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IS EVERYTHING PERMITTED? ATHEISM VS. THE DIVINE COMMAND THEORY

10/4/2017

It’s a common claim that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. In particular, those who accept some form of the Divine Command Theory (DCT) tend to say this. It’s not true, of course — but given what their theory implies, it is rather ironic that proponents of DCT claim such a thing.

On the traditional DCT, God determines right and wrong by issuing commands. Moreover, from a moral standpoint, these commands have to be arbitrary. (If they weren’t — if there were some moral reason why God commands one thing rather than another — then there would be something other than God’s commands making things right or wrong.) But this arbitrariness means that, morally speaking, God can command anything he wants. There are no moral rules preventing him from doing so. It is therefore in principle possible for God to permit anything. It follows that on the traditional DCT, anything might be permitted.

Nor is this problem entirely solved by modified DCT. Modified theorists say that God’s nature is such that he can only command those things that are compatible with his nature. Thus, they may argue that God is by nature a loving being — and therefore that we can say that cruelty, for example, will never be permitted.

However, if the most fundamental principle of modified DCT is that it is God’s nature that determines what is good, then it follows that that is the case even if theists are wrong about what that nature is. But in that case, they must admit that it is possible that they are wrong about what might be permitted. In other words, if what makes something right is that it is a command that follows from God’s nature, and theists might be mistaken about that nature, then they cannot rule out anything being permitted.

At this point, some theists might of course reply that they cannot be wrong about God's nature. And yet, these are the same people who on other occasions say that no one can truly understand God's ways. Or who, when something bad happens, say that God must have had his reasons — reasons which he obviously has kept from us. But then God may also have a reason to hide his true nature from us.

It appears that it is the DCT, then, and not atheism, that creates this kind of problem for morality.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

ROY MOORE

9/28/2017

Roy Moore, the controversial former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, famous for his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building, is now a nominee for the U.S. Senate. In case some here aren’t all that familiar with him, here are some of his views:

The “pursuit of happiness” refers to following the commandments, since “you can’t be happy unless you follow God’s law.”

Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress.

Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” is something that can be said of America today, since among other things we now have gay marriage.

“Homosexual conduct should be illegal.”

9/11 was God punishing America.

"Religion" in the constitution means "Christianity," since that is what the framers meant by it. (This implies that the freedom of religion is exclusively about Christianity, though Moore denied claiming such a thing.)

He also claims to have a “personal belief” that Obama was not born in the U.S.

It’s a sobering thought that he won his party’s nomination, not in spite of such views, but because of them.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

EMPIRICAL PROOF THAT CHRISTIANITY IS FALSE?

9/19/2017

Split-brain patients are individuals who have had the corpus callosum (which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain) severed. This causes the individual to have two centers of both perceptual and motor activity. Each side of the brain may give a different answer to the same question.

In the video clip below, neurologist V. S. Ramachandran discusses a split-brain patient whose right hemisphere believed in God and whose left hemisphere did not. Now, I don’t know if the individual in this case was Christian. But it is not at all unlikely. After all, he was a patient in the United States. And if he was and what he is saying is true, then “standard” Christianity (at least) cannot be true. For according to that view, (1) each human being is/has exactly one soul; (2) anyone who accepts Jesus is saved; (3) anyone who knowingly fails to accept Jesus throughout their entire life isn’t saved; and (4) anyone can continue in their non-acceptance of Jesus as long as they live. But if this patient is Christian, then he has accepted Jesus and can continue to knowingly reject Jesus until he dies. And then what will happen to his soul?

Even if this patient is, say, a Hindu, his case provides strong evidence against the standard Christian view. For the fact that he exists means it must be possible for the same thing to happen to a Christian.

Split brain with one half atheist and one half theist

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

SMART PEOPLE SAYING STUPID THINGS

9/13/2017

Loftus’s observation that faith makes smart people say stupid things ["Don Camp is Our Gullible/Deluded/Anti-Intellectual Person of the Day!"] reminded me of two instances of this I’d previously come across. The first involves Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. As some here may already know, Collins, a geneticist and defender of evolutionary theory, “knelt in the dewy grass… and surrendered to Jesus Christ” as a result of seeing “a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall” while hiking in the Cascade Mountains. That he considers a purely emotional reaction like that as a reason for accepting the claims of Christianity shows just how unscientific a scientist can be. (How would he respond to someone who denied evolution based on nothing more than emotion?)

Collins was also convinced by C. S. Lewis’s “liar, lunatic or Lord” argument. Most readers here are probably familiar with this very weak argument: Lewis says that one cannot call Jesus merely a great moral teacher. For, if he wasn’t who he claimed to be, then he was either lying or deluded. “Either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.” So the only options are liar, lunatic, or Lord. But of course there is a fourth option: that Jesus didn’t claim to be God at all. Thus the choices really are liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend (and in fact, probably a mixture of three of these).

Lewis’s argument is obviously flawed and very easy to refute — and yet Collins fell for it. Why? I think the answer is clear: because he wanted to believe it.

