a power even can exist, then it could have lots of non-divine causes, which would be no more bizarre than that power itself would be. Maybe free will is an accident of quantum mechanics, preserved by evolution because it’s useful (look at all the things we can do with it!). Maybe the laws of physics just randomly include, besides the laws we know, other laws whereby ethereal souls are caused to exist by physical structures of sufficient complexity (like brains), and it just is an inalienable property of them that they have contra-causal free will—and therefore the reason we observe we have free will is because only in such universes will there be such consciously aware observations in the first place (observational selection bias). I think both explanations are bollocks. But they are logically possible.”
It seems to me there is an equivocation here in the notion of “explanation.” Quantum mechanics—>body—>brain—>mind—>free will doesn’t specify any of the steps. QM doesn’t rely on everyday intuitions derived from billiards but it nonetheless does describe probabilistically evolution from a beginning state to end states, complete with rules for calculating the probabilities. That’s explanation by QM, even if it isn’t microscopic Laplacian determinism. The objection that you can “explain” free will by QM is not an explanation in its own terms, it’s an undescribed hypothetical. To my mind, that’s a kind of possibiliter.
The notion that complexity just happens to have free will as a property is also a kind of unspecified assertion empty of real meaning, just a label. It also is incomplete, with a failure to describe “complexity.” It also is indistinguishable from panpsychism. It’s anybody’s guess whether panpsychism isn’t just an unpopular (aka “heretical”) notion of God. Kami are manifestations of complexity, no?
The equivocation I think lies in the fact that the God hypothesis is frankly supernatural. Thus, God has agency and it is not necessary to describe un-agented, that is in some sense natural (“material” to use a scare word!) steps in manifesting free will in his creatures. In fact it’s something of a contradiction self-contradiction to the supernatural hypothesis. If anything, describing the steps by which the supernatural agent is both foolish and impious. Suddenly revising “atheism” to include equally undescribed possibilities conducted by undefined entities without specified rules basically assigns supernatural powers. But that to me just seems to be disguised supernaturalism, a sudden switching of the goal posts.
To be sure, I reject supernatural explanations as constituting explanations. I refuse to take the God hypothesis, QM malarkey and panpsychism (even arbitrarily limited to humans) as explanations. But I’m a terrible philosopher.
I quite agree. Hence I call the explanation bollocks. I have that opinion of it for many other reasons as well, but that included.
I offered it only as a logical possibility. You and I can rule it out for the reason you note (it’s a bad explanation; just as “God did it” is), because we are starting from an assumption that the world works in a certain naturalistic way. But if we admitted that it worked in some bizarre magical way, then bizarre magical causes come back into play as plausible.
(To be clear, I’m not being literal; I don’t think a QM Consciousness model would literally be “magic,” just that it would be as weird as magic. But so would Libertarian Free Will.)
Most Quantum Consciousness models have nothing to do with panspsychism so I am not sure what you mean here. The average QM model is that only certain structures generate consciousness, not “all structures generate consciousness” or “the universe as a whole is conscious.”
But otherwise yes, supernaturalist explanations tend in fact to be non-explanations, trying to Mary Sue away problems rather than actually solve them.
The only world I have ever known is the one I am dreaming into existence. I have never known a moment when I did not exist and never will. I did not create myself and therefore have aspects of my full self apparently hidden from me, but that does not stop me from being GOD.
Solipsism is a Cartesian Demon, which is extraordinarily improbable. It’s therefore least likely to be a true account of your experience.
See Epistemological End Game and Why A Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism Is Probably True.
no one likes solipsism but all logical roads lead right to it… there are benefits that don’t seem to be known, for example, I have no one to blame for my emotions and so come to the rational notion that I am causing them by false expectations and anticipations. I have no one to hate, as everyone is just an aspect of me, a dream character or virtual entity of my own making… equanimity and the concept of Maya fit well with this.
then there is physics… one of the leading theoies known as M-Theory or brane theory has all of us as different aspects of a single substance differing only by our multi-dimensional vibrations.
All false. Read the articles I linked you to. They explain why.
Your new sentence about M-Theory is also incorrect (it also isn’t the same thing as Brane Theory). But that you can find out on Wikipedia. You really need to school up here.
Jiohdi:
Even within the logic you suggested, where do you think false expectations are coming from? Do you think you totally originated them? Because if you’re careful, you’ll realize that a ton of your expectations were prompted by other people.
Which strongly gravitates against solipsism.
Yeah, Ben should definitely stick to his politics and let apologetics to more knowledgeable people on the subject, such as Alexander Pruss and Josh Rasmussen.
See, what I’ve found is that there aren’t people more knowledgeable. There are just people who run a better grift in that field. After having WLC be hyped up to me as a serious thinker who Dawkins was totally in the wrong to ignore and then see that critical parts of his arguments require ignoring special relativity and pretty ordinary quantum mechanical conclusions, I was pretty well done.
I do sometimes see more sophisticated “apologists” who are really just intellectuals who also happen to be Christian and can think in a broader context. But those are overwhelmingly much more liberal, secular thinkers who recognize huge error bars on everything from Biblical inerrancy to the certitude of God’s existence. Those people aren’t very useful to Christianity as it exists today, which is either as relatively benign cultural Christianity or as an extremist authoritarian movement.
When Ben talked about comprehending reality, I think he was making a reference to John Lennox’s argument from intelligibility (which is defended at length in Meynell’s book titled “The Intelligible Universe”). Thomas Nagel also talks about this argument in his book “Mind and Cosmos”.
But Ben joined all the arguments in a single statement; it has nothing to do with free will.
Lennox’s argument doesn’t involve premises about free will, so I took that as less likely. The Lewis argument, by contrast, explains all of Ben’s content, just garbled. Because the Lewis version does involve premises about free will (and links tangentially to “meaning” which Ben also garbled in).
