Evidentialist Atheism

If you traffic in atheistic circles, online or elsewhere, you'll notice that the primary objection lodged against belief in God is the evidential objection i.e. "I believe things based on [usually 'scientific'] evidence (and others ought to as well); in the absence of evidence for some proposition, I withhold (and others ought to withhold) belief in it; there is no evidence for God's existence that I've ever seen; hence I can't justify believing in God (and neither can anyone else)." Not only is this the primary objection, it's virtually becoming the sole objection. There are many weaknesses to this argument, but I just want to examine one of them in this post. Namely this: for someone who adopts this stance, what would count as evidence of the supernatural or of God? And if it turns out there is not any sort of event, fact, datum, or combination of facts that would count as evidence of the supernatural or of God, then how is this stance distinguishable from a priori atheism, rather than a result of a survey of the pertinent evidence? And if it is indistinguishable from a priori atheism, why countenance the objection seriously at all?

If an atheist can give criteria for what would count as evidence for God or the supernatural, and a good reason for adopting whatever particular criterion they choose, then they can be rationally justified in their unbelief if they have never been confronted with the sort of evidence they require. The vast majority of atheists I've encountered  adopt the 'scientific' criterion for belief. That is: they will believe in those things which are deliverances of scientific method and nothing else. Now, this doesn't mean that some atheist somewhere couldn't adopt some other criterion, in which case I would have to address whatever criterion that would be, but in this post I will be content to address the criterion that the vast majority of unbelievers appeal to.

If 'science' is that certain sort of investigation of natural phenomena via a particular systematic method of observation and experiment, then immediately one must ask why this criterion for knowledge should be adopted to answer a question necessarily outside its purview i.e. the question of the existence of the supernatural. Could the supernatural theoretically exist and never be isolated and observed in material phenomena, with conditions necessary for repeatable, controlled lab experiments? Not only could this be the case, but if anything supernatural did exist, then this would necessarily be the case: science as traditionally understood and practiced, could not be performed on said phenomena. So we are left with no sensible, justifiable reason to think that the scientific criterion for knowledge is capable of addressing the question of whether anything supernatural exists. Anyone who demands 'scientific evidence of the unscientific (or a-scientific)' makes a nonsensical demand.

This problem seems to bear itself out practically in my experience with atheists. Ask them what would theoretically constitute scientific evidence for God and most of them will struggle to think of something that would count. Recently, I tried to help them out and posed the following hypothetical: suppose the famous double-slit experiment revealed that, on the sheet behind the slits, the particles arrayed in a pattern that spelled out 'YAHWEH WAS HERE' or 'JESUS CHRIST IS THE ETERNAL LOGOS', rather than dispersing in the way that they actually do. Would this count as extremely strong scientific evidence for belief in God? The immediate reaction was that they would suspect a hoax, so I clarified that the results were repeated and confirmed in numerous independent peer-reviewed experiments and accepted by the scientific community at large as legitimate. "Very powerful aliens could be controlling that reality", "Could be a mass delusion", "Could still be a hoax" etc. came the responses. In other words, even paradigm-shifting evidence of God's existence, literally written into the fabric of existence, would not count as evidence for God or the supernatural. At which point we can properly accuse atheists of this sort of holding to an a priori atheism that isn't the result of insufficient scientific evidence, but which is entirely impervious to scientific evidence of even the most radical sort.

In the case of atheists who hold to the scientific criterion of knowledge as solely legitimate, but who would accept this theoretical sort of evidence as persuasive (and so avoid being properly accused of evidence-independent atheism), there is another problem. Namely, that those atheists don't apply the scientific criterion of knowledge to many things that they hold to be true. An atheist who ate toast for breakfast, for example, will believe that he ate toast for breakfast if you ask him about it that evening, and he will believe it to be so on no other basis than his own memory. No repeatable experiment results, no test of any sort, no peer-review, just his memory. And, of course, it's rational for him to do so as it's a properly basic sort of belief. Same goes for that which we currently apprehend with our senses. There's no scientific way of demonstrating that these constant sources of beliefs are reliable, but the atheist (rationally) cleaves to them nonetheless, and so breaks his own standard for what counts as knowledge.

An atheist who holds to the scientific criterion of knowledge as merely the best, but not exclusive, criterion of knowledge, and who acknowledges some sensible minimum standard for what would count as evidence for God mostly escapes this particular critique but -- lucky for me -- mostly doesn't exist. I'll rationally withhold belief in such a creature until presented with evidence of his existence.