My second example comes from William F. Buckley’s Nearer, My God. Buckley, father of the modern conservative movement, was — whatever you may think of him — obviously very smart. It is therefore fascinating seeing him try to defend claims that are clearly unfounded.

One such claim is that of miracles at Lourdes. Buckley points out that nonbelievers (like one reportedly sent by a French “anti-religious organization") have attempted to discredit the process by which miracles are verified — sometimes even by faking illnesses and then claiming cures. And yet, they all have failed, he informs us, for the process is very strict: “there are no tribunals in existence more skeptical than those through which you need to pass if your claim is to have been cured of illness at Lourdes.” In fact, although millions of pilgrims have visited the sanctuary, “fewer than one hundred ‘cures’ have been certified by the Church as miraculous.” So you see, the verified ones must have been the genuine article.

It never appears to have dawned on Buckley that odds this bad, though supporting the argument that the process of verification is strict, completely fail to support the claim of miracles in the first place. A "miracle" here just means that “there is no known or hypothetical scientific explanation” for what the doctors have observed. The patient simply got better. But since cases of spontaneous remission of disease do occur from time to time, the fact that some of these occurred to people who visited Lourdes — and at a rate that does not appear to be greater than for others — proves exactly nothing.

And why did Buckley fail to see this? Once again, it seems the reason is that he wanted to believe. Buckley admits that his visit to Lourdes left him “profoundly affected” — maybe as much as Collins was by the frozen waterfall. In other words, his emotions got in the way of his better judgement.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

"GOD CAN DO ANYTHING"

9/3/2017

As a sort-of follow up to my previous post, one more comment related to the problem of evil:

According to some believers, God can do anything – and that means literally anything. He can make square circles, married bachelors, and even non-Catholic Popes! In these people's opinion, to say that God is omnipotent is to say that logical impossibility is no obstacle to his power.

And it’s often hard to convince them otherwise. I used to teach philosophy, and I remember several former students who were adamant on this point – including two who became visibly upset when I argued that not even God could make a married bachelor. Their suspicion that I was an atheist probably had something to do with it (though my pointing out that it’s common for Christian theologians to agree with me didn’t help).

It’s instructive to ask these people what they think of the problem of evil. Usually, they will offer one of the standard replies, such as the free-will defense. In other words, they will say that there is evil in the world because God gave us freedom. But of course if God can do what these people claim, then, even if it is logically impossible, he can give us freedom and make it the case that no one ever does the wrong thing. And the same goes for any other reason God might allow evil. Whatever the believer offers as an excuse (“evil exists because of X”), the reply can be, “according to your view, God could have made the world both with X and without evil.”

Even after having this pointed out to them, many of these true believers refuse to change their minds. One of the two students who had initially became upset, however, did admit a few weeks later that God could not create married bachelors after all: he had asked his pastor about it!

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

A NEW ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

8/24/2017

[Another post from Debunking Christianity]

The problem of evil is well known: How can there be an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good god if there is evil? The kind of reply most theists give is also familiar to most: Evil is not incompatible with God provided there is some reason for allowing that evil – for instance, in order to prevent something even worse happening. It is only gratuitous evil – evil for which there is no moral justification – that would pose a problem. And most theists appear to be confident that one cannot show that gratuitous evil exists. No matter what example one brings up – whether it’s that of a disease, a war, some natural disaster, or what have you – they think there is some possible explanation as to why God might allow it.

I think it’s actually pretty easy to show that there is gratuitous evil, however.

All the theist has to grant me is that animals sometimes experience pain from which they derive no benefit. Theists are of course free to deny such a thing. But how many would do so (at least before hearing my argument)? It’s obvious that there are many animals that experience pain – their behavior and the similarity of their physiology to our own attest to this fact. It’s also obvious that in many cases, their pain does not serve them any purpose. Pain in general serves a purpose, of course, but an animal that is suffering in its final moments of life isn’t getting anything out of that suffering. In order to gain from it, the animal would both have to have an afterlife and acquire something valuable from its terrible experience – neither of which is at all plausible.

Instead of arguing that the animal gains some benefit in the afterlife, theists are more likely to argue that the animal’s suffering serves some purpose for others. Perhaps without that one animal’s suffering there would be far greater suffering in the future, and not just for animals, but for people. (The animal's behavior might be part of a causal chain that results in a better future.) Or perhaps the suffering is witnessed by a person who then learns compassion from it, thereby bringing about some good that far surpasses the evil experienced by the animal. And so on.

Now, I agree that replies like these are complete BS. But we could argue about them until Jesus returns (or until the cows come home – same thing) and never convince the theist. So instead, let’s consider a very simple fact: that mental experiences are private. The pain that the animal suffers cannot be experienced by anyone else.

