Inquiring Infidel

Morality- Desirism vs. Goal Theory

2011-05-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had a debate with Richard Carrier on morality. He believes that Goal Theory is the best account of morality, and I believe desirism is more accurate. After any debate, you go back and think of some things that you should have said better, but I think overall it was a great exchange. Video of the debate will be posted soon, but for now, here's the text of my opening speech:

First off, I'd like to thank Ben and the Ethical Society for hosting tonight's debate. I'd also like to thank Dr. Carrier for that excellent opening speech. Like Dr. Carrier, I think it's important to use reason to discover moral truth. We must expose our views to scrutiny and embrace the possibility that we're wrong, for that's the only way we learn. I hope that however tonight's debate turns out, we all walk away slightly closer to the truth. Far too much evil has already been done by people who thought they were doing good.

While I think morality is important, there's nothing magic about the word itself. If someone defined morality as following some person's arbitrary whim, then morality wouldn't matter to me. I don't care about how you choose to define the word morality; I care about making the world a better place.

To figure out what a better world would be, I think we have to start with desires. As Dr. Carrier said in a recent blog post, desire is the root of all value. Among other things, I want to eat a tasty slice of pizza, have fewer people die of preventable diseases, and live a happy life. Those things have value to me. That value is real. The objects of of my desires have real value. But morality is about more than my desires. In order to make the world a better place where everyone gets more of what they value, we have to consider ALL desires.

How do we bring about such a world? We do that by promoting good desires. In a world where everyone hated being hurt but wanted to hurt as many people as possible, everyone would be miserable. But in a world where everyone wanted everyone else to be happy, everyone's desires would be fulfilled. So a moral desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires, and a moral action is one that someone with those good desires would perform.

Some people think that morality should be focused on what action maximizes happiness. But I disagree. If a mother had to either kill one of her children or have them both be killed, happiness would be maximized by her gleefully killing one of her children without hesitation or remorse. This would minimize their suffering, as well as her suffering. However, think about the kind of mother who would do that. If she had a strong desire for her children to be happy and healthy, it would have been very difficult for her to kill either of them and if she did decide to kill one of them, it would at least have been an immensely painful decision for her to make. A loving mother cannot instantly turn off her love in cases like this. Since desiring that your kids be happy and healthy generally fulfills a lot of other desires (like their desires to be happy and healthy), it's a good desire, one that we should promote. We should not praise a mother who gleefully kills her child regardless of the circumstances, because we want parents who have a strong desire to care for their children.

If we promote good desires, we will make the world a better place, and will also make ourselves better off. If everyone had more good desires which fulfilled more of the desires of others, then more of our own desires would be fulfilled. It is in our own interest to get people to have good desires.

In order to promote good desires, we need to make better use of tools like praise and condemnation, reward and punishment. Although those words may have a negative connotation, there's nothing sinister about them. We already use these tools every day. For example, a simple “Thank you” to someone who helped you out can make them more likely to help you in the future. A football coach might praise his team and reward them with an extra day of rest after a well-played game. Your wife might punish you for your indiscretions.

We should focus on improving desires since our desires determine our actions. If I desire to go see the latest Disney movie, and I believe it is showing at 5pm at the local theater, I drive to the theater.

Almost everyone wants to be happy. But it is not the only thing we desire. I would want my children to go to college, even if I knew I would not live long enough to derive any happiness from seeing it happen. I would rather make a groundbreaking scientific advance that was only recognized after my death than be famous in my lifetime for a discovery that later turned out to be false and which ended up holding back scientific progress. The second life might be happier, but I would prefer the first. So happiness, which Dr. Carrier defines in his book as “an abiding contentment” is not the only thing people value. A content world is not necessarily a better world. We must consider everything we care about.

Dr. Carrier could respond by using a different definition of happiness, in which you can become happier even after you're dead. One problem with this approach is that it is misleading since it is so far from how people normally use the word “happiness”. It also doesn't make much sense to say that happiness is the one thing we want more than anything else, if by happiness you just mean everything that we value.

While we're typically happy when our desires are fulfilled, happiness and desire fulfillment are not the same. People who are moderately depressed may still desire that their family does well even if nothing makes them happy. We also may be willing to sacrifice our own life to save someone else's. Even if we know that we will die instantly and get almost no happiness from the action, we will lay down our life if we care enough about the cause.

For these reasons, I think it is wrong to say that happiness is the goal of morality. Morality should take into account everything that we value.

I think Dr. Carrier is also mistaken when he says in his writings that since people will always do what they most desire to do, we should focus on making sure that all moral agents act rationally and with sufficient information. It's important to be rational and well informed, but I think he's mistaken when he argues that everyone would act morally if only they were fully informed and rational. The problem is that everyone has different desires. Some people have more evil desires than good ones and could best fulfill their desires by acting immorally. If your only desire is to kill as many people as possible, being more informed and rational will not prevent you from killing.

Of course Dr. Carrier could respond by slipping morality into his definition of rationality, but I think this is problematic. A theist could simply define rationality as acting based on the Bible. By that definition, the theist could rightly argue that if only atheists were rational, they would believe in God. Rationality is about acting consistently with your reasons for action and the only reasons for action that have been shown to exist are desires.

I think Dr. Carrier would respond by saying that even if someone has bad desires, they would be happier if they acted perfectly morally. For the moment, let's set aside my concern that happiness is not the only thing we value. What reason do we have to think that someone would be happier if they were perfectly moral? There are definitely some moral traits that make us happier, but it seems like an extraordinary claim to say that evolution would just happen to result in all our brains working in such a way that every moral trait would increase our happiness. Evolution works on the individual gene level. If an immoral trait makes it more likely that you'll pass on your genes, that trait will become more common. Even one of the works that Dr. Carrier cites to defend his claim that acting virtuously makes you better off argues that evolution promotes some negative traits like aggressiveness. Sometimes doing good makes us happy, and sometimes doing evil makes us happy. Sometimes evolution favors good, sometimes evolution favors evil. With all the violence in the animal kingdom, and our own species, it seems unreasonable to assume that every trait which helps others would also help one's own genes. So I see no reason to think that evolution would make it so that acting morally would always make us happier.

In addition to happiness, many of us value the freedom to be ourselves and pursue the things we want to pursue. If we could become fully informed and rational, and then had the same desires that all the other fully informed and rational people have, we would lose everything that makes us unique. We would no longer have our own unique memories, or our own unique wants. Even if a fully informed perfectly morally person was maximally happy, that person would not and could not be me.

So I reject Dr. Carrier's claim that knowing about morality causes you to act like an angel regardless of your desires. Many philosophers argue that in order for something to count as morality, it has to provide a reason-for-action that motives all people to follow it. I don't think that such a morality exists, but I also don't think this is an essential part of morality. People have many contradictory beliefs about what morality is and no definition could satisfy all of them. But this doesn't disprove morality any more than some people believing that God is supernatural and others believing that he's the entire natural world proves that God could not exist. If our definition of a word had to be consistent with everything people ever took the word to mean, then we would have to throw out all language.

Atoms used to be defined as the indivisible building blocks of everything. But when we discovered that they could be divided, we didn't say “I guess atoms don't exist after all”, we just said that they're slightly different than we once thought. However, when we discovered there was no mass-less inside things which was released by fire, we stopped using the term phlogiston because there was nothing for it to refer to. Even though morality does not compel evil people to be good, it still has all the important components of morality. Under my view of morality, we can still say that regardless of individual opinion, certain actions are wrong because they tend to hurt other people by depriving them of things they care about. We have good reason to praise those who do good, and condemn those who do evil.

We can condemn slavery as the evil that it is. Even if everyone on Earth thought slavery was moral and wanted to be enslaved, it would still be wrong since it deprives people of things they want, like freedom to make decisions for themselves, freedom from pain, and the ability to choose one’s spouse and protect one’s family. Evil desires like the desire to enslave others thwart more and stronger desires than they fulfill.

Thankfully, today there are few people who actually want to own a slave. This is a huge change in just 200 years. We didn't get rid of slavery by presenting everyone with a logical case for why slavery is wrong. It's not like those who supported slavery hundreds of years ago had a logical case for it or that most people today oppose it because of logical arguments against it. It's that people are far less likely to want to enslave others today since slavery is seen as reprehensible. We need to condemn and punish those who hurt others in order to change their desires and make the world a better place .

That is why tonight's debate matters. If something like happiness is the root of all value and acting morally makes us perfectly happy, we could just get people to be moral by showing them that only morality leads to happiness. But if not, then we have to work to change desires. It may not be easy, but if we try, we can make the world just a little bit better. Thank you.

The Moral Argument for God

2010-10-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

I recently did another debate with my friend Ben. We've been taking turns defending some of the most popular theistic arguments. This month, he was defending William Lane Craig's version of the moral argument for the existence of God. Here's the basic argument:

If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
Objective moral values do exist.
Therefore, God exists.

I think there are a lot of problems with this argument, but have been disappointed to see how poorly atheist debaters typically respond. The argument is not saying that you need to believe in God to be good, just that in a world without God, there would be no such thing as goodness. I think my opening statement provides a pretty good (though brief) summary of my views on the moral argument and morality overall. Here it is:

Although riddled with flaws, I think that the moral argument is one of the most persuasive arguments for belief in God. We all want to say that Hitler was wrong, and for many of those raised in Christian homes, God seems like the most reasonable foundation for morality. But, if we care about truth, we need to see whether the argument actually works.

The first problem is that my opponent provided no evidence for his second premise, that objective moral values exist. We may really really want them to exist, but this doesn't prove that they do any more than really really wanting to have an eternity of bliss proves that heaven exists, or that really really wanting to have won the lottery proves that you did. But maybe my opponent is saying that our strong revulsion to the Holocaust is itself evidence that it is immoral. Even if we assume that icky feelings are good evidence of something's immorality, this evidence for objective moral values exists even if God does not exist, which undermines his first premise that objective moral values cannot exist without God. Either his first premise is clearly false, or he has provided no support whatsoever that his second premise is true. Thus his argument fails.

Another problem with his argument is that moral values do exist regardless of whether God exists. Morality is a very difficult word to define. If you look in a dictionary, you'll find that acting morally means acting ethically, doing what is good. But what do those words mean? If all we have is a group of synonyms that have no relation to anything else in the world, then obviously we can't show that morality exists. If a zivafil is defined as a fritibal and a fritibal is defined as a zivafil, we'd have no way to say whether either exists, and we also wouldn't have any reason to care about whether they do.

We care a lot more about whether morality exists than about whether a zivafil exists. Yet what do we believe about morality that makes us care so much about it? Is it that we see morality as requiring that everyone who does evil be punished and want to think that Hitler is suffering for his evil deeds? I don't think so. I care about right and wrong, but don't care at all about exacting retribution for it's own sake. Also, many Christians believe that God forgives everyone for their sins, but we don't say this would prove that morality does not exist.

Do we think that morality means that merely telling someone what is moral will make them behave like angels? This would certainly be nice, but I don't think it's reasonable to think that morality can do this. Thinking that it's immoral to have sex with children certainly hasn't stopped Catholic priests or Protestant pastors from raping them. People who have evil desires will do evil, even if they know what is right and wrong.

I believe we care so much about morality because we want make the world a better place. We want to think we've made things better rather than worse. I think we can figure out what is good- not by asking God or Jiminy Cricket, but by using reason.

All of us have desires. Among other things, I want a tasty slice of pizza, fewer people starving to death in Africa, and to live a happy life. There's no halo of goodness around that slice of pizza, but getting it has value to me. This value is real. The fulfillment of my desires has real value. But if we want to know a more general good, and not just what is good for me, we need to look at all desires. A better world would be one where more people get what they desire. Some of our desires are bad and tend to make the world worse, while other desires are good and tend to make the world better. Knowing this, we should do what we can to change people's desires so they want to do good. We can punish people for rape, condemn people for lying, and praise people for generosity. The world will never be perfect, but we can all work to make it just a little bit better.

Now some people will say that my view of morality, known as desirism, is not true morality, because some people think that true morality must magically compel everyone who knows about it to be moral. Others may reject it because they think that morality is synonymous with God's commands and God's commands cannot exist without God. If there is nothing that satisfies everyone's beliefs about morality, does that mean that morality does not exist? I think not; people have a wide variety of incompatible definitions of God, but that alone does not prove that God does not exist. In the end, I don't care that much about how you define morality. What I care about is doing what I can to help others and making the world a better place. I'll still be doing this, even if you choose to define it as evil.

Not only is there morality without God, this morality is objective. William Lane Craig defines objective as “independent of people’s opinions.” Regardless of my opinion of it, slavery does a lot of harm. Even if everyone on earth believed that slavery was good, it would still be wrong because it deprives people of things they strongly desire, such as the freedom to make decisions for themselves, freedom from pain, and the ability to choose one’s spouse and protect one’s family.

But one question that rarely gets asked is whether objective morality is possible WITH God. If what is moral is grounded in what a personal God thinks is moral, then morality is not independent of people's opinions. A morality based on God's opinions seems just as subjective as a morality based on the opinions of some space alien that visits earth.

This gets to the biggest problem with theistic morality: the Euthyphro dilemma. It asks whether God commands things because they are good, or whether they are good merely because they are commanded by God. If things are only good because they are commanded by God, then morality is subjective. It also makes it meaningless to say that God is good, because he could have made love evil and rape good. Whatever God happened to choose, he could have made us think that those things are good or evil. If morality is nothing more than what God wills, then we can't even say that we're lucky that God ended up favoring good things, because there's nothing good about them other than that God happened to will them. If good is whatever God wants, then God being good means nothing more than that God does whatever he wants.

The other option is that God commands things because they are good. This seems much more reasonable, though believers who think that God is the creator of everything might have a problem with it. If God commands things because they are good, then theists still have to explain what the source of morality really is. However, if they are Christian, then they have the added problem or reconciling this view of morality with the God of the Old Testament. According to 1 Samuel 15, God commanded: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” At least when God commanded genocide in Numbers 31, he said that the virginal girls should be kept alive for the use of the soldiers, which I guess is slightly better than death. Genocide thwarts a hell of a lot of desires, such as the desire for people to live, and I don't see how it could be moral to promote genocide. Maybe Christians can disprove my moral theory and come up with their own theory of morality apart from God under which God's actions in the Old Testament happen to be morally perfect, but that seems absurdly unlikely.

The most common response to the Euthyphro dilemma is to say that morality is grounded in God's perfectly good nature. But this only pushes the problem back a step. You can then ask whether God is good because his nature has the properties of moral goodness, or whether those properties are good merely because God has them (See this excellent article by Christian philosopher Wes Morriston for a more detailed explanation of the problem). You still either have to either come up with a theory of morality apart from God and explain how promoting genocide and permitting the Holocaust are consistent with that theory, or accept that morality is somewhat arbitrary and that it is meaningless to call God good.

