by David Ottlinger
“The problem of evil, in the sense in which I am using this phrase, is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds. It is not a scientific problem that might be solved by further discoveries…” [1]
-JL Mackie, The Miracle of Theism p 150
There is a great deal of insight packed in to this little passage. In two sentences Mackie makes the case that the problem of evil, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil to belief in God, is a problem radically unlike a scientific problem. I am inclined to believe that the same is true for every argument for and against the existence of God, for the reasons Mackie provides. If I am right, then accepting this little argument means accepting something quite important and general about the God debate. Further, if I am right, the conclusion of this argument would cast a pall of suspicion over the scientific language and trappings of many atheists and some Christian apologists. We hear often of the “God hypothesis” and “scientific evidence” of God’s existence and that modern science “disproves” God. There are even calls for a “science” of religion. Such language, of course, does not entail that the existence or inexistence of God is a scientific question but suggests that debate over the existence of God can and should be modeled on scientific debate. Most of this, I believe, is profoundly misguided and these few lines can show us why. Accordingly I want to blow up what I take to be Mackie’s argument, as one would a photograph, to make its logic more perspicuous. In enlarging the argument, undoubtedly, I will fill in some details of my own, of which Mackie will be innocent, but I believe the basic shape of the argument will remain the same. Mackie argues the nature of the question of God, by examining how the question is answered. On this basis he calls the problem “logical”, a term I find misleading as he deploys no formal logic. I would prefer to say that the problem of evil and the existence of God are philosophical problems. I shall try to say what this means and why it must be so.
In saying this, I anticipate two objections. First, some accuse philosophers of “defending their turf,” in the sense that they are trying to discourage others from commenting on subjects traditionally considered their own. Secondly they accuse philosophers of making recondite, hair-splitting distinctions, in order to make questions appear a matter for their own expertise. To the first charge, it should be noted that there is nothing unique in a discipline feeling it has a privilege of place, in relation to certain questions. No one would doubt that some matters fall within biology, others history. There is no reason to think philosophy should not have its own domain, or, in principle, that arguments concerning the existence of God should be within it. I will be making the case that the question of the existence of God falls naturally within that domain. Furthermore those who decry philosophers defending their “turf” do so just when they would have all the territory for themselves, as many view science as having the answers to everything from astronomy to ethics, biology to mathematics, all of which seems at least as suspect. (It should also be said that it is the most uncharitable kind of argument that completely by-passes the logic of what a person is saying and explains their disagreement by attributing to them bad motives.)
To the second charge, I have more sympathy. Philosophy does indeed frequently deal with fine, conceptual distinctions. And it is not infrequently the case that in addressing one philosophical question, one can find oneself suddenly addressing something that seemed far afield and almost irrelevant, as many of Socrates’ consternated conversation partners discovered (and as many undergraduates are still discovering in introductory courses some little while later). Philosophical arguments are protracted and as Nietzsche once wrote, things that are protracted are difficult to see. Yet, I will be defending these careful distinctions, as fine as they may seem, as deeply important. A complex argument can turn on a careful distinction, in the same way that the huge mass of a bank vault’s door can turn on a hinge.
As one last piece of ground-clearing, I want to make clear what I am not saying. By suggesting that the existence of God is not a scientific question or even very much like a scientific question, I am not thereby rendering science irrelevant. Science may furnish premises and undermine or disprove claims about the material world that a theist may want to make. As such science may play an important role in debating the question, but even though the arguments may be concerned with science and scientific facts, this does not make them scientific arguments. I realize that this may sound like a cavil or triviality. But in the end it makes all the difference, because it will determine how we attempt to answer the question of God’s existence, and whether the paths we pursue are promising ones.
Wittgenstein famously suggested that instead of asking what the meaning of a word was, we should ask how we would explain the meaning of that word. As he put it, “The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question ‘how do we measure a length’ helps us to understand the problem ‘what is length?’” [2] I want to suggest a similar strategy for understanding the question of God’s existence. What kind of evidence matters in weighing such a question? What sort of answers would we find convincing? How would we dispute answers? The meaning of a question is revealed in the answers to these and similar statements. With these questions in mind I want to briefly rehearse to of the most famous arguments in the God debate, one for the existence of God and the other against. These arguments, however summarily treated, will, I believe, give us a sense of how the question of the existence of God is disputed and ultimately yield insight into the nature of the question itself.
One of the key arguments for the existence of God concerns elements of the natural world that evince design or purpose. [3] It is inferred from the existence of such phenomena that a supernatural mind must have had some part in their creation. As the classic version of the argument runs, suppose we find a watch alone in a field. The watch has certain complex features that work together, in intricate and interdependent ways, to serve a common purpose, namely, displaying the time. Finding such an object, we would immediately infer that it had been created by an intelligence. But of course, natural phenomena have in common with the watch and other artifacts many of the same remarkable features. The human eye or hand have many complex features that work in confluence to serve their natural functions. The parts of the eye—retina, cornea, iris, optical nerve, rods, cones and much else—all interact in a functional complexity that would put a Breitling to shame. The argument then concludes that we ought to do in the case of the eye what we do in the case of the watch and infer that it was designed by some intelligence for some purpose. Since the functional features of the eye pervade the natural world, it is usually thought that the creative designer must be some supernatural intelligence, beyond and outside of nature. With some further expenditure of energy which need not detain us here it is concluded that the designing intelligence must be a great deal like the God of traditional theism, and so is taken as evidence for his existence.
Interestingly there is no doubt, among theists or atheists, what the greatest argument against God’s existence is. The argument from evil argues against God’s existence by assuming, according to traditional theism, that God is both omnipotent and all good. It is argued then that God’s existence is inconsistent with the many evils that are all too obvious in a world full of pain, injustice, sickness, pestilence, and death. For a human being at least, permitting such evils to go unrectified, especially if they are easily correctible, would impute a great deal of moral blame. Someone who watched someone be robbed or attacked when they could easily prevent it, would not be a good person. If God seems to allow these blights in the world, that is not consistent with his goodness. If he is unable to rectify them, this is inconsistent with his omnipotence. It is then neatly concluded that no being like God could exist.
What kind of arguments are these? How are they to be decided? Well, Mackie has some very helpful notes. Referring to the problem of evil, he writes that “it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds.” This seems to me essentially right and equally true of the design argument as it is of the argument from evil. In the first case we are asked how it is possible to believe in God and simultaneously believe in the existence of evil. In the second we are asked how we are able to make a ready inference in one case and not in a strongly parallel case. Both then deal with the consequences of beliefs and how they cohere with other beliefs. Accordingly, these are essentially conceptual arguments. They are driven by what is internal to the concepts and what follows from them. The argument from evil turns on the fact that the concept of God contains the content of ‘omnipotent’ and ‘wholly good’. The design argument turns on the content of concept ‘design’, including ‘function’ and ‘interdependence’. It forces us to ask how we can describe some things (the watch) as designed, and impute a designer, but not other strongly parallel things (the eye). Again it is argued that making the inference in the former case without making it in the latter case would be incoherent. Both deal with prima facie contradictions which, as Mackie notes, have to be “reconciled” as much as possible.
Second, Mackie notes that “It is not a scientific problem that might be solved by further discoveries…” Again this seems to be true of both arguments. It is perfectly true that both arguments turn on facts about the world. The argument from evil turns on the fact that there are seemingly unjustifiable instances of suffering and deprivation in the world. The design argument turns on the fact that things in the natural evince remarkable functional complexity. Now these are indeed empirical beliefs, but they are not the kind that are going to leave anyone gobsmacked. They are about as obvious and familiar as anything can be. In fact, evidence of natural evil and natural design are so ubiquitous that no new, undiscovered example is likely to seriously impact the problem. The greatest natural disasters and human atrocities down to every stubbed toe adds to the sum of human evil. Likewise every eye, hand, fin and scale has functional complexity of the requisite type to become fodder for the design argument.
A full discussion of either argument would involve taking on board and examining some more fine-grained facts. This is usually where science plays a role. For instance, the design argument suggests a parallel between natural function and the function of artifacts. Examining how well this parallel holds often involves taking on board some serious biology. Unfortunately, it can also be the case that to counter certain objections to the problem of evil, one has to consider the grisly details of what evil there is and what it is like. But for all that, I think it is clear that these arguments are relatively free from the facts; what really drives them is the concepts. In discussing the problem of evil, for instance, we do not necessarily have to discuss any real life evil. Indeed some imagined but plausible evil, one which we can reasonably infer happened or would be similar to one which did happen, will do as well as anything else.
So far I have said that arguments for and against the existence of God, insofar as they are represented in the design argument and the argument from evil, are largely concerned with the coherence of prior beliefs, are largely driven by the content of concepts, and are largely indifferent to new empirical discoveries. And while they may be concerned with genuine facts, they are largely a priori and can be discussed with a great deal of supposition. Given these considerations, Mackie was moved to call them “logical” arguments, and there is a certain appeal to this, insofar as logic certainly meets all the criteria just mentioned. But ‘logic’ is a term with its own history which I will, contra Mackie, reserve for arguments which deploy the formal symbolisms we call logic. What I want to stress now is how atypical these features would be for scientific arguments. Now describing in general what scientific arguments are like, supposing such a thing was possible, would involve spilling a good deal more virtual ink than I can afford at the moment. But I think that each one of the above characteristics would be considered atypical of scientific arguments. Scientific arguments generally deal not with how beliefs cohere with one another, but how they agree with the empirical evidence. They are driven by the nature of the evidence, not the content of the concepts. They are highly responsive to new empirical evidence. Supposition and a priori reasoning is meant to be used sparingly if at all. It seems, then, that arguments for and against the existence of God typically evince features that are quite uncommon among scientific arguments. This is a strong basis on which we could say that arguments for and against the existence of God are radically unlike scientific arguments and should not be modeled on them.
However the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Some brash advocates on both sides might be willing to say farewell to the old traditional arguments and embrace a new, more scientific era of the God debate. Well, how do they fare? To my eye the person who cleaves most closely to these ideals is the physicist Victor Stenger, so his work naturally suggests itself as a test case. [5] His book is tellingly titled God: The Failed Hypothesis, and written just below the title “How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.” There is no messing around here. In fact, the arrangement of the book apes that of a scientific paper. It begins, in the first chapter, by laying out methodology much as a paper in experimental science would. In this portion, Stenger lays out what he considers to be adequate conditions to accept extraordinary claims and other considerations. Each chapter then constitutes an “experiment” — or at least, a survey — of the evidence to see which competing hypothesis, theism or atheism, fairs better. Every chapter ends in the same tedious way: “Indeed, Earth and life look just as they can be expected to look if there is no designer God.” (71) “The observed universe and the laws and parameters pf physics look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God. From this we can conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, that such a God does not exist.” (164) “The information and insights contained in the scriptures and other revelations look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God who revealed truths to humanity that were recorded in sacred texts.” (189). And much more.
There are many reasons to be dissatisfied with this kind of treatment. Stenger treats theism and atheism as alternative hypotheses and derives what he takes to be straight-forward consequences, which can then be tested against the facts. Such ready inferences may be possible with empirical, scientific hypotheses (without being naïve about the complexities of modern science), but it is not so easy with ideas concerning God and other grand philosophical ideas. How exactly would an all good, all powerful, all knowing being create a world? How could we know? These are not easy questions to answer but Stenger is reliably cavalier. This was pointed out to Stenger by our old friend Massimo Pigliucci in the pages of Science, Religion and Culture. [6] In an original challenge in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Pigliucci noted that “that there is no coherent or sensible way in which the idea of God can possibly be considered a “hypothesis,” in any sense remotely resembling the scientific sense of the term. The problem is that the supernatural…is simply too swishy to be pinpointed precisely enough.” (148) In the course of his reply, Stenger provided several examples of obviously (to him) testable implications of theism. Here is one of my favorites:
If God is responsible for the complex structure of the world, especially living things, we should see evidence for it in nature. We do not. Complex systems are observed to evolve from simpler ones and show none of the expected signs of design. Indeed, the universe looks as it should look in the absence of design. What is more, well established cosmological knowledge indicates that the universe began with maximum entropy, that is, total chaos with the absence of structure. Thus the universe bears no imprint of a creator.
Obviously Stenger has no truck with the idea that God could be seen to work through evolution, by designing or guiding the process, an article of faith common to most mainstream Christian sects. He is also extremely confident that the idea began in a state of maximum entropy and later developed order is at odds with theism. I see no obvious reason why this should be the case. In fact it seems to agree quite nicely with Genesis 1:1-4: “When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth then being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.”
But really the problem is with Stenger’s entire approach. He attempts to derive consequences from theistic views and then runs along to try to verify or falsify them. In doing so he gives too little notice to the space of possible implications. What is need is something much more like Mackie’s approach. It starts from the idea that common sense beliefs are in tension with theistic beliefs. Tension is a matter of degree and there can be many strategies for “reconcilement” between prima facie contradictory beliefs. But in the end if the reconcilement fails, and the tension is strong enough, some beliefs will have to be given up. In short, what is needed is the evaluative approach of philosophy that can deal with open-endedness and ambiguities of theistic doctrine in a way that rigid scientifically inspired methods cannot. Pursuing a line suggested by Wittgenstein, I suggested that in order to understand the question of God’s existence we ought to ask what kind of arguments and answers are best suited to settling such a question. I have found that philosophical approaches are very helpful and that approaches modeled on science of really of very little help. On this basis I am happy to conclude that the existence of God is a philosophical and not a scientific question. If that is defending my turf, here I stand, I can do no other.
[1] Mackie, J. L. (1982). _The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God_. Oxford University Press.
[2] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Major Works. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. Print.
