Category Atheism

Some Meta-Arguments Against God, Part 2

Lack of good apologetics

As with direct evidence, theists have had thousands of years to figure out what their gods are like, what they want, how they operate, and so forth. And yet, there are no good apologetics or arguments for any god’s existence. Most of them rely on false dichotomies, or faulty reasoning, or faulty assumptions, or are otherwise flawed.

In fact, one of the most popular apologetic arguments, Pascal’s wager explicitly begins with the premise that the existence or nonexistence of God cannot be known. This is not an argument that you pull out if there’s direct evidence of the truth of your claim. And yet, it comes up all the time.

In fact, many bad arguments keep coming back over and over. There appears to be no mechanism (selective pressure, if you will) for getting rid of bad arguments.

One running theme that I’ve noticed is that a lot of apologetic claims are not arguments for a god, but rather excuses for the lack of evidence, or excuses to reinforce someone’s failing belief. “You need to have faith” is just “trust me” in fancy clothes. “God doesn’t want to show himself for fear of undermining our free will” isn’t an argument, it’s an excuse for the absence of evidence. In fact, so is the whole “faith is a good thing” constellation of memes (which people don’t believe anyway, but we’ll address that later).

The world of apologetics is littered with arguments that, in any other context, would be relegated to the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps the most famous of these is Tertullian’s “Credo quia absurdum” — “I believe it because it is absurd”. Whether you take that as “I believe weird things” or as “The apostles wouldn’t have tried so hard to convince us of something that wasn’t true”, it still doesn’t belong on anyone’s top 10 list.

“I can feel Jesus in my heart” is just “dude, I’m telling you, I saw it!”. It’s something you resort to when you don’t have anything better.

“God works through people” just means that people do remarkable things. It’s not an argument for the existence of a god, it’s another excuse for the absence of evidence.

Now, people will say that esteemed theologians don’t use bad arguments like “well, just look at the trees and the birds and stuff”, and that’s mostly true. However, their arguments tend to be flawed in other ways. C.S. Lewis’s famous trilemma, Liar, Lunatic or Lord ignores possibilities like “Legend” (which also fits the alliteration). This is an elementary logical flaw that Lewis himself, if not one of his early reviewers, should have spotted.

Alvin Plantinga has come up with a version of the ontological argument for the existence of God, which relies on certain properties of modal logic. I don’t claim to understand it. On the other hand, presumably a lot of philosophers do, and I’m not hearing a lot of conversion stories about philosophers converting to Plantinga’s brand of theism.

In fact, that’s a running theme: there are simple arguments that people cite when asked why they believe in gods, all of which are wrong. And then there are the sophisticated complex arguments, but no one is convinced by those. It’s almost as if the complex arguments are just excuses to believe; if they sound complicated enough, you can pretend that they’re sound, and rest assured that somewhere out there, someone has a good justification for your faith.

The “You’re Both Equally Wrong” Fallacy

Adam Weishaupt left a
comment
in another thread, and I’m conceited enough to think my reply is worth
reposting.

You know you will never agree, right?
This discussion can be likened with this: Imagine that there are only two people left in the world. One of them can only speak chinese, and the other can only speak arabic. No matter how much they talk with each other they will never understand each other. That is simply because they do not understand each others language. It is really the same with atheists vs christians or creationists vs evolutionists; the evolutionists leave out the possibility of the existence of God, so they can not understand the “language” of the Christians. On the other hand, the Christians leave out the possibility of the “non-existence” of God, so they can not understand the language of the atheists. Still, atheists try to prove their theories using their own language, and the same goes for the Christians.

You seem to be wrong on just about every point.

For starters, even using your analogy, I think you underestimate people’s ability to understand each other. A Chinese speaker and an Arabic speaker trapped on a desert island would, I’m sure, quickly work out some way of understanding each other.

the evolutionists leave out the possibility of the existence of God, so they can not understand the “language” of the Christians.

This is manifestly untrue. Kenneth Miller, the author of Finding Darwin’s God is an evolutionary biologist, the author of one of the standard High School textbooks in biology, was a witness at the Dover trial for the pro-evolution side, and is also a devout Christian.