While emotionally powerful, the moral argument does not actually work. My opponent has not provided any evidence that objective morality exists which does not also undermine his first premise, that objective morality cannot exist if God does not exist. But the larger problem is that objective morality makes far more sense under atheism than under theism. I have shown that morality does exist even though God does not exist, and shown that if a meaningfully good God did exist, it's very difficult to see how objective morality could exist.

Why I Want to Die

2010-07-22T19:34:00.000-07:00

No, I don’t want to die right now. For all its problems, I genuinely love my life. Even if I live to be a hundred, I will probably want to live a hundred years more. But I do not want to live forever.

Some argue that death is not bad since we didn’t care about not being alive before we were born and we won’t be around to care after we die. This argument has been around for at least a couple thousand years, since Epicurus stated in his Letter to Menoeceus that “Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.”

However, I think Epicurus got it wrong. There are things we value very deeply that death would take away from us, whether it’s the ability to fall in love and get married, to be there when your child takes her first steps, to write that book you’ve always wanted to write, or simply to have one more day with the one you love. Death takes away things of great value, even if we won’t be there to mourn their loss.

We want to go on living because there are things we want to do, whether those goals are long term goals like becoming a nuclear physicist, or short term goals like going to see our son’s play. We have far more things we want to do then we have years to do them. Even if we live for one thousand years, there will still be things left that we want to do.

While I love life, I would not want eternal life, either on earth, or in heaven. I don’t think most people have really thought about what it would mean to live forever. It would mean that you would have time to accomplish every single goal that you’re capable of accomplishing. You could be a conductor, a teacher, and a marine biologist. You could hike every mountain and sing every conceivable song. But you might also lose motivation to accomplish your long term goals. Why put in the hard work to become a brain surgeon if you could always put it off until tomorrow? But regardless of how motivated you are to accomplish your goals, there will come a point at which you will have accomplished every goal you really wanted to accomplish. You will have nothing left that will make life worth living.

Even if we were in a realm where we could do anything, from walking through walls to talking to George Washington, there are only a finite number of possible things a finite mind can experience in one minute. There is only so much sensory data we can take in, and only so many ways that our neurons can fire. Since there are only a finite number of one minute experiences, there would only be a finite number of billion minute experiences too (just like how there are finite digits and also finite billion-digit numbers). We could even do every possible googolplex year experience a googolplex times.

However there are some things we want to do again and again. Just because I achieve my goal of eating a delicious pizza doesn’t mean I would never want to eat an identical pizza in the future. Even if I do everything I could possibly do, I would still want to redo some of it. But eventually, the pleasure would diminish. I don’t think sex with Brad Pitt would be as much fun if you’ve already done it a googolplex times.

At some point, there would be nothing new to accomplish or experience, and all I could do is relive past experiences. It may be fun for a while, but I think eventually I would find it unfulfilling.

But maybe we’re not in a heavenly realm where we can do anything, and there are barriers preventing us from achieving all our goals right away. Let’s say that I was only able to achieve one new goal every billion years. Since there are finite goals, there would still come a point where I achieved all my goals, and then a point where I had achieved all my goals a googolplex times.

One way to avoid the problem of getting tired of things would be if I kept forgetting what I did in the past. I could then do exactly the same series of things over and over again without ever getting bored. However, I don't see why living an identical life over and over again is necessarily more valuable than living that life once. Either way I end up achieving and enjoying exactly the same things. I also think that my memories are such an important part of what makes ‘me’ ‘me’, that if you took them all away, it may no longer be ‘me’ that is living forever.

Another way around the problem would be if my brain was changed so that I behaved differently. Maybe the brains of pigs (or some other animal) are set up so they would enjoy eternal life. If so, my brain could be gradually changed until it was identical to that of a pig. "I" would then enjoy eternal life.

I’ve thought a lot about it, and I can’t think of any type of immortality worth wanting. Not only would eternal life be endlessly repetitive, it would deprive life of its value. It is because life is finite that every moment of my life is precious. I will do some amazing things in my life, but there will be other things that I will never get to do. What I get to do will be based on the choices I make and the work I do. I will not have infinite time to try again, and that makes my life’s successes so much sweeter. My choices matter. Every minute matters. That is why I love life, and why I want to die.

Review of “The Reason for God” (Part 1)

2010-07-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

In The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Tim Keller (pastor of the popular Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan) tries to not only preach to the choir, but persuade non-believers to become Christians. Keller makes a lot of claims in the book, and if someone does not examine whether those claims are actually true, they will probably think that Keller makes a very compelling case for Christianity.

Even though I believe the book fails at persuading thoughtful nonbelievers, it has become quite popular. It has been the top selling apologetics book an Amazon for months and even reached #7 on the New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction. I’ve also spoken to a couple people who highly recommended Keller’s work.

Although I find the book unpersuasive, Keller does make a lot of good points. He even recognizes that religion is one of the main barriers to world peace. “Each religion informs its followers that they have “the truth,” and this naturally leads them to feel superior to those with differing beliefs. … Therefore, it is easy for one religious group to stereotype and caricature other ones. Once this situation exists it can easily spiral down into the marginalization of others or even to active oppression, abuse, or violence against them” (page 4).

I also completely agree with what he says about doubt. “A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts—not only their own but their friends’ and neighbors’. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs because you inherited them” (xvii).

This should apply not only to believers, but to atheists as well. Atheists should be just as willing to consider objections to their beliefs. As Keller points out, if someone believes that God does not exist because she says that “There can’t just be one true religion,” but does not have good evidence to back up that statement, believing it is an act of faith.

However, Keller errs when he says that “All doubts, however, skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really just a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. … Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith” (xvii). If I say that I’m going to flip a coin and it will come up heads, you can doubt that it will come up heads without having to believe that it will come up tails. If you don’t think that we have a good enough idea of the values in the Drake equation to say whether there is intelligent life on other planets, you can doubt someone’s claim that there is extraterrestrial life without believing that there isn’t. It is possible to simply say, “I don’t know.”

In order to doubt that Christianity is true, you don’t need an argument to show that it is false, just as you can doubt that invisible unicorns exist even without an argument showing that they do not exist. Of course, many atheists do believe that things like the problem of evil are evidence against Christianity, but even if all those objections were refuted, it would not show that Christianity is true. There could still be no good reasons to believe in it, just as there are no good reasons to believe in invisible unicorns (as far as I know).

Early in the book, Keller describes his own religious journey. Growing up in the ‘60’s, he saw “two camps before [him], and there was something radically wrong with both of them. The people most passionate about social justice were moral relativists, while the morally upright didn’t seem to care about the oppression going on all over the world” (xii). He was drawn to the former camp, but kept asking himself: “If morality is relative, why isn’t social justice as well?” I agree with Keller that both of these camps have it wrong, but these are definitely not the only camps. While Keller ended up in the camp of Christians who care about social justice, I ended up in the camp of atheists who reject moral relativism and care about making the world a better place.

The Reason for God is broken up into two parts. In the first half, Keller attempts to refute what he sees as some of the incorrect faith beliefs of nonbelievers which stand in the way of them believing in God. In the second, Keller explains what he sees as sufficient reasons for believing that Christianity is true.

He opens the first half of the book by addressing the claim that “There can’t be just one true religion.” I agree with him that this is a bad reason for thinking that Christianity must be false. The diversity of religions does mean it’s unlikely that we happened to be raised into the one true religion and gives us a good reason to examine whether there is evidence for our religious beliefs. But it does not show that all religious beliefs are false or that all religious beliefs are true any more than a diversity of moral beliefs proves moral nihilism or moral relativism.

In the next chapter, he engages with the biggest objection many non-believers have: the problem of evil. He rightly points out that “just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one” (23). I agree with Keller that my own inability to think of good reasons why an omnibenevolent God would permit the Holocaust is no proof that there aren’t any.

Even if horrendous evils are not a logical disproof of God, they at least seem like evidence against the existence of such a God. This world is far different than what I would expect if the world had been created by a perfect God. However, a lot has been written on the problem of evil, so I feel I should read more before being confident that the evidential argument from evil can withstand all objections (I’m particularly interested in reading The God Beyond Belief, in which Christian philosopher Nick Trakakis argues that the evidential problem of evil does provide evidence against Christianity).

But even if Keller’s approach, which is known as skeptical theism, is a sufficient answer to the problem of evil, it has consequences that Christians might be unwilling to accept. Skeptical theism asserts that an inability to think of a morally sufficient reason for God having done something is no evidence that God didn’t have a morally sufficient reason. As I discussed in previous post, if skeptical theism is true, then our inability to think of a morally sufficient reason for why God would lie to us about heaven existing is no evidence that God didn’t have a morally sufficient reason to lie about heaven. Accepting skeptical theism means accepting that you have no good reasons to believe that the most basic tenants of the Christian faith are true.

Keller also describes people who went through periods of suffering and became better because of it. This is a good point. I’ve had some rough periods in my own life, and I definitely think that temporary suffering can sometimes help change one’s life for the better. However, it is very hard for me to accept that that the Holocaust made all the Jews better off or that a young girl who is gang raped and then killed benefits from the experience.

Keller then argues that evil is actually a bigger problem for atheism than for theism. He says that without God, there is no good basis for saying that an action is good or evil. But here he is guilty of what he just accused atheists of. He assumes that an inability to think of a good basis for morality outside of God means that there can’t be one. I, as well as many moral philosophers, do believe that morality can exist without God. But even if we are all wrong, this wouldn’t prove that God exists, it would instead show that theism would be more desirable than atheism for people who want morality to exist. Similarly, belief in God is more desirable for people who want to live forever, but this doesn’t prove that God actually exists.

Christianity also has a problem of saying what the basis of morality is. Many Christians say that it is God’s benevolent nature. But is his nature good just because it happens to be God’s, or is it good because it is consistent with some principles of moral goodness. If it’s the former, then if God had thought murder was good and love was evil, murder actually would be good and love would be evil. It would then be omnibenevolent of God to hate and kill everyone. In this case, it seems meaningless to call God good. But if you take the latter approach and say that God’s nature is good because it adheres to principles of moral goodness (such as kindness and fairness), then you still have to give a basis outside of God for those moral principles. And this is even more problematic for Christians, since it is very hard to come up with an ethical system under which all the things the Bible says that God did would be moral (1 Samuel 15, Numbers 31, and Exodus 11 are particularly problematic).

Not only does atheism provide a better answer to why there’s evil in the world (animals that kill and eat other animals have a better chance of surviving and passing on their genes), it is also better able to give a basis for morality.

Is Porn Harmful?

2010-04-23T11:39:00.000-07:00

I recently got into a discussion with a Catholic friend of mine about the morality of porn. He thinks that masturbating to porn is immoral because it goes against God’s natural law, while I don’t think there is anything immoral about it. He thinks it is very harmful to society, while I don’t think there is anything necessarily harmful about porn.

After our discussion, my friend sent me a bunch of articles which attempt to show how evil pornography is. These articles made a lot of bad arguments, far too many to explore in this post, but I’d like to lay out some of the problems I see with two of them. In Pornography’s Effects on Interpersonal Relationships, Ana J. Bridges argues that pornography has a very harmful effect on marriages and romantic relationships. In Industry Size, Measurement, and Social Costs, K. Doran argues that there is no good statistical evidence that consuming porn has positive or negative effects, but says that there are still good reasons to limit its distribution.

On page 3, Bridges comments that porn typically provides a flawed script for real life relationships. I agree. Porn emphasizes “culturally accepted beauty standards”, typically focuses on male rather than female pleasure, and often focuses too much on penetration. But I would argue that mainstream movies are also a terrible guide to real life relationships. They also emphasize “culturally accepted beauty standards”, make it seem like couples always end up living happily ever after, treat women as if they need validation from men, and make it seem like all men and women are supposed to conform to certain behaviors within relationships rather than being themselves. I think that both should be improved, but I support banning neither porn nor mainstream movies.

I also think the author draws a ridiculously unsubstantiated conclusion in the section titled “Pornography increases negative attitudes to women”. She bases this conclusion on a study that showed a very slight correlation between viewing degrading porn and a less positive view of women. But correlation is not causation. If porn use had no affect whatsoever on views of women, I would still expect that those who had a negative view of women and wanted to dominate them would prefer porn that showed women being dominated. Without the seemingly unjustifiable assumption that attitudes towards women have no effect on taste in porn, we can draw absolutely nothing from the slight correlation shown here.

Yet the very next section “Pornography decreases empathy for victims of sexual violence” is even worse. In an attempt to support the claim that porn decreases empathy for victims of sexual violence, the author cites a study showing that people who were shown R-rated slasher films were significantly less empathetic to rape victims then those shown X-rated porn or R-rated teen sex films. They found no difference between those who viewed the porn and those who viewed the R-rated teen sex films. The author misleadingly refers to the slasher films as “graphically violent sexual films”. In reality, the authors of this study said that at most, the slasher films contained “mildly erotic scenes”. This study did not show that viewing porn was worse than viewing any other film, and showed that mainstream slasher movies were far worse.

Bridges also talks about the negative effects of porn within romantic relationships, but the examples she gives are primarily problems with how porn is perceived rather than problems with porn itself. She says that while porn can be used together by couples to enhance their sex life, it is often used in secret without the knowledge of one’s partner. Since openness and honesty are important to a successful relationship, this is not good. But this doesn’t mean that porn is bad, just that if a person does use it, he/she should not hide that from his/her spouse. Another piece of evidence given is that porn can be addictive and can cause people to spend more time alone rather than with their spouse. However, this is true of many entertaining diversions, such as video games. Some people spend several hours a day playing video games instead of spending that time with their spouses, but this doesn’t mean we should get rid of video games, just that we should encourage people to use them in healthy amounts. We should do the same with porn. Finally, Bridges mentions that women are reluctant to enter into a relationship with porn users. But this is a problem caused not by porn itself, or by its users, but by people like her who encourage people to have a negative view of it.

Bridges further argues that porn is bad because it leads to decreased sexual satisfaction. To support this, she cites a study which found that happily married people viewed less porn. But instead of porn making people less happy, it seems far more likely that the causal arrow points in the other direction. People who are feeling sexually unsatisfied in their relationship almost certainly have less sex and therefore will need to get a greater percentage of their orgasms from looking at porn. Bridges also provides evidence that looking at porn leads to people viewing their partner as less attractive. This seems plausible. Just as watching Hollywood movies where even ugly women are played by beautiful actresses could lead one to have unrealistic standards of beauty, so could watching porn movies where everyone is beautiful and has unnaturally large breasts.

Finally, Bridges brings up a New York study that she says showed that porn use “nearly doubled the odds that a woman reported being sexually assaulted by her partner.” I have some concerns over their choice of control group, but setting that aside, this study still does nothing to establish that pornography caused the abuse. Violent sexual criminals may be more obsessed with sexual content more than the average person, but this doesn’t mean that viewing pornographic content causes someone to become a violent sexual criminal. Killers generally tend to like guns, but guns don’t make people killers.