[3] For more information see here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/
[4] Again see here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/
[5] God: the failed hypothesis Victor J.Stenger – Prometheus Books – 2008
[6] Pigliucci’s opening salvo http://philpapers.org/archive/PIGNAA.pdf
Stenger’s response http://smithandfranklin.com/current-issues/A-Defense-of-New-Atheism-A-Reply-to-Massimo-Pigliucci/9/5/3
Pigliucci’s reply http://smithandfranklin.com/current-issues/A-Muddled-Defense-of-New-Atheism-On-Stengers-response/9/5/4
Comments
90 responses to “The God Non-Hypothesis”
That there are different kinds of “truths” to be determined: one kind existing in a one domain studied by science and another kind in another domain by philosophy, would be Platonism, I think, in Rorty’s sense, and thus rejected. A Pragmatist might say the questions of “God” may not be scientifically resolvable, but they are not philosophically resolvable either — or that either science or philosophy is equally advantaged or disadvantaged to answer such questions.
Thank you for writing this piece. I found it intriguing and well-written. I am looking forward to some lively commentary on it even though I don’t personally have a horse in this race.
My friend, Vic Stenger, was always careful to specify what god(s) he could make scientific arguments against. They were gods that made some observable difference in the world, and especially the Abrahamic God. The dodge that we don’t know how God might order the world requires that we obfuscate the meaning of “good” and “beneficent” and so that millions dying of smallpox is really “good” in the theistic twist of meaning. Ottlinger overlooks history when he says that arguments about the existence of God are not affected by scientific discoveries. The Copernican revolution put a crack in theism. The discovery of germs eliminated the sin theory of disease. Darwin’s discovery of evolution defeated the most common argument for God’s existence; even though Hume had shown it to be weak a century before.
Ottlinger makes his purpose clear at the end,”Tension is a matter of degree and there can be many strategies for “reconcilement” between prima facie contradictory beliefs. But in the end if the reconcilement fails, and the tension is strong enough, some beliefs will have to be given up.” The function of philosophy is to save beliefs. I wonder who’s working on reconciling the gods of Olympus with quantum field theory, or is it only gods with theological chairs that get reconciled?
The Copernican revolution put a crack in theism.
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Really? How so. Seems like a non sequitur to me, unless you assume a very literalist reading of the Bible.
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Darwin’s discovery of evolution defeated the most common argument for God’s existence; even though Hume had shown it to be weak a century before
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Do you think that most people who believe in God, do so, because they are persuaded by “arguments”?
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Seems to me that you — and Stenger — have a very narrow view of what a religious life constists of, as well as a quite narrow view of religious belief. The Rabbi of our liberal, Reform congregation has a Master’s degree in philosophy, as well as a Rabbinical ordination, and accepts all the science that you and Stenger do. So, what’s wrong with her?
Philip: Sorry, but this just seems wrong. There are any number of questions about which science has nothing to tell us, but about which philosophy may have quite a bit. Questions of moral and aesthetic value; questions as to the most just forms of governance; questions as to the rational grounds for belief; etc.
We don’t really have any idea why there is anything at all and only tentative ideas on why things are as they are, so some kind of creative agent (call it a god if you like) can’t be ruled out I suppose.
But why should we assume that this hypothetical agent has anything whatsoever to do with the ‘God’ or gods of traditional religion?
My personal view is that, at our present stage of knowledge at least, we can’t really go anywhere with these ideas, scientifically or otherwise. Consigning them to philosophy doesn’t get us very far (and doesn’t do philosophy any good in my opinion).
Nothing, so long as she doesn’t believe there’s a omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient person who created the world, answers prayers, and is really, really concerned with your behavior. When people talk about an expansive view of religious life they usually intend to include sophisticated theologians who know better than to assert silly anti-science stuff, but the expansive view in terms of number of adherents includes the Joel Osteens, Pat Roberts, and ISIS too. Which is why it’s important to say what you arguing for an against.
I’m not sure, for example, how philosophy (in particular) tells me that the Democratic Party Platform is moral, and that the Republican Party Platform is immoral. Philosophy is the foundry and criticism of vocabularies, but it’s not going to resolve any moral questions.
Philip: The point is that science has zero, zilch, nada to tell us about such questions, insofar as they are not empirical in nature. And while I probably agree with you that philosophy doesn’t have *answers*, it certainly is the discipline that provides the correct frame of reference within which to *discuss* such issues.
Some nice writing in this piece, but it is unclear to me how much oomph it offers to elucidating why science is the wrong hammer for the theism/atheism nail. Maybe another reading tomorrow will help. That said, I have no doubt that science is in fact the wrong hammer, especially as currently practiced with it’s underlying unexamined axiom of materialism. This immediately rules it out. I have never come across an argument strictly within the scientific arena which comprehends this — it’s always a matter of some ‘science’ spokesperson trying to project his certainty that philosophy is irrelevant to the question onto everything else. Lawrence Krauss is the best recent example of this. Some people legitimately have no interest in the question. And so good — let them admit so and be done with it. Among those who do have interest, you cannot get very far without entering into philosophy. And especially epistemology, in my view. It is maybe not so ironic therefore that many avid scientism athiests harbor a deep contempt for epistemology.
It is not true that science has nothing to say about ethics and government and culture. Sure, science can’t tell us what our most basic values are. As Hume noted, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” But history is an empirical science to; and it can tell us a lot about what forms of government lead to satisfying our passions and which thwart them. It tells us that deontological moralities based on the revelations of priests are likely to serve only the passions of priests. It tells us that supernatural world views that cannot be empirically tested often have to be reconciled on the battle field.
For lack of a better word, I would say I’m ambivalent with regard to David’s contention. This is reflected in my “like” of both Mark’s and Daniel K’s comments. For example, Mark says in part, “Consigning them to philosophy doesn’t get us very far . . . .” This is suggestive of the “philosophy makes no progress” motif. On the other hand, Daniel K says this in responding to Philip, “[Philosophy] certainly is the discipline that provides the correct frame of reference within which to *discuss* such issues.”
There’s much ground between these statements, both of which need further explanation IMO, else we are back at an impasse, which is what David attempts to defeat and which accounts for my hesitance in even exploring this subject with either theists or atheists. Any further explication from either would be helpful to me.
Hi David,
A very well argued article. I agree that these are philosophical arguments, but I expect that someone will say that science can use this type of argument too.
I suppose we can make the divide on the basis of what is the main type of approach for any subject.
But if it is a philosophical subject then I suppose we would prefer the term God proposition.
Hi Brent,
“The Copernican revolution put a crack in theism.”
In what way? In the 15th century, before Copernicus, a prominent theologian, Cusanus, suggested that the universe was infinite and that the Earth moved and was not at the centre of the universe, except in the sense that everywhere is, relatively, the centre of an infinite universe. He also spoke of beings on other planets. Others, like Buridan and his followers were putting cracks in the Ptolemaic/Aristotlean scientific orthodoxy for a couple of centuries before that.
What put a crack in theism was the reactionary stance of the 17th century Catholic Church, retreating back to scriptural/Aristotlean literalism in order to get Galileo.
Hello all,
Thank you for the many kind words and basically complete lack of trolls. This bodes very well for EA as a community. I’ll try to address as much as I can.
Philip,
“That there are different kinds of “truths” to be determined: one kind existing in a one domain studied by science and another kind in another domain by philosophy, would be Platonism, I think, in Rorty’s sense, and thus rejected.”
The first thing to say is that I am quite sure no argument in this piece ways for or against any kind of platonism. Myself, I do not endorse any kind of platonism. If you asked me whether or not the existence (or non-existence) or God is a “different kind” of truth than a scientific truth I would have to hear a good bit more of what you meant by kinds of truth. But my argument is epistemological and not metaphysical. It concerns how we go about establishings claims, not what kinds of claims they are except, of course, in so far as they are distinctive in the way they are established.
Thomas,
Thank you for the compliment. If you have anything you want clarified (even if not argumentative) I will do my best.
Brent,
“My friend, Vic Stenger, was always careful to specify what god(s) he could make scientific arguments against. They were gods that made some observable difference in the world, and especially the Abrahamic God.”
He certainly was and I give him credit for that. But even having specified the God of traditional theism (as I did as well) I find that it is far less straightforward to establish what “observable differences” the existence of God implies then Stenger takes it to be. Again, I do not think that this cannot be argued but that if it is to be argued, it will have to be done so philosophically in ways that are responsive to the conceptual space.
“The dodge that we don’t know how God might order the world requires that we obfuscate the meaning of “good” and “beneficent” and so that millions dying of smallpox is really “good” in the theistic twist of meaning.”
This is not the only “dodge”, or as I would put it, response to the problem of evil. If you think it is, I am afraid you underestimate the sophistication of the debate.
“Ottlinger overlooks history when he says that arguments about the existence of God are not affected by scientific discoveries.”
Ottlinger is not overlooking history. And Ottlinger nowhere makes this statement. Science does “affect” the God debate. From the piece: I want to make clear what I am not saying. By suggesting that the existence of God is not a scientific question or even very much like a scientific question, I am not thereby rendering science irrelevant. Science may furnish premises and undermine or disprove claims about the material world that a theist may want to make.
“Ottlinger makes his purpose clear at the end…The function of philosophy is to save beliefs.”
I would not agree with this statement. In fact I believe, like DanK, that philosophy more often *dis*proves beliefs as it is most often critical. And if it helps I am an atheist and I think philosophical objections to theism are quite damning, as of course does Mackie
Stolyz,
“Some nice writing in this piece…”
Oh stop it, you.
“…but it is unclear to me how much oomph it offers to elucidating why science is the wrong hammer for the theism/atheism nail. Maybe another reading tomorrow will help.”
Flattered you find it worth a second read. The following, from the piece, is pay dirt. Following the arguments back from this point may be helpful.
“… I have said that arguments for and against the existence of God, insofar as they are represented in the design argument and the argument from evil, are largely concerned with the coherence of prior beliefs, are largely driven by the content of concepts, and are largely indifferent to new empirical discoveries…Scientific arguments generally deal not with how beliefs cohere with one another, but how they agree with the empirical evidence. They are driven by the nature of the evidence, not the content of the concepts. They are highly responsive to new empirical evidence. Supposition and a priori reasoning is meant to be used sparingly if at all. It seems, then, that arguments for and against the existence of God typically evince features that are quite uncommon among scientific arguments.”
” I have no doubt that science is in fact the wrong hammer, especially as currently practiced with it’s underlying unexamined axiom of materialism. This immediately rules it out. I have never come across an argument strictly within the scientific arena which comprehends this”
Eugenie Scott routinely makes this point as, I believe, has Massimo.
” Lawrence Krauss is the best recent example of this.”
yup.
Thomas,
“I would say I’m ambivalent with regard to David’s contention.”
For what it is worth I think I am between Mark and Dan here. I do find that science is relevant, as the piece makes clear, but is not sufficient. You might see my response to Stolyz where I try to make clear the heart of the argument.
Hi Robin,
“I expect that someone will say that science can use this type of argument too.”
A scient*ist* may make this kind of argument but by doing so they will stray out of science and into philosophy. This is not ignominious but it marks the fact that they are practicing a different kind of argument with distinct criteria of success.
Hi David,
“In fact I believe, like DanK, that philosophy more often *dis*proves beliefs as it is most often critical. And if it helps I am an atheist and I think philosophical objections to theism are quite damning, as of course does Mackie”
Can I ask which philosophical objections in particular?
I started blogging in an effort to find a place for my own secular Buddhism in the New Atheism movement, but eventually withdrew from NA, although I remain sympathetic to the more thoughtful participants (none of them being the ‘stars’ who popularized the movement and continue to assert its primacy in public). The benefit of my year as a secular Buddhist New Atheist is that I was able to clarify my own beliefs, with which I am now quite comfortable – but being comfortable, I find the ‘god debate’ somewhat tiresome now.
Philosophically, the point of origin for me is George Smith’s “Atheism: the Case against God” presenting the strictly logical arguments against belief; the end point is Kai Nielsen’s “Atheism and Philosophy,” which presents the the case that the very idea of god is simply incoherent, and cannot survive sustained argumentation. Notably, neither of these texts invoke science or scientism (although Smith does make the demand for some evidence to support beliefs that are historically only assertions). The rational basis of belief is fundamentally flawed, much of it spurious.
But the problem is, as I discovered reading theist responses to atheist arguments, religious belief is not really a matter of reasoning. Its foundations are first, foremost, and overwhelmingly emotional. It may be a simple, vague, intuition of ‘something out there;’ an undeniable pathology of needing paternal guidance; a profound sense that some spiritual ‘other’ lovingly follows one around, invested in one’s success in life, forgiving any perceived transgression. But whatever it else is, it is emotional yearning, emotional fulfillment, emotional satisfaction, that rational argument can never reach.
I confess I tried feeling this for a long time – but I never did. The year before I adopted what I would call the truth of the non-theistic tradition of Buddhism, I went to a priest for confession (having a history as a Catholic). I spoke admiringly of Thomas Aquinas – upon which the priest shook his head sadly, saying “you love wisdom more than god.” He gave me absolution, but warned that I didn’t really believe. He was right, on both counts.
My problem here is that I do not recognize the universe Mackie’s writing about; I don’t live there. The ‘radical evil’ that Kant and other philosophers write about is comprehensible once one recognizes that it arises out of unbridled desire – this is completely in keeping with the Buddhist understanding of suffering arising from the ‘self.’ The notion that evil is a floating signifier requiring some basis in a disembodied metaphysics is entirely alien to me – I’ve honestly no idea what Mackie is saying. Tegner’s universe is much closer to the one I inhabit; he makes mistakes, and I think Pigliucci’s arguments against these are cogent. But it’s a universe where ‘evil’ and moral counter-agents arise among us as we are, not as we ‘should’ be.
It’s not a matter of choice, but of epistemic conditioning. My emotions do not govern my beliefs – and I don’t believe that they should.
For a long time I have had the feeling that atheists are even drafter than theists.
Stenger, at one point, says that if there was a God then you would expect that we could visit other planets as easily as we could visit other continents. Seriously? It sounds like a parody of an atheist argument.