On Godwin's Law

If you frequent online message boards or social media, you may have encountered something known as Godwin's Law. The 'Law' officially states that 'As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.' This aspect of the 'Law' is pretty uncontroversial, but in practice the 'Law' is invoked in some circles any time a comparison to Hitler or Nazi Germany is made -- many of which are legitimate -- with the invoker of the Law claiming that the invoker of Hitler has lost simply by making the comparison. Godwin himself says that this is not the intent of the law, and admits that such a move is often fallacious. Rather his intent in formulating such a 'Law' is to get "folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust." In other words, he wants to discourage lightly making such serious comparisons when they often are not appropriate and to foster an environment where such analogies are made much less regularly.

The problem -- with both over-eager Godwin's-Law-invokers and Godwin's goal itself -- is that the seeming surfeit of Hitler and Nazi analogies in the marketplace of ideas are not purely a product of a general lack of circumspection about the gravity of the Holocaust (though some of that exists), but are very often an appropriate, necessary feature of rational thought. And not only within the narrow band of exceptions explicitly carved out by Godwin for comparing similarly genocidal or totalitarian actions to the Nazis.

The Most Extreme X, for any given category or subject, is always a useful referent for the logician. Any time someone makes categorical or absolute claims about any subject, appealing to The Most Extreme X within that field can often immediately refute their claim. For example, if someone says "It is never morally permissible to lie", the most popular refutation by way of anecdote appeals to the Most Extreme Circumstance in the field of morally permissible lying, and it's almost always the case of hiding Jews in your house with Nazi SS at the door interrogating you. This is a completely legitimate and logical move, and its intent isn't to tar anyone with guilt by association. So the fact that this example is invoked over and over again is a good thing, contrary to Godwin's desire to see the use of such analogies decrease.

And this isn't the only situation where such a move is called for and appropriate. The examples are virtually innumerable. Consider someone making a defense of democracy as an inherent good, without qualification. Once again, the rigorous logician is immediately compelled to point out that Hitler rose to power via democratic institutions of government. And again, this sort of move is nothing like the glib, dismissive sort of analogy where someone compares one person who did something mildly bad to Hitler, who also did something bad. Yet the Godwin-Law-invokers will pipe up with their facile objections just the same.

Godwin's Law isn't an actual law, of course, and it was formulated in an at least partially frivolous and sarcastic way, so a serious response to the phenomenon on my behalf may seem disproportionate or silly. But it really does injure legitimate discourse and gives shelter to faulty, irrational dogmas, if it is taken even semi-seriously, which it often is.

Argument by Fiat -- Yet More on Faith and Peter Boghossian

In his aggressive public campaign against "faith", Peter Boghossian is back with another lecture on the topic titled Faith: Pretending to Know Things You Don't Know. For most people, I suggest reading the title of the lecture and allowing your feelings about it to determine whether it could be valuable for you to engage. If that is what you believe faith to be, then you may want to watch the lecture and explore some of the out-workings of this belief, while having your ego gently stroked. If you don't believe that is what faith is -- along with the vast majority of people who have ever used the term -- then there's no sense in watching the lecture because Peter offers no argument for this controversial conclusion, rather he assumes it to be true and declares it to be so by fiat.

Unless, like me, you have a somewhat masochistic streak or other reasons for which you wish to engage communities of un-faith, rest assured that the title tells the whole story and go along with your day. At the risk of losing some readers here, you probably need not even read this post any further, but if you want a more in depth explication of the reasons the presentation is entirely impotent, or if you have an inclination to defend it, then proceed.

I've already hinted at the problem with Peter's thesis, but let me expound more fully: A) That isn't what faith is. B) Peter never demonstrates that people of faith actually don't know what they "pretend to know"; it's a bald assertion. C) To the extent that it is most likely true of some or even many faith claims (due to, for example, the mutual exclusivity of the claims), this does not mean it is necessarily true of faith itself or for specific faiths. This, as in his previous lecture on the topic, commits the fallacy of division. 

In addition to his central definitional thesis, Boghossian also wants to attempt to divorce faith from its assumed alliance to morality. He thinks being a 'person of faith' tends to automatically bring up the association in many people's minds of strong moral character, while Peter thinks being a 'person of faith' is essentially neutral, in terms of morality. This seems to me mostly uncontroversial; most honest people of faith don't claim to be inherently morally superior simply because they have "faith". Christians, for instance, readily admit that sin infects the entire human race, including all Christians, and that they do nothing to merit their salvation from the consequences, reality, and dominion of sin but recieve salvation as an unmerited gift. But if Peter wants to divorce non-specific 'faith' (that is, faith-as-process, rather than faith-in-X) from the cultural linkage to morality, no thinking person of faith would be troubled by the agenda (since we have faith-in-X, not faith-in-faith-as-process).