Given her frequent abuse of statistics to further her case, it seems far more likely that she started with her conclusion and then tried to find evidence to support it, rather than following the evidence where it led.

I thought Doran’s piece was much better. Unlike Bridges, Doran does not recklessly leap from correlation to causation. Doran instead critiques the methodology of other studies and concludes that “there is no convincing statistical evidence that consumption of pornography does or does not affect behavior.” And while it may initially seem contrary to my position, I even agree with Doran’s statement that “some people do appear to have a strong incentive to prevent themselves from consuming pornography, and to pay more for this prevention than for the pornography itself. This suggests that there may be large personal costs of consumption associated with pornography, and opens up the possibility that it may be optimal for the state to use regulation to limit the distribution and consumption of pornography.”

The government should impose some regulations. I do not think that hardcore pornography should be plastered on buildings so that young children can’t even go outside without seeing anal penetration. I think the government’s role in regulating porn should be a lot like the government’s role in regulating food. The government makes sure the people producing the food have safe working conditions. The government restricts what foods are available to children (for example, banning soda in school vending machines). But the government does not restrict what foods people are able to enjoy in the privacy of their own homes. Like with porn, there are some people who eat a lot, but who want to eat less. Some of them spend more on weight loss plans than they do on the food itself. But this does not mean we should ban food, or even ban people from eating fattening foods.

Just because someone wants to view less porn does not mean that he/she should. In many cases, people are taught by their religion that all porn use is sin and so see their perfectly normal level of porn use as a problem. Similarly, many people who are perfectly healthy and have an about average weight are taught by societal norms that the only good body is supermodel skinny. These people may desperately want to reduce their weight, turning to weight loss fads or even bulimia, but this doesn’t mean that they should become skinnier. If society had healthier attitudes towards porn and weight, then maybe there would be less money spent trying to fix what was never broken.

Neither of these articles provides good evidence that porn is necessarily harmful. Unless such harm can be demonstrated, I don’t think there is any justification for the government limiting what people can view in the privacy of their own homes.

Why Most Catholics are Heretics

2010-04-15T13:09:00.000-07:00

Based on the Catholics I’ve talked to, it seems like most Catholics are heretics and don’t even realize it. Many Catholics are firm believers in God, but do not think that God’s existence can be proven with certainty. They merely have ‘faith’ that God exists. However, based on some of the statements which the Catholic Church identifies as infallible, such people are heretics.

According to the Catholic Catechism, “Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.” This was declared infallibly by both the first and second Vatican Councils. While the Catholic Church does not claim that one single argument proves all of God’s attributes, it does claim that proofs for the existence of God allow people to use reason to attain certainty that God exists (Catholic Catechism).

According to the First Vatican Council, anyone who says that God cannot be known with certainty from the natural world is considered anathema. The word ‘anathema’ is often misunderstood, so I turn to a quote from Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin’s article which clears up a lot of Protestant misconceptions about anathema and explains what it really is:

Catholic scholars have long recognized that when an ecumenical council applies this phrase to a doctrinal matter, then the matter is settled infallibly. (If a council applied the phrase to a disciplinary matter, then the matter would not be settled infallibly, since only matters of doctrine, not discipline, are subject to doctrinal definition.)

Thus, when Trent and other ecumenical councils employed anathema sit in regard to doctrinal matters, not only was a judicial penalty prescribed but a doctrinal definition was also made. Today, the judicial penalty may be gone, but the doctrinal definition remains. Everything that was infallibly decided by these councils is still infallibly settled.

This has consequences under current canon law. Those things that are both divinely revealed by God and proposed as such by the Church cannot be obdurately denied or doubted without the offense of heresy (CIC [1983] 751). Heresy does carry a penalty of automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication (can. 1041, 2º), though this does not apply to those who have never been members of the Catholic Church (can. 11), and even then there is a significant list of exceptions (can. 1323).

So someone who denies that the existence of God can be known with certainty is considered a heretic and is automatically excommunicated (excommunication applies only to mentally capable adults who knowingly and without coercion deny that God’s existence can be known with certainty). Someone cannot deny the teaching that God’s existence can be proved with certainty from the natural world without being automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

This poses a problem for many Catholics who merely have faith in God but do not think that the natural world definitively proves that God exists. This also poses a problem for Catholics who have seriously studied the arguments for and against God’s existence and who conclude that while the evidence leans towards God’s existence, it is not enough to establish his existence with certainty.

According to the Catechism, some people may not believe that the existence of God can be known with certainty due to not being willing to surrender oneself or due to “disordered appetites” that lead men to believe what they want to believe rather than what is true. However, this is not a good answer for those people who really want Catholicism to be true and are willing to humbly submit themselves.

If someone has studied all the arguments people have given for the existence of God and thinks they provide evidence for God’s existence but fall short of establishing it with certainty, is there any way to avoid being seen as a heretic who is automatically excommunicated? One escape route I can find is to say that it only says that God ‘can’ be known with certainty, not that he ‘is’ known. Perhaps it is true that God can be proved with certainty, it’s just that no one has figured out how to do it yet after thousands of years. Perhaps it is also true that pigs can fly, it’s just that no pig has yet decided to fly in the presence of humans. There is also the problem that this interpretation appears inconsistent with the Bible, which says that “since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

I guess another response would be to say that even if something is declared infallible, that declaration might not itself be infallible, and even if the declaration was declared infallible, the declaration that the declaration was infallible might not itself be infallible. I think this is true, but if someone rejects even the most firmly established Catholic doctrines, then the label ‘Catholic’ loses all meaning. Someone could believe absolutely anything (the pope is the anti-Christ, Jesus never existed, Oprah Winfrey is God) and consider themselves a Catholic. So this Catholic doctrine seems to be a serious problem for those who do not think that the existence of God can be proved with certainty.

It is also a problem for convincing an atheist that Catholicism is true. You would not only have to convince him or her that God probably exists, but that God’s existence can be established with certainty based on the evidence from the natural world. This would require a great deal more evidence than merely establishing that the likelihood of God existing is more than 50%.

I believe that this is a doctrine that more Catholics should be aware of (and if you agree, pass the word along to your Catholic friends). I know that if I was a Catholic who didn’t think that God could be proven with certainty and I heard about this doctrine, I would really want to investigate and find out how God can be proven. If my religion taught that the creator of all space and time had profoundly demonstrated his existence through the natural world, I wouldn’t just say “Whatever, I don’t really care”, I’d be taking advantage of the opportunity to witness God’s power and goodness through his creation, to connect the everyday world with the divine creator. If I found the proof I sought (proof that could withstand even the best atheist arguments), I would come away with greater admiration and respect for God’s majesty and would feel a deep sense of peace. And if I searched and searched and did not find any proof that God exists, I may realize that the religion I thought was true may not be true after all.

Why Kalam Fails (Part 1)

2010-03-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, I had a debate with fellow atheist blogger Saint Gasoline about whether the Kalam cosmological argument proves the existence of God and I posted some of our speeches here, here, and here. In the debate, I tried to make the strongest possible case for Kalam, and I think I was reasonably effective. A pastor friend of mine who was in the audience even said that it was like I was channeling William Lane Craig (one of the top apologists and the foremost proponent of the Kalam argument).

Kalam is a complex argument and it can be very effective in debates, but when examined more closely, it does not provide any reason for thinking that God exists. I think that neither the general public, nor professional philosophers, should find it convincing. In later posts, I’ll try to explain the problems I see with various parts of the argument.

But first, there’s a more general problem. Kalam rests on a very shaky foundation since it makes a wide array of questionable assumptions about the nature of reality. There are some of these assumptions that most people in the general public would agree with, and others that few would agree with. There are some of these assumptions that most philosophers would agree with and others that very few philosophers would agree with. When William Lane Craig needs to make an assumption that he knows most people will agree with, he appeals to their intuition and casts the alternative as absurd. When he needs to make an assumption that he knows most people will disagree with, he gives a philosophical argument for that assumption. This tactic is very effective, since those who want to believe in Christianity and who see Craig as an authority figure will readily accept his assumptions. While a Christian may see it as absurd if an atheist tried to argue that the number 2 does not exist, he may readily accept that numbers don’t exist when the argument is made by Craig. Craig says that Kalam works, and they trust Craig, so barring irrefutable disproof of any of Craig’s assumptions, they conclude that Kalam works. This is really no better than believing in God because you know a smart guy who also believes in God. The existence of a smart believer no more proves the existence of God than a smart nonbeliever disproves it.

Craig assumes that the A-theory of time is correct, while the B-theory is false. Craig assumes that the relational view of time is correct, while the absolute view of time is false. Craig assumes that numbers do not exist, and actually believes that the existence of numbers would refute theism. Craig assumes that something can be called eternal, even if it has only existed for a finite amount of time. Craig assumes that there are not infinitely many points in space or moments in a day. These are just a few of the many assumptions Kalam relies on.

Someone putting forth an argument has a duty to justify his assumptions, and a critic merely has to point out that there is insufficient reason for thinking that those assumptions are true. For example, consider this argument:

Premise 1: Condoms exist.
Premise 2: If condoms exist, then God exists.
Conclusion: God exists.

This is a valid argument, so if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. A critic of such an argument only needs to point out that there is no reason to believe that premise 2 is true and does not actually have to prove that it’s false. If God is defined as a necessary being, then if he exists, he exists in all possible worlds. It would thus be true that if condoms exist, God exists, since condoms could never exist without God. So unless you can prove that God does not exist, you cannot disprove premise 2. Yet this argument is absurd.

To his credit, Craig has published a great deal of work defending some of his assumptions. Many of these assumptions are on issues that philosophers have debated for centuries, with no resolution in sight. While it may be appealing for a Christian to ignore the other side of these debates and just assume Craig is right on every point, the argument should not compel anyone else to believe in God when it relies on so many questionable assumptions.

However, even if every one of the assumptions I listed is correct, I still do not think the Kalam cosmological argument gives good reason to think that any God or gods exist. In future posts, I will explore the problems I see with various parts of the Kalam argument.

Debating Kalam: My Response to Dustin

2010-02-14T14:04:00.000-08:00

As discussed in my previous two posts, I recently debated the Kalam cosmological argument with fellow atheist blogger Saint Gasoline. My previous two posts had our opening statements, so you might want to read them before reading this post.

Since I only had 5 minutes to respond to Dustin’s opening statement, I had to make a lot of points very quickly. I ended up not responding to everything that I thought could be reasonably criticized. For example, Dustin (in the written, but not the spoken, version of his opening statement) said that modern physicists do not seriously entertain the idea of God. This is an overgeneralization and could be easily refuted by pointing out that Nobel Prize-winning physicists like Charles Townes, William Phillips, Arno Penzias, Antony Hewish, and Joseph Taylor all currently affirm that God was the cause of the universe. Since a decent number of top physicists not only seriously consider the idea of God as the cause of the universe, but affirm that he was the cause, Dustin’s statement seems to simply be factually incorrect (even though the large majority of physicists do not believe in God).

Dustin also argued that modern physics denies that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Since he was the one making an aggressive claim, I was able to shift the burden of proof onto him and argue that modern physics does not deny that everything that begins to exist has a cause by saying it’s still possible that all things may be caused. Of course, saying that premise 1 of the Kalam argument has not been disproven is different than giving good reasons for thinking that it is true.

In response to my second premise, Dustin argued that there are other models of the universe in which it could have been eternal. Not being a physicist, I don’t really know how viable these models are. But William Lane Craig has a pretty comprehensive argument against the plausibility of these models, which I tried to summarize in my response.

In my next post, I’ll explain some of the reasons why I find Kalam unpersuasive, but first, here’s my response to Dustin’s opening speech:

I'd first like to clarify that by 'universe', I mean not just the observable universe, but the entire material world. My opponent acknowledges that the observable universe was created at the singularity, but hypothesizes that it may have been materially caused by what he calls “fantastic elements”. This may once have been plausible, but in 2003, Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin proved that as long as the average expansion has been positive, the material world must have had a beginning. Their theorem made no other assumptions and holds even if the universe has extra dimensions or if our theory of gravity is wrong. There are only three ways around the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem: an infinitely contracting universe, a static universe followed by our present expansion, or an infinitely cycling universe. The problem with eternal contraction before our present expansion is that the collapse would become increasingly chaotic (BKL chaos) in a way that is inconsistent with the type of Big Bang that took place. Static universe models also fail since, as Vilenkin points out, “Small fluctuations in the size of the universe are inevitable according to the quantum theory, and thus Einstein’s universe (the pre-expansion state) cannot remain in balance for infinite time.” And cyclic universe models do not work since in order for them to have been eternally cycling, entropy must be preserved, yet as physicist Thomas Banks points out, during collapse higher and higher energy states would be entered, maximizing entropy. It would be impossible for subsequent cycles to still begin at a low entropy state, like that right after the Big Bang. So the observable universe cannot be the latest in an infinite series of cycles. As Vilenkin observes, “an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”

My opponent also did not respond to my hotel and book examples which demonstrated the extreme absurdities that would result from an actual infinity, other than to say that some things once thought absurd have later been shown to be true. He is correct, but scientists did not embrace seeming absurdities like general relativity merely because they best fit with their prior prejudices, they did so because that’s where the evidence led. I don’t think my opponent should be so willing to go against the evidence and accept an absurdity merely because of his prior beliefs.

Accepting that there could be an infinite series of events in time leads not just to absurdities, but even outright contradictions. Consider the Grim Reaper paradox, which recently won over Joshua Rasmussen, a published critic of the Kalam argument. Infinitely many grim reapers each set their alarms to between 8 and 9 and kill you as soon as they wake up if you’re not already dead. Unless they all conspire so that one of them wakes up at some time, say 8:15, and everyone else wakes up later, there will, with probability 1, for each grim reaper, be a grim reaper that woke up before him. So it is impossible for any one grim reaper to kill you, but it is also impossible for you to survive. Unless there’s some magic force making the reapers chose a non-problematic set of times, you either accept that someone could be killed without ever being killed, or recognize that an actually infinite series of temporal events is impossible. While events can go on without end, there can never come a time at which an infinite number of events have been completed.

My opponent claims that physics has shown that there are uncaused events. This is false. There are both deterministic and non-deterministic interpretations of quantum physics. As Victor Stenger explains, “Other viable interpretations of quantum mechanics remain with no consensus on which, if any, is the correct one”; hence, we have to remain “open to the possibility that causes may someday be found for such phenomena.” But even under non-deterministic interpretations of quantum physics, virtual particles do not come out of nothing. They arise out of the conditions of the quantum vacuum, which constitute a probabilistic cause of their origination.

In my last speech I explained why the creator of space and time can rightly be called God. While we do not fully understand immaterial agency, we also do not fully understand material agency and have no good material explanation for qualia or answer to the hard problem of consciousness. And since the creator of all matter cannot be material, an immaterial agent is the only reasonable explanation. So we still reach the conclusion that there is a personal creator of the universe who is beginningless, immaterial, and incredibly powerful.

