Theophobia, Empiricism, and Why I Doubt the Doubts

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academia, atheism, Chalmers, Dennett, dualism, Empiricism, God, materialism, methodological naturalism, Nagel, naturalism, Philosophy, Plantinga, theism

In my “about” page I described my story a little; I said that I was a born-again Christian in college, then I started doubting the faith. I studied philosophy at a conservative Christian seminary hoping to solve my doubts, but instead of solving my doubts, studying there got me to doubt the doubts. That is, I didn’t come out with an overwhelming case for Christianity and against, say, atheism, but I did come out with reasons to be doubtful of atheism. In fact, I became doubtful of the whole naturalist project. This was the story of my faith from then through my PhD studies at a secular (and somewhat hostile; well, at least some of the professors were hostile to Christianity) philosophy department. It’s still my story.

Why doubt the doubts? It may be bordering on the genetic fallacy, but let me start with this: consider this blog post from Subversive Thinking. The poster quotes Thomas Nagel, a prominent philosopher. I’ll requote:

I believe that this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.

The field I know best, philosophy, definitely displays what Nagel is talking about. Consider this quote from another prominent philosopher, David Chalmers:

A fourth motivation to avoid dualism [the view that there is a non-physical component to us], for many, has arisen from various spiritualistic, religious, supernatural, and other antiscientific overtones of the view. On the view I advocate, consciousness is governed by natural law, and there may eventually be a reasonable scientific theory to it. There is no a priori principle that says that all natural laws will be physical laws; to deny materialism is not to deny naturalism. A naturalistic dualism expands our view of the world, but it does not invoke the forces of darkness.

From The Conscious Mind, p.170. Italics his.

This passage follows what I take to be a powerful case against materialism (the view that matter and energy are all that exist. By the way, for more on his views, see here.). He tries to reassure his readers that his views are genuinely naturalistic (i.e., secular, atheistic); even if dualistic they do not “invoke the forces of darkness.” This passage reflects a definite trend not only towards arguing for materialism among philosophers, but desiring materialism among philosophers. If the desire wasn’t there, then why the fear of dualism?

If other academics are anything like these philosophers it seems that academic atheists are influenced by emotions and other subjective stuff as much as anyone. They have their worldviews, their cherished beliefs. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not logic machines impersonally crunching the data and destroying God.

Peer review doesn’t eliminate this bias. It may work regarding individual biases, but what I’m talking about isn’t that; it’s more like a Spirit of the Age. I felt it in grad school. Other theists feel it (naturalists may not feel it, as the bias is not directed against them). Since so many in academia are alike in their naturalism, personal biases become a systemic bias, the kind that resists correction from peer-review and the like (so much so that even religious academics typically think that to be good academics they need to keep their religion out of their discipline — e.g. cell biologist Ken Miller’s endorsement of methodological naturalism).

Why does this produce “doubts about the doubts?” It might seem that since there is sort of a consensus with academics that naturalism is true, that reasonable people ought to accept it. The above mitigates this, especially since, to my knowledge, no one has really produced an overwhelming case for naturalism. Part of this consensus might be based on emotions, values (humanist values such as the desire for autonomy), and desires as much as it is based on facts and reason. In addition to this, perhaps motivated by such values, academics usually begin with an a priori commitment to naturalism (their justification being something along the lines of the success of science) before they even start investigating a topic. Then they make everything fit in it. Consider this dogmatic passage from Daniel Dennett, a prominent philosopher of mind:

This fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying feature, and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up.

From Explaining Consciousness, p 37, emphasis his.

Dennett sees dualism as a non-starter, not because it’s been disproven, but because it’s unscientific and draws a limit to what humans can know. It’s not naturalistic. It violates sacred humanist values! In my mind the doubts arise: “But humanism is just one worldview. And what if there really are souls? What if God really does exist? Wouldn’t this attitude rule out our ever knowing these valuable facts?”