Francis Collins, Obama’s choice to head the NIH, used to be the head of the Human Genome Project, is by all accounts a very good scientist, has said that even if there weren’t a single fossil, the DNA evidence alone would be sufficient proof of evolution, is also an evangelical Christian, and quite a vocal one. In fact, his book The Language of God is subtitled A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Hell, even in the ID camp, Michael Behe accepts common descent of humans with all other living creatures. I know this because I he told me personally when I sent him email about it.

It isn’t hard to find evolutionary biologists who are also Christians. You need to look around a bit more.

the evolutionists leave out the possibility of the existence of God

As shown above, this is patently untrue. And even if you meant to write “atheist” instead of “evolutionist”, you’d still be wrong. Read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who is both an evolutionary biologist and a vocal atheist. In this book, which is all about atheism, he spends several pages making it quite clear that he does not exclude the possibility of a god’s existence.

I can’t think of a single atheist, either among the famous published writers or my friends and acquaintances, who categorically excludes the possibility that there might be a god out there.

You should also google “deconversion story” and read some people’s accounts of how and why they left their particular religion. You’ll find that in many, probably most cases, deconversion doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long process that takes years. Often people give up each bit of faith only after a struggle.

Furthermore, most atheists, at least in the US, were raised religious and grew out of it. Many remember being believers quite well, so it’s not a question of never having thought the way a believer does.

On the other hand, the Christians leave out the possibility of the “non-existence” of God

Again, this is manifestly untrue. Every church I’ve ever seen has programs to help backsliders, help people strengthen their faith, ceremonies to help those who have stumbled in the faith to rejoin the flock, and the like. What does it mean to have “weak faith”, if not to admit the possibility that the god they were taught about doesn’t exist? In fact, the very existence of such programs and ceremonies tells me that even believers find it hard to believe in gods; that they want to believe, but often can’t manage to do so. After all, plumbers don’t have retreats to relearn to believe in water. Bankers don’t go to seminars to strengthen their belief in money. Yet theists apparently require these sorts of thing.

Or perhaps you’re saying that you, personally, are unwilling to admit even the possibility that there might not be any gods. That just means you’re closed-minded. You may want to work on that. It’s not a virtue.

(Thanks to
Eamon Knight
for the
title.)

Does the Pope Shit on the Woods?

I keep hearing that atheists attack a strawman version of religion,
that sophisticated theologians don’t make the sorts of simplistic
arguments we attribute to theists, and the like.

On Wednesday, the Pope gave a
speech about the environment,
in which he said:

Experiencing the shared responsibility for creation (Cf. 51), the Church is not only committed to the promotion of the defense of the earth, of water and of air, given by the Creator to everyone, but above all is committed to protect man from the destruction of himself. In fact, “when ‘human ecology’ is respected in society, environmental ecology also benefits” (ibid).

That’s rich, coming from the head of an organization whose policy
forbids family planning through birth control, a guy who himself, just
five months ago, said that
condoms make the AIDS problem worse,
in short, a guy who advocates policies of population growth checked
only by disease and competition for resources like water.

And then there’s the second half of that paragraph:

Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where is existence is denied? If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the “final authority,” and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Ratz, no. Inconsiderate use of creation does
not begin where the existence of your magic man is denied, it begins
where people don’t think their actions will have undesirable
consequences. And by the way, if you’re going to rail about people
pursuing “a feverish race to possess the most possible”, may I suggest
that you take off the silk robes and step outside of your
palatial summer residence?
Just a thought. Might make you look a little less of a hypocritical
douchebag.

As for who owns the Earth, let’s take a look at the
Bible, page 1,
right after the copyright page:

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The NIV says “rule over”. The NRSV says “have dominion”. I think it’s
clear how this can lead to a “fuck you, it’s my earth, I can do what I
want” attitude, the “final authority” attitude that Ratzinger
deplores. And creationists in Darwin’s day didn’t believe in
extinction, on the grounds that God would never allow one of his
creations to die out.

As for “inconsiderate use of creation”, I shouldn’t have to point out
that if there are no gods, then they can’t save us or the planet, so
it’s up to us. If we don’t take charge of passing on to the next
generation the kind of planet we’d like to have, who will? In fact,
the pope’s next paragraph says as much:

Creation, matter structured in an intelligent manner by God, is entrusted to man’s responsibility, who is able to interpret and refashion it actively, without regarding himself as the absolute owner. Man is called to exercise responsible government to protect it, to obtain benefits and cultivate it, finding the necessary resources for a dignified existence for all.

except that he has to throw in a wholly gratuitous referece to God.