As to the Lennox argument, I refute that in All Godless Universes Are Mathematical and a past comment on Ten Reasons to Expect a Universe with Uniformities (I might polish that up into a blog later).
I find the “You believe in something science can’t prove!” rhetoric so particularly silly.
You know what we call experiences? Data. If literally everyone, everywhere, always experienced the ability to stop their impulses, that would tell us something. That wouldn’t be “something science couldn’t explain”.
It’s so critical for right-wing gadflies to make “science” only into a very narrow experimentalist term, basically only the absolutely hard sciences, because even the lower-certainty conclusions of the social and “soft” sciences destroy their position totally.
In this case, the fact that Ben not only will have people in an average audience who have definitely experienced being not fully in control of their full range of behavior and decisions and faculties (e.g. DID, blackouts, Tourette’s etc.) but almost certainly even knows it is itself additional disproof against his position. No, Ben, we actually don’t experience anything like libertarian free will. We experience that we have habits that are beyond our immediate control, and intrusive thoughts, and restrictions on our inhibitions. Even a consultation of our intuitive experience makes libertarian free will a very poor fit to the data.
There is a documented “feeling of control” and independence that Ben could be referencing (much experimental philosophy in free will explores this).
It is generated by our limited cognitive field. Our brain only renders into consciousness the outputs of mental subprocessing, not the entire logic chain, which creates the illusion that the latter doesn’t exist; informally, this is what Freud started fumbling at with the discovery of the subconscious.
The functional tool is narrative self-identity which is extremely powerful, but it can produce an illusion that “I am making all my decisions independently of everything else,” kind of like the way conservatives think they can survive entirely on their own initiative by “not seeing” the massive infrastructure society sustains them on (from maintaining roads and clean water to fire departments and schools, as well as all the policing, which requires all the bureaucracy they hate, because you can’t catch white-collar criminals if you never document anything).
This is not unlike the way this same cognitive modeling produces the illusion that we are a singular bodiless soul located about an inch behind our eyes (and not a massively complex physical machine occupying the entire top half of our skull).
But like all cognitive illusions, it is science that helps us expose them. To renounce any effort to test whether our assumptions are illusions, our intuitions errors, our feelings misfires, is the kind of anti-scientism that conservatives like Ben Shapiro swim in while ironically stumping for “Western culture” that is supposed to be all about not doing that.
What I find telling is that you don’t need science to dismiss the most unserious versions of theist claims. Buddhists were doing it long before a more substantial scientific method, just engaging consistently with and building craft knowledge around consciousness exploration.
So, yes, it feels like we’re in control… sometimes. Sometimes we actually don’t. Those moments can be pretty awful. Sleep paralysis can be so terrifying even if one could, under more rational circumstances, recognize that it will pass and simply be patient.
Simply consulting our own experiences carefuly makes us realize that our consciousness is a lot more of a construct than it may superficially look like. To make an analogy: You don’t need a microscope to prove Ben wrong. You just need to look carefully with your eyes.
All of the subsequent immense psychology we’ve discovered just drives that home further, of course. But anyone who’s being honest with themselves has to admit that their cognitions don’t look like free will.
What a reckless argument by Shapiro. He obviously didn’t think it through. But one thing I respect about him is that he doesn’t use the Bible to justify his politicals beliefs and values. For example, he’s pro-life but he never uses religion to justify why he thinks abortion is bad. He’s quite secular.
I have question for you about free will. If everything in the universe is interdependent, do you think there can be free will?
You can’t use the Bible to defend a pro-life position. The Bible is pro-abortion. So it is no merit that someone recognizes the Bible is no help there. Likewise most Christian and Jewish pro-lifers give secular arguments for their position, because they know biblical arguments can have no legal or popular appeal. So there is nothing peculiar in finding yet another one doing that. It doesn’t make anyone secular. To the contrary, Shapiro spits on secularism, regarding it as a threat, not a boon.
As to free will, I have a lot of articles on that. There is a “free will” category in the category dropdown menu down the right margin of this blog. If you want to know where to start though, I recommend Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters. Both of those are already linked in the article you are reading, so I recommend from now on that you just read the article you are commenting on and follow its links first, rather than asking a superfluous and redundant question. It saves us both time.
The Bible-abortion issue I raised was just an example. I’ve heard Christians make the argument that since god forbids the murder people, and a fetus is a person, the Bible forbids abortion. Never heard Shapiro use the Bible to justify his values or political beliefs. But I’ve also heard him spit on secularism as well like the example you provided.
Sorry, I read the article, I just didn’t check the links. Will do though
A lot of Christian anti-abortion activists don’t try to cite the Bible. They argue like Shapiro. Because they know citing the Bible can have no legal effect (and indeed even threatens their program as a violation of the religion clause of the first amendment), nor is going to persuade (since their targets of persuasion don’t respond to such arguments).
So only the unskilled randos and garden variety preachers do that. Shapiro fits right into the stock mold of all competent anti-abortionists, even Christian fundamentalists. There is nothing “new” about this.
Indeed Shapiro explicitly admits this: “I think the Bible is right but I don’t think the Bible is the important textbook here,” a.k.a. he doesn’t think citing it would be persuasive, so he lies about the science instead. He goes on to defend the fundamentalist religious ontology (ensoulment) with bogus “scientific” arguments instead. Like most savvy anti-abortionists do.
Of course, again, this isn’t even true (the Bible endorses abortion, it does not oppose it). But neither is the bogus “science” he cites. That’s just religious appropriation of an authority now more trusted than the Bible. Like always. It’s the exact same playbook as any religious fundamentalist employs who is smart enough to know how rhetoric works.