Debating Kalam: Dustin’s Response

2010-02-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

Dustin and I agreed to exchange opening statements before the debate, so I’m going to be posing the text of the first half of the debate we had on Wednesday. My previous post has my opening statement, this post has his response, and the next one will have my response to his response. He didn’t end up reading his speech exactly as he prepared it, but hit on pretty much all the same points and I didn’t have to make many changes to my prepared response.

Although I don’t think it mattered much in this debate, if you are going to be arguing against Kalam in a debate, do not agree to exchange opening statements. It helps your opponent much more than it helps you. If you took the time to prepare, you should be pretty familiar with all the arguments in favor of Kalam. But if your opening statement contains objections that are difficult to answer, giving it to your opponent before the debate might allow him or her to come up with something that sounds like an adequate response. It’s a little harder to come up with bullshit that doesn’t sound like bullshit in the middle of a debate.

Anyway, here’s Dustin’s speech:

The kalam cosmological argument, though it pretends to be based on scientific principles, is nevertheless riddled with flaws. Allow me to restate the argument:

The first premise is that everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The second premise is that the universe began to exist.
The conclusion is that the universe was caused, and this cause is known as God.

The argument is indeed valid, but the problem is that all of the premises can indeed be rejected, most notably the first premise, and even accepting the premises, the conclusion does not necessarily demonstrate that a God defined in the traditional senses exists.

Does everything that begins to exist have a cause? Modern physics denies this premise. Many events at the subatomic level are completely random and occur without a cause. The energy fluctuations that occur in vacuums are just one example of an uncaused event. My opponent argues that we never see macroscopic entities like dogs, cats, and hamburgers randomly pop into existence, and that is correct. That is because these uncaused events only occur on a subatomic level, where the science of quantum mechanics applies. Macroscopic objects like dogs and cats, of course, are not subject to these fluctuations for a variety of proposed reasons, of which the most prominent is decoherence. To use another example, it is well-known that quantum mechanics shows that photons can behave in ways similar to particles and waves, depending on the experiment. But no one then argues that wave-particle duality is impossible because we never see cats and dogs behaving as both particles and waves. If you shoot a cat toward a slit in the double slit experiment, it will not create an interference pattern characteristic of a wave, but instead a particle-like and flustered cat imprint in one spot on the wall! My opponent has also claimed that denying causality would impede science, but this is clearly not the case if one gives only a cursory glance at the flourishing fields of cosmology, quantum physics, and other areas of theoretical physics that accept uncaused events. Because the events are uncaused, scientists can't say with deterministic certainty whether an event will occur, but he or she can use statistical analysis to get an idea of the probability. Hence, science can still be practiced even without assuming every event is caused, contrary to the claims of my opponent. The idea that uncaused events exist is so well demonstrated that the kalam cosmological's first premise is highly unlikely to be true, even if it does seem intuitively true to those of us who live in the macroscopic world. Physics, unfortunately, is not intuitive.

Given the seemingly insurmountable problems with the first premise, it is not necessary to also deny the second premise. If the first premise is incorrect, the whole argument fails. As such I can accept that the universe began to exist with ease. Even so, I will make a few general comments about ways in which the second premise could potentially be incorrect, and rebut some of the philosophical justifications made for the premise.

One of the reasons given for the premise that the universe began to exist is that an actual infinite cannot exist. That is, if the universe always existed, its eternal extension backwards through time would be an actual infinite. This is not necessarily true, though. It is important to note that the argument does not deny potential infinites. The universe can continue to exist throughout the future indefinitely, but this is not an actual infinity. It only means that the universe's existence is limitless. But if this applies to the universe's future, it can also apply to its past. If the universe never began, it would be limitless, not infinite.

Many appeals are made to the weirdness that results when adding and subtracting different infinite sets in the Hilbert Hotel example, but merely because it leads to weird results doesn't mean an actual infinite is impossible. Subtract all odd numbers from all even numbers, and you are left with the result of infinity. (That is, infinity minus infinity equals infinity.) But subtract all numbers greater than 3 from all positive numbers, and you are left with 3. (That is, infinity minus infinity equals three.) This is certainly weird! It is also weird that light behaves like a wave and a particle. But the reason it is weird is only because there are different classes of the infinite. It is only confusing if you think of infinity as a single number, not unlike 3, and not a class of various sets of numbers containing infinite members. It is also important to remember that physicists are not claiming that the number infinity exists. Numbers are only tools used to describe reality, not existing entities in their own right. Thus, it isn't that the number infinity exists, but that the universe has existed for an infinite number of years. There is nothing problematic about saying that. But as I noted previously, it is more proper to say the universe has no limit forward or backward in time. As such, it seems the philosophical justifications in support of this premise are not unquestionable. In the end, a priori arguments such as these should not decide the case of whether infinity exists---we should let reality and empirical evidence decide.

What does the empirical evidence say concerning the matter of a universe beginning to exist? My opponent is correct to point out that the universe implies a beginning in time. This is because observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the expansion of the universe, and so on show that the universe was once condensed into a single point. The mathematics show the laws of physics breaking down at the point of the Big Bang known as the singularity. Time and space are thus created at that point. The evidence listed in support of the Big Bang is correct, and I will not question it. However, while it seems clear our own universe had a beginning in time (and time itself had a beginning), it doesn't necessarily imply that our universe was caused by God. Before the Big Bang, physicists cannot say what happened. God, in fact, is the least likely explanation, and modern physicists do not seriously entertain that idea. Because uncaused events are common at the subatomic level, and the universe was once reduced to a subatomic point, we can explain the creation of the universe as an uncaused event. This would certainly be the most parsimonious explanation. However, physical models of the universe are not complete; we are working with lots of missing puzzle pieces. For example, relativity and quantum mechanics are not consistent with each other. As such, some cosmological theories have been proposed that hypothesize extra dimensions, multiple universes, and other fantastic elements in a manner that renders relativity consistent with quantum mechanics. These are generally known as String Theory, M-Theory, and a host of other names. Some propose that there are multiple universes, with our own universe being a single bud among an endless landscape of possibilities. While these are not quite empirically supported, they at least have the advantage over conjectures about God in that they attempt to render the mathematics consistent! But the most reasonable stance to take concerning the creation of the universe, given our current knowledge, is to admit we don't know. These ideas also show that the cause of the universe may not have been God, but budding from other multiverses.

It should also be said that even if the argument were valid, it would not demonstrate that God exists in the traditional sense of the word. All the argument demonstrates, if true, is that the universe was caused by something. There is no additional evidence as to what attributes this cause may have (or even that it was the first cause), much less that it has the qualities of a personal God, like the ability to think and the characteristics of omnipotence and moral perfection. It strikes me that if the argument succeeds, it does so only by relying on the elusiveness of properly defining what God is. It is not unlike proving that a plastic object used to heat bread exists on my kitchen counter, and then proclaiming that this object is God. No, it is not a God, but a toaster. And to the kalam argument I can respond that, no, it is not a God, but a cause, and this cause may very well be what string theorists allude to when speaking of our universe budding from additional universes. My opponent argues that the cause must be immaterial, but presumably if the universe arose out of nothing (as in a vacuum fluctuation or sea of virtual particles), then in a sense we can call that immaterial, but it is not a god. The attempt to argue that the cause is personal and capable of thought is likewise faulty. Big Bang cosmology only demonstrates that the current laws of physics as we know them break down at the time of the big bang. My opponent argues that there cannot be a scientific explanation since there was no natural world before the Big Bang, and therefore it cannot be accounted for by laws operating on initial conditions. He then concludes that the cause is best explained in terms of agents and volition. But there are plenty of other possibilities that I've mentioned, including the idea that our universe is one of many in a multiverse, or that there was nothing prior to the Big Bang and our universe simply resulted from a quantum vacuum fluctuation. These are possibilities that are taken seriously by physicists that do not require characteristics like agency, and hence my opponent is simply wrong to think the physics points to agency as the only reasonable cause. In fact, it is the most unreasonable cause of the three, because in science we generally observe that agency results from brain function, and there is no model for agency existing in some immaterial sense. Likewise, vacuum fluctuations are already known to exist so that explanation in particular is more parsimonious than any God hypothesis.

Debating Kalam

2010-02-06T13:29:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday I took part in debate night, where a bunch of us St. Louis atheists get together and debate various things. It was an interesting experience since this is the first semi-serious debate I have done, and because I was the one arguing for the existence of God. My opponent was Dustin (Saint Gasoline) and the topic was William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Since I didn’t think Kalam was a sound argument and had a long list of things I thought was wrong with it, I figured I should do some research to see how Craig would respond to those objections. I didn’t want to just concede the debate as soon as Dustin pointed out something I thought was a fatal flaw in Kalam. And I figured that I couldn’t get away with just evading or pretending to answer one of his criticisms since he’s pretty good with philosophy and great at lampooning absurdities:

So I decided to read a lot of the published work on Kalam, both pro and con. I tried to put myself in the shoes of a believer and focus not on finding fault with the argument but on finding the best arguments for Kalam and finding the best responses to arguments against it. I think I was able to do a pretty good job of this, perhaps because I would have no problem believing in God if I actually thought there were solid arguments for his existence. It was a pretty weird experience though. After reading many of Craig’s responses to objections to the argument, whenever I read a new objection I would feel sure that Craig would have a good response. And sure enough, he did, or at least one that seemed good when you were predisposed in favor of Kalam. Eventually though, I came across serious objections that neither I nor Craig seemed to have good answers to. Fortunately for my chances in the debate, Craig had reasonable responses to many of the most common objections to Kalam.

Does the fact that Craig has good answers to some of the most common objections mean they are bad objections? Not necessarily. If someone does not provide any support for the premises of the Kalam argument, then a reasonable objection is to say that you haven’t seen any reason to think that either premise is true. If someone provides some arguments for the premises, but those arguments have flaws, it’s perfectly reasonable to point out those flaws. It may be possible for a theist to get around some of those flaws by making a more complex version of the argument that has new and different flaws, but that doesn’t make the original objections bad. However, I think it is a big mistake for people debating William Lane Craig to focus on the more basic objections. Craig can respond by quickly rebutting these objections and can then use the rest of his time to make even more arguments in favor of Kalam. That’s what I hoped to do in the debate, and I think this strategy was pretty successful.

So it’s important for anyone debating Kalam to not only know a lot of objections, but to know how a proponent of Kalam will likely respond. Since Kalam is one of the most popular arguments for the existence of God, I think that anyone wanting to debate the existence of God should have a good understanding of the arguments for Kalam.

I’m planning on doing a series of posts which will hopefully give people a better idea of what to expect when debating Kalam. But before I get into arguments against Kalam, I’m going to post the opening speech I prepared for the debate so you can see Kalam at its strongest (or at least my attempt to present it as strongly as possible). Here’s the speech:

The question of whether God exists is one of the most important questions we will ever have to answer. The decision we reach has the potential to not only affect how we live our lives, but what will happen to us after we die. For that reason, I think that all arguments for and against God’s existence should be exposed to intense scrutiny. My opponent tonight is an atheist writer and cartoonist who has previously written on, and debated, the Kalam cosmological argument. I expect him to have a long list of objections, which I will do my best to answer. I believe that the Kalam cosmological argument will withstand his criticisms, but you will have to judge that for yourselves.

The Kalam cosmological argument is actually remarkably simple. Its first premise is that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Its second premise is that the universe began to exist. Therefore, we conclude that the universe has a cause. This is a valid argument, which means that if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. So an atheist must reject at least one of these premises if he wants to avoid believing that the universe had a creator.

I will begin by talking about why I think that the universe must have had a beginning. One argument in favor of this is as follows: Premise 1: An actual infinity cannot exist, Premise 2: an infinite temporal regress of events would be an actual infinity. Therefore an infinite temporal regress cannot occur. Something may be potentially infinite; you may be able to keep dividing it, or adding to it. But you can never reach the point where you actually have an infinite quantity of something. While the concept of an actual infinity can be expressed mathematically, as in Cantor’s system of transfinite arithmetic, mathematicians Kasner and Newman have noted that “’Existence’ in the mathematical sense is wholly different from the existence of objects in the physical world.” In the words of the influential mathematician David Hilbert, “The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought… The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea.”

For the existence of an actual infinity would have absurd consequences. Imagine a book whose first page is 1/2 inch thick, whose second page is 1/4 thick, etc. Although there is no last page, the book is of finite thickness and each page is still a finite number of pages away from the first page. Now take the book, close it, turn it over and lift up the back cover. There is nothing there to see! Now imagine trying to touch the last page. The problem is that after any page, there are infinitely more after it. So if you are able to touch any page at all, your hand must have somehow already penetrated infinitely many pages. This example demonstrates the absurdities inherent in having actual infinities exist in reality.

This point is further emphasized by the example of Hilbert’s Hotel. In a hotel of infinitely many rooms and with no vacancies, you could still find room for infinitely many new guests merely by shifting the current guests to the even numbered rooms and putting the new guests in the odd-numbered rooms (assigning the old guests to the rooms that are twice their old room number). And you could even have infinitely many guests check out (all those in odd numbered rooms) and still have a full hotel merely by shifting people to rooms that were half their old room number. But if the infinitely many guests that leave are all those in rooms numbered above 3, then the hotel would become virtually empty and there would be no way to shift the guests around to avoid this. Thus you can have the same number of people leave, and get radically different results. Can anyone genuinely believe that such an absurd hotel could exist in reality?!

And any infinite temporal regress must be an actual infinity because every event takes a certain amount of time, for an infinitely slow event would actually be a changeless state. Regardless of how long each event took, infinitely many events would have taken place given an infinite amount of time. Since an actual infinity cannot exist and an infinite temporal regress would be an actual infinity, the universe must have had a beginning.

There is also ample empirical evidence that the universe had a beginning. Over the last century, scientific discoveries such as cosmic microwave background radiation and the cosmological redshift have provided strong evidence in favor of the Big Bang model. We now know that the universe is expanding, and if you were to travel back in time, you would see the universe getting smaller and smaller. In the words of physicist P.C.W. Davies, “If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme, we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. …the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.” Under the Friedmann-Lemaitre model, which is the standard Big Bang model, matter and time originated ex nihilo a finite amount of time ago at the initial cosmological singularity. There have been countless attempts over the years to avoid the inescapable conclusion that the universe began to exist. The steady state model was proposed and then discarded. The oscillating universe model was proposed and then discarded. There have always been, and will continue to be, plenty of fanciful speculations, but none of them are realistic. Time does not permit me to explain the problems with every alternative ever conceived, but I would be happy to explain the problems I see with any alternatives that my opponent thinks are viable. Since there is no plausible way in which the universe could have existed for eternity and because of the strong philosophical arguments against a beginningless universe, we reach the conclusion that the universe began to exist.