I can easily get behind a lot of what the speech said about protecting
the environment. But I can’t help noticing that the pope had to ignore
the Bible, his own policies, and a big chunk of the history of
religion in order to justify his conclusions with vague platitudes
about how “that covenant between the human being and the environment
that must be a reflection of the creative love of God”.

All of which would be mostly harmless if he hadn’t just taken a dump
on people who have been making those arguments long before he got
around to considering catching up to the 20th century, on the sole
grounds that they recognize his magic man for the superstitious tripe
that it is.

I keep hearing that morality has to come from God. And this is a
perfect example of that attitude: the leader of the single largest
sect on the planet saying that atheists must ipso facto be
inconsiderate and greedy.

So fuck you, Ratzi. Fuck you with a rusty crucifix.

Some Meta-Arguments Against God, Part 1

It’s widely acknowledged that it isn’t possible to prove absolutely
that no gods exist, any more than it’s impossible to prove absolutely
that no invisible unicorns exist. Every atheist I know freely
acknowledges that. But at the same time, one can easily argue that
gods (or invisible unicorns) are very unlikely to exist.

A lot of these arguments are meta-arguments, in that they don’t stand
on their own, but build upon arguments made by theists.

Lack of evidence

Despite what a lot of people think, atheism isn’t the firm belief that
there aren’t any gods. Rather, it’s a lack of belief in gods.
To put it another way, the atheist position is “You believers haven’t
made your case. I’m not convinced that you’re right.”

So the lack of evidence is the big one. There is no good evidence for
any gods. No verified miracles, no verified prophecies, no burning
bushes, no nothing.

There’s a saying that “absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence”. This is true as far as it goes, but absence of evidence
where we would expect to see some is evidence of absence.
If I say that there’s a Thai restaurant at 15th and K, the fact that
you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean that I’m wrong. If, however, you
go down to 15th and K, and look all over, and fail to find the Thai
restaurant, that is good evidence that I’m wrong.

Theists have had thousands of years to demonstrate that their various
gods are real. And they’ve tried. Oh, boy, have they tried. And so
far, bupkis. No divine abodes on top of Mount Olympus, no rainbow
bridge to Asgard, no Noah’s Ark, no nothing.

Okay, so maybe gods aren’t directly detectable, either with our senses
or simple measurement devices. Maybe they don’t reflect visible light,
or emit sound waves, or pull compass needles toward them. That still
leaves indirect evidence.

I’ve seen satellite photos in which you couldn’t see ships, but you
could see their wakes. A lot of extrasolar planets have been
discovered not by direct observation, but by they affect the orbit of
their sun. Heck, if it comes to that, all nuclear physics is done
through indirect observation: protons and electrons are too small to
see, but we can observe the shape of trails in a bubble chamber, or
flashes of light on a CRT.

It’s not just the so-called hard sciences, either: there are
statistical methods for figuring out whether an election was rigged by
looking for anomalies in the results, the sorts of things that would
be introduced by a cheater, but unlikely to come up by chance.

And yet, nothing. No good direct evidence, no good indirect evidence.
The Templeton Foundation keeps throwing money at trying to come up
with evidence of a god — studies on intercessory prayer, that
sort of thing — and so far they’ve come up with two kinds of
results: ones that come from flawed experiments, and ones that show no
effect.

I don’t think it’s just me being overly skeptical: after 2000 years,
Christians have still failed to convince two thirds of the world’s
population that they’re right. Jews and Hindus have had even longer.
Miracles of Islam
are not convincing to anyone but Muslims. And so on, and so forth.

Secular Bible Study: Ecclesiastes

Here are the
notes
(also
in org format)
for the Secular Bible Study presentation I’m going to be giving in an hour or so, about the book of Ecclesiastes.

More Catholic Idiocy

While in Israel, pope Benny
said:

“Those deeply moving encounters brought back memories of my visit three years ago to the death camp at Auschwitz, where so many Jews – mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends – were brutally exterminated under a godless regime.”

Yeah, “godless”.