I dipped into the George H Smith book. At one point he uses the fact that “god”, (like every other word) is used by different people to mean different things, to argue that theists don’t know what they mean by God.
Then he arbitrarily selects a stupid definition of “God”
Hmm fat fingers posted too early,
…chooses a stupid definition of god in order to show that it is stupid.
So, despite all the ink spilt, there seems to be a general consensus here that “religious belief is not really a matter of reasoning”. Then what does philosophy really have to offer? As opposed to say “natural history of religion” (yes, I know Hume did do it first), psychology, “cognitive science of religion”, sociology (outside), or the teachings of a given religion (inside)?
Specifically, the problem of evil is only really a problem for some religions and some religious people: eg amount of suffering for animals inherent in Darwinian evolution leads to a) ineffability b) Neo-Cartesianism c) a compensatory afterlife (as recently debated) – are there others?
By contrast, the various natural theological arguments take scientific facts – lightning disproportionately striking church towers, unexpected remissions of severe disease, stability of the solar system, organisation and complexity of life, cosmological fine tuning – where a supernatural explanation actually can be regarded as parsimonious, so that alternative hypotheses need to be posited: Darwinian evolution, anthropic hypotheses, multiple universes etc. It actually is a scientific hypothesis, in that the god in question has particular physical properties, but also has lead to the retreating god of the gaps phenomenon that inductively leads us to expect it to be refuted into the future.
Re argumentation:
This is of course the usual complaint made about Richard Dawkins, that he argues as though religious beliefs are in fact factual in nature.
Helen DeCruz comments on her survey of PoR
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/2014/12/10/results-of-my-survey-on-religious-disagreement/
1. I do not think that I trivialise or minimise the importance of philosophy if I observe that the question whether something exists is by the nature of the question squarely in the domain of empirical science, unless one were to talk about extremely esoteric definitions of “exist”. (As in Platonism.)
2. The observation that enough empirical evidence had been gathered 3,000 years ago to support discussions of e.g. the Problem of Evil does not mean that it therefore isn’t a question of empirical science. Same for design. Surely the domain of science is not limited to questions whose answers science has yet to find, where new evidence is still needed?
3. Really I do not understand what is so hard about the concept of god as a hypothesis. Postulate a god, figure out what one should be able to observe if such a god existed, then go looking for evidence, Stenger style. It is at least not a crazy idea. Of course real life god hypotheses are squishy, but only because the theists are constantly moving goal posts. But they are not the only ones. Medical quacks for example also try to move goal posts, but somehow philosophers who happily allow the theist to move goal posts when their claim is disproved do not allow the quack to do the same.
The point is, once the goal posts have been moved all the way to where the claim being true is no longer empirically distinguishable from the claim being false, the scientist is permitted to, or I should say has to, consider it disproved. You can claim this principle of parsimony for philosophy as Massimo Pigliucci does, fine, but it is *also* part of the toolbox of science.
(An aside: As an atheist I have no idea why the PoE is considered “the greatest argument” against gods. If a god is conceived to be incompetent or evil the problem vanishes, but we are still left with the idea of a god.)
David Ottlinger (@DavidOttlinger): If you asked me whether or not the existence (or non-existence) or God is a “different kind” of truth than a scientific truth I would have to hear a good bit more of what you meant by kinds of truth.
I am guided first by a pragmatist definition of ‘truth’ (vs. platonist or positivist) in Rorty’s “Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists” [1] (from Introduction, Consequences of Pragmatism). I expand on this in a Note [2], “Philosophy’s (pragmatic) function” [3].
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=6L2Wkls7UnwC&pg=PR13&lpg=PR13
[2] https://codicalist.wordpress.com/contents/
[3] https://codicalist.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/philosophys-pragmatic-function/
In the end, I think the endeavor to separate what’s the domain of science vs. what’s the domain philosophy is not a pragmatic one. They both may have developed their vocabularies (languages), frameworks, and paradigms, but these can overlap, migrate, and intermingle.
Thank you, David. I take it you would agree that the differences you mention between science and philosophy are matters of degree, not absolutes. I would think of “science” and “philosophy” as very fuzzy family-resemblance terms. But my judgement of the degrees is somewhat different from yours, to the point that I don’t think it’s useful to assign the question of God’s existence to either category. What’s gained by such an assignment? Does it help to be told that we should think about the question in a “philosophical” way? I think not.
One difference between us is that you heavily emphasise arguments. I would put more emphasis on judgements. Most of the time our arguments are post-hoc rationalisations in support of judgements we’ve already made. That said, I strongly recommend subjecting our important intuitive judgements to skeptical scrutiny, involving some discursive reasoning, but that’s still not just a matter of making arguments.
We don’t need any specifically philosophical expertise or knowledge to make a good judgement about the existence of God. It doesn’t require a philosopher to point out the inconsistency between a good God and the amount of suffering in the world. What we need is a well-trained faculty of judgement and a skeptical attitude. Experience with science helps to provide both. I think it’s no coincidence that belief in supernatural beings has declined as science has advanced, and is rarer among scientists than among the general population. I think that a more scientific way of thinking and of understanding the world inclines us more towards a lack of belief in such beings, and appropriately so. No doubt a philosophical training helps too, and it’s also no coincidence that most philosophers are atheists. But I suspect that’s also primarily a consequence of the advance of science, and not of specifically philosophical thinking.
I thought it was an excellent discussion of the issues and mostly fair to everyone. However many problems arise. The first would be that evil would not exists for many theists. The teachings of Meher Baba, for instance, would render this analysis was off the mark. Having said that, it does seem to apply very often for ‘people of the book’.
– “It is not a scientific problem that might be solved by further discoveries…”
Not by further ‘scientific’ discoveries. An important qualifier.
” Again this seems to be true of both arguments. It is perfectly true that both arguments turn on facts about the world. The argument from evil turns on the fact that there are seemingly unjustifiable instances of suffering and deprivation in the world. The design argument turns on the fact that things in the natural evince remarkable functional complexity. Now these are indeed empirical beliefs, but they are not the kind that are going to leave anyone gobsmacked. They are about as obvious and familiar as anything can be. In fact, evidence of natural evil and natural design are so ubiquitous that no new, undiscovered example is likely to seriously impact the problem.”
This is the para. that got me going. Has someone proved the existence of evil or natural design? It would be news to me. Human beings say there is evil and then have to explain their invention. If they cannot do so then this reflects poorly on their invention. A great deal of religion rejects the idea of evil, so the problem would not arise. It can easily be explained why an all-powerful God allows suffering.and deprivation. It is said that Krishna ‘deprives those He loves of everything’. Not a friendly thing to do, one would think, but sometimes the cure for deprivation and suffering would require some deprivation and suffering.
Not really disagreeing but noting some subtleties.
As for Victor Stenger, I struggle to grasp why his opinion is given any attention.
EJW
Agree with some of the above but…
– “religious belief is not really a matter of reasoning. Its foundations are first, foremost, and overwhelmingly emotional. It may be a simple, vague, intuition of ‘something out there;’ an undeniable pathology of needing paternal guidance; a profound sense that some spiritual ‘other’ lovingly follows one around, invested in one’s success in life, forgiving any perceived transgression. But whatever it else is, it is emotional yearning, emotional fulfillment, emotional satisfaction, that rational argument can never reach.”
This will be true for some ‘believers’, perhaps even many, but it surely cannot be generalised across all of religion. It is really quite insulting to do so. A rational argument could say that intuitions mean something, and It would not be irrational to conclude that something ljke God would be required to explain existence. It would certainly be eminently rational to conclude that science will never do it. And then, religious belief is often the result of rational argument. These comments seem widely applicable, but they would be relevant only to popular religion, the kind for which a few second-hand beliefs are considered enough for the believer.
A religious belief is not necessarily a wild guess at something. It may be well-justified as the most sensible belief to hold under the circumstances. We all know people who hold beliefs for poor reasons and who can even be dogmatic and try to force them on others, and some are religious people and some are scientists and philosophers. Let’s get rid of the nonsense wherever it arises and not only in religion. I doubt that Stenger, Dawkins or Krauss would survive the cull.
I’ve heard Stenger speak before, as well as read most of his books. I would agree that his ideas, and generally, others of his ilk, are muddied.
That said, I think David missed a couple of key issues.
First, if we’re pivoting on Wittgenstein (and hat tip to Robin and others) what is a person’s definition of the word “god”? Per a recent post by Massimo at his newest site, the Euthyphro dilemma requires people (who are honest about accepting the implications of the issue) to ask how much power below omnipotence, or how much morality below omnibenevolence, they are willing to accept in a superior being and still call said being “god” (without being under duress).
Second, to riff on EJ, into non-secular Buddhism … what about a religion that, like Theravada Buddhism, does not (on paper at least), believe in any divinity or divinities? (I say “on paper” because the reality is somewhat different, often. Also, Theravada still believes in metaphysical entities, namely the two of a reincarnated “life force” and the karma that governs how said reincarnation works.)
Surely, per Atran, Boyer, and others, to riff on Stenger dissing theistic evolution, and ideas of evolution, concepts of god, non-deistic metaphysical ideas, religion and more have all evolved.
So, third …
In that sense, the concept of god IS a scientific one. No, not scientific in the way that Stenger proposes. But, scientific in evolutionary biology done correctly, cultural and evolutionary anthropology, etc.? You bet it’s scientific.
Not sure Wittgenstein is going to help us here. Which Wittgenstein? The one who gave friends copies of Tolstoy’s “The Gospel in Brief”? The one who wrote a note in 1929, “What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.” The Wittgenstein of PI? I do appreciate the several comments, though, that point to the quandry of getting to an acceptable definition of what everyone means when they use the word god(s). But why would this fit comfortably in the scientific domain as opposed to the philosophic?
The problem of evil is not a strong argument against, say the Olympian gods, but it is against the Abrahamic God who is postulated to be both powerful and good. It works even if He is not all-powerful or perfectly good. Human beings, mere scientists and doctors, have eradicated smallpox. God either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Thomas as for the “why would this fit comfortably,” all I can do is suggest reading Scott Atran or Pascal Boyer. Social sciences are sciences, after all, at least when done in as scientific a manner as possible. On Wittgenstein, I was using him as a trope for philosophy of language in general, not his personal beliefs, interesting as they may be.
As Stenger and others have pointed out theistic evolution is not Darwinian evolution at all. The whole point and power of Darwin’s evolution, the thing that makes it an explanation and not just a description, is that it works with random variation, that it dispenses with any agency or teleology.
Hi everyone,
Thank you all for your comments. There are a lot of comments on similar themes so I am going to address some of them in the aggregate. Hopefully people will feel I still responded to their questions.
A lot of people have raised the issue of the relative importance (or lack of importance) of arguments in people’s religious beliefs. Some have come close to saying that arguments are unimportant to believers. This cannot be. The Veritas Forum and other outlets routinely fill huge halls to hear the existence of God argued. Barnstorming debates in churches take place all across America.When you hear ordinary people walk up to the microphone at these events or call in to call-in shows, they are often using arguments on the existence of God and the interpretation of scripture that come from Christian intellectuals. Arguments I assume many have heard in their churches on Sunday. Many of them are familiar with William Lane Craig. I know very well that people do not believe in God simply because of arguments, but it is evidently important for millions of believers to feel that their faith is at least intellectually respectable. They can be engaged on these terms.
There are different ways to write to believers about the in-existence of God. Some strategies attempt to by-pass arguments for and against God altogether and address why people believe. Dennett’s Breaking The Spell is the most popular example. Philip Kitcher’s Life After Faith is another and, I think, the better book. And of course there are the great works of Nietzsche which are particularly successful at engaging and challenging the emotions and potential self-deceptions surrounding faith. While I think these approaches have an important role to play, I think the case against theism is incomplete without some straightforward arguments about why God does not exist. Address only people’s intellect and they are unmoved. Address only people’s emotions and faith and you miss some of the best reasons we have to believe there is no God. People are creatures of emotion and reason both and the arguments we use should reflect that. (Noteworthy also is the fact that this is the same from the other side, as theistic apologists have always engaged reason and emotion and sought to strike a balance between fides et ratio.)
Some more individual comments,
Robin,
“Can I ask which philosophical objections in particular?”
Sure. I take the problem of evil to be the most important. I tend to think that the argument starting from the fact that there are no well attested disembodied minds is stronger than many people take it to be. There are also arguments, used by Richard Gale for instance, that the success of a naturalist worldview undercuts belief in God, not definitively but in conjunction with other things. There are also just epistemological issues about the weight of evidence that would be needed to establish the existence of something as radically unprecedented in our experience as God.
On your next comment, reading better atheist authors might assuage your concerns. I am always frustrated that the worst atheist writers are the most popular. I recommend William Rowe, Peter Millican and maybe best of all Philip Kitcher.
ej,
Your story of drifting away from Catholicism is a great deal like my own. I had the same feeling of an unquiet intellectual conscience that could eventually only be satisfied by letting go of belief. Don’t we disprove that reason and argument never sways anyone? We cannot be that unique.Many of us love wisdom more than God.
“The notion that evil is a floating signifier requiring some basis in a disembodied metaphysics is entirely alien to me – I’ve honestly no idea what Mackie is saying.”
It is widely acknowledged, on both sides, that “the problem of evil” is a bit of a misnomer as the problem concerns not just moral evil but different kinds of wrongness and unfortunate circumstance in the world. Mackie does not assume “evil” has some kind of metaphysical reality and nothing in the argument turns on this.
“My emotions do not govern my beliefs – and I don’t believe that they should.”
You are right in your view of yourself that reason is more important to you than other people, but there is not, never has been and never will be a human of whom that is true. You are still human, all too human cut from the same cloth as the priest on the other side of that screen. Remember that, my friend.