Of course an atheist could still argue that maybe there’s some a-causal way in which the universe could have come about. To do this, he must argue that the entire universe just suddenly appeared for no reason whatsoever. But no one seriously believes that things like dogs and sports cars can just pop into existence without a cause. However, if things could come into existence from nothing, why just universes, why not airplanes, hamburgers and construction workers? Why is nothingness so discriminatory? How can there be some property of nothingness that favors universes, since nothingness has no properties? And believing that things do not need causal explanations would wreak havoc on the sciences. If scientists had simply assumed that things could appear uncaused out of nothing, there would not have been such a wealth of groundbreaking scientific discoveries over the last century. Scientists could always label something uncaused and never have to search for a causal explanation for it. We should be very careful not to cut off the search for explanations too soon.

While I do not think the universe could be eternal for the philosophical and scientific reasons I listed, if all my philosophical arguments turn out to be misguided and our current understanding of physics turns out to be merely a mythic narrative with no basis in reality, we should obviously reconsider. But barring this, I think we need to go with what seems like the only reasonable explanation, that some entity created the universe a finite amount of time ago.

Once we realize that there must be a creator of the universe, the next step is to try to figure out what properties this creator possesses. Since everything that begins to exist has a cause, we have (by contraposition) that the uncaused creator did not ever begin toexist. Since he is the creator of all matter, he must himself be immaterial. He must also be unbelievably powerful since he brought all matter, energy, and even space-time itself into existence without any material cause. There is also good reason to think that this cause is personal. There are two types of causal explanations: scientific explanations in terms of laws and initial conditions, and personal explanations in terms of someone’s will. For example, if you asked, “Why is the kettle boiling?”, I could say that heat from the burner is being conducted through the metal bottom of the kettle to the water, causing the water molecules to vibrate so violently that they break the surface tension of the water and escape in the form of steam, or I could say that I put the water on because I wanted some tea. In this case, both are legitimate explanations, though some people may look at me a little funny if I responded with the former. But with the universe, there cannot be a scientific explanation since there was no natural world before it came into being and therefore it cannot be accounted for by laws operating on initial conditions. So the most plausible explanation is in terms of an agent and their volitions. Therefore, we have good evidence for an uncaused personal creator of the universe who is beginningless, immaterial, and incredibly powerful. This is what we mean by God. Of course this does not prove that the Christian conception of God is correct while the Muslim one is false. For that we need to look at things like the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, and the countless miracles that have taken place over the years. But if sound, the Kalam cosmological argument invalidates atheism. I urge you to carefully consider this argument, for the conclusions you reach tonight may have consequences far greater than you realize. Thank you.

Why I Care so Much About Gay Rights

2010-01-12T10:30:00.000-08:00

The main reason why I support gay rights is because there is no good reason to deny gay people the same rights that the rest of us enjoy. I’ve heard all kinds of arguments against gay rights, but none of them make any sense. That is why I support gay rights. But there’s also a much more personal reason, and that’s what I’d like to share in this post.

My mother grew up in a large family in western Maryland. She had six siblings: five sisters and one brother. They were very poor growing up, and everyone had to wear hand-me-down clothes and shoes, regardless of whether or not they fit. My grandmother was a homemaker and my grandfather never completed elementary school and made a living helping to build houses. According to my mother, they were also sometimes emotionally abusive and inflicted wounds on her that she has only recently been able to deal with.
But her brother rose above all of that and went on to become a very successful doctor. He was also gay. I can only imagine how hard it must have been to hide who he really was for many years. But he was fortunate that when he did come out, his family was still very supportive of him.

He was also one of the kindest men I have ever met. He loved spending time with me and I loved spending time with him. He would show me how to do little art projects and take me camping. I remember one of our camping trips when I was a few years old and I peed in the bed in his RV. I was incredibly embarrassed, but he reacted with nothing but compassion. He also paid for some of us to go on a cruise of Hawaii with him and his spouse. While I was only three or four at the time, I still remember a couple things from that trip. I remember being absolutely disgusted by poi and I remember how one night a volcano erupted and lit up the night sky with an explosion of color.

One time I made a painting for him with watercolors. It wasn’t of anything in particular, just a somewhat random mishmash of various colors. But he had it framed and hung it in his office. He also created funds for each of my cousins to help us pay for college since he realized the value of a good education. He was a good man, and I am honored that my parents chose to name me after my Uncle Michael.

Then in the late 1980’s, he tested positive for AIDS. He was on a lot of medications, but his health continued to deteriorate. Perhaps in an attempt to make sense of what I had no control over, I tried to make a chart of his progress. When my mom told me he was doing well, I’d draw a line going up and when my mom told me he was getting worse, I’d draw a line going down. I think that for the last couple weeks, my mom didn’t have the heart to tell me quite how bad he had gotten. Then late one night we got the phone call. I cried a lot that night.

I was only 7 at the time, but my mom did not try to hide the reality of death from me and let me come along when she went to see him that night. I remember standing there and seeing his stiff lifeless body laying there in his bed. I had no illusions that there would be another life that awaited him. The man I knew and loved was no more. He would never again be able to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, or get to watch his nieces and nephews grow up.

I have lost a few relatives over the years, but he is the one I’ve missed the most. There were nights, even years later, when I cried myself to sleep thinking about him. Even writing this post is bringing me to tears.

At the time, I was unaware of a lot of the controversy over homosexuality. I had never heard the slogan “AIDS Kills Fags Dead” that some religious people used to liken gays to vermin that deserved to be killed. I didn’t realize that some people actually thought that that my uncle was an evil person and deserved the worst punishment imaginable, just because of who he was attracted to. What really pains me is that many of these people opposed the government trying to do what it could to prevent these senseless deaths and didn’t even want gay people to be able to freely visit their partners in the hospital and be with them as they wasted away.

I just hope that one day people will look back on these days with shock and embarrassment over the way that homosexuals have been treated. That day did not come soon enough for my Uncle Michael. But I hope I will live to see that day.

DJ Grothe’s Failed Speech on Morality

2009-11-29T15:43:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Skepticon II, a free conference on skepticism held in Springfield, Missouri. I had a fantastic time, and if anyone lives nearby and missed it this year, I highly recommend going to Skepticon III. There were many excellent speeches, but the one I found most interesting was DJ Grothe’s speech on morality. DJ is someone who thinks deeply about life’s big questions, as demonstrated by his Point of Inquiry podcast. He is also a great speaker and all-around good guy. So I was excited to hear that he was going to be speaking on morality, a subject that I have recently become very interested in. While I agreed with many of the points he made in his speech, I do not think he succeeded in showing how morality can exist without God.

DJ stated that he would be arguing for three conclusions:

Evolution can help explain ethics; it alone cannot justify ethics.
Justifying ethics requires critical reasoning.
Mere knowledge of evolution does not make people less moral.

In his speech he argued not only that you need reason to justify ethics, but how you can use reason to justify ethics. I strongly agree with all three of DJ’s conclusions, but do not think he provided any reasons to move beyond moral nihilism. Although I am a moral realist, I thought his arguments for moral realism were inadequate. I recognize that a short speech can at most sketch out a moral theory, but I don’t think he even managed to provide a good sketch of his beliefs on morality, let alone justify them.

The first part of DJ’s speech was his attack on evolutionary ethics. He made the excellent point that showing that the golden rule evolved would not establish it as moral any more than showing that xenophobia evolved would establish it as moral. As he said in his speech, “Evolution is inefficient, wasteful, [and] cruel.”

After explaining why he disagrees with grounding morality in evolution or in God, DJ briefly explained his view of morality. He stated that freedom from unnecessary suffering is something good to the individual, something that has value. He then went on to say that something everyone values is good in a more general sense. He defined his position as “well-being consequentialism” whereby the goodness of an action is determined by its effect on the well-being of individuals.

One problem I have with this is that he never explains why he thinks it makes sense to call this collective good a moral good. Everyone can value something without it being a moral good. For example, if everyone on earth valued the Mona Lisa, that wouldn’t make it morally good. Even taking things like this into account, there’s still the question of whether any of the remaining goods can be rightly called moral goods.

He addressed this a little bit when he was asked about the “is-ought distinction” which basically says that you can’t get from what is to what ought to be. DJ said that he buys into the is-ought distinction, but there can still be something that feels like the science of ethics. I saw this as a very poor response. Creation science may feel like real science to some people, but that doesn’t mean it is. This seems like a concession that DJ was not actually talking about morality all along and that while something similar to morality might exist, morality itself does not exist. I’m sure that DJ would disagree with that implication, but if so he should explain why he thinks morality exists in spite of the is-ought distinction.

Another problem is that he never defines “well-being.” He instead leaves it so incredibly vague that it’s almost like saying the goodness of an action is defined by whether something has good consequences. It seems so vague that you could use it to pretend you have a basis for your moral beliefs when instead you are really just relying on your moral intuitions (which may be completely unreliable since they are products of evolution). Is drinking alcohol good because it makes people happy and happiness is part of one’s well-being, or is it bad because it has negative health consequences?

And there is also the problem of what happens when something is good for someone’s well-being, but is bad for someone else’s. Instead of putting forward a means of saying what is moral when there are competing interests, DJ just says that when something is good for each individual’s well-being, it is good. But if you can only establish morality when something is good or bad for everyone, it becomes a useless concept. The morality of an action only matters if that action might actually take place. But if something makes everyone worse off, then who would have the incentive to do that action?

After the speech, I asked DJ how he defined well-being and how he determined morality when an action made some people better off and other people worse off. He named a couple things that he saw as part of well-being, but he never really defined exactly what he meant by it. We only talked for a few minutes, but hopefully we’ll be able to continue our conversation in the future. It may turn out that DJ has good answers to my objections, but based only on this talk, I am very skeptical of his view of morality.

Update: I just listened to the recent Reasonable Doubts podcast in which they interviewed DJ. While this post is primarily about DJ’s speech at Skepticon, he makes a few points in the podcast that I wanted to respond to.

He says that his response to moral nihilists is to say that just because something evolved doesn’t mean that it’s unreliable. Our eyes evolved, yet we think it’s reasonable to trust them. I agree that the fact that our view of morality evolved does not make it unreliable. But there’s a key difference between our moral sense and vision. While we have good reasons to expect that evolution will give us a generally reliable sense of sight, we do not have any reason to expect our evolved morality to generally match true morality. If predators looked like human babies and babies looked like predators, our species probably would not have survived as long as it has. However, if there are moral facts distinct from all other facts, why would evolution make our moral sense match these facts instead of whatever led to the greatest reproductive success? I think our senses and intuitions are pretty reliable in cases where we need them to be accurate, but are unreliable in other cases. For example, while my intuitions about physics are roughly accurate in the everyday world, science has shown that my intuitions about the very large and the very small are way off. And finally, I don’t see how someone could say it’s rational to trust our moral sense, but it’s irrational for someone to trust their sense of God (their sensus divinitatis).

When asked about how we can justify our ethics without looking at what is (in light of the is-ought distinction), DJ said that we can ground our morality in critical rational reflection. But this doesn’t make sense to me. If you can’t use what is to determine morality, what are you basing it on? I guess you could arbitrarily make up a few moral facts and then rationally determine the implications of those facts, but then there’s no reason to trust your conclusions.

When asked about moral duties, DJ says that we have to start at the beginning: what is valuable to us. I agree completely. He says that we value well-being, which he minimally defines as “limiting unnecessary suffering.” But I think you need to consider all things that we value. If you only look at one thing, then all of your moral conclusions are suspect because there are some times that limiting suffering is worse than the suffering itself. As an extreme example, hooking my brain up to a machine that makes me experience a virtual world in which every day is the same may prevent me from ever feeling suffering again, but it would also deny me other things that I value. A more complete definition of value is needed.

Finally, DJ says, as he did at Skepticon, that from his vantage point, he can say that what the Nazis did is morally wrong, even if it made sense to the Germans. But anyone can say anything; the key is whether he has good reasons for saying that what the Nazis did is wrong. This depends on whether he has good reasons for believing that his view of morality is true. I could believe in a Magic 8-Ball based system of morality in which whether something is moral is determined by what a Magic 8-Ball tells me. If I ask it whether what the Nazis did was immoral and it says “It is certain”, then from my view of morality, I would be able to say definitively that what the Nazis did is wrong. If we have no good reasons to believe that a certain theory of morality is true, then we have no reason to believe that theory’s implications. Unless DJ has some other justification for his view of morality, I see no more reason to trust his theory as a reliable guide to morality than to trust the Magic 8-Ball based theory.

Solving the Problem of Female Pain

2009-11-16T20:41:00.000-08:00

While atheists and theists often disagree on what constitutes evil, they can usually agree that unnecessary suffering is evil. If God brings about immense suffering without some greater good coming from it, it’s hard to see how he could still be good without the word ‘good’ losing all meaning. As I discussed in a previous post, it doesn’t work to just say that God has unknown purposes.

So animal suffering appears to pose a problem for an omnibenevolent God. If animals do not have eternal souls, what possible greater good could come from a deer dying in a forest fire? While this initially appears to be a tough question, philosopher Alexander Pruss explains, in a recent post at Prosblogion and his personal blog, why animal pain is not such a problem after all. But Pruss is far too modest in his conclusions. His argument can also explain why female pain is not a problem for the view that God is omnibenevolent.

The first argument Pruss addresses is that an omnibenevolent God could have created something that had the same effect as pain, but that did not hurt. When we touch something hot, instead of feeling pain and instinctively pulling away, God could give us the instinct to pull away without the pain. But, as Pruss points out, how do we know that God hasn’t done this? He writes that “if the pain-replacement, call it shpain, had the same motivational effects, we would observe the same kinds of aversive responses to shpain as to pain.” Animals would react to shpain exactly as they would to pain, but without the experience of pain.

Since the reactions to shpain and pain are the same, the fact that many animals act similar to us is no evidence that they actually feel pain. Of course I could argue that since my brain looks similar to a chimps brain when we get hurt, chimps probably feel pain. But Pruss does not think this would work. He argues that there are differences between human and non-human brains. If animals feel shpain instead of pain, we would expect lots of similarities, but some differences, which is exactly what we find.

Pruss’ argument can also address the problem of female pain. If females experience shpain rather than pain, we would expect them to have a similar response to things that would cause men pain. But just because they look like they’re in pain doesn’t mean they actually are. Just like a dog’s whimper is no evidence that a dog is experiencing pain rather than shpain, a woman’s tears are no evidence that she is experiencing pain rather than shpain. Shpain has the same motivational effects and would cause women to talk like they were in pain, even though they’re not. Someone could argue that the similarity in how our brains react could provide evidence that women actually feel pain. But that is not the case. A 2003 study showed that when men and women receive the same painful (or shpainful) stimuli, the parts of the female brain that get stimulated are different than the parts of the male brain that get stimulated. While there are many similarities in how our brains react, there are also some differences, which is exactly what we would expect if women only experience shpain.