Nazi belt buckle with the inscription "Gott mit uns": "God with us"
Now, I’m no historian, and my knowledge of religion in Nazi Germany
comes from such places as
Wikipedia
and
The Straight Dope,
and it looks as though the situation is about as clear as mud: yes,
there were people like Martin Niemöller, but there were also Catholic
priests and bishops who didn’t seem to have a problem with the Nazi
regime. And Hitler certainly paid lip service to religion a lot. And
as far as I know, no one was ever excommunicated for participating in
the Holocaust.

Oh, and, of course, there’s the matter of Benny’s own membership in
the Hitler Youth.

At any rate, the situation is certainly nowhere near as clear as “Nazi
Germany was a godless regime.” In fact, one could easily make the case
that Nazi Germany (and the Soviet Union) had a lot of the uglier
aspects of religion: cult of personality, adherence to dogma, sworn
fealty to the authorities, and so forth.

But maybe The Ratz is simply using the word “godless” as synonymous
with “evil”. In which case, I hope he won’t mind if I use “Catholic”
as a synonym for “pederast”.

Irony meter
On a lighter note, Jesus and Mo
informs us
that Catholics have
condemned
reiki
(aka magic massage):

But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine in late March dismissed reiki as superstition incompatible with Christian belief or scientific teaching, and said it is inappropriate for use in Catholic institutions, including hospitals, retreat centers and schools.

From the Catholic Committee on Doctrine’s
Guidelines for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy:

[F]rom the time of the Apostles the
Church has interceded on behalf of the sick through the invocation of
the name of the Lord Jesus, asking for healing through the power of
the Holy Spirit, whether in the form of the sacramental laying on of
hands and anointing with oil or of simple prayers for healing, which
often include an appeal to the saints for their aid.
[…]

[A] Catholic who puts his or her trust in Reiki would be operating
in the realm of superstition, the no-man’s-land that is neither faith
nor science.

(emphasis added)

Clearly, “faith” here means “the good kind of superstition”.

Secular Bible Study: The Book of Joshua

I’m leading Secular Bible Study today, so here are my notes on the book of Joshua (org-mode version).

More details later, hopefully.

Update, Sat Apr 18 17:42:26 2009:

Well, that went pretty well, I thought. I didn’t get to give my presentation, just give out bits and pieces of it as they became relevant to the conversation. Then again, since I wasn’t really able to turn my disjoint collection of notes into a coherent presentation, it’s probably just as well.

I mentioned Iron Chariots, the counter-apologetics wiki (which is where I got the definitions of henotheism and monolatrism. (Consider this a plug for the site. All of you who attended had interesting things to contribute, so you might as well contribute to the wiki and share with the world.)

The topic of theologians tying themselves in logical knots to justify or rationalize things like the book of Joshua reminded me of this post by Greta Christina, comparing religion to fan fiction.

I’ve probably forgotten some references that I promised people. If so, please speak up in the comments.

More on ARIS’s “Nones”

I’ve taken a second look at the ARIS results, particularly the “Nones” which have attracted so much attention. Here’s a graph of various Nones through the three surveys, as a percentage of the US population at the time:

ARIS's "Nones"
(click to see a little larger.) This graph is drawn from data in Tables 1 and 3, and 4 of ARIS 2008.

Here, the topmost line represents what ARIS 2008 calls the “Nones”: atheists, agnostics, “anti-clerical theists”, nonreligious, and so forth. As expected, it’s the largest group.

It’s also the group that has grown the most since 1990, when NSRI 1990 (the survey to which ARIS 2001 was a followup) was conducted. However, its growth has slowed down substantially since 2001.

The red line at the bottom shows self-described agnostics, and the purple line just below that, self-described atheists. NSRI 1990 lumped atheists and agnostics together, so the leftmost data point actually shows the sum of both. This also explains the dip in 2001. The sum of self-described atheists and agnostics is 0.7% in 1990, 0.9% in 2001, and 1.6% in 2008, so the trend is actually increasing, and has apparently picked up steam (there were 29% more atheists+agnostics in 2001 than in 1990, and 78% more in 2008 than in 2001).

It’s interesting to contrast this to the slowing growth in Nones overall. I note that the “new atheist” bestsellers all came out between the last two surveys: The End of Faith in 2004, The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell, and Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, and god is not Great in 2007.