So much for academic atheists. Regarding “street-atheists”, just look at some of the atheist blogs or YouTube videos or free-thought forums and you’ll see how emotional they can be (e.g., the comments here, my favorite being (in the original spelling), “Gods don’t exist. any one of them. so go and ride something else then death horse of religin from bronze age.” Pure brilliance!).

What I take from all this is that I need to be just as careful around atheist arguments as I need to be around theist arguments; I am tempted (due to the confidence we naturally grant to swaggering intellectuals) to let atheists slide in logic when I would pounce on a feeble-minded born-again Christian making a similar error. I also take from this that there are significant personal, psychological, and sociological forces behind naturalism that I, as a rational agent, need to resist.

My second point has to do with the epistemological (pertaining to knowledge or justification) assumptions that atheists typically make. Usually they are empiricist evidentialists. An empiricist, on an influential definition, believes that the senses are the only source of knowledge about the factual world; all that we can know without the senses are empty tautologies like “All cats are cats” and so forth: to know that there actually are cats one must go and look. Scientism is a related view that holds that science is the limit of knowledge. Evidentialism is the view that one shouldn’t believe something on insufficient evidence, or, perhaps more precisely, that one’s level of confidence should match one’s degree of evidence. These views can be traced back to John Locke, though the skeptical empiricist Hume is the philosopher most associated with them.

Empiricist evidentialism is one of the commitments I hear most often from atheists. Richard Dawkins states it in so many words in many places (here’s one). How is it used to argue for atheism? Here’s my stab at it:

(1) As far as we can tell from our best science, the universe goes about its ways without the interference of God.
(2) Therefore, there is no scientific evidence for God.
(3) All evidence comes from science or the senses (science, perhaps, can be understood as the careful systematic use of the senses).
(4) Therefore, there is no evidence for God.
(5) We shouldn’t believe things on insufficient evidence.
(6) Therefore, we shouldn’t believe in God.

This argument only gets us to non-theism and falls short of atheism. However, add the following:

(7) The prior probability of God existing (that is, the probablity of some being like God existing without considering any evidence) is pretty low.
(8) Therefore, the probability of God existing is pretty low (premises (4) and (7)).

(8) is a form of atheism (in fact, the form of Dawkins’s atheism). Actually, I think that this argument is the structure of Dawkins’s argument as a whole; he explains how natural selection can explain what God used to explain, hence attempting to secure (1). He adds in a dash of evidentialism and empiricism. Then, with his infamous Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit, attempts to secure something like (7). Bayesian confirmation theory (Dawkins doesn’t use it, but I would if I were arguing for atheism) gives us (8) given (4) and (7).

I can’t confidently say that argument is the way most atheists argue, but something like it I suspect is behind much atheist reasoning. I have doubts about it.

I doubt (1), first of all. The fine-tuning argument, which argues that the constants and initial conditions of the physical universe are all within the narrow range required for the existence of life is best explained by God’s action, is one argument I give. Another is what I take to be the failure of philosophy of mind/neuroscience in finding a materialist explanation for the experiential aspects of consciousness. There are also myriads of miracle claims. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to think that at least some of them, even if a very small percentage of them, may be true. Finally there is religious experience (including my own). Though this itself isn’t empirical evidence, it is a source of doubt regarding atheism.

Now I would be begging the question if I were to think that these are counter-examples to (1) without further argument. I will eventually post on all of them, I hope, so I politely ask that I be allowed to postpone these discussions until then. But if I’m anywhere near right about the above, doubts about (1) seem reasonable. Also I want to highlight that none of these attempts at counterexamples are incompatible with evolution.

I also doubt (3). If one considers mathematical intuition as a sort of evidence, it would be false. Inductive reasoning, a bedrock of science, depends on the uniformity principle (the principle that patterns in observations in one place or time will tend to be repeated in other places and times). This view was famously attacked by Hume as being without any non-circular justification. If he was right, induction itself is an assumption that scientists must make without empirical evidence. In fact, the best knowledge I have, that of my own existence, doesn’t stem from my five senses (or science) at all; it comes from direct awareness of my mind. Finally, moral truths, if objective, cannot be derived from science, and moral knowledge cannot be empirically based. Thus if we can really know that it is really objectively wrong to rape children, there is knowledge beyond what science can tell us.