The second argument Pruss addresses is that even if some cases of animal pain were beneficial, God could still miraculously prevent pain in cases where it wasn’t necessary, for example when an animal is about to die. Pruss again responds by saying that maybe God does do this. This intervention may be as minimal as possible, so it doesn't disrupt anything. He may intervene to prevent the pain, but keep everything else the same. He may make it so their brains react similarly to how they’d react to pain, so that they’d display the outward signs of pain, even though they are only experiencing shpain. Of course this also applies to women. Even though it may look like a woman that is being beaten to death is in extreme pain, she may actually be feeling no pain at all.

At first the evidence that animals experience pain appears to be strong, as Michael Murray explains:

We also have independent evidence that many animals are capable of experiencing pain, evidence that parallels the evidence we have for thinking our fellow humans are capable of feeling pain: We witness pain behavior, not just reflex actions to noxious stimuli (protective pain), but subsequent pain-induced behavioral modification caused by bodily damage (restorative pain); we observe significant anatomical and neurophysiological similarity between humans and many animals (including all mammals and most vertebrates); endogenous serotonergic and opioid pain-control mechanisms are present in all mammals[Why would organisms incapable of feeling pain have endogenous pain-control systems?]; efferent and afferent nerves run throughout their bodies; analgesics and anesthetics stop animals from exhibiting pain behavior, presumably because these substances prevent the pain itself in much the way they prevent pain in humans; and there is compelling experimental evidence that the capacity to feel pain enhances survival value in animals, based on the self-destructive tendencies displayed by animals that have been surgically deafferented.

But as Alexander Pruss’ article shows, this evidence is exactly what you would expect if animals felt shpain rather than pain. Similarly, even though it may initially seem obvious that women feel pain, there’s actually no reason to think their pain is real (at least if God exists).

However, since I do not believe in God, I think that female pain is real. It just seems incredibly unlikely that evolution would result in men experiencing pain and women experiencing shpain. But since the Christian God is supposed to be omnipotent, this seems perfectly reasonable if Christianity is true.

I think Pruss’ argument provides just as good of a solution to the problem of female pain as it does to the problem of animal pain. While this still leaves male pain unaccounted for, I think this is a very significant step in solving the problem of evil.

Critiquing the Argument from Desire

2009-11-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

One argument that has come up a few times in my discussions with theists is the argument from desire. While I don’t think it works, I think many atheists are too dismissive of it. The argument from desire basically says that God exists because we have a natural desire for God (or the transcendent) and for each of our natural desires, something exists that can satisfies it. One objection is that this doesn’t prove that God exists. That is true, but given that nothing is provable with absolute certainty, this is an unreasonable demand.

We should be careful not to instinctively reject arguments merely because we disagree with their conclusion. For example, many atheists argue that since almost all things in our universe have turned out to have natural explanations, everything probably has a natural explanation. But this is similar to the argument from desire which says that because almost all our natural desires have something that can fulfill them, all our desires probably have something that can fulfill them. So I think the argument from desire deserves a closer examination.

Peter Kreeft formulates the argument from desire as follows:

Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."

He argues that there are two types of desires: those that are innate, and those that are externally conditioned. While we have innate desires for food, sleep, and sex, we also have desires that are not innate, like “flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world championship.” While other desires vary, the natural desires exist in each of us, according to Kreeft. He goes on to say that “no one has ever found one case of an innate desire for a nonexistent object.” Kreeft believes that if we are honest, we will acknowledge that the second premise is true and that we do desire something more.

Kreeft observes that someone could just say they don’t think they have a desire for God or for something beyond this world. Someone could say that they’d be perfectly happy “if only [they] had ten million dollars, a Lear jet, and a new mistress every day." Kreeft says that even if someone won the whole world, this would not be enough. I agree with Kreeft that all the wealth in the world would not bring us complete happiness.

Another objection Kreeft addresses is that we don’t know whether all our natural desires can be satisfied because we don’t know whether our desire for the transcendent can be satisfied. While true, Kreeft rightly points out that this criticism could be made against pretty much all logical arguments. Such a criticism could also be launched against the argument that since I am a man and all men are mortal, I am mortal. We can neither verify nor falsify the claim that all men are mortal, yet we take it to be true since everyone seems to die well before turning 200.

But Victor Reppert, the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea and a proponent of the argument, sees this response as somewhat inadequate. Kreeft is basically saying “We just know.” Reppert asks “why shouldn’t natural unsatisfiable desires arise?” He mentions John Beversluis’ criticism that C.S. Lewis, in his version of the argument, justifies premise 1 by saying that nature does nothing in vain but does not justify his claim that nature does nothing in vain. If Lewis is merely presupposing a theological view of the world, then his argument seems to be begging the question. But, as Reppert observes, the principle that nature does nothing in vain is pretty reasonable. It would be very strange if there was a creature that desired to have sex, but that had “no way of having sex, and which reproduced asexually.” He goes on to say that “we would not need creationism; even evolutionary biologists would have to agree.”

While Reppert thinks it’s possible that a desire for God could evolve even if God doesn’t exist, he thinks it’s unlikely. He thinks that evolution should cause us to desire things that promote survival, instead of things that do not. While I would nitpick and substitute “reproduction” for “survival”, his claim seems pretty reasonable. So a natural desire for God looks a little bit more probable under theism than atheism. Reppert says that even if you are very conservative and say that the chances of having such a desire if God exists is .9 and the chances of having it if you don’t know whether or not God exists is .7, then based on this evidence, someone who previously thought there was a 50% chance that theism was true will now think the chances of it being true are 64.3% (This is calculated through a simple application of Bayes’ theorem. See Reppert’s article for more detail.). This is a substantial improvement, and less conservative estimates could yield an even greater improvement. While this is far short of proof for the existence of God, Reppert’s argument, if sound, would provide evidence for the existence of God.

Before getting to my criticisms of the argument, I would like to briefly analyze how another atheist has responded to the argument from desire. Austin Cline criticized C.S. Lewis’ version of the argument, but I do not think his criticisms undermine Reppert’s version of the argument. Cline points out that someone could desire something in vain, but Reppert acknowledges this possibility. Cline also argues that Lewis does not explain the difference between a natural desire and an unnatural desire. Reppert’s argument is an extension of Kreeft’s, and Kreeft defines a natural desire as a desire that we all have and that was not conditioned by society. Another of Cline’s criticisms is that Lewis’s argument does not prove that God exists. But Reppert recognizes this and only argues that this provides evidence for the existence of God.

However, I still think there are quite a lot of problems with the argument from desire. First, I have a small issue with the distinction between natural and unnatural desires. Defining natural desires as those that everyone has would be too strict. Under that definition, even sex would be unnatural, for there are people who are asexual and have no sexual desire at all. I can’t think of any desires that are completely universal, but if there are some, this set would surely be way too small to generalize from. So we should instead say natural desires are those that the large majority of people possess and which were not conditioned by society.

I agree with premise 2 that we do have desires that nothing on earth can fulfill. However, I do not think it is a single desire for the transcendent. Instead, I think that there are a number of different things associated with religion that people desire. I think the overwhelming majority of people fear death and desire to keep on living. I also think the large majority of people desire to know the answers to life’s big questions. I think we also desire to be free of pain and to attain total happiness. And finally, I think that almost everyone who has ever lost a loved one wishes they could talk to them just once more. These are all desires that the Christian God, if he exists, could fulfill.

But it looks like we actually have two sets of desires: those that can be fulfilled in the natural world as we know it and those that cannot. We can satisfy our hunger, thirst, and sexual desire here on earth, but it seems that only a supernatural being could give us immortality, the answers to everything, absolute happiness, and the ability to talk with the dead. So this is not at all like the restaurant metaphor Kreeft describes where we try 49 of the 50 meat dishes that a restaurant serves and they all have the same gravy, therefore we infer that the 50th will as well. It is more like trying every meat dish at a given restaurant, seeing that all of them are steak, and inferring that all the meat dishes at another restaurant must be steak as well. I do not think we can generalize about all desires based only on those that have earthly fulfillment.

Unlike Reppert, I think that unfulfillable desires are perfectly reasonable under evolution. Even though we cannot live forever, our desire to live may help ensure that we stay alive long enough to raise our children. Our desire to know answers to the hard questions drove us to learn about the world and how to succeed in it. And while we can never be totally free of pain and attain total pleasure here on earth, our aversion to pain helps protect us, and our desire for pleasure ensures we do things that help our species survive. Our deep love for our family helps our family survive, but it also leads to us wishing desperately that we could be with them once more after they die. So even if a desire cannot be fulfilled, the pursuit of it may have evolutionary benefits. It’s also possible that a non-beneficial desire could result from a beneficial one (as appears to be the case with our desire to reconnect with dead loved ones).

But we may have a shared desire to connect with something greater than ourselves. While I have a strong desire to connect with people in this world, I do not have the desire to connect with something beyond this world. Of course, it may be that the overwhelming majority of people do. Even nonbelievers like Carl Sagan seemed to have this desire. He was in awe of the wonders of our universe and felt a deep connection to it. He didn’t look like someone searching for something he could not find; he looked like someone in a passionate love affair with the universe. The desire to connect with something greater can be fulfilled regardless of whether God exists. And even if it did require a God in order to be fulfilled, I see no reason to assume that such a desire could not arise by natural means. There are a number of seemingly plausible reasons it could have come about through evolution. One possibility that comes to mind is that maybe the desire to connect with something greater than ourselves could help drive our exploration of the world and this knowledge would make us better suited to deal with its challenges. Quite a lot has been written on why religion came about, but not being an expert on this area, I will not attempt to make a complete explanation of why we might have developed a desire for something beyond ourselves.

Just because the evolutionary reason for a desire isn’t immediately obvious doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. For example, Reppert thought it would be absurd for there to be an asexual creature that desires to have sex, but cannot. Yet such a creature exists! Cnemidophorus uniparens is an asexual species made up solely of females who still desire to have sex. They alternate between trying to mount, and be mounted by others. They keep trying to have sex, despite it being anatomically impossible. You could say that their desire is still being fulfilled by the attempt regardless of whether there is actual sex, but you could also argue that believers are having a desire fulfilled when they pray, regardless of whether there is someone listening. Evolution is simple, and yet it can be incredibly complex. Even if a behavior does not seem to have an evolutionary benefit, it may have once had one, or it may have arisen as a result of other behaviors or desires that do.

In the end, I just don’t see any reason to think that our ability to fulfill some of our desires means that all of them can be fulfilled. And I don’t think that Reppert’s use of Bayes’ theorem helps him any. He takes theism and atheism as the two possibilities. Either there is some supernatural entity or there isn’t. While I share Reppert’s concern that it is difficult to come up with objective antecedent probabilities, it seems pretty reasonable, absent any evidence, to start with theism and atheism being equally likely. If the existence of something supernatural merely means that there is something aside from the natural world of matter and energy, this seems perfectly plausible. I have no idea what is outside the known universe, and there could be something far different than what I’ve experienced. However, if such a supernatural thing existed, we have no idea what it would be like. I don’t think there’s any reason to say that the existence of something supernatural would make us more likely to yearn for the transcendent.

Of course you could instead set things up as a decision between belief and disbelief in a God like that of the major monotheistic religions. Such a God desires to have a relationship with us, so it seems very likely that he would give us a desire to have a relationship with him. At first this looks like it might increase the probability that God exists. However, regardless of whether God exists we would expect that popular concepts of God would be those that closely match the actual world. People are more likely to believe in a God that would want to create a universe than one that would not. People are more likely to believe in a God that would want to create people than one that would not. So if we do have a desire to communicate with something greater than ourselves, it makes sense that the religions we develop would think that God wanted us to establish a relationship with him.

In many conceptions of God, everything that has happened is in accordance with God’s plan. Since the probability that every single event throughout history happening exactly as it did by chance is infinitesimal, you could take this as unbelievably strong evidence that God exists (since otherwise things would almost certainly have been different). The reason this doesn’t work is that we don’t have an a prior sense of what a supernatural being’s plan would be which we could then compare our world to. No matter how our world happened to be, we could always conceive of a God that wanted it to be just that way. Similarly, if we desire a relationship with something greater, we can always conceive of a God that wanted a relationship with us. But this doesn’t mean we have any evidence that he exists.

While the argument from desire is an interesting one, I think it fails on a lot of levels. I am unsure whether we have a natural, non-conditioned desire that only a God could fulfill, I don’t think there’s a reason to expect that all our desires can be fulfilled, and even if both of these criticisms were invalid, I don’t think it would provide evidence for theism over atheism (at least without some further assumptions). Of course I do make mistakes, so please leave comments about whether you think my argument works.

Review of Collision: Hitchens v. Wilson

2009-11-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

In a fascinating new documentary, director Darren Doane provides an in-depth look into a recent debate tour by Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson. While it certainly has some clips from their debates, it also offers insight into what the two men are really like when they’re not on stage. There are clips of their debates, them being interviewed on TV, them joking around with each other, their private lives, and the director asking them about their personal beliefs. Although the movie jumps from one thing to another, it never seems disorganized. While a debate movie seems like it could be boring, I thought every minute of it was interesting. The movie does not include long speeches, but instead just focuses on the core of their arguments.

The subject of their debate is whether Christianity is good for the world. Pastor Wilson argues that it is since it is objectively true, beautiful, and good. Hitchens argues that religion is not good because of all the evil acts that religion has led people to do.

If you don’t want to know any specifics about what happens in the movie, stop reading this review now. It’s not like there’s any dramatic conclusion for me to spoil, like Hitchens converting to Christianity, or Hitchens and Wilson becoming lovers, but I just thought I’d warn you in case you don’t want to know any details about what gets said.

One thing that surprised me about the movie was how well Hitchens and Wilson seemed to get along with each other. They joke around with each other and also recite quotes by P.G. Wodehouse, an author they both admire.

Hitchens shows off his apartment in D.C. as well as his extensive library, much of which is taken up by books on religion. Throughout the movie, a number of people recognize Hitchens on the street and thank him for his work. Hitchens comments that given how much hate mail he gets, there must be an even greater number of people who recognize him but don’t say anything because they think he’s a dick.

But Hitchens remains somewhat enigmatic. Early in the movie he remarks that “I try and deny people their illusions.” He says that the idea that faith is a good thing needs to be repudiated "because the most faith based people in the united states on September the 11th 2001 were undoubtedly the people who high jacked those planes.” But later he admits to Wilson that if he could eliminate religion, he wouldn’t do it. He says it is not just because he’d miss having religious people to argue with, as he made it seem in the Four Horsemen discussion. He says, "I don't quite know why I wouldn't do it."

The movie also gives a glimpse into Pastor Wilson’s personal life. It shows him having dinner and praying with his family. It also shows why Pastor Wilson is actually a Christian. He says that while he believes the defenses of the Christian faith are sound, that’s not why he’s a Christian. He believes the reason he is a Christian is that it was a gift of God that his parents happened to raise him that way. I found it notable that Pastor Wilson did not say he thought the arguments for Christianity were sound, merely that the defenses of Christianity were sound. Even if it cannot be definitively disproven, that doesn’t mean that there are good reasons for believing in it.