Peter goes on in his lecture to address 5 common assertions people of faith make, such as "My faith is true for me", and substitutes his definition for "faith", for the word "faith", to yield "My pretending to know what I don't know is true for me". He seems to think this a potent move, but why? "My faith is true for me" is already silly in itself. Substituting the words of your silly definition compounds the silliness, to be sure, but it tells us nothing about the nature of faith. It only tells us that A) people of faith sometimes say dumb things and B) that you are baking your conclusion into your premises, producing a circular argument (if any).

Peter goes on to address people who, when attempting to defend the use of "faith", use the term when they really mean "hope". The difficulty here is what seems to be a prescriptivist naivety that believes words to be ontological entities with hard, fast, immobile meanings and vivid, necessary demarcations. But there's no hard distinction between "faith" and "hope"; faith isn't synonymous with hope, but hope is (usually) an element of what constitutes faith, at least for the Christian (and I assume many faiths). Faith makes knowledge claims, but that's not all it does. And you can't change this fact by fiat; if you think faith and hope should have some hard, impenetrable boundary between them, you must make the argument, and he doesn't attempt to. With that said, I'm sure people he engages with sometimes improperly invoke "faith" when they should invoke "hope", or vice versa, but so what? This also tells us nothing about the nature of faith. 

But perhaps, since he is presenting to a crowd of presumably like-minded individuals (the gathering is hosted by some sort of 'humanist' group), he wouldn't object to my characterization of him offering no arguments here. After all, in no uncertain terms, he makes it clear that the primary objective for the talk is, essentially, wholly propagandistic. That is, operating on the presumption that faith is necessarily void of content or value, what are productive rhetorical ways to create cultural and linguistic shifts that would serve to best spread this idea. If this is the case, there's nothing inherently wrong with holding meetings for PR purposes, but the lack of any underlying foundation for the ideas you're looking to propagate remains a glaring problem. 

Since these presentations couldn't possibly do anything to persuade a genuine, intelligent person of faith to abandon their faith, you might wonder why I bother responding to them. It's a good question and, frankly, there probably are much better uses of my time. But there are also those people who are not yet believers, as well as people (whether Christian already or not) who may not be diligent enough in their thinking to parse this stuff out, who may come in contact with the arguments and find the superficial rhetorical force of them to be persuasive. Of course, I'm under no delusion that my blog has enough readership to act as any hugely significant counterweight to this effect, but there still is some value in making sure such things don't go unresponded to.  

Peter recently accused me of never having anything nice to say about him, and he was completely right in his charge (I since attempted to rectify it by offering him a sincere compliment). To offer some further redress:  one good recommendation Peter had in his lecture is that we attempt to separate beliefs we find noxious from the people who hold them, and to, accordingly, respect people even as we attack their ideas. And that we ought to treat them how we want them to treat us. I do try to separate ideas from people, (or sin from sinner) and I harbor no personal ill will against Peter, I only take issue with his ideas. Per his recommendation, but more importantly per my Maker's command. 

On "Meta-Atheism" and Georges Rey

Our old friend Peter Boghossian recently posted a link to this short article from 2000, bearing the title Meta-Atheism, by Georges Rey who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Why this old article is circulating I'm not sure, especially since it doesn't go much beyond Freud's standard account of religious belief as wishful thinking, only adding some particulars to the observation, but there it is.

The "meta-atheism" the title refers to is Rey's claim that "despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived." This is a formulation of the de jure objection to religious belief which Alvin Plantinga deals with thoroughly in his Warranted Christian Belief (in which Plantinga rigorously demonstrates why none of the de jure objections, in their various formulations, actually work as objections).

Be that as it may, it certainly isn't controversial to suggest that if God is not real, or there is no supernatural reality, that therefore religious belief is a product of wishful thinking or self-deception. That's obviously true, operating on that conditional. Indeed, even if God does exist and one religion is True, it still may be true that other instances of religious belief in other gods are products of these mental processes (though Christians would claim that they are products of a natural desire for God, implanted by the creator, though this doesn't mean that desire can't be commingling with other, fallen mental processes). So that hypothesis (even though I don't accept it, at least as regards Christian faith) is at least understandable.