Alex,
“I do not think that I trivialise or minimise the importance of philosophy if I observe that the question whether something exists is by the nature of the question squarely in the domain of empirical science”
If you put in “empirical disciplines” for “empirical science” I would agree that this is usually true but not always. Some existence claims are debated philosophically. Do propositions exist? Do qualia exist? Do meanings of words exist? Do holes exist (or are they the abscence of something else)? And most of these have nothing to do with Platonism (though of course some do).
“2. The observation that enough empirical evidence had been gathered 3,000 years ago to support discussions of e.g. the Problem of Evil does not mean that it therefore isn’t a question of empirical science. Same for design. Surely the domain of science is not limited to questions whose answers science has yet to find, where new evidence is still needed?”
Not sure what lead you to that last question (the answer is no). Again science is relevant especially to the design argument but does not make arguments for or against scientific it just means it uses scientific facts as premises. What is important is how the arguments proceed.
” It is at least not a crazy idea. Of course real life god hypotheses are squishy, but only because the theists are constantly moving goal posts.”
Please note I never said that the idea of a God hypothesis was “crazy” just mistaken. I also do not think all theist responses are as disingenuous or as unsuccessful as you seem to. Of course some are but some are pretty good.
” An aside: As an atheist I have no idea why the PoE is considered “the greatest argument” against gods. If a god is conceived to be incompetent or evil the problem vanishes, but we are still left with the idea of a god”
Partly it is because traditional Christianity and Islam claim that God is perfectly good, being influenced by Greek philosophy as they are. But remember also, as Millican points out, that God’s goodness is perhaps his most important quality because it is what makes him worthy of worship. Lose that and you lose your religion.
Philip,
“In the end, I think the endeavor to separate what’s the domain of science vs. what’s the domain philosophy is not a pragmatic one. They both may have developed their vocabularies (languages), frameworks, and paradigms, but these can overlap, migrate, and intermingle.”
They can but they usually don’t and I find the two are reliably distinct enough and suit different purposes so often that they are more meaningfully thought of as distinct. Please note that is a pragmatic argument.
richardwein,
“What we need is a well-trained faculty of judgement and a skeptical attitude. Experience with science helps to provide both. I think it’s no coincidence that belief in supernatural beings has declined as science has advanced, and is rarer among scientists than among the general population.”
No doubt, but notice that skepticism is a philosophical attitude. Again I have no problem making a place for science, just with saying that these are scientific arguments.
“No doubt a philosophical training helps too, and it’s also no coincidence that most philosophers are atheists. But I suspect that’s also primarily a consequence of the advance of science, and not of specifically philosophical thinking.”
Well most philosophers are naturalists (at least about most things). They are naturalists becasue of philosophical arguments that partly informed by science. Again science has an important role to play but the arguments, even concerning science, are not themselves scientific.
PeterJ,
“This is the para. that got me going. Has someone proved the existence of evil or natural design? It would be news to me. Human beings say there is evil and then have to explain their invention. If they cannot do so then this reflects poorly on their invention. A great deal of religion rejects the idea of evil, so the problem would not arise. It can easily be explained why an all-powerful God allows suffering.and deprivation. It is said that Krishna ‘deprives those He loves of everything’. Not a friendly thing to do, one would think, but sometimes the cure for deprivation and suffering would require some deprivation and suffering”
That approach to the problem of evil has certainly been tried in a Christian context. The biggest apologist of this kind of response in recent years is John Hicks with his Vale of Soul-making theodicy. I hate this approach. I don’t want to sound harsh here but people’s willingness to say such things when discussing religion is one of my main reasons for speaking out against it. Only in talking about God would way say children having there entire families wiped out by natural disaster, sudden infant death syndrome, crushing poverty and many other horrors that are very real in the world are somehow good because they build character. Some evils might be justified in this way but nowhere near all. Losing a child does not build one’s character it is just a horrible, awful thing. The notion strikes me as not only laughably false but morally corrosive. Again I know people who defend theodicies are often moral and respectable people but I doubt they are made better by entertaining such thoughts.
Socratic,
“what is a person’s definition of the word “god””
I am assuming something like the omni-perfect God of tradition theisms (in case Dan chimes in, I know, I know, Jews are different.)
“In that sense, the concept of god IS a scientific one. No, not scientific in the way that Stenger proposes. But, scientific in evolutionary biology done correctly, cultural and evolutionary anthropology, etc.? You bet it’s scientific.”
This is a bit off topic but I disagree. I think science has relatively little to tell us about religion (though not nothing by any means) and that the disciplines that do have a lot to tell us about religion (history, sociology, religious studies) are not sciences. They do not deal with stochastic explanations and causal mechanism, perform experiments or have many of the other features distinctive of science.
Thomas,
“Not sure Wittgenstein is going to help us here. Which Wittgenstein?”
I am thinking of the later Wittgenstein. And I am aware that Wittgenstein was a Christian but, let’s remember, a highly idiosycratic kind of Christian who did not seem to believe in miracles, the after life or maybe even a literal God. At any rate I can take his philosophy of language without taking his theology.
Another general comment.
A lot of people are just stating that they do not see how moving the God debate into philosophy helps. This is somewhat dispiriting because I did just write 3,000 words trying to explain why it is. Let me just reiterate key points of the argument. Many features distinctive of scientific arguments do not seem to be features of arguments for or against the existence of God. Many features of philosophical arguments do seem to be features of arguments for and against the existence of God. Arguments modeled on science tend to fail because they do not appreciate the subtleties of the concepts and the ambiguities of implication. Philosophical arguments fare better because they are highly responsive to just these issues. If you disagree, it would help me if you would engage the argument and perhaps tell me which part you do not find convincing (as several of you have).
There are some things which are neither science, nor philosophy, but just reasoning. And that is something all of us can do, even if we are neither scientist nor philosopher.
Personally I can never be sure my beliefs are not coloured by my emotions, that seems to be a very difficult thing to tell. Do I weight some kinds of evidence more than others because of what I do and I don’t want to believe, or because of how it makes me feel? Quite possibly. I think that everyone does this to an extent, theists, atheists and agnostics. If anyone believes that their beliefs are not coloured by their emotions, is that not, in itself, a belief coloured by emotion?
I have put together a couple of ground rules for myself. The first one is “There are no no-go areas”. If there is some question that I have to avoid answering (even if just to frankly admit that I don’t know the answer), then I am probably deceiving myself about something. (Atheists usually claim to have no such”no-go areas”, but they have as many as anyone else).
The second one is to admit to myself my prejudices and desires in any matter, to the extent that I am able to determine this.
The third is to always be able to give an account of why I believe anything on which I place any certainty.
The fourth is to be able to state the argument in the clearest and most concise manner possible, defining the key terms as carefully and clearly as I can and – crucially – be able to state why I think that the conclusion follows from the argument.
This last rule has helped me to demolish many more of my own beliefs than it has ever helped to support. Again, if I have to keep something unnecessarily vague, then I am probably fooling myself about it.
Hi David
I think we can do better than that. For most of the major monotheistic faiths there are certain key attributes:
1. Intelligent
2. Necessarily existing
3. Ultimate creator of all contingent things (as opposed to proximate creator, like me building a model aeroplane)
These three make up the definition of what is sometimes termed “bare theism”, distinguishing God from a mere “superior being”. These three say, in effect, that God is the fundamental unit of reality.
Then there are other attributes normally attributed to God:
4. Maximally good
5. Maximally powerful
6. Omniscient
Not everyone uses “God” to mean this and as I said, this is the same for any other word. For example some deities have aunts and uncles and as such are a different concept and must be treated separately. But this is a widely used definition of God.
In effect theism, as I have described above is not a claim about a being which happens to exist, but a claim about the fundamental nature of reality. I get depressed by the “there is no definition” argument. There is a perfectly good definition which is widely used and consistent across traditions and has been consistent for centuries, at least. This kind of theism is a lot more clearly defined than something like, for example, Naturalism.
On the subject of the argument from evil – do you take the base premise that a maximally good being would not want there to be any suffering? Or that it would not want there to be as much suffering as there is in this world?
Well, David, like with Coel of commenting fame over at Massimo’s site, I’ll have to respectively disagree with you on how we define the “sciences.”
And, I’ll also have to respectively disagree with the details of why we disagree. Psychology is becoming more scientific, through folks such as Kahnemann, Ariely, et al, on a regular basis, as far as gathering empirical data, analyzing it, and constructing theories. And, of course, ev psych is just the fusion of this with evolutionary biology. Evolutionary anthropology is a similar fusion with cultural anthropology.
There are differences, of course.
For example, to go to history, now that I’ve touched on psychology and anthropology, and indirectly on sociology.
Historic events are multi-causal, of course. There was no “one” cause (and even no “three” causes) of, say, the American Revolution. And, historians will disagree which of those causes to weight more. But, history can and does conclusively rule out that, say, Manchu China had any causal contribution to the American Revolution.
Therefore, this:
Is precisely how the social sciences, at their best, are both social and scientific, because they appreciate the subtleties of concepts involved, but still bring a scientific eye to bear as much as possible.
To be specific, evolutionary psychology ideas of things like pattern detectors and agency imputers being part of the basis of religious evolution, even if ev psych can never meet provability hurdles of modern psychology, do seem reasonable and fit with what we know about human mental development.
While said social sciences can’t provide “the answers” on this issue, they certainly can — and, in my opinion, should — “inform” philosophy.
David, understood about Wittgenstein. Of course, you and others can call on Wittgenstein. But let’s at least acknowledge that even in this there is a broader context. You may “take his philosophy of language without taking his theology.” But let’s at least acknowledge that his theology is no more meaningful to some than is Tolstoy’s. At any rate, please note my ending question (“But why would this fit comfortably in the scientific domain as opposed to the philosophic?”) is rather supportive of your thesis before saying, “A lot of people are just stating that they do not see how moving the God debate into philosophy helps.”
Key here is “helps” in your statement. You know that this is exactly what many scientists have a problem with when they reply, “Okay, what is “helped”? I’m neither a scientist nor a philosopher; nevertheless, I think I can appreciate some conceptual subtleties as well as ambiguity and the attendant implications of it. I do think philosophy is the better of the two domains in which to have discussion about the existence of god(s) and what we mean conceptually in such discussions. But I also believe that many atheists–whether in the sciences or in philosophy–don’t even see any usefulness in discussing this matter–couldn’t care less if it were never mentioned again, just as many of my theist friends couldn’t care less when an atheist demands that they “prove” the existence of the god or gods they believe in.
Do I find this particular topic helpful? Yes. Why? Because it interests me when discussed in a philosophic framework. At the same time, I don’t think many atheists consider it interesting or helpful, particularly those of a scientific persuasion that borders on a sort of dogmatism.
Ottlinger: ” Many features distinctive of scientific arguments do not seem to be features of arguments for or against the existence of God.”
Of course many are not about god. I’d say science argues against the Abrahmic God in a broad way by explaining things that were thought to be evidence for God: We are at the center of universe. Disease and other natural disasters are caused by sin and impiety. Each animal species, and especially humans, must have been specially created. Of course these are not direct proofs of Gods non-existence; but then neither would proving that Studebaker no longer makes cars be direct proof of Studebaker’s non-existence. But it would be evidence.
There are also direct scientific tests of the existence of God. For example the statistical evaluation of the efficacy of prayer for people having heart surgery. Again, not proof of non-existence, but it could have provided strong evidence of existence – and it didn’t. The problem of evil is a direct empirical test of the existence of a very powerful, beneficient god who cares about human beings. Such a god would not permit childhood leukemia, whooping cough, and smallpox. Any human being with the power to prevent them, but who refused to do so, would rightly be condemned as a monster – not excused by theological sophistry.
Tis true, per Brent, that theistic evolution is not Darwinian. Is it, though, the ‘interventions” aside, evolutionary? Yes.
And, with a hat tip to Wittgenstein the linguist again, another note on terminology.
Just as Theravada Buddhism can be “atheistic” yet a religion … evolution is NOT the same as abiogenesis. The origins of the first “critter” that we would call alive is much more problematic than evolutionary development afterward. (Note: The Urey-Miller reducing atmosphere idea is pretty untenable, based on evidence of today.)
The problem with the three key attributes is that 2 and 3 just imply something like quantum field theory and 1 means nothing unless the intelligence includes some values or purpose it aims for. Together they don’t get to a religion and every religion that has ever existed adds that God has ways he wants you to behave – usually to obey authority and to make everybody believe in Him.
“Arguments modeled on science tend to fail because they do not appreciate the subtleties of the concepts and the ambiguities of implication. Philosophical arguments fare better because they are highly responsive to just these issues.”
I think this a too strong a distinction, but as I have characterized philosophy as the foundry and criticism of vocabularies, I do see philosophy as distinct in that it is the study of the nature of vocabularies in themselves.
Brent, “The problem of evil is a direct empirical test of the existence of a very powerful, beneficient god who cares about human beings.” I don’t think so–“direct empirical test”–, at least not any more so than saying the existence of supposed good is a direct empirical test, etc.
David Ottinger,
Well, I confess myself guilty of some misreading here – although I think a clearer introduction to Mackie would have helped, since I was not at all familiar with him prior to reading your article. But I’ve read up a little on him today, and see where he is coming from and why I had a difficulty understanding his position from your presentation of it.
Mackie is trying to argue against a position that itself is incoherent, so it’s not clear one can do more than reveal its incoherence and be done with it (ala Kai Nielsen).