I doubt (5) as well. The statement itself would then require evidence. But if the earlier premises are true, that evidence would have to be from science. But science couldn’t verify a philosophical and methodological principle like this (what experiment could you do to prove it?).

Without these premises, the argument falls appart. I don’t claim to have proven the premises false; I just have doubts about them. And if I’m right about my reconstruction being more or less what atheists typically argue, and if I’m right about the doubts, then the typical argument for atheism is doubtful.

Finally, I have doubts about unaided human abilities to know anything at all. I don’t think Descartes’ skeptical arguments have ever really been answered (see Barry Stroud’s Philosophical Scepticism for a powerful case for skepticism). Then there are Plantinga’s arguments that naturalism and evolution, if both true, are not likely to produce reliable abilities to form true beliefs (He concluded that from this that atheistic neo-Darwinism is self-defeating.). Then there is the actual empirical evidence from psychology (see Thomas Gillovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So, for an excellent summary of the research) that human cognitive abilities are systematically biased toward overconfidence, toward finding patterns when there are none, toward our own already held beliefs. One could try to argue that we can “boot-strap” ourselves out of the errors by checking ourselves (Gillovich’s summary is an example of this very thing); i.e., we can detect our own errors. But these errors are only the errors we detect; what about all those that we don’t (and aren’t able to) detect, due to our own cognitive shortcomings? In short, philosophy has made me doubt human reasoning. Thus I am not as optimistic as many atheists are about the expansion of human knowledge.

These are my doubts. They don’t prove theism, or even argue for it. They doubt atheism. Maybe an atheist might say “Atheism isn’t the sort of thing you doubt; it’s more like refusing to believe in something that other people believe in because of doubts.” In other words, there’s a burden of proof on theists that is not on atheists, and that having doubts towards atheist arguments doesn’t discharge this; the burden’s still on theism. That is, when in doubt, choose atheism. I won’t say much about this reply here, as I hope to write on it in more detail later, but my view is that religious experience along with practical interests can change this burden of proof for religious people (like myself) who take themselves to have experienced God or have benefitted from their religious beliefs. We are all aware of examples of what we value affecting burdens of proof (the presumption of innocence is a good one). Why could they have the same effect here?

The Purpose of Life and Why God is not the President

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autonomy, christians and muslims, explanation, freedom ring, god save the king, humanism, lady liberty, personal autonomy, purpose of human existence

Is freedom the purpose of life? Freedom in the sense of nobody telling you what to do? It’s the point of government, at least as moderns think of it. For it used to be that kings ruled by divine right. But ever since the Enlightenment (a period of Western history from about 1680 to 1790 where traditional ideas were questioned) westerns thought that the right to rule comes from the consent of the governed, and that the point of government is to protect human rights. One of these is freedom; we have the right to do what we want as long as we don’t interfere with others doing the same. Government thus consists of an elected body with the duty of protecting freedom and administering public services. Government is a servant; we are the masters. Or, at least that’s how it’s supposed to be.

I think this is good, and I think that most people think it’s good. It’s good because we don’t trust governments. We need to control them; people with power have a temptation, and often tendency, to various evils. And human beings are also susceptible to incompetence. So democracy is the way to go; we need to be able to hold leaders responsible.

Those of us in the west have all grown up with this idea. American children learn “Let Freedom Ring!” (to the tune of “God Save the King”). We dumped the king for the sake of freedom. The French built a statue for America to honor (worship?) Lady Liberty that puts the statues of Athena to shame. And it’s at the core of the Arab Spring.

This freedom is about personal autonomy, being lord of oneself. The point of government is to protect this. But must this be the purpose of everything?

I think it’s easy to confuse the two. Of course we don’t want government telling us what to do unless it must (to protect others). We don’t trust other human beings with running our lives. But that doesn’t mean the purpose of human existence itself is autonomy.