While most of the movie was about morality, it also touches on the issue of truth. Pastor Wilson says that "We can't know anything apart from the revelation of God" and the fact that people can’t find God doesn’t mean that God can’t find them. Hitchens rightly points out that it’s a little contradictory to say that you can’t know God and also say that you know that he has revealed himself. If our reason is unreliable, then how can we know whether or not something is a revelation by God?

But Pastor Wilson also made an excellent point about the search for truth. He references G.K. Chesterton’s comment that the purpose of an open mind is to close on something. He sees it as self defeating to always have a mind that’s completely open. I agree with him, and this made me think about QualiaSoup’s excellent video on open-mindedness:

Hitchens made his usual arguments about the absurdity of biblical morality. Pastor Wilson responded by saying that it was indeed good for people to kill the Amalekites because God told them to do so. He then tries to turn this around by arguing that it doesn’t matter under atheism either because the universe doesn’t care what happens to Amalekites. But I don’t see why this matters. The universe is an inanimate object. I don’t care about what a rock thinks about murder, so why should I care what the universe thinks? It seems like morality had to be based, to some extent, on people. If there was no one else in the universe, what could you do that would be evil?

Pastor Wilson repeatedly criticizes Hitchens for critiquing Christianity by appealing to a shared moral sense without giving a firm grounding to his view of morality. While I think Pastor Wilson overreaches with some of his comments, I think his criticism is valid. Hitchens appeals to a shared moral intuition, but Pastor Wilson points out that sometimes our intuitions conflict. If we see it as good to conquer other tribes or countries, does that make it moral? Did the fact that people once thought slavery was a moral institution mean that it once was? Is there any reason to think that evolution would shape our moral sense to reflect any reality other than what would lead to the survival of our genes?

Hitchens responds by saying that humans have an innate sense of right and wrong and it seems silly to think that the Jews got all the way to Mt. Sinai thinking that murder and theft were fine until God told them otherwise. Like many atheists, Hitchens dodges the question. The issue is not how it is possible to believe in morality without God, for, as some religions demonstrate, it’s possibly to believe weird things without a good reason. The issue is whether there is a rational basis for believing that a given action is moral or immoral.

However, Hitchens correctly points out that things aren’t any better under religion. “Religious morality is just as relative, just as subject to evolution.” While religion used to say that sinners would burn in the fiery pits of hell, many of them have shifted to seeing hell as merely separation from God. Pastor Wilson defends Christian morality by saying that morality is grounded in the nature of God. However, as I pointed out in an earlier post, that doesn’t really help. If God's nature does not fit some external standard of morality, then his nature is good merely because it is God's. So then murder is wrong just because that's what God's nature happened to be, and you end up with an arbitrary basis for morality.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie and highly recommend seeing it if you get the chance. The full video isn't online, but here's a clip of the first 13 minutes of it:

COLLISION - 13 min VIMEO Exclusive Sneak Peek from Collision Movie on Vimeo.

House Appeases Pro-Lifers, Passes Health Care

2009-11-08T04:23:00.000-08:00

Saturday night the House finally passed the health care bill by a vote of 220 to 215. There were 39 Democrats who ended up voting against the bill, and only one Republican who voted for it.

That Republican was Rep. Joseph Cao (pronounced Gow) of Louisiana who represents an extremely liberal district. His district is about as liberal as Missouri's 1st district. It's so liberal that the only reason a Republican won was that William Jefferson, the Democratic incumbent, was insanely corrupt. Sometimes politicians can pretend they made an innocent mistake, but this is a little hard when federal agents find almost $100,000 in cash in your freezer. The district was so liberal that despite all of this, Jefferson was heavily favored, and Cao only won because the election was held in December, leading to embarrassingly low turnout. While Republicans were able to force Cao to vote against the stimulus bill, voting against health care would have been political suicide for him.

Unfortunately, in order to win the support of Cao and a few moderate Democrats, Democratic leaders allowed the Stupak amendment to be voted on and passed. This amendment prevents the public option from covering abortion. It even prevents people who receive affordability credits from purchasing any private plan that covers abortion. It still allows people to buy additional "abortion plans", but how many people are actually going to get an additional plan that just covers abortion? How many people really expect to have an abortion sometime in the future and make plans accordingly? What will end up happening is that poor women who get their insurance through the health care exchange will be unable to get an abortion, even when one is desperately needed.

This language was inserted into the bill primarily to receive the blessing of the Conference of Catholic Bishops. Democratic leaders had been working for days trying to find something the church would accept because there was a group of Democrats who wouldn't vote for the bill unless it had the church's endorsement. I'm a little uncomfortable with important legislation needing the Catholic church's seal of approval in order to pass. And considering how much of the funding for the anti-gay marriage ads in Maine came from the Catholic church, it seems like the church has become very effective at getting their moral beliefs written into our laws.

Besides this, the bill appears to be pretty good. It contains a public option, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cover 36 million additional people and would reduce the budget deficit by more than $100 billion dollars over 10 years. However, it still has a tough road ahead. It first has to pass the Senate, where it will need 60 Senators to prevent a filibuster and bring it to the floor. There are some means, such as reconciliation, that have previously been used to get bills passed with a bare majority, but Democrats seem unlikely to go this route. Then a group of members from the House and Senate will get together in a conference committee to hash out the differences between the House and Senate bills. The resulting bill then has to be voted on in both houses. This could be problematic because many Democrats have pledged to vote against a bill that does not have a public option, and the Senate bill may not have one. Also, some House members voted for the bill with hopes that the anti-abortion language would later be taken out and may vote against the bill if it’s in the final version. But if it's taken out, a group of moderates may vote against the bill. If the bill makes it through all of that, it finally reaches the President’s desk.

While we're still a long way from health care reform being signed into law, the vote last night was an important first step.

Bigotry Wins Again

2009-11-04T01:22:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, Maine voted to deprive people of the right to marry the one they love. Mainers struck down a law that was passed in May which gave gay couples the right to get married. It was expected to be a close vote, but many experts were expecting gay rights to squeak out a narrow victory. Instead, about 53% of voters decided that only straight people should have the right to marry.

This is depressing news. Despite many recent victories in the fight for equal rights, this vote makes clear that we still have a long way to go. This isn’t Oklahoma or Idaho; Barack Obama won Maine by 17% of the vote. If gay marriage can’t even win in liberal states like California and Maine, equal rights nation-wide look a long way off.

I see absolutely no reason that people should only be permitted to marry those of a certain gender. I’ve heard dozens of arguments for why only straight people should be able to get married, but they are all completely unconvincing. In the end, people do not oppose gay marriage because they have studied the evidence and found that it will have harmful consequences; they oppose it because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. I see no reason why I should respect these people’s beliefs any more than I respect the beliefs of those who used the Bible to support banning interracial marriage.

Of course, no matter how much I disagree with their views, everyone is entitled to a vote. What bothers me most about the situation in Maine is the amount of money that religious groups across the country gave in order to convince Maine voters to take away rights from gay people. In a recent article, Nate Silver examined where the money was actually coming from. While gay marriage supporters raised 43% of their money from within Maine, gay marriage opponents raised only 26% of their money within the state. While the pro-gay marriage side received contributions from 3,766 Mainers, only 422 contributed to the campaign against gay marriage. While the pro-gay marriage side got most of their money from small donors, much of the anti-gay marriage money came from religious groups. Over 80% of the in-state funding came from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, and almost all of the out-of-state funding came from the National Organization for Marriage, which has ties to the Mormon church.

And just as in California, this money was used to run ads playing to the fears of voters. These ads threatened that unless gays were prevented from marrying, there would be a flood of lawsuits, religions would lose their tax exemptions, and young children would be taught in school that it's okay to be gay.

The news might not be all bad though. It is looking like a referendum in Washington state which would increase domestic partner rights will probably pass, though the vote is much closer than people predicted. And even though change is coming much more slowly than I would like, it is coming. I hope that 50 years from now people will look back with shock that there was once a time when the government told you what sex your partner had to be, just like people growing up today are shocked that only 50 years ago, the government got to determine what race your partner had to be. I think that day will become a reality, but there is still a lot of work left.

I leave you with this touching gay marriage ad from Ireland:

Update: Just to be clear, I do not think that everyone who opposes gay marriage is a bigot. However, there are certainly some people who oppose gay marriage out of bigotry, though I don't claim to know how many. I have some regrets about titling this post as I did because it seems to imply that everyone who voted against gay marriage is a bigot.

Atheist Blogroll

2009-11-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

I just joined the Atheist Blogroll, which you can see in my sidebar. It seems like a pretty good way of finding blogs to read, and maybe it will cause a few people to check out my blog. If you have a blog and would like to join, contact Mojoey at Deep Thoughts.

By the way, I'm working on a couple posts right now and should have something new up in the next couple days.

Can God be Trusted?

2009-10-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

If God does exist, does it make sense to trust him? Most atheists would probably look at all the evil acts that God did in the Bible and say that it would be silly to trust a God like that. Most Christians would probably say that based on their personal experiences with God, they have come to trust him and that if he did everything the Bible says he did, he must have had good reasons. In a way this makes sense. If you trust someone deeply, you will give them the benefit of the doubt. And even if some of them sound implausible, Christians have come up with all kinds of different explanations for why God might have done the things the Bible says he did. So I think that any discussion of trust should start with how much trust God has actually earned. If there’s no reason to trust God to begin with, then you don’t even have to bring up his seemingly evil acts.

Suppose we know that God does exist. Suppose we know of good reasons why it was moral for God to do all those things he did. Suppose God communicates with us constantly and seems to do good things that make our lives better. Would it then make sense to trust God? Is it even possible for God to earn our trust? A while ago I probably would have said yes, but now I’m not so sure.

The first step is looking at why we come to trust people. It all starts with how much trust we have for people in general. If my experiences have shown that people are pretty trustworthy, I should trust a stranger more than if I thought that most humans were evil. But how much we trust someone depends on other things like the context that we met them in. We assign teachers, drug dealers, people in suits, and people who look like gang members different initial levels of trust based on what we think we know about the trustworthiness of these groups. While this can be a good thing, sometimes these biases are irrational. Many people are racist or xenophobic without any actual evidence supporting their biases.

What about God? For one thing, we have no experience with other all-powerful supernatural beings. Even if humans are trustworthy in general, that doesn’t mean that the same holds for supernatural beings. Given that there doesn’t seem to be any reason a priori to think a good God is more likely than an evil God, I don’t think we have an a priori reason for trusting him.

But as we get to know someone better, our level of trust changes. If someone tries to steal my wallet and is not a magician, I start trusting them less. But if I see someone giving up their time or money to help someone else, I start trusting them more. While this seems like a good way of figuring out whether someone is trustworthy, you have to be careful. If you ask an email scammer to send you $10 to prove he’s honest and he does, that doesn’t mean you should send him your life’s savings. While small selfless acts may cause us to trust someone, we still shouldn’t trust that person totally or we could be easily swindled.

So what has God sacrificed? Many Christians will say that he sacrificed his son/himself. But since God is all powerful, he could have brought about the same result without having Jesus die. It’s a little like if a judge stabbed himself in the leg with a pencil and then decided not to send someone to jail. The pencil has nothing to do with whether the act is benevolent. But also, if Jesus is God, he would be infinitely capable of dealing with pain and dying on the cross wouldn’t hurt him at all. Even if he could strip himself of his ability to deal with pain, his act would be no more benevolent than the judge’s self-mutilation. It would also raise the interesting question of whether God could take away all his powers and kill himself.

A Christian might say that it’s still benevolent because God forgave our sins. Laying aside the fact that most Christians think that this gift was conditional upon believing in God, this is still not the kind of self-sacrificing act that should make us more likely to trust someone. God is essentially giving up nothing of value, and then asking us to give up something we value very much: our ability to live our lives the way we see fit. So sacrificing to God would be worse than giving your life’s savings to the scammer. God has sacrificed less to earn your trust and is asking for more.

Certainly this isn’t the only way someone can earn your trust. If you get to know someone very well and you see what they’re really like, you might start to trust them. If you see someone at their most raw and uninhibited, you can get a better idea of whether they’re trustworthy. For example, if you meet a politician after he’s had a few beers you might get a better idea of what he’s like than if you listen to every single one of his speeches. While we can be easily fooled, this can at least give us some idea of how trustworthy someone is. This works because humans are not perfect at deception, as the success of poker players at reading tells demonstrates. But since God is all powerful, he is infinitely skilled at deception. So we could not tell whether our interactions with him show us what he is really like, or whether he is merely deceiving us.

One other good way of seeing whether we should trust someone is seeing what other people we trust think of him. At first this seems like it could be a good reason to trust God, but then you have to think about why other people trust God. If there is no good reason to trust God even in the best case scenario when God communicates with us constantly and seems to make our lives better, what basis do those people have for trusting God? If everyone I knew believed something but I knew that they had no good reason for believing it, that wouldn’t give me a reason to believe it. If everyone I knew trusted in the U.S. government, but I knew that the only reason they did so was they thought blind patriotism was good, that wouldn’t give me any reason to trust the U.S. government.

Yet even if you realize there’s no good reason to trust God, you could still say that if God rewards you for doing what he says, it makes sense to keep doing it. If God somehow demonstrates to us in an unmistakable way that he is rewarding us for our actions, then maybe this would make sense. If I gave a $10 bill to a poor person and then a $100 bill appeared in my wallet and God told me he’d keep doing that, I’d start giving out a lot more $10 bills. But God still wouldn’t earn my trust. I see trust as a confidence that someone is generally honest and a good person. There could be a practical benefit to doing what an evil dictator says, but that doesn’t mean you should trust him.

One final reason someone might trust God is for the psychological benefits. It seems like it would be disturbing to believe that God exists, but have no idea whether he’s good or evil. While there are probably cases where it could make you happier, trusting in people merely for psychological benefits can be very dangerous. Many people had a profound trust in Jim Jones and this may have made them happy, but this misplaced trust had disastrous consequences.

Even if God exists, and even if he does the things Christians claim he does, it still doesn’t seem like there’s any rational way to justify trust in God. God controls our reality, and if he wants to create a world in which he makes us think he’s nice in order to get us to do evil, he can do so without any effort whatsoever. So the question is not whether we can still trust God despite the genocide he ordered in the Bible. The question is whether there’s any good reason for trusting him in the first place.

Skeptical Theism and a Lying God

2009-10-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

I just read an intriguing paper by Erik Wielenberg entitled Skeptical Theism and Divine Lies. The entire paper is worth reading, but I’ll try to summarize his arguments and offer my thoughts. And judging by the stuff he has on his faculty web page, he seems like a pretty good guy overall:

In his paper, Wielenberg argues that people who try to get around the problem of evil by saying that just because we can’t think of a justification for a particular evil doesn’t mean that there isn’t one must also accept that just because we can’t think of a justification for God lying to us doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. Although this would not disprove God, it would show that we have no good reason for thinking that God is telling us the truth. Of course a believer could instead reject skeptical theism, but that would make it very difficult to respond to the problem of evil.