I should have remarked for readers unfamiliar with the term, that ‘floating signifier’ is a term of art in semiotics for “a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified” (David Chandler, “Semiotics: the Basics). Here is the moment when I saw that this argument, how well formed, would be chasing after a ‘floating signifier’: “The greatest natural disasters and human atrocities down to every stubbed toe adds to the sum of human evil” (a remark consistent with the understanding of evil that Mackie seeks to unravel). This is an ancient Christian understanding of evil in the material universe following the Fall from Eden. It is unfortunately completely devoid of identifiable significance; or rather, as floating signifier, it can be made to have any significance rhetorically useful in a given context. For instance, religious teleology: “You are here to confront the evils of your nature;” “you are here to confront the evils of the threatening natural world;” “the internet could be invented to challenge you with the evils of temptation” – etc., etc. And this is the universe that I said I don’t see myself living in. There is nothing evil about anybody’s stubbed toe. Asserting there is, certainly may rhetorically ramp up religious paranoia among some more superstitious Christians, requiring rhetorical re-assurance of divine mercy from wiser, more liberally minded theologians, priests, etc. The work of logical analysis would be to reveal the incoherence and paradoxes involved such an understanding of evil – and I now see that this seems to have been Mackie’s intent. So, again, sorry, I misread.
For me, the universe is simply what is, just as it is. There is no inherent good or evil to it; there is no ‘wrongness’ or misfortune. The only meaningful sense of ‘evil’ for me lies in the harm we do to ourselves or others. Such is properly addressed by either ethics, psychology, or collectively in politics.
That said, I note (to PeterJ) that I use the word ‘rhetoric’ here, and also the charged word ‘paranoia’ (loosely, indicating extreme, systematized or pathological distrust or fear of the world around us), to indicate that I continue to hold that the foundation of religious belief is emotional. Fearing the ‘evil’ all around us, or trusting in a loving god’s mercy to save us from this, are clearly drawn from deeper feelings than logic can reach.
Robin,
“I think we can do better than that”
No doubt we can but in a relatively brief piece on how the existence of God is debated, I can’t get to everything. There are (many) books on defining God.
Also I hope I never implied that someone who is not a philosopher should not engage in philosophy. Far from it.
“On the subject of the argument from evil – do you take the base premise that a maximally good being would not want there to be any suffering? Or that it would not want there to be as much suffering as there is in this world?”
No it seems quite plausible to me that the best possible world could involve some suffering, even significant suffering (though I am not convinced it is true or that we can know). But the amount the nature and the distribution of what there actually is seem to me totally contrary to what a totally God and omnipotent being would order.
Thomas,
I’m not sure I understand everything you wrote. I can say though that I was not thinking of you when I asked people to explain a little more why they disagreed with me. I also understood where you were sympathetic. Something I’m not getting? Sorry, just trying to get clear.
Brent,
“Of course many are not about god.”
Many what? Many scientific arguments? (didnt get this, sorry) At any rate I was talking about general *features* of arguments. Scientific arguments generally have features which mark them as quite different from arguments about the nature or existence of God.
Socratic,
I’m not going to try to hunt all the foxes you just set loose but I will say that I never denied psychology was a science. I just denied that psychology is going to be one of the disciplines with the most to teach us about religion. Yes I am skeptical of evo-psych which strikes me as long on promises and short on results.
ejwinner: “For me, the universe is simply what is, just as it is. There is no inherent good or evil to it; there is no ‘wrongness’ or misfortune. The only meaningful sense of ‘evil’ for me lies in the harm we do to ourselves or others.”
For me too, but that’s because I don’t see any agency, any God as responsible for it. The Problem of Evil is that if there’s a powerful God responsible for it, He’s not a good person and not worthy of worship. In common discourse, everyone considers the death of children from smallpox very bad. Is it a moral evil? Well let’s ask whether it was a moral good to have eradicated it? Were those people who worked and dedicated much of their lives to eradicating smallpox doing good? Then it’s pretty clear that if they had the power to eliminate smallpox at no inconvenience to themselves and simply refused to do so, they would be guilty of a moral evil! Would we excuse them by saying well they are just as they are? I guess we might if we were theologians because that’s what theologians do for God.
Well, this is just one more reason to leave god out of such a discussion. Why complicate a clear good (to us) (elimination of small pox) with esoteric questions about whether some supernatural being liked it or not?
If those who can reduce the pain some go through, wish to believe in supernatural agency, fine; that doesn’t impel any of us to accept such feelings, only the results of their research.
David Ottlinger,
Existence claims: That is a rather strange interpretation of what I wrote. Platonism was just an example, and gods are not like propositions or meanings, they are like gravity, dark matter or flower fairies. They are taken to have actual effects on the world, even if it is as hard to tackle as having created the universe or “sustaining” it.
it just means it uses scientific facts as premises. What is important is how the arguments proceed.
This is what always frustrates me about this subject: how is that different from any other discussion dealing with what the world is like and what exists in it? You can consider crystal therapy, whether Joe has an alibi for last Friday at 6pm, the Yeti, or climate change. In all cases it invariably goes like this: (1) there is an idea; (2) we can use logic or philosophy to check it for self-contradiction, and if it passes that test we can (3) invest the time to do science to it and look for empirical evidence, and then (4) we can interpret the evidence and discuss its strength using again tools from the toolbox of philosophy.
There are two points here: first, you need to be able to do all of this to do science at all. If a philosopher says that because something includes steps 2 and 4 it isn’t science, then there is no science ever, on any question, and science cannot say anything about anything ever. Second, all this is what happens when examining cold fusion, and it is what happens when examining the existence of gods. Of course you can say that it is all so complicated because the god that was originally claimed to answer prayers can be redefined to be ineffable after a failed prayer study, but with the exact same justification you could say that cold fusion is beyond the grasp of science because it can just be redefined as ineffable after a failed experiment. To me this is merely a question of intellectual consistency.
Hi EJW – you say…
“That said, I note (to PeterJ) that I use the word ‘rhetoric’ here, and also the charged word ‘paranoia’ (loosely, indicating extreme, systematized or pathological distrust or fear of the world around us), to indicate that I continue to hold that the foundation of religious belief is emotional. Fearing the ‘evil’ all around us, or trusting in a loving god’s mercy to save us from this, are clearly drawn from deeper feelings than logic can reach.”
I’d agree that this is usually the case. But a search for absolute truths will lead one into religion, and while such a search might be called ’emotional’ this seems to devalue it somewhat. It would not be merely emotional.
If the foundation of a belief is emotional it has no place in the mind of a truth-seeker,. Come to that. beliefs as a whole are to be overcome for knowledge. The seeking itself may be emotionally driven. But then, what do we ever do that is not at least in part emotionally driven? My experience of talking to physicists is that many of their beliefs are emotional attachments, and very obviously so when they are challenged. .
I can speak with some authority here because any religious beliefs I hold have emerged from a study of formal metaphysics and experiments with consciousness, not from a search for consolation or a social group to join etc, and have come as rather a surprise to a long-standing and quite vocal skeptic. . .
Thanks for your reply, David.
(1) I’ve already objected to focusing just on arguments. But also, when you say “these” arguments, a lot depends on which arguments you’re talking about. I assume you mean the appropriate arguments, as there would be no point in your appealing to inappropriate arguments. But I would probably disagree with you about which arguments are appropriate. On the whole, I would say that the most appropriate arguments on this subject are the more straightforward ones, the ones that require least philosophical expertise (whatever philosophical expertise might be). A significant part of your case was that the PoE is “essentially conceptual” because “the concept of God contains the content of ‘omnipotent’ and ‘wholly good’”. But all language uses concepts, and we typically don’t need any special philosophical expertise to understand them. Our ordinary understanding of the phrase “God is omnipotent and wholly good” is sufficient for seeing that this claim is in tension with the existence of so much suffering. Complex analyses of these concepts are not needed.
(2) You didn’t just deny that the problem is scientific; you claimed that it’s philosophical. My Wittgensteinian approach to language leads me to say that there’s no fact to be discovered as to which category this problem falls into. With such fuzzy and context-dependent concepts, we should ask ourselves instead what useful purpose, if any, is played by such language in a given context. In another context, to say that a problem is “philosophical” might say little more than that it is the sort of problem that philosophers have made it their business to discuss. But in the current context it seems to be claiming that philosophers have specialist expertise on the subject. I think that’s why some people interpret it as a “turf” claim, and I think it’s reasonable to question whether philosophers do in fact have significant relevant specialist expertise. No doubt philosophers are better on average than other groups at making arguments, and that may give them some advantage in arguing about God’s existence. But that’s a general skill, and so not a reason for categorising this particular problem as “philosophical”. I think this sort of unhelpful claiming of things for philosophy (or theology) has played a significant part in provoking the contrary claims of Dawkins et al.
Why “philosophical”? Isn’t skepticism important in science too?
I’d like to go back to an early comment from Thomas Jones.
“For lack of a better word, I would say I’m ambivalent with regard to David’s contention. This is reflected in my “like” of both Mark’s and Daniel K’s comments. For example, Mark says in part, “Consigning them to philosophy doesn’t get us very far . . . .” This is suggestive of the “philosophy makes no progress” motif. On the other hand, Daniel K says this in responding to Philip, “[Philosophy] certainly is the discipline that provides the correct frame of reference within which to *discuss* such issues.”
There’s much ground between these statements… ”
Yes there sure is, Here we see the problem of assuming that philosophy does not produce answers. It becomes pointless referring problems to philosophy, so people feel free to form an opinion with no adequate philosophising behind it.
The ground between these statements is there because of the failure of the form of philosophy.that is being cited. We can argue that philosophy is the right place for deciding these questions but this ‘doesn’t get us very far’. True enough. But it would be untrue if we could make some progress in philosophy. So, for me this God issue is just another case of philosophers pfaffing about. (Sorry David). There is no recognition of religion except as dogmatic theism, and no suggestion of how philosophy can help decide these matters. Some idea of evil are daft and some are not and that’s about all we can say. David reject the idea that suffering serves a purpose and is an ineluctable consequence of existence but will have no counter-proof. , .
The only people for whom evil is a problem are those who think that God deliberately created it and had a choice in so doing . I’d rather just ignore such people since they are a small minority and they make no claims to knowledge. They are not truth-seekers. I would recommend the book ‘A Course in Miracles’ for a more intelligent and authoritative but firmly Christian approach to our concepts of God and evil. We don’t have to believe the text was ‘channelled’. Oddly, the view presented would be perfectly consistent with that of all the other sages. Evil would be a human invention. .
EJW and others like him will not face a problem of evil since Buddhist researchers and their like find that for an ultimate view evil, suffering and God.would be unreal. It’s the dogmatic book-lovers with their various conjectural interpretations that cause all these problems. I blame the Church of Rome for cutting Christianity off from its roots, but I’d better not mention this. Oops,
David, thanks for noting I’m good at setting foxes loose. I’m probably *slightly* less skeptical about ev psych than you, or Massimo. And, hence my qualifier of “done right.” To others, all I can do is, as with Thomas, invite you to read Scott Atran or Pascal Boyer, if you’re unfamiliar with them.
Brent, “good” isn’t on a system of 2 polarities, either 100 percent good or 100 percent evil. That’s just one of several things I could note, but it’s enough for now.
Hi David,
But I think you mistake me, I was talking of general reasoning, which is neither science nor philosophy, nor even mathematics, although it might benefit from all of those fields.
I don’t think I would presume to do philosophy any more than I would presume to do science.
Hi Brent,
But we do not need science to tell us that there is great sufferning in the world. So what does science bring to the argument?
Also, in the same vein as I asked David, what is the hypothesis? That a good God would not want to there to be any suffering. Or that a good God would not want there to be as much suffering as we see in the world?
It is easy to show that the first hypothesis is untenable. So you are left to deciding just how much, or what kinds of suffering a good God would permit. These appear to be questions of philosophy.
So even if you could frame the problem of evil as a hypothesis of science, you would still have a heap of philosophy to do before you could frame that hypothesis.
But, having done that philosophy, what does it add to call the last part science?
Hi David,
Insightful post, as well as the generated commentary. Some of what follows is unique to my own cause, which I do hope you’ll consider, though fortunately much of it seems in line both with you and our community.
Though the “problem of evil,” may not be an argument against the supernatural, it does at least suggest to me that if there is a creator with true agency, then it must be an “evil” one. Why? Because the potential extremity of pain and suffering seems inordinately greater than what comes by means of any positive experiences of qualia that I know of. Thus I suspect that years of extremely happy existence could be counterbalanced by mere hours of torture. So while my evidence does suggest that modern theists ought to consider their gods “evil,” apparently it’s more convenient for them to consider their gods “benevolent” (which of course they do). Furthermore, I don’t see why the evidence that I’ve mentioned couldn’t one day become empirically documented. If anyone would like me to discuss how, please do ask!
As far as such quandaries being inherently “philosophy” rather than “science,” I’m fine with you defining it this way, though in the end I do hope for greater phi/sci convergence. It seems to me that there is only one way that the conscious entity has to figure anything out: It takes what it thinks it knows (evidence), and then uses this to assess things that it’s not so sure about (theory). When evidence does continue to stay consistent with theory, theory tends to become accepted. It’s not just the scientist, the philosopher, or even the idiot that uses this essential process to figure things out, but everything that’s conscious. The dog will use this process when it’s trying to figure out if its master has yet returned, for example.
The greatest practical difference I see between science and philosophy today is not “method,” but rather that one has developed a vast array of accepted understandings, while the other has not. Observe that if both science and philosophy explore the nature of reality, and if all of reality does happen to be causally connected, then if there are problems on one side, this should hold back the other in associated ways. I mean to help the ancient study of philosophy gain its own generally accepted understandings, which I believe will help modern science overcome its greatest difficulties.
Hello all,
Glad some of some of you are still with us.
There are several comments about the problem of evil. A few people have contended that in order for the argument to work, there has to be some kind of monolithic or metaphysical notion of “evil”. This is not true. For the purposes of the argument essentially anything that counts as bad for human beings is an “evil”. Whether it is moral evil or “natural” evil, harm that occurs in the world apart from human action, there is some question as to why a beneficent and powerful God would allow it (or forced to include it). Again people on both sides of the argument allow that “evil” as it is used in the argument is heterogeneous, but that is not a fault of the argument. Now I want to say that it is *exactly* these kinds of points which require philosophical thinking. We are asking what the concept evil extends to, how heterogeneous it is and whether that makes a moral difference and why. It is this kind of thinking which requires philosophy.