It would be nice to say that the Four Horsemen led to the growth in nonbelief, but there’s not enough data in here to jump to such a conclusion. At most, I think we can say that Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens haven’t killed atheism; atheists aren’t going back into the closet.

Lastly, the three triangles with no lines, in 2008, represent the answers in Table 4:

  • Atheist A: there is no such thing as a god.
  • Agnostic A: there is no way to know whether there are any gods.
  • Agnostic B: don’t know whether there are any gods.

The obvious thing to notice is that there are far more of them than either self-described atheists, agnostics, or both together. Doubtless this includes some Buddhists, Taoists, Scientologists, etc., but there are too few of those to account for these numbers. I suppose that some come from the “generically non-religious” pool, while others identify themselves as members of some mainstream religious group, but don’t accept all of the group’s tenets. “Cultural Catholics”, if you will.

All in all, it’s a bit disappointing that with all the hoopla about “the new atheism” and uppity unbelievers, out-of-the-closet atheists still haven’t cracked the 1% mark.

Another point that’s been talked about is the growth in “generic” Christianity (“Christian unspecified” and “Non-denominational Christian” in Table 4 of ARIS 2008). Some of this is due, I’m sure, to smaller churches shutting down and their parishioners migrating to generic megachurches. But the growth of the Nones leads me to suspect that it’s also due to a growing disenchantment with organized religion.

It’s not uncommon to hear a sentiment along the lines of “I’m a Christian, but religion is bullshit”. People who feel the divine, but feel that organized religions are corrupt, or self-serving, or otherwise undeserving of their membership. These people are not swelling the ranks of rationality; but at the same time, they’re diminshing church rolls, and helping to reduce the power base that the Pat Robertsons and Ted Haggards of the world can mobilize and use to wield social and political (to say nothing of monetary) power. So they’re a net gain.

In other words, what this data seems to show is that a) Americans are rejecting religion, and b) Americans are rejecting superstition. These are two separate issues, but in both cases, we’re moving in the right direction.

The New ARIS Is Out!

ARIS 2008,
the American Religious Identification Survey, has just been released,
and the atheosphere is as giddy as a bunch of schoolgirls upon the
release of Harry Potter and the Adjective Noun.

The most significant finding, IMHO, is that the “Nones”
(atheist/agnostic/no religious preference) are up since 2001,
although nowhere near as dramatically as betwen 1990 and 2001. But
still the fastest-growing segment of the population.

One new feature is that, unlike the 1990 and 2001 ARISes, the 2008
survey asked “what do you believe?”-type questions, rather than just
“what do you call yourself?”

Table 3
in the
full report
(p. 5) lists atheists as comprising 0.7% of the US population, and
agnostics at 0.9%. However,
table 4
(p. 8) lists people’s answers to
the question of whether there is a god: “There is no such thing”
(atheism) comes in at 2.3%, “There is no way to know” (proper
agnosticism) at 4.3%, and “I’m not sure” (common agnosticism) at 5.7%.
(IMHO it might be interesting to see how many people haven’t really
thought about it. Maybe next time.)

In other words, there are a bunch of people who are atheists and
agnostics, but don’t call themselves that. Presumably they either just
call themselves “None of the above”, “No religion”, or “Spiritual, but
not religious”; or else they’re members of religious groups that allow
that kind of latitude, such as Buddhism or Taoism.

Table 7
(p. 11) shows that religion is stronger among women than men. In most
religions listed, there are more women than men. “None” is an
exception to this rule (as are “Eastern Religions”, “Muslim”, and “New
Religious Movements/Other”), but the skew is most pronounced: 60% of
Nones are male vs. 40% female.

Update, 16:14: USA Today has a nice
interactive graph
of the survey results.

I’m guessing that the sharp drop in “Other religions” in Wyoming, and of “Don’t know/Refuse” in Delaware represent statistical anomalies (i.e., they happened to get a bad batch of poll respondents), rather than real demographic trends.

Bible Study Notes: Homosexuality in the Bible

I’m leading the discussion at today’s Bible Study session with the
Beltway Atheists.
The topic is Homosexuality in the Bible.

I’m attaching my
notes
(also available in
Org mode for Emacs
here).