What doesn't make any sense at all is Rey's particular enumerated list of 'extensions' of wishful thinking in religious belief and practice. These seem to be specific examples of how self-deception and wishful thinking manifest themselves in things believers do and say. Rey thinks certain things believers do and say betray that they don't really believe what they claim they believe. Let's see if he has a point, and address them:

1) Detail Resistance
2) Comparability to Fiction

Though listed separately, this is actually a single objection, with #2 functioning as an addendum to #1. The problem here is that he mistakes a well established doctrine of creation ex nihilo for intellectual incuriosity to detail, when really it's acute attention to the conceptual details of that doctrine which reveals there simply can be no mechanistic 'details' of the kind he's asking for, nor is there any reason to expect they should exist. On the contrary, expecting them (as he does) shows a lack of understanding of the doctrine. The lay religious person may not articulate this to him in his interactions with them, but it's what they're intuiting when they recognize his questions as 'silly'. The one example he gives of 'detail resistance' is justified 'detail resistance'. Ignoring the specific example, and attempting to make sense of the objection itself, it still fails; given the Christian doctrine of Incarnation -- that God became flesh in a very particular, fleshly Jew, in whom all truth and hope resides -- 'detail', or the finite, or the-particular-as-such is entirely redeemed, as David Bentley Hart explains in The Beauty of The Infinite. The details of the form of Christ are everything, and we have no desire to shy from them.

However, it is sometimes, with regards to certain questions, entirely appropriate to point out that the "how" of some process is at best of secondary importance, or possibly of no functional significance at all.

3) Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of Absence

Here he attempts to flip a common theistic refrain on its head, though he fails to do so. Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, if the evidence that's missing is evidence we would otherwise expect to find were the claim true. Which is the case (to some extent) in the murder example he gives, but not the case as regards Christian belief, and so the supposed objection is really no objection at all. If Christian belief is true there is no reason to expect we should have more evidence that it's true than what we do in fact have.

4) Appeals to "Mystery"

Some believers appeal to 'mystery' or 'paradox' at times when they ought not to. When, for instance, an answer to something isn't actually a mystery, it's just something they don't know or understand. Believers ought to have more humility and acknowledge that just because they don't understand, or aren't aware of, something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a mystery. However, certain appeals to mystery (as it happens, the ones that are most commonly made) are absolutely justified, given that an infinite God can't be fully apprehended by finite creatures. We can -- through His Grace, the Incarnation, scripture, tradition and the intervention of the Holy Spirit -- come to know truths that He reveals to us about Him, but as finite beings we by definition will not be able to have a full knowledge of Him. This "appeal to mystery" is entirely appropriate given the infinite-finite distinction.

5) Merely Symbolic Status of the Stories

This objection is not very well articulated. First he objects to the internal coherence of the Christian doctrine of atonement (an objection which is predicated on a misunderstanding, which I will explain anon), and then says something about how if the Christian story is merely symbolism then the problems aren't relevant. Well yes, but so what? Is he saying that many believers do claim that such stories are symbolic? If so, how are they self-deceiving, according to him? I honestly can't make out what his point is here.

As for his objection to the doctrine of the atonement: One must first understand death as a consequence of sin -- rather than just something that happens for no ultimate reason, but just because of entropy or whatever -- and then one can begin to understand how the unjustified death of a sinless man can be an atoning death. I won't attempt to exegete the entire doctrine here, but he is missing the very fundamental first principles of it and then declaring it incoherent. Of course, if God doesn't exist, and death isn't a consequence of sin etc. then the atonement of Jesus doesn't make sense either, but what he's really objecting to here is the internal logic of the scheme of atonement, when that logic is absolutely pristine and he simply doesn't understand it.

6) Betrayals By Reactions and Behavior

The example he gives here may be somehow inconsistent for certain faiths, but not for Christian faith. And I suspect his confusion is a result of a confusion that is common among Christians too, which he just accepts but which is false; namely, that our eternal destiny is a disembodied heaven which we arrive at upon at the instance of our death, when actually our hope is in bodily resurrection and in New creation, a New Heavens and a New Earth. None of which has yet to come, and so mourning at death (which is a consequence of sin, and antithetical to God's plans for creation) is completely consistent and appropriate. Again, his confusion is somewhat understandable since even a wide swath of Christians share it, but it's his (and their) confusion that leads to seeing mourning as contradictory when it's perfectly consonant with orthodox Christian belief. "Blessed are the mourners, for they shall be [future tense] comforted". Jesus, significantly, didn't say "cursed are the mourners for there is nothing to mourn." Because there is something to mourn; death is inimical to God, God's enemy, and Christ defeats his enemy at the cross. Because of Christ's work death has no ultimate power over us, and therefore we don't sorrow like those without hope, but we do mourn a loss to the waste and destruction of death. For now.