Brent,
“Then it’s pretty clear that if they had the power to eliminate smallpox at no inconvenience to themselves and simply refused to do so, they would be guilty of a moral evil! ”
Exactly right which is why dividing moral evil from natural evil does little to undermine the argument.
ej,
I’m sorry but I think you had it right the first time. Mackie is not very concerned with the incoherence of theism, indeed his arguments generally assume it is coherent. His treatment of the problem of evil argues that the existence of evil is inconsistent with God not that evil is inconsistent itself. OH! I see what happened. Were you reading about Mackie’s Inventing Right and Wrong? Because that is a very different project where he does argue, as I understand it, that there are not properties such as moral rightness and wrongness. But, to repeat, “evil” in the problem of evil extends beyond moral good and evil (see above).
PeterJ,
“So, for me this God issue is just another case of philosophers pfaffing about. (Sorry David). There is no recognition of religion except as dogmatic theism, and no suggestion of how philosophy can help decide these matters.”
This is simply not true. Mackie himself provides a discussion of whether or not we have reasons to *believe* in God beyond the arguments for the *truth* of claims about God in a different part of the book. Much has been made of such arguments. On the Christian side there is Kant, James and Kierkegaard. On the atheist side Nietzsche, Clifford and Freud. Again I recommend Kitcher’s Life After Faith as a great book along these lines. But I still think arguments about theistic claims is an important part of the debate as I argued above.
“David reject the idea that suffering serves a purpose and is an ineluctable consequence of existence but will have no counter-proof. , .”
First I said above that I did not necessarily disagree that suffering may be ineluctable. Second I don’t think we need a “counter-proof”. The “counter-proof” is life. Do you think, as Richard Swinbourne has argued, that the Holocaust was a net good for humanity because it was an occasion for many people to show compassion? If you want to explain *all* evils in this way, you have to take those kinds of positions.
Philosopher Eric,
“Thus I suspect that years of extremely happy existence could be counterbalanced by mere hours of torture.”
Its an interesting question. Marilyn McCord Adams has argued that there are some evils so great that suffering them could raise the question of the value of an entire life in suffering them.
“When evidence does continue to stay consistent with theory, theory tends to become accepted. It’s not just the scientist”
If you are satisfied with similarties this broad you can always make the case that two different things are really one thing. But that is not how we usually do things, nor is it the most useful way to term things.
“The greatest practical difference I see between science and philosophy today is not “method,” but rather that one has developed a vast array of accepted understandings, while the other has not.”
I’m sorry, but if you think that I think you are vastly underestimating the radically different nature of the two disciplines. IF you want my views you should see my Philosophy and Philosophobia (published here).
Eric wrote:
I do hope for greater phi/sci convergence.
———————-
Given that philosophy and science ask fundamentally different kinds of questions, this is not going to happen.
—————————-
“The greatest practical difference I see between science and philosophy today is not “method,” but rather that one has developed a vast array of accepted understandings, while the other has not”
——————————
I think that this fundamentally misunderstands what philosophy is about, but you and I have been around this merry-go-round before, so I won’t press it.
——————————-
Observe that if both science and philosophy explore the nature of reality…
—————————–
Well, I don’t think that’s what philosophy does, so….
David wrote: “A lot of people are just stating that they do not see how moving the God debate into philosophy helps. This is somewhat dispiriting […] Arguments modeled on science tend to fail because they do not appreciate the subtleties of the concepts and the ambiguities of implication. Philosophical arguments fare better because they are highly responsive to just these issues. If you disagree, it would help me if you would engage the argument and perhaps tell me which part you do not find convincing…”
Well, for a start, you are making all sorts of assumptions about science (using a very narrow definition, I might add) and about philosophy which I think are questionable. Others have made the point that subtle reasoning occurs in a wide variety of human contexts.
What puzzles me particularly is this: you reject theism and yet, conceptually, you seem to be working within a traditional religious framework, using the language of natural theology, etc..
Why are these particular questions important (to an atheist)? Sure, we can talk about the inconsistencies of traditional religious belief, but why are they interesting (to non-believers)?
We agree that the ‘problem of evil’ is a huge problem for traditional believers, but for those who reject theism not only is it not an urgent or important issue, it is simply not an issue at all. Similarly the ‘design’ question these days mainly interests those seeking to defend theism. Admittedly, it does have more general and not just religious interest, but to the extent that it is not a religious question it seems more a scientific than a philosophical one, relating to evolutionary processes for example. (Some scientific questions have a more significant ‘philosophical’ component than others, of course.)
Actually, as “poked” by someone else, the “mu” of Zen Buddhism, as “popularized” (popularized, hell yes!) at Massimo’s Scientia Salon in my saying “mu” to the old “free will vs. determinism” might apply here, too. Some issues aren’t “science vs. philosophy” or “philosophy vs. science.” Yes, philosophers fear the continuing encroachment of the scientism types, but that doesn’t mean that legitimate science that legitimately “informs” philosophy should be the baby tossed out with the bathwater.
Hi again,
I missed some replies so I’m doubling back. Sorry for that.
Alex,
You say “Existence claims: That is a rather strange interpretation of what I wrote.” But earlier you wrote ” I do not think that I trivialise or minimise the importance of philosophy if I observe that the question whether something exists is by the nature of the question squarely in the domain of empirical science, unless one were to talk about extremely esoteric definitions of “exist”. (As in Platonism.)”
“In all cases it invariably goes like this: (1) there is an idea; (2) we can use logic or philosophy to check it for self-contradiction, and if it passes that test we can (3) invest the time to do science to it and look for empirical evidence, and then (4) we can interpret the evidence and discuss its strength using again tools from the toolbox of philosophy.”
One problem with this idea is that if it is meant as a definition of science, it is wildly over inclusive. If I want to see if it rained yesterday I form an idea (non self-contradictory) and go out to see if the ground is wet and infer that it rained last night. No part of that is scientific. Science would appear to be a much more complex and distinctive activity.
Also mathematics, logic and (usually) philosophy do not do (3) or (4). PoE is a great example. We don’t in any real sense go out and look for evil in the world. We know there is evil prior to beginning an enquiry and then examine our beliefs for inconsistency. Also in philosophical arguments there is way more action in (1) and (2) than is almost ever the case in science. These differences are more important than extremely broad over-arching similarities. That is why I stress that these arguments are quite different from scientific ones.
“One problem with this idea is that if it is meant as a definition of science, it is wildly over inclusive. If I want to see if it rained yesterday I form an idea (non self-contradictory) and go out to see if the ground is wet and infer that it rained last night. No part of that is scientific. Science would appear to be a much more complex and distinctive activity.”
That’s where I would disagree. Science is just common sense writ large and pursued relentlessly. It has become complex because it has discovered a lot. But it’s not distinct from everyday testing of an hypothesis by looking out the window. Aristotle thought women had fewer teeth than men. He’s more famous as a philosopher than a scientist because he left out (3). He never bothered to count his wife’s teeth.
I wholeheartedly agree that the abundance of evil is very problematic for the God of the Bible. However, closer examination suggests there are major problems that should caution us against placing too much weight on this argument also.
Evil is defined as that which causes vicarious suffering for humans. The suffering of animals apparently does not count? As predators, we necessarily inflict untold ‘suffering’ on other creatures. We experiment on primates and mammals, for example.
Darwinian evolution depends on speciation through a process of survival of the fittest. That sounds a little ‘evil’, but without this process we would not be here. Without bacteria we could not survive, but often things go wrong. Our advanced ability to suffer, in fact, is the end-result of evolution. An acute sense of pain allows us to be very aware of dangers and injury. Our sense of suffering and struggle are manifestations of our biology; so is our moral outrage when things go wrong.
The concept of evil is exquisitely anthropocentric. The story of Genesis suggests that God created everything with us in mind, but that does not seem reasonable, considering the size and age of the universe, and our arrival a few minutes ago in the cosmic scale of things. There is no reason why our culture could not create a more factually correct foundational myth. Evolution is harsh and unforgiving, nevertheless almost everyone would rather be alive than dead. Evil is not our central concern.
I agree with Brent that science has fundamentally and completely changed the conversation on religion. I also agree with ejwinner that commitment to a faith (in god or some other ontology) is mostly determined by the particular emotional structure of the individual. Such faith plays a central role in the organization of that individual. There are probably emotional factors that determine other commitments in life: to be a scientist, a philosopher, a stock broker, or whatever. Science can be expected to produce new information to inform and clarify these issues. Philosophers are free to chime in too, in response. The conversation is what it is all about.
Mark English wrote:
“Why are these particular questions important (to an atheist)?”
Well for a start and as you may have noticed, there are a few atheists around who want to convince others to their point of view.
You think that the problem of evil is a big problem for believers, but in fact for most believers it is not a big problem. So if one were to want to convince them away from their beliefs then one would have to convince them that it is a big problem. You are imagining believers fretting and biting their fingernails about the problem of evil, but really it does not happen in most cases.
I have put it to people quite often that if they are genuine about their beliefs then they should face this squarely, look at some instance, for example, of a child suffering terribly from some disease and say “God intended that this should happen”, or at the very least “God intended that this could happen”. Never get much interest in that.
Also, and again if this is to convince believers that they are mistaken, then you have to talk in traditional theological terms. As I have pointed out a number of times, it is no point in refuting a belief that no one recognises holding.
On the other hand, if an atheist is not interested in convincing anyone to their point of view then I can’t imagine why they would be interested other than a general interest in people and their beliefs.
On this matter of existence claims and whether they are scientific, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about.
At one level — a relatively superficial one — science is obviously in the business of making existence claims. “There is an asteroid belt in our solar system” is an example of such a claim.
But at a deeper level, existence claims are essentially linguistic in nature. Quine’s “On What There Is” and “Ontological Relativity” and Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” as well as much of the work of the later Wittgenstein all, in their ways, attest to this. Whether or not there are rabbits or rabbity-moments is a matter of which conceptual schemes/analytical hypotheses one employs and these are essentially linguistic in nature.
Hi Brent
“He’s more famous as a philosopher than a scientist because he left out (3). He never bothered to count his wife’s teeth.”
This is a furphy . Aristotle got it wrong because he trusted an incorrect observation, not because he didn’t think testing by observation was necessary.
If you look at Aristotle’s actual words he says that this has been observed in three species and that it has not been observed in other animals yet.
That “yet” clearly shows that he believes further testing is necessary.
Very little of the observational data that we have, has been observed by us personally. How many of us have actually counted our wives’ or husbands’ teeth?
In a way you could say that you (and Bertrand Russell) have also failed (3) because you didn’t go to the primary source and check what Aristotle said.
The atheists I know are not generally sanguine about converting believers. Their intent is to prevent young people from becoming believers. It’s in stage of life between 14 and 20 that people tend to examine the assumptions of religion and culture they’ve learned at their mother’s knee.
Okay David and Daniel, if each of you don’t find it useful to define philosophy as a kind of “reality study,” this is fine with me. In fact I don’t mind adopting whatever definitions you prefer for the term. Daniel has mentioned that the field is best in a purely “critical” capacity, and I certainly do have my own such pet peeves to air. Nevertheless my primary interests do concern reality itself (or “science” I suppose), and thus it’s fortunate for me that the EA isn’t simply about philosophy!
Last comment I mentioned that, yes, the “problem of evil” does suggest to me that if there is a creator with true agency, then it should also be “evil.” This is simply given the potential magnitude for instantaneous suffering over pleasure. I also mentioned that I don’t see why empirically documented evidence couldn’t bear this out, and thus scientifically demonstrate to rational people that any such god would be quite useful to view as “evil.” In fact I believe that this is exactly what will happen some day, though as a side effect from something much greater. So if anyone out there is up for some conceptual science in this regard, then please do let me know. Otherwise I’ll find something to say that has a more critical nature.
[…] TONY: I have found that philosophical approaches [to questions about the existence of God] are very helpful and that approaches modeled on science of really of very little help. On this basis I am happy to conclude that the existence of God is a philosophical and not a scientific question. [ref] […]
David
Me – ” There is no recognition of religion except as dogmatic theism, and no suggestion of how philosophy can help decide these matters.”
Your good self- This is simply not true. Mackie himself provides a discussion of whether or not we have reasons to *believe* in God beyond the arguments for the *truth* of claims about God in a different part of the book. Much has been made of such arguments. On the Christian side there is Kant, James and Kierkegaard. On the atheist side Nietzsche, Clifford and Freud. Again I recommend Kitcher’s Life After Faith as a great book along these lines. But I still think arguments about theistic claims is an important part of the debate as I argued above.”
I’m sorry, but I do quite not see the relevance of this reply. Maybe my point was unclear. The problem of evil is not a problem for religion, it is a problem for people who have an idea of God that clashes with the occurrence of what they choose to call evil.
The whole problem arises from a muddle of unnecessary assumptions. By framing the debate narrowly within a dogmatic theist context we take it our of philosophy and into the realm of superstition and, imho, waffle. If we approach the problem from within philosophy we see immediately that we have no idea what we mean by ‘God’ or ‘evil’ and the problem becomes difficult to even define.
Let us complain about dogmatism and the problems it causes, but let’s not take them on board unexamined in philosophy. There is no problem of evil unless we define God and evil so as to create one. The presence of so much earthly suffering tells us something about God, if there is such a thing, and this seems about all that can be said other than that it renders some ideas of God ridiculous. .
Because all the talk is of commonplace theism the problem appears difficult.But it is a problem for commonplace theism ,not for philosophy. The Principle of Charity suggests we should not take the least plausible view of God as our target, nor worry much about the problems it creates. I see the article (in itself) as a good account of the problems facing one particular naive conjectural concept of God, but does anyone here hold such a view?