Christians and Muslims are actually committed to rejecting this. In Islam, the point of life is submission to Allah (that’s what Islam means, “submission”). Christians have a similar idea; the point of everything is to glorify God. In seminary I learned that all human sin can be reduced to the pursuit of autonomy (from God). So a Christian can support the idea of government’s role being that of protecting freedom, but she cannot accept that the point of her existence is to protect freedom.

There is some logic to this; if the reason we see government as a public servant that we must control is that we don’t trust other human beings, then the main reason for this view of government wouldn’t apply to God, for God is neither evil nor incompetent (Though sometimes, when looking at the world, we might be tempted to think so. Or put it this way, if God is these things, or if Christianity is merely a myth, then there isn’t much reason to be a Christian). Thus God is not a mere president, but God.

Because of this, as an American, I find Christianity difficult. I don’t like autocracies. But actually God’s kingdom is more of an aristocracy, that is, rule of the best. It’s what Plato favored; for the best should rule. And in Plato’s Republic the best are trained to selflessly serve people, for the Philosopher King’s goal in life isn’t wealth or power, but knowledge of Goodness. God is more like the Philosopher King than president. Of course, I can’t trust human beings with my very soul; I’ll just trust them to pave the roads and arrest murderers. But I can trust God; I don’t have to resist this kind of autocracy. Liberty is at best a goddess (with a ‘g’), not God (with a ‘G’).

I think that secularists might say, “Well, fine and good for you, do what you want in your own private life, just let me pursue autonomy (on my terms) as my personal goal, without your meddling.” And as far as this goes, I agree. But coming back to the topic of my last post (Is God a Poor Explanation), I see that when the goal of truth is frustrated, we turn to other goals regarding explanations of what we experience. Autonomy seekers like mechanism and laws as explanations because they increase humanity’s powers. Theists also enjoy technology, but they don’t see this as the ultimate goal of all explanation.

Logic itself, as far as I can see now, cannot decide between these goals. Our desires (or, if I may add, God’s desires) do that. But what I take from all this is that we should be wary of taking ideas that were designed for a political context to fit our entire lives, or assume that they must do so for others.

Is God a Poor Explanation?

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atheism, Bacon, explanation, fine-tuning, science, theism, theistic arguments, theodore drange

Here’s a common atheist reply to theistic arguments; explaining something (life, the universe, miracles, morality, or whatever) with God is not helpful, for it still leaves us with a mystery (the mysteries of where God came from, how God caused whatever it is we want to explain). God is therefore a poor explanation; we should look for another.

Examples are plenty, but here’s one I came across today, from Theodore Drange (context: he is attacking God as an explanation for the apparent fine-tuning of the constants of physics for life):

I do not find that [God] is a good explanation, or even adequate, for the fact to be explained. First, it does not supply any information about how God is supposed to have created anything or how he is supposed to have “fine-tuned” the physical constants of the universe. It fails to address what Paul Edwards (in his book REINCARNATION: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION, Prometheus Books, 1996, pp. 301-303) calls the “modus operandi problem.” For that reason, it is an explanation that is grossly incomplete. And not only is creation out of nothing not described within G, but it is an idea that conflicts with the conservation laws of modern physics. It is also an idea which is hard to understand. We have no experience on the basis of which we might understand it. None of the acts of creation with which we are acquainted (such as by artists) involve creation out of nothing. Not only is G incomplete, but it is incomprehensible as well.

Second, we need some understanding of the properties ascribed to the being mentioned in G, which, on the basis of premise (P5), I shall refer to as “God.” What, exactly, does it mean to say of God that he is omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving, and eternal? Each of these properties is in need of clarification. What logical or conceptual restrictions, if any, are to be placed on an omnipotent and omniscient being? Can such a being make himself weak or ignorant? Can he avoid doing an action that he knows he will perform? There are many puzzles here. Presumably, in order to have created the physical universe, God must have existed prior to the universe. But then how could he possess the given properties with no physical universe in existence? For example, what sorts of actions did he (as an omnipotent being) perform in that prior period and what sorts of things did he (as an all-loving being) love? Advocates of G usually declare it to be simply a “great mystery,” but that is unsatisfactory in an explanation. We started out with a mystery (why the physical constants are what they are). Nothing has been adequately explained or illuminated if we end up with a still greater mystery (the nature of God and his activities). G is too obscure to be regarded as an adequate explanation of anything.