Calling God’s honesty into question would cause serious problems for Christianity. Wielenberg quotes Nicholas Wolterstorff's observation that “deep in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is the attribution of speech to God. To excise those attributions from those religions would be to have only shards left.” Wolterstorff also noted that the “traditional principles guiding biblical interpretation in the Christian tradition” is the principle “that God never speaks falsehood.” Wielenberg then quotes Richard Swinburne discussing how mankind needs God to reveal things like the atonement and heaven and hell. If Christians can’t rely on God to be honest, then how can Christians possibly know anything about God or the afterlife? The self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that apologist William Lane Craig loves to talk about might not be so self-authenticating after all.

But it would also be problematic to reject skeptical theism, as it seems to be the only half-decent answer to the problem of evil. Many non-believers argue that if there is an evil act that seems completely irreconcilable with an omnibenevolent God, then it probably is. At the very least, the great number of seemingly unjustifiable evils provides evidence against the existence of God. A skeptical theist would respond by saying that our knowledge is extremely limited and just because we can’t think of a justification doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have one. Given how little we actually know, this seems like a somewhat reasonable response, though in cases like the Holocaust, it seems impossible that the good could outweigh the bad without the word good losing all meaning. But at least the skeptical theist response is logically coherent.

Wielenberg explains that one problem with accepting skeptical theism is that God could have a justification for anything. A Christian might believe that they don’t have to worry about global warming or a nuclear holocaust because God will protect them. But under skeptical theism, this would be irrational. God might have some justification for killing everyone on earth in the most painful way imaginable. He could even have some justification for then sending everyone on Earth to an eternity in hell. We have no reason to take God at his word, for he could have an unknown reason for lying to us.

Wielenberg’s core argument is essentially this:
Premise 1: If skeptical theism is true, we have no reason to deny that God telling a lie has some justification we don’t know about.
Premise 2: If we have no reason to deny that God telling a lie has some justification we don’t know about, then we do not know any proposition based solely on God’s word.
Therefore: Skeptical theism implies that we do not know any proposition based solely on God’s word.

So a skeptical theist must accept that they cannot know even core tenants of Christianity like the claim that Christians can get eternal life. Of course it’s hard to imagine how God could be justified in lying to us about something like that. But as skeptical theists say, just because we can’t think of a justification doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Maybe there’s some justification for the Holocaust that we can’t even begin to understand, and maybe there’s some justification for God deluding us into thinking we will live forever when instead we will rot in the ground.

I was glad to see that Wielenberg addressed what I see as a likely response from Christians: “So what?” Why is it so horrible if God does lie occasionally? That was basically the reaction I anticipated some Christians having when I first heard about my friend Ben’s project of mapping a debate with a number of Christians on whether God is lying about hell.

A believer could still say that at the very least if God tells them something, they can know that God wants them to believe it. So divine revelation is not God revealing the truth, but God revealing what he wants us to believe. However, even this is uncertain. If we do not know God’s purpose for telling us something, we do not know how God wants us to respond. For all we know, he could want us to respond by being angry at God, for maybe this will lead to the most good in the end. So God telling us something gives us no basis for believing it or even for acting as if we believe it.

Another possible response Wielenberg addresses is that this argument does not show that God is morally imperfect, so at least everything will end up fine in the end. But since under skeptical theism there may be moral goods that God is trying to achieve which are beyond our understanding, we cannot know anything about our fate. For all we know, there is some overriding good that could be achieved by torturing all believers eternally and letting only atheists into heaven.

So while skeptical theism may enable Christians to escape the problem of evil, it ends up destroying mainstream Christianity. If Isaiah 55:9 and Ecclesiastes 8:17 really do indicate that God may have unknowable reasons for his actions, and Stephen Wykstra is right that skeptical theism “is not an additional postulate: it was implicit in theism (taken with a little realism about our cognitive powers) all along,” then Christianity itself is incoherent.

Overall, I think that Wielenberg presents a strong argument, one that all believers should carefully consider.

Atheist Rift?

2009-10-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Barbara Bradley Hagerty did a piece on atheism for NPR entitled “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists.” In it, she describes what she sees as a major split between New atheists like Christopher Hitchens and old school atheists like Paul Kurtz. There certainly are differences of opinion within the atheist community, but I think she greatly exaggerates them.

There are no atheist dogmas that we are fighting over; the dispute she talks about is primarily about tactics. Just because people have different views about what are the most effective ways of promoting a positive atheistic worldview doesn’t mean that there’s a civil war going on. All groups have some disagreements over tactics. For example, I’m sure there are some people in the pro-life movement who see it as counterproductive to show people pictures of bloody aborted fetuses, but they’re all still united in their shared goal of reducing the number of abortions.

Personally, I don’t see myself as a member of either camp. I don’t agree with everything Hitchens says, and I don’t agree with everything Kurtz says. But I think they both have important points to make.

I disagree with some New atheists who think that all religion is inherently evil. Certainly some religions have done immense harm to society, and we have a moral imperative to prevent the severe abuse that is sometimes done in the name of religion. But there are other religions like Jainism that do not cause people to harm others. I think that they are still delusions in the sense that they are false beliefs, but they may be relatively harmless delusions. I don’t see any more reason to actively fight against them than I do against non-religious beliefs that I see as harmless delusions, like contra-causal free will and Platonic realism.

I also think that some of the arguments the prominent New atheist authors use are philosophically weak and are easy to rebut. For example, I do not think that Dawkins’ “central argument” in The God Delusion is very strong. This bothers me because I fear that someone who thinks that they should expose themselves to at least one atheist book may read The God Delusion and then come away with an even stronger belief in God after finding problems with a couple of his arguments. Dawkins does make some very good arguments as well, but when someone finds a couple flawed arguments, they may just assume that the rest are flawed as well. But despite their flaws, and we’re all flawed somehow, I think the New atheists have done a very valuable service by getting the atheist message out there. While I may think that people like Graham Oppy make stronger arguments for atheism than Dawkins or Hitchens, you don’t get your message out in the mainstream media by writing philosophically rigorous criticisms of theistic arguments.

But I also have strong disagreements with some of the old atheists. I do not think we should keep our beliefs to ourselves, and I do not think that religion should be accorded some special status as an issue that it is taboo to discuss. I also definitely do not think that science and religion should be treated as Non-overlapping magisteria. As long as religions make testable claims like saying that prayer works, science has a right to test those claims. I also believe that blasphemy really is a victimless crime. While there probably are conditions where it could be counterproductive, it can also be a powerful demonstration of the religious freedom and free speech rights that our country was founded upon, as well as sending an important message to believers that not everyone shares their views. Trying to avoid offending any believers would be a fool’s errand, for there are some people who are offended by the mere existence of atheists.

Yet, I do agree with some of the points Paul Kurtz makes in the piece. Atheism itself is simply a lack of belief in God. In order to make the world a better place, we need to go beyond simple disbelief and explore issues of morality.

While the people who get the most media attention are the New atheists and their strongest opponents, I think there are actually quite a lot of atheists like me who are somewhat moderate. I don’t think atheists should be shy about their beliefs, but I also think that bashing religious people for the fun of it isn’t the way to get people to take your arguments seriously. I like making people really think about what they believe and why. People should look closely at whether they have good reasons to believe that their religion is the one that happens to be true. There’s no perfect way to do this; sometimes it helps to be understanding, and sometimes it helps to show how silly their beliefs really sound to someone not brought up in the religion. For example, it’s true that the God most people believe in is a magical invisible being who grants wishes. If I realized that one of my core beliefs seemed silly, I'd really want to research it to see whether or not it’s true.

But it’s also important to be understanding. I’ve had plenty of false beliefs over the years, and it’s never fun to have your own ignorance exposed. However, I still welcome learning that one of my beliefs is false because that’s the only way I come to know what’s true and because it can be dangerous to act on false beliefs. Just because there is tons of stuff I’m wrong about does not mean I’m a stupid person, and the people I appreciate the most are those who point out my errors with kindness and humility. At least that’s what I think is the best approach.

Atheists are never going to agree on everything, just like theists are never going to agree on everything. But the two things atheists share are a lack of belief in God, and the desire to make the world a better place.

Morality

2009-10-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

The issue of morality comes up a lot in debates between atheists and Christians. Christians say that it’s impossible for there to be morality without God and we have no right to say a murderer did anything wrong, while atheists say that it’s impossible for God to be omnibenevolent when, according to the Bible, he has killed millions of people. As is often the case in formal debates, it becomes more about scoring political points than really investigating the issues. I think people on both sides should give a little more thought to the basis of their moral beliefs.

It seems to me that most people make moral judgments primarily based on intuition. Both atheists and theists intuitively feel that there is something deeply immoral about killing or raping someone. They also intuitively feel that things like kindness, honesty, and generosity are good. I think abortion polling illustrates that many religious people rely on intuition rather than their religion when it comes to religious matters. For example, in a poll from earlier this year, 50% of Catholics said that abortions should be legal in most cases and only 16% said it should be illegal in all cases, despite the Catholic Church’s clear stance that abortion is deeply immoral.

But some people do not merely go by intuition and end up adhering to a certain system of morality. Some theists try hard to behave as they think God wants them to, and some atheists try to behave as they think they should based on some variety of utilitarianism (or some other ethical theory). Of course, people may still be relying on their intuition when choosing a religion or an ethical theory. If a believer intuitively believes that it is wrong to prevent gay people from getting married, he will probably be less likely to join an extremely conservative church. If an atheist feels that people have a moral obligation to help the poor, he’s probably not going to adopt Social Darwinism. But I think that many people do not go further and try to figure out why God’s will or a certain brand of utilitarianism is the standard of morality.

I think that many atheists have a very weak foundation for their morality (of course, this does not mean that atheists cannot be moral people, as people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have been incredibly generous). Some atheists believe that something like happiness or preference satisfaction has intrinsic value and this serves as the foundation for morality. The problem with this is that there’s no reason to think that intrinsic values exist, and people’s behavior can be explained without resorting to a strange entity that we have no evidence for. I think that atheists who reject God because he’s a strange entity that we have no evidence for, but believe that intrinsic values exist without any evidence are being inconsistent.

However, morality is an even bigger problem for Christians. Atheism itself does not make any claims about morality and if there is no such thing as objective morality, that does not invalidate atheism. However, an important part of mainstream Christianity is that God is omnibenevolent. If God could not possibly be good in a meaningful way, that would pose a serious problem for Christians. The Euthyphro Dilemma asks whether God commands things because they are good or whether they are good because God commands them. If God commands things because they are good, then God is not the source of morality and Christians have the same problem of having to explain the foundation of morality that atheists do. But they also have the added problem of trying to reconcile this morality with God’s actions in the Old Testament (such as Numbers 31). If God is the source of morality, then God’s morality is arbitrary and God could have made murder good and love bad if he had wanted to (and he could have made us intuitively see murder as good). Most people try to get around this problem by saying that God’s nature itself is good, but then you have the problem of whether God is good because his nature has the properties of moral goodness, or whether the properties are good merely because God has them. There have been attempts to reconcile this problem, but I don’t think any of them work. Wes Morriston, although himself a theist, sees serious problems with the answers believers typically give to the Euthyphro dilemma. If you have a chance, I encourage you check out two articles that he has recently written on the subject: http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/GodGood.pdf and http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/WhatIfGod.pdf.

But even if all current models of morality do not work, that wouldn’t prove that morality does not exist any more than proving to ancient people that Zeus did not exist would have proven that there could not be a God that actually does exist. However, I actually do think there is a moral theory that has a good chance of being correct: desirism. It’s a relatively recent theory so it needs to be subjected to more scrutiny before concluding that it’s correct, but it seems to avoid the common pitfalls of other moral theories. Basically desirism says that desires are the only reasons for action that exist and that a good desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires. For example, a desire to rape is a bad desire because either the desires of the rape victim to not be raped are thwarted, or the desires of the rapist to rape are thwarted. We all act based on our desires. It’s not like there’s something intrinsically good about kindness that forces us to be kind against our will, we are kind because we have the desire to be kind (and that is a good desire). Divine morality would not prevent someone who desired to kill someone from killing that person if they did not desire to go to heaven or please God. Similarly, divine command theory does not somehow force someone to be moral regardless of their desires. However, there are means such as the legal system, praise, and condemnation which can give people a strong desire not to do evil acts. The threat of hell is not the only means of inducing someone to act morally. I’ll try to explore desirism in a little more depth in future posts, but if you want to read more about it, I suggest checking out this article on desirism.

About Me

2009-10-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

Basically, I’m just someone who’s really interested in learning about stuff like religion and philosophy in his spare time. I’ve always been an atheist, so unfortunately I cannot regale you with any exciting deconversion stories. There’s no one thing that “caused” me to be an atheist, or one single barrier keeping me from believing; I simply have never found any good reasons to think God exists.

I was baptized Catholic, but my parents became less religious when I was very young and I stopped going to church. So I’ve never gotten to experience what it’s like to believe in God. I occasionally thought about philosophic or religious issues when I was growing up, but I generally focused on other things. When I did discuss religion with other people, no one seemed to have any good reasons for believing that God existed or that their religion was true. I wasn’t terribly passionate about my disbelief; I just saw no better reason to believe in God than in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

When I learned about agnosticism in high school, I started labeling myself as that because I thought that there was no real way you could know one way or another whether God exists. Then in college I started calling myself an atheist once I learned more about what it means. I had always thought that atheists were people who claimed to know with absolute certainty that there was nothing supernatural and that is why used to avoid calling myself an atheist. The definition of atheism is still controversial, but most people see it as either a lack of belief in God, or a belief that God does not exist. Although I think the former definition makes more sense, I am an atheist under either one. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that some supernatural entity exists because I know just a tiny fraction of all there is to know. But I don’t know of any good reasons to think that God does exist, and given the infinitely many possible Gods that could exist, I think the odds that any of the religions happened to get it right are extremely low.

I got more interested in religion in 2008 when my dad started talking to me about religion and trying to get me to become Catholic. I asked him why he believed and I looked into some of the reasons he gave. None of them were convincing. My dad had gotten very active in the church and got a lot of emails from right-wing religious groups. He would occasionally forward them to me and I would offer my take on them. Then there was one particularly dishonest email he sent me from Focus on the Family that really set me off. We ended up getting in a long discussion on religion and that led to me reading up on it a little bit more. I found the arguments for religion fascinating to read, but unpersuasive. Reading up on religion has caused me to learn more about a wide variety of subjects, from philosophy, to biology, to history, to physics, to psychology. I really enjoy exploring all the incredible aspects of our world. Eventually, I decided to take a stab at writing about some of these things, so I started this blog.

If you disagree with something I say in one of my posts, please leave a comment. I’m sure there are plenty of things I’m wrong about, and it’s always good to find out what they are.