I would suggest that moving the problem into philosophy would mean watching it evaporate. . .
— “First I said above that I did not necessarily disagree that suffering may be ineluctable. Second I don’t think we need a “counter-proof”. The “counter-proof” is life. Do you think, as Richard Swinbourne has argued, that the Holocaust was a net good for humanity because it was an occasion for many people to show compassion? If you want to explain *all* evils in this way, you have to take those kinds of positions.”
I don’t believe in evil so do not need to explain it, and can easily reconcile suffering with my notion of God. I don;t worry about trying to convince, say, evangelical protestants who have no interest in philosophy since they are unreachable.
Life means death. The only way to avoid suffering would therefore be to avoid living, as mysticism proposes.
Just giving another view – please don’t feel obliged to respond. There’s a lot going on here.
History indicates that human concepts of God have been falsified repeatedly through the application of common sense. For example, Rome was inhabited by hundreds of gods, even families had their own. Then the Christians arrived and 300 years later a tripartite monism became the official creed. So much simpler or parsimonious. But this god has also been manipulated over time so that today no feature ascribed to God remains unquestioned. Intelligence (science, philosophy and common sense) has done its job – and we are the better for it.
What we are left with is a contradiction. We observe ourselves in this vast universe but all is ultimately inexplicable. Human moments of love, beauty and truth seem to make it right.
Hi all,
PeterJ,
I took you to be saying that philosophy of religion can only deal with factual religious claims about the world (I went back and looked at what you wrote before again and it still strikes me that that is what you were saying). I said that was false because philosophy has many great arguments on why people believe as well as ways to engage emotions around their belief. Part of philosophy of religion is debating factual theological claims, but only part.
As to your claim that I am presupposing some “dogma” to be held by the other side, my target here is theism. All theisms posit some creator God who could make creation in various ways and is morally extremely admirable if not perfect. This is true even of “open” theisms which do not necessarily posit the omni-perfect and necessary God of tradition. If it is a dogma it is not mine. If you have a different view, that is fine but that is not the view addressed by the argument. (Also I am not sure that your view–so far as I understand it–is different in any way that helps. See, if you like, my prior challenge about other kinds of suffering.)
Liam,
“Evil is defined as that which causes vicarious suffering for humans. The suffering of animals apparently does not count?”
Ah. You are right. I should not have said harm only to humans. Animals suffer “natural evil” as well. There is actually a great deal of discussion about this in the literature. One of the most famous papers about this in the past 50 years is William Rowe’s “The Evidential Argument From Evil” which asks theists to justify why a deer would be allowed to die in a forest fire.
Brent,
“That’s where I would disagree. Science is just common sense writ large and pursued relentlessly.”
There are several things wrong with this. It is just wildly out of step with how the word “science” is used including by scientists. It also does not do justice to how science emerges or what it achieves. Phlogistic chemists and geocentrists had common sense (and no they were not merely superstitious and not fully critical, Herbert Butterfield and Thomas Kuhn put that old condescension permanently to bed.) It took a great deal more than “ruthless” common sense to get chemistry, physics and biology going as sciences. My mother taught graduate students to do biological research. She kept me periodically informed of their bumblings and misstarts. Learning to be a scientist means learning more than just “common sense” or any simple “method”.
“Aristotle thought women had fewer teeth than men. He’s more famous as a philosopher than a scientist because he left out (3). He never bothered to count his wife’s teeth.”
I want to find whoever started this meme and kick him in the shin. Aristotle, as others pointed, out did a great deal of observing both of animals and foreign human societies. Also when concerned with non-empirical claims we do not decline to go out and gather evidence because we are lazy but because there is no evidence to get. Where should I go to get “evidence” that modus ponens is a good argument form?
Mark,
“you are making all sorts of assumptions about science (using a very narrow definition, I might add) and about philosophy which I think are questionable.”
I am not making assumptions, I am making contentions with arguments. I said the following: “Scientific arguments generally deal not with how beliefs cohere with one another, but how they agree with the empirical evidence. They are driven by the nature of the evidence, not the content of the concepts. They are highly responsive to new empirical evidence. Supposition and a priori reasoning is meant to be used sparingly if at all.” Which of these is mistaken?
“What puzzles me particularly is this: you reject theism and yet, conceptually, you seem to be working within a traditional religious framework, using the language of natural theology, etc..”
I don’t quite understand how my framework is religious. Of course it does use terms like “natural theology” because that is the substance of the view I am arguing against.
“Why are these particular questions important (to an atheist)? Sure, we can talk about the inconsistencies of traditional religious belief, but why are they interesting (to non-believers)?”
Because I live in a democracy that is 85% Christian. Because I want good, democratic debate and critical thinking. Because most of my fellow citizens get their morality, dogmatically, from their religion and not from moral philosophy and that will probably continue to be the case until Christianity is challenged more effectively. Because I want people to understand atheists and why they believe as they do.
“to the extent that it is not a religious question it seems more a scientific than a philosophical one”
I just argued at length about why I think this is mistaken. If you tell me where you think my argument is unsatisfying maybe I can help, but not really otherwise.
David Ottlinger,
Yes, and “as in” is generally understood to indicate that an example follows. I will admit I overlooked mathematics as another form of studying abstract concepts.
But essentially what you are saying is this. While thinking critically about gods is automatically philosophy, looking at evidence is not automatically science, and if we are using evidence that has been gathered “prior to beginning an enquiry” we can completely ignore that that evidence still had to be gathered at some point. That is very convenient for your argument. However, if that is really what the discussion is about then it reduces to different circumscriptions of what counts as science, and thus it would a bit much to claim that Stenger was mistaken. At most you could claim that he was using a different, equally legitimate definition.
This squabbling about the definition of science is not in itself very productive. So perhaps let me consider your observation that the exploration of god(s) tends to take the shape of endless philosophical and apologetic discussions rather than straightforward examination of empirical evidence. Why is that so? Is it because that is the nature of the question? Or is it perhaps simply because the quests for relevant evidence have consistently failed? As a thought experiment, does anybody really believe we would be having these rarefied discussions if a Catholic priest praying in Latin could heal people from cancer, regrow lost limbs and call rains of fire down onto the armies of non-Catholic countries? If angels or demons could be summoned into magical circles to provide testable information that would not otherwise be available? If there was no evidence for the existence of the planet before 4004 BCE, and somewhere in the Middle East was a portal guarded by an invincible angel with a sword of fire?
I think we all know the answer. The only dodge is the usual “but what if it is just aliens messing with us?”, but that kind of brain in a tank solipsism never leads anywhere.
Daniel Kaufman,
You could just as well argue that “at a deeper level”, existence claims are essentially mathematical because we have to count if there is one or zero. Again, trying to claim everything for the one’s favourite intellectual exercise while wiping those of other fields off the table isn’t useful. As long as you want to figure out what is out there in the world you can’t do without empirics either, end of story, and the question is just whether you redefine looking at empirical evidence as “not science”.
What is more, and without doubting that the clarification of concepts is essential, we can discuss whether there is a wall or a wallity-moment until we turn blue, but if we try to walk through we will still bump our noses. It exists as a matter of empirical reality regardless of the word games of armchair reasoning, and as a wasp can’t fly through the wall it exists materially even to organisms that do not have a language, much less an understanding of ontology.
Robin Herbert wrote (in response to my question to David about what interest or importance atheists or non-believers might find in theological issues like the problem of evil):
“… [I]f an atheist is not interested in convincing anyone to their point of view then I can’t imagine why they would be interested other than a general interest in people and their beliefs.”
Thanks for that. You seem to see the matter more or less as I do.
“You are imagining believers fretting and biting their fingernails about the problem of evil… ”
Well, you are imagining I am imagining this, but I readily acknowledge that many who claim to believe in the Christian God seem to be totally unfazed by what I happen to see as a big problem for them.
I am probably less inclined than you appear to be to raise this matter with them however!
David, I wish you would elaborate on this part in a remark you made above, “Because I want people to understand atheists and why they believe as they do.” This position frequently comes up in discussions between theists and atheists. Would you say, for example, that a theist could not endorse secular humanism on the one hand while also being a theist on the other? Or would a theist have to describe himself. as many do, as simply a humanist? Or, are you simply engaging fundamentalist or evangelical Christians who sometimes characterize humanists as being atheists. There seem to be misbegotten political undertones here.
This is comment #3 for me here, and the recap is that I’ve decided to no longer reference any existence claims under “philosophy.” Thus the essential nature of good/bad for us, or the dynamics of consciousness, or even how we might usefully judge a divine creator, shall instead be referenced under the field of “science.” Conversely philosophers shall frame questions and ponder their coherence against others, not suggest answers. The field from my definition shall essentially provide needed criticism on a host of topics, by means of language and logic.
As such, the contribution to philosophy which I’m most hopeful about, concerns my ideas on the nature of definition. The heuristic would be that we must not ask “What is/are…” anything. For example, I see no “true” definitions for the terms “philosophy,” “consciousness,” “life,” “mass,” “two,” or any others. Instead I see more and less “useful” definitions in respect to their associated arguments. If accepted, theorists would then be free to design their terms however they deem appropriate, while critics would formally be in error for disputing them.
I’ll certainly take questions and comments about this position, though let me remind you that I did earlier leave something else one the table. I believe that the PoE will one day become empirically validated, though I’ve decided to not specifically describe how, without formally being asked.
Hi David
“All theisms posit some creator God who could make creation in various ways and is morally extremely admirable if not perfect.”
Well, not in my world. In my world it would not be correct to say that God exists or does not exist, and He would have all properties and no properties, and created phenomenon would be unreal . I mention this just to suggest that the issue may be far more subtle than it appears to be when we stick to discussing folk-theism. I sometimes think that religious discussion must be very difficult in the US, so dominant and vocal are the dogmatic sects and their preachers that they create an opposition in their own image. Must be the tax-breaks.
Would not the question of whether God is a scientific hypothesis depend entirely on whether the hypothesis makes any testable predictions for science? This would be a matter of fact. If some particular idea of God implies no scientific predictions then it cannot be scientific. So wouldn’t the essay title be a case-by-case question, depending on how we are defining God in each case?
David
You say you don’t make assumptions. *Everybody* makes assumptions. I have trouble with a lot of the philosophical literature precisely because I balk at certain (often implicit) claims or assumptions on which arguments are often predicated.
Typically, at almost every step I want to jump in and object. (I am speaking generally here.) It is not relaxing that’s for sure…
The first example of this in your piece came very early. You quote Mackie, who talked about this issue as basically a logical one, and you immediately want to replace ‘logical’ with ‘philosophical’ on the basis that logic equals formal logic. It may do in philosophical circles, but my guess is that Mackie was just using the word in its ordinary English sense. I haven’t read the book, but I have read other works of his and I know he is a careful writer and I suspect he meant precisely what he said. This is the sort of thing I mean. You have certain strong views (assumptions?) about the nature and role of philosophy which – how shall I put it? – colours your arguments.
Why not just accept that there are *different* ways of viewing philosophy and its relationship with scientific and other modes of thinking?
Thanks for answering my key question clearly and directly. I had thought that cultural factors were playing a part, and so it appears.
You wrote that you are interested in these questions…
“Because I live in a democracy that is 85% Christian. Because I want good, democratic debate and critical thinking. Because most of my fellow citizens get their morality, dogmatically, from their religion and not from moral philosophy and that will probably continue to be the case until Christianity is challenged more effectively. Because I want people to understand atheists and why they believe as they do.”
I get it now. You are not interested in the questions themselves because you have reached your own conclusions on these matters (as I have reached my own – probably similar – conclusions). You are mainly interested in discussing them as a means to change the moral thinking etc. of others (and so that others will understand and so presumably be more accepting of atheists and the atheistic point of view).
My main concern with what you say here relates to the assumption that ‘moral philosophy’ is/should be a (the?) major source of morality. I think this view is seriously mistaken – but I agree with you that taking morality from Christian doctrines, etc. is not the way to go either.
I also have reservations about seeing philosophy as a means to a particular end. I think it cheapens it. Philosophical thinking should always (I’m sure you agree) remain radically open (as science and music and art and literature are open).
[This is a general response focusing on my main question. I can certainly elaborate if you like. I may put something together to address your other points also, but a comprehensive response would probably be inappropriate for this format (too drawn out). There is a lot going on in this thread as it is. Congratulations on precipitating a very rich and interesting discussion.]
I know this is not about the problem of evil, but as it has come up quite a lot, I thought I would put my non-scientist, non-philosopher, non-theologian thinking on the subject.
The first point is that if there was a God as I have defined above then obviously she could create a world without suffering.
She could create a world of free, happy and fulfilled beings who had never known suffering and which never will. *
But she could never create it for an individual such as me, because I am a.vulnerable, fallible being and in any world in which I inhabit there is always the possibility for some suffering, even if not the intensity and type of suffering we see in this world. (You may say that God could always protect vulnerable beings but that would simply be the same as them being invulnerable).
So the next question is, do we, fallible, vulnerable creatures have value? We can take the value we see in people as evidence of that.
So the first premise is:
There are some things of value which could not be achieved without there being at least some suffering.
Then I ask, suppose all the value in this world could be achieved and the worst suffering that would befall would be the equivalent of a stubbed toe. Would it be better that none of the good things in this world had never happened rather than someone suffer something like a stubbed toe? Again, obviously not.
So I have my second premise:
There are some kinds of value which would be worth at least some suffering.
But of course the suffering in this world is of many, many orders of magnitude greater than that.
But it seems to me that if I am to confidently say that the problem of evil falsified God I must overcome these premises, so.I must say:
1. There is no kind of value that could not be achieved without the kind of suffering that exists in the world and;
2. There is no kind of value that would be worth that suffering.
I don’t see how I could possibly know that, with my limited understanding.
I am not sure how science or philosophy or anything could establish that.
So from my point of view we might say that, cetrera paribus, Naturalism is the better explanation of the suffering of the world.