From: The Fine Tuning Argument

Is this a good reply? I’ve heard it said many times that explanations aren’t adequate or scientific if they don’t give us either testable laws of nature or a mechanism as to how observed phenomena came to be. If an explanation doesn’t add to our understanding of how the universe works, then the explanation just replaces mystery with mystery. That’s not science.

What are the goals of explanation anyway? I agree that if the only goal of explanation is the Baconian goal of increasing our power over nature, God’s actions would adequately explain only if they added to our understanding of how to predict and control nature. And as they arguably don’t, God would then be a worthless explanation.

But isn’t the goal of explanation truth? Don’t we want to know what really happened, regardless of whether it aids us in being able to understand the mechanisms or laws of nature?

Or let me put it this way, just suppose, for the sake of argument, that God does exist, is all the wonderful mystery theists make of Him, and that God did fine-tune the universe for life. Wouldn’t this be worth knowing, even if it didn’t aid Baconian goals? If God spelled His name in the stars in all the different languages of the world, God would certainly be the best explanation for that set of observations, even if God’s nature or even how He managed that feat remains a mystery.

Someone could reply that an explanation involving mechanisms or predictable laws is better aimed at truth than a mysterious explanation in that only explanations of the former kind are testable. That’s probably true, but sometimes we don’t have that luxury. With the fine-tuning argument, for example, the alternative naturalist explanations also end up appealing to untestable entities (such as parallel universes) to explain the fine-tuning.

Theists don’t think the ultimate goal of science is removing all mystery anyway. In fact, theists like myself think that mystery is a good thing. The goal of knowledge is to serve God, not ourselves or whatever goals we might have. The point of our existence isn’t our own omnipotence or omniscience. We’re not trying to be God. This is a different perspective, of course, from atheistic humanism. But then atheistic humanism is just another quasi-religion; why should it have pride of place in determining what the goals of explanation (or science for that matter) are?

Hume and Dawkins’s Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit

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Apologietics, Boeing 747 Gambit, Christianity, Dawkins, Empiricism, God, Hume, Philosophy

There is an interesting comparison to be made between Dawkins’s now infamous argument and an argument made by the eighteenth century skeptical empiricist Hume. I’m not sure if Dawkins has actually read Hume’s version, but the similarities are striking. Consider the following passage from Part 4 of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (a transcript of a fictional dialog between three thinkers, Demea, who represents orthodoxy, Cleanthes, representing natural theology, and Philo, representing skepticism.):

. . . I shall endeavour to show you, a little more distinctly, the inconveniences of that Anthropomorphism, which you have embraced; and shall prove, that there is no ground to suppose a plan of the world to be formed in the Divine mind, consisting of distinct ideas, differently arranged, in the same manner as an architect forms in his head the plan of a house which he intends to execute. It is not easy, I own, to see what is gained by this supposition, whether we judge of the matter by Reason or by Experience. We are still obliged to mount higher, in order to find the cause of this cause, which you had assigned as satisfactory and conclusive. If Reason (I mean abstract reason, derived from inquiries a priori) be not alike mute with regard to all questions concerning cause and effect, this sentence at least it will venture to pronounce, That a mental world, or universe of ideas, requires a cause as much, as does a material world, or universe of objects; and, if similar in its arrangement, must require a similar cause. For what is there in this subject, which should occasion a different conclusion or inference? In an abstract view, they are entirely alike; and no difficulty attends the one which is not common to both of them.

Philo then goes on to argue that if one uses intelligence to explain the complexity of the material universe, one will need a further intelligence to explain the complexity of the first intelligence, and so on. Philo then asks, why not just stop at the material universe and say it has its own principles of order?