7) Belief is Not a Matter of Choice

Again, his point here isn't all that clear. It seems to consist in nothing more than ponderous musings on the nature of 'faith' and how faith differs from simple 'belief'. Well, yes, quite. And? He does make the unsupported assertion that "I suspect you can have 'faith' only about what isn't really a serious contender for truth." Oh you suspect that, eh? Cool story, bro. I suspect differently. Glad that's all cleared up.

Somewhat more seriously, faith is mostly invoked with regard to propositions that are not matters of efficient, material causality, and so when he talks about "a serious contender for truth", he's pitting religious belief against scientific empiricism as a means for finding out truths about material causality -- something people of faith don't use faith for, at least not in the vast majority of cases, so the objection is just absurd and amounts to no more than "faith doesn't do what it isn't intended to do".

8) Projection

Here he merely asserts that humans have the capability to project meaning into things where it might not be there. Of course, he doesn't make an argument showing why this is what is occurring in all or most instances of religious belief, but merely asserts that it's something that can happen. Indeed it can, though I'm not sure how this supports his hypothesis. If the meaning he believes is being projected into things is actually there and he just isn't apprehending it, then it's his senses which are damaged, not the supposed 'projector'. And assuming said meaning isn't there presupposes atheism, rather than lends support to it as a conclusion.

In addition to each of these claims having problems within themselves, many of them don't even have any logical link to his central hypothesis about self-deception. His #3, for example, is just an attempt at a standard atheistic argument about God's non-existence. It's a de facto objection, not the de jure objection he was claiming that he was making. It's about the likely truth of religious belief, not whether religious persons are self-deceiving for holding to the belief. The objection, even if true, would not establish that religious people were self-deceiving when noting that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is true to varying degrees of a number of the listed objections.

Granted, this isn't a scholarly piece, and it comes with a disclaimer that he has developed the argument in more depth elsewhere, but with such carelessness of thought and with so many fundamental errors and misunderstandings, I can't imagine the argument gets anything but more convoluted and confused in its 'deeper' incarnation.

"God of the Gaps"

If you've ever been involved in, or witnessed a debate between a theist and an atheist on the issue of God's existence, you may have encountered the 'God of the Gaps' argument. The argument usually takes the form of this:

1. Ancient peoples often attributed explanations of physical phenomena to direct interactions by God or gods. i.e. Rainbows occur because the god of rainbows shoot them out of his belly
2. As scientific knowledge increases explanations for the mechanisms behind these physical phenomena are discovered. i.e. rainbows occur due to refraction of the light spectrum when passing through water molecules (or something like that)
Therefore
3. God's explanatory role is diminished, and his existence becomes progressively less likely. God retreats into gaps of understanding, once the gaps are filled, he is forced to retreat further and further.

Sam Harris is a popular atheist who often make this argument (his professional atheist contemporaries don't make it nearly as often as he does). Stressing the strengths of modernity, and the idea that religion is a 'failed science'.

The key problem with this argument is right in the title. "God of the gaps". Clearly, if we look at the argument in the form presented God himself does not have a diminished role, God himself is not forced to retreat, God himself is completely unaffected by the increase in information. If God exists, then he exists in exactly the same form that he did prior to the increase in information. If God does not exist, then he didn't exist prior to the increase in information and still doesn't.

The only thing that is affected by the increased information is people's perception of God (or gods) and how He interacts with his creation. Clearly these advances in knowledge and understanding have the capacity to falsify a particular belief about the specific manner in which God behaves. Clearly God doesn't shoot Rainbows out of his belly. Clearly God doesn't physically grasp the 'edge' of the Earth and shake it to cause an Earthquake. So any person who believed these things, was wrong, and their false conception of God's nature is forced to retreat.

Also notice that the argument does nothing to decrease the likelihood that God is ultimately behind, and ultimately responsible for any particular physical phenomena. If the ancient person said 'God created rainbows' rather than 'God makes rainbows BY shooting them out of his belly', then the ancient person is just as likely to be correct once we understand the physical mechanisms involved in making rainbows as he was before we did. God is still just as likely to have created rainbows (or created the mechanisms that cause rainbows) before and after our increase in understanding. The likelihood that he exists, and the likelihood that he created rainbows, is exactly the same before and after. The only thing that is falsified are claims that God created rainbows using some specific methodology that has been shown to be false.

That pretty much completely neutralizes the argument. The argument is more appropriately titled "people's-conception-of-God-of-the-gaps". And yes, admittedly, as the limited beings that we are, our conception of God and how he works is always changing, always incomplete, and often flat out wrong. This is not evidence against his existence, however. Merely evidence of our own shortcomings.