But if you are going to talk of it as a problem, or falsification then you would need to have a supporting argument to those points.J
—–
* NB Please don’t reply as though I had said she couldn’t create such a world. Just forestalled the inevitable clarification
“1. There is no kind of value that could not be achieved without the kind of suffering that exists in the world and;
2. There is no kind of value that would be worth that suffering.
I don’t see how I could possibly know that, with my limited understanding.
I am not sure how science or philosophy or anything could establish that.
So from my point of view we might say that, cetrera paribus, Naturalism is the better explanation of the suffering of the world.
But if you are going to talk of it as a problem, or falsification then you would need to have a supporting argument to those points.J”
The argument against (1) is simple: God is omnipotent so there need be no nomological connection between suffering events and achieved values.
As for (2) what kind of value is achieved by the suffering of a twelve year old girl, the daughter of a friend of mine, who died from leukemia in agony that even morphine couldn’t relieve.
Sure there’s value that that can only be achieved with the possibility of suffering. There would be no value in competitive games if you couldn’t lose. I race motorcycles for sport and part of the sport is the possibility of getting hurt. But those are risks taken voluntarily. My friends daughter didn’t volunteer.
Well gang, to all good things must come an end. Thank you all for an interesting discussion.
Thomas,
For one thing many Christian see atheists as being disingenuous or see their disbelief as issuing from a place of resentment or anger at God. Calmly laying out why atheists think the way they do should at least help to rectify that. Some people also have difficulty understanding how atheists have values and morals, so explaining what moral philosophy is and how we get values from it could help with that also. By definition a theist cannot be a secular humanist but, yes, can be a humanist. I want to engage whoever is interested which, again, going by the many churches, lecture halls and other places that are filled when this stuff is debated, I imagine that is quite a few people.
Eric,
“This is comment #3 for me here, and the recap is that I’ve decided to no longer reference any existence claims under “philosophy.” Thus the essential nature of good/bad for us, or the dynamics of consciousness, or even how we might usefully judge a divine creator, shall instead be referenced under the field of “science.” Conversely philosophers shall frame questions and ponder their coherence against others, not suggest answers. The field from my definition shall essentially provide needed criticism on a host of topics, by means of language and logic.”
I will inform the philosophers of your decision.
“As such, the contribution to philosophy which I’m most hopeful about, concerns my ideas on the nature of definition”
That is a place where philosophy is quite useful. Wittgenstein’s comments have had quite a lot of influence.
PeterJ,
I am not sure I understand your theology, but it sounds to me like it is not a traditional theism which doesn’t make it wrong, just outside the scope of my argument.
“I sometimes think that religious discussion must be very difficult in the US, so dominant and vocal are the dogmatic sects and their preachers that they create an opposition in their own image. Must be the tax-breaks.”
You are not wrong.
“So wouldn’t the essay title be a case-by-case question, depending on how we are defining God in each case?”
Maybe. The age of the Earth is verifiable. So I guess you can directly refute a God who is defined, in part, as having created the world 6,000 years ago. Feels like a bit of a cop out though. (Is his having created the world when he did really part of the *definition*? On the whole though, most conceptions of God will need to be argued philosophically for the reasons I tried to outline.
Mark,
“*Everybody* makes assumptions.”
You can’t think I don’t know this. What I said was that I was not making assumptions about the general characteristics of science I gave. I was prepared to defend them, but so far you havent issued any challenges.
“This is the sort of thing I mean. You have certain strong views (assumptions?) about the nature and role of philosophy which – how shall I put it? – colours your arguments.”
Views. Not assumptions. I am not “assuming” what philosophy is like, I am making statements about what it is like having immersed myself in the subject for several years and having read it my entire life. I have also studied some significant science as well as the history and philosophy of science so I make some claim to knowing what that is like. I have tried to motivate these views at length, none of which, so far, you have engaged so I am a bit at a loss as to address your concerns. Also I do not understand why you “balk” at a small and essentially lexical point about what is most helpfully termed “logical”.
“My main concern with what you say here relates to the assumption that ‘moral philosophy’ is/should be a (the?) major source of morality.”
Again this is not an assumption, it’s a conviction after much study.
Brent,
Sorry to hear about your experience, but I agree with you entirely. There is no justifying such events.
And Dan, I thought rabbity-moments was so much better than spatio-temporal slices of rabbit. I will use that forever after.
Brent
“The argument against (1) is simple: God is omnipotent so there need be no nomological connection between suffering events and achieved values.”
I am not sure if you actually read what I said, or just skimmed. Are you saying that omnipotence mean that God could produce a world without suffering, which was populated by fallible, vulnerable beings?
“As for (2) what kind of value is achieved by the suffering of a twelve year old girl, the daughter of a friend of mine, who died from leukemia in agony that even morphine couldn’t relieve.”
I am sorry for your friends and their daughter, but I am not sure why you think that question relates to (2). I didn’t say “achieved by”, nor was that implied.
So if your question was about (2) then it should have been, “What sort of value would be worth that sort of suffering?”
If your question was about (1) then it should have been “What sort of value could not have been achieved without this suffering? ”
In both cases I don’t know, but I don’t know that there is not that kind of value.
And I was, of course, referring to unchosen suffering throughout, not chosen suffering That should have been obvious from the context
David, would it be wrong to suggest that you have perhaps drifted far afield of your thesis in some of your remarks? I don’t want to mistakenly attribute to you the sort of resentment and proselytising that I find underlying some of Brent’s remarks or that many theists also engage in. I happen to be an agnostic, BTW.
You note: “Some people also have difficulty understanding how atheists have values and morals, so explaining what moral philosophy is and how we get values from it could help with that also.” Certainly, you are far too intelligent not to detect a somewhat condescending tone here, aren’t you? Those “some people,” I suppose are theists, many of whom–like some atheists–it’s true have not really given much thought to values and morals, or moral philosophy, apart from those espoused by their religious affiliations. At the same time, I think you’ll agree that many theists have devoted considerable time and energy to exploring moral philosophy and still choose to be theists. So your target audience would be?
As for the subject of humanism, it is notable that today’s secular humanist movement places, IMO, far greater emphasis on scientific theory and empiric evidence than it does on philosophic argumentation in explaining its positions. Consequently, an historic figure that might have been described as Renaissance humanist and a theist is merely someone who suffered the misfortune of being born too early to be acquainted with or fully appreciate Darwin or much scientific discovery in the past two centuries.
I take a “world” to be a sequence of related states. An omnipotent God can make state X follow state Y independent of any rules or causal laws. So having a cell mutate to become a leukemia cell can be followed by that cell disappearing. Can an omnipotent God make a world without suffering populated by human beings? Religions that postulate an omnipotent God generally suppose He creates a heaven.
Your contrasting value being achieved through suffering and what sort would be worth the suffering seems like a distinction without a difference. It can only be worth the suffering if the value couldn’t be achieved without the suffering. But it appears that neither of us can think of a value that would redeem the suffering of my friends daughter. But because it’s about “God” we let theologians imagine there could be an excuse – in a way we wouldn’t consider for a second if she’d been the victim of a serial killer. That, I think is the point of the New Atheism; religious ideas aren’t given special exemptions.
Thanks for the response, David. You imply you are done with the discussion so perhaps this is not the time for me to deal in any comprehensive way with the issues we have been discussing. I hope we shall have opportunities in the future to pursue the main issues further.
Let me just deal with a couple of points from your last comment.
Re. assumptions. My original claim was that you were “making all sorts of assumptions about science (using a very narrow definition, I might add) and about philosophy which I think are questionable.”
There is a misunderstanding here. I was not referring to the explicit definition you quote, but rather to the implicit definition which I discerned to lie behind many of your claims.
For example, I was thinking of a comment up-thread in which you said that “the disciplines that do have a lot to tell us about religion (history, sociology, religious studies) are not sciences.” I take the social sciences – like sociology – to be sciences. Your view here just seemed unnecessarily narrow.
But my point was concerned with claims or assumptions (I used both words, I think) about science and philosophy, not just science.
You express surprise that I ‘balk’ at a mere lexical point. But this relatively trivial-seeming point is emblematic of the problems which I (and some others here apparently) see with the view of philosophy which is implicit in much of what you say. You say it is a considered view and I am not disputing this. Rather I am saying that your claims, while explicitly liberal, are potentially quite the opposite of liberal (in a couple of important senses of this word). They are not, in my opinion, sufficiently open to other perspectives and so – ironically – they could be seen to reflect elements of the dogmatisms you are attacking. We all need to accept, I think, that there is no one correct way of understanding philosophy and its relation to other modes of thinking, nor with dealing with complex practical or moral questions.
This is not to say that philosophical thinking (whether done by analytic philosophers, other types of philosopher, or non-philosophers) doesn’t have an important role to play in clarifying scientific, practical and moral issues.
But logic and morality are deeply woven into the fabric of human existence and transcend the (inevitably arbitrary) boundaries of any specific academic discipline or disciplines.
David I’m sure you know that when your name pops up on the screen, I do pay particular interest. This post, as well as the one on “Philosophobia,” have been both informative for me, as well as great fun. If you’re out for this one, well I do eagerly await your future contributions!
For those who would nevertheless continue on however, you may note that I’ve left a sizable meatball the table. Perhaps most have decided not to have me cash this in, since I’d probably just make a fool of myself. Thanks for the concern! I do see that there are five days left for this one however, though I’d at least hope for any of the less compassionate out there, to get moving — I haven’t actually prepared anything. So then how is it that I believe science will ultimately take the philosopher’s PoE, and empirically bear this out? Hmm…
AlexSL wrote:
You could just as well argue that “at a deeper level”, existence claims are essentially mathematical because we have to count if there is one or zero. Again, trying to claim everything for the one’s favourite intellectual exercise while wiping those of other fields off the table isn’t useful. As long as you want to figure out what is out there in the world you can’t do without empirics either, end of story, and the question is just whether you redefine looking at empirical evidence as “not science”.
—————————————————————
Well, until your ready to engage with the actual arguments offered in works like the one’s I cited, this really isn’t very resopnsive. Saying that it’s nothing more than “trying to claim everything for my favorite intellectual exercise” is also unresponsive — and unfair.
You speak uncritically of “empirical evidence” but that’s exactly the point. One’s empirical evidence is of objects and events, all of which fall under various concepts, employing various — and distinct — principles of individuation. Working out how all of this works is the job of philosophers — and specifically philosophers of language and contemporary researchers in metaphysics. They are not, in themselves, empirical questions. Nothing empirical is going to settle the questions Quine raises in “Translation and Meaning” and “Ontological Relativity,” for they inquire beyond the point of empirical discrimination.
Accounts of ontological commitment and the ontological role of linguistic frames of reference is something on which philosophers have written quite a lot. It’s not something that physicists or botanists write about at all.
Philosopher Eric wrote:
I’ve decided to no longer reference any existence claims under “philosophy.”
————————————————————————–
Er…ok. Nonetheless, ontology is a branch of philosophy.
Daniel Kaufman,
Maybe I misunderstood you, but you did not seem to argue merely that working out how concepts work is the job of philosophy, which I would agree with as long as it is understood that no scientist or mathematician can do their job without doing a bit of that also, and that that does not by itself make their job philosophy. But the point of the discussion here is what the existence question of god is, and to me it is the same kind of question as whether gravity or horses exist, i.e. one that would be squarely in the realm of natural history if not for the fact that too many people don’t like the answer that natural history has already provided.
David, thanks for spelling out the differences between humanism and secular humanism.
Second, per comments back and forth, tis true your focus is on theism. This gets indirectly at a few of the foxes I set loose; I think others posted thoughts kind of along those lines. Per the old Star Trek episode, if I met “Apollo” today here on earth, or on an alien planet, no, he wouldn’t be god in my book.
Per Peter J and others, given that, say, Theravada Buddhism is even less amenable to not only scientific, but also to philosophical discourse, why should be even bother? An immaterial life force, but not a personal soul, is reincarnated, you say? How do you put that under either a philosophical or a scientific magnifying glass, other than reversing the polarity on Hume’s idea of “I sleep easy at night” and scoffing at the idea?
AlexSL:
That’s why I distinguished between the surface level at which existence claims operate — and with respect to which you are, of course correct — and the deeper level, at which ontological questions are clearly linguistic in nature.
To a philosopher, the question of the existence of god likely is, unsurprisingly, a philosophical question. If the philosopher happens to be an atheist, as is most often the case, god will likely be liquidated.
To most scientists, in most fields, the question of the ultimate nature of things (ontology/metaphysics) hinges on the data, less on philosophical/linguistic analysis. (Nota bene Ph. Eric.) All the data collected so far have severely under-cut the historical non-scientific narratives, both religious and philosophic. Stenger, Dawkins and others have effectively presented the evidence against those primitive gods. However, Intelligent Design and pan-psychism still inspire some scientists and others to speculate about god. There is no scientific field of deology since a possible substrate of god has not yet been identified.
To almost all theologians, the question of God’s existence, is a theological one. Religion is a field that I have not paid much attention to, and I hope to correct the omission, but it apparently predates science and philosophy by millennia. It seems to be a mostly intuitive theory of everything, and the struggle between good (God) and evil (Devil) is an important component of the system. These fundamental belief systems can have very powerful social effects by promoting or inhibiting certain behaviors – sometimes in most disconcerting ways.
So what is one to do? We all have to make decisions every day and act accordingly, whether one is a professional researcher, as above, or not. Information is always incomplete and unreliable. Nevertheless, we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, whether we like it or not. All those dead great thinkers of the past are now mute and unable to guide us. Each new generation has so much more information to deal with, and the problems have become more complex. We are obliged to be ‘maximally eclectic’.
What do I do? I try to be honest with myself, fair to others, be diligent and open to all relevant information. But in the end, I rely on my own judgment. To rely on the judgment of others is very unwise.