Before making the comparison, here’s a quick review of Dawkins’s argument. As when a chess player gambits (sacrifices) a piece for an advantage, Dawkins makes a similar sacrifice when he concedes a point theists often make. Quoting astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, they claim that life, due to its complexity, has about the same chance of occurring randomly as a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and producing a Boeing 747 jetliner. Theists then quickly conclude that God’s designing activity must then be responsible for this life. Dawkins, however argues that God, if He is capable of such a design, must be at least as complex as what He’s supposed to explain. If that’s true, then the probability of God existing would be even less than that of a Boeing 747 arising out of a hurricane blowing through a junkyard.

What then is the solution to the origin of the complexity of life? Evolution by natural selection. The complexity of life can be explained by a long series of very simple steps, simple enough to occur by chance, in which complexity increases. These increases are preserved due to natural selection if they provide a survival/reproductive advantage. Thus we have a very simple algorithm for, as he puts it, “climbing Mount Improbable,” that is, accounting for apparent improbability of life arising by blind natural forces. Not so with God; either you have Him with all his powers and intelligence, or you don’t! There is no step-by-step simple algorithm for God’s existence; and if there were, He wouldn’t be much of a God! And the probability of such a being existing without further explanation is very low.

I don’t know if Dawkins would agree, but perhaps he had in mind something like what Hume was writing; God’s design of life would be on the architect model Hume described. God would have the draft in His head, a mental model. But, as Hume’s Philo complained, what advantage is there in explaining the complexity of life with complexity in thought? Surely the latter needs an explanation as well.

Hume argued that this is a problem with all anthropomorphic views about God; they make God’s mind something like a human mind. And what do we see when we look into a human mind? In the words of Hume’s Demea:

In reality, CLEANTHES, consider what it is you assert when you represent the Deity as similar to a human mind and understanding. What is the soul of man? A composition of various faculties, passions, sentiments, ideas; united, indeed, into one self or person, but still distinct from each other. When it reasons, the ideas, which are the parts of its discourse, arrange themselves in a certain form or order; which is not preserved entire for a moment, but immediately gives place to another arrangement. New opinions, new passions, new affections, new feelings arise, which continually diversify the mental scene, and produce in it the greatest variety and most rapid succession imaginable. How is this compatible with that perfect immutability and simplicity which all true Theists ascribe to the Deity?

The character Demea in the Dialogues represents the traditional philosophical view of God as changeless, timeless, simple etc. And here is, I think, the crux of the matter. Theists responding to Dawkins’s argument often (perhaps usually) reply that he is wrong to say God is complex; God is simple, as God is perfect, infinite, and indivisible. But Theists, or at least Christian theists, also see God in the anthropomorphic way; they see God as having emotions, will, thoughts, plans, and judgments. How are these two compatible? Cleanthes, the anthropomorphite of the group, complains that this sort of God couldn’t even be a mind.

In short, it is true that Dawkins’s argument doesn’t really apply to the God of Demea, who (which?) is simple. But that God, it might be claimed, is not compatible with the God of today’s theists; they see God as a loving redeemer who hears their prayers.

Might there be an middle path? In part 12 of the Dialogues Philo argues that both the theist and atheist, when considering the origin of the universe, must make concessions. The theist must concede that the divine mind is very unlike the human mind. The atheist, in turn, must concede that the cause of the universe, since it gave rise to something, to at least some degree, like an artifact, must contain something like human thought. So we might ascribe to the cause of the universe something like human thought but pause before granting much else. The debate would then be about degrees of similarity between human minds and God.

This, I think, is the reach of natural theology (the attempt to know about God from nature alone). It’s as far as it will take us. Dawkins’s arguments won’t work on this God, for we know not how complex such a being must be. But it won’t get us to the God of the Bible either.

There is another similarity between Hume and Dawkins I’d like to discuss — their empiricist evidentialism. But I’ll wait until the next post.