That, however, also means that it cannot serve a purpose for anyone else. For God could make it the case that animals only appear to be in pain without actually being so, and the results as far as anyone else is concerned would be the same. Thus, the animal's suffering is not needed to make someone more compassionate: If the animal only appeared to be in pain without actually feeling anything, the person who learns compassion from seeing the animal would be none the wiser. Nor is it needed in order to set up a causal chain of any kind – an animal that behaved the same way without feeling any pain would set up exactly the same chain.

Given that the pain is private, and that it serves no purpose for the animal, it serves no purpose, period. Thus, it is gratuitous suffering – it is completely unjustified. Any theist who believes there is such pain, then, cannot consistently believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good god.

ARE CHRISTIANS EVIL?

8/16/2017

[Note: I've been invited to contribute to John Loftus's blog, Debunking Christianity. However, I will re-post here whatever I write for that site. The following is my first such post.]

Orthodox Christianity holds that those who don’t “make the cut” end up suffering for all of eternity, and this has of course been the cause of much criticism of the religion. Something that is rarely considered, however, is what this doctrine says about Christians themselves. For the Christian must of course view the eternal suffering of sinners as justified. And yet, by the moral standards most of us accept, eternal punishment is never justified – much less for individuals who aren’t really evil. Perhaps some would consider that kind of suffering as appropriate punishment for Hitler or Ted Bundy. But what about all the average non-Christians who end up in hell – people like your neighborhood atheist or Hindu? An orthodox Christian must be in favor of eternal suffering for such individuals as well. If he were to witness their being thrown into hell fire on Judgement Day, he would have to find that perfectly proper and right. Does this mean orthodox Christians are evil?

There is of course some debate regarding what the orthodox view is. Many apologists these days claim that all that talk of hell fire is metaphorical, and that eternal punishment is merely separation from God. But that doesn’t really help much. For even if the language is metaphorical, it must represent something really bad – why else use such terrible imagery? And in fact those who say that hell is merely separation from God then turn around and point out just how truly horrible that separation is. But if it is so terrible, then the problem remains: how can it be right?

One thing we might say in defense of the average Christian is that most may only be paying lip service to the doctrine of eternal punishment. They may say that they believe in the Bible, but they don’t really think about what it actually states. The doctrines of their religion are far removed from their everyday concerns. I think this is the case with most of my neighbors, for example. There are many others, however, who take their faith more seriously, who really think about it, read scripture, and seem to literally believe what it says. And it is these people that present a problem here. Do we really want to say they are evil? That would mean, for me, having to call my own grandmother (among many others) evil – and probably similarly for most of you. And what about atheists who used to believe? Did they use to be terrible people who are now redeemed?

None of that sounds even close to being right. And yet I’m not sure what the solution is. How can someone’s approval of eternal suffering be excused?

The best suggestion I have is to point out how people tend to compartmentalize their beliefs. A few weeks ago, I wrote in a comment that “If I told my neighbors I was going to sacrifice my son tomorrow in the backyard because God told me to do it, they'd call the police. Yet they regard Abraham's obedience to God as a virtue.” How can one explain this inconsistency? I think it’s because their religious beliefs are kept separate form their everyday beliefs. They apply different standards to them. If the reality of divine “justice” was right in front of them, if it was every bit as real as their everyday experiences, they would find it horrible. It is only because they keep such ideas in a separate compartment at the back of their minds that they can claim to endorse them. Thus, in a sense, they don’t really believe it.

I’d love to hear what others think about this.

CAN CRAIG CLAIM THAT A WORLD WITHOUT GOD WOULD BE BAD?

7/24/2017

There is an interesting inconsistency between William Lane Craig’s understanding of a godless universe and his acceptance of the moral argument for the existence of God. Craig likes to convince his readers that the atheist’s universe is ultimately a depressing, unattractive, god-awful place. But he also likes to argue for God’s existence based on the idea that moral values depend on God. Now, at first these two claims may not appear to be at odds with one another. But take a closer look at what he says about each one:

According to Craig, objective value depends on the existence of God: “If God does not exist, objective moral values… do not exist.” And since “when we speak of moral values, we’re talking about whether something is good or bad,” it follows from this that if God does not exist, nothing can be objectively bad. [Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed., p. 172 (emphasis added)]

And yet, Craig also claims that a godless universe is really bad. He argues that it is “only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place” that an atheist “can successfully come to terms with life” in it. “This,” he goes on, “is the horror of modern man.” And he asks of is readers if they truly “understand the gravity of the alternatives” here. For “if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair.” The world that the atheist believes in is, in other words, dreadful. [Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed., pp. 73-78 (emphasis added)]

So, to sum up, if there is no God, nothing is objectively bad… and yet that would be really bad!

Now, maybe one could try to defend Craig’s views here by claiming that, when he says that a godless world would be “a terrible place,” all he means is that he personally finds the idea distasteful – in other words, that he is expressing his subjective opinion about such a world, not arguing that it would be objectively bad. But to begin with, it seems clear that he means the latter – that it is a fact that a godless world would be bad. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that this is a man who regularly takes atheists to task for claiming that this or that is bad when, in his opinion, they have no basis for believing in objective values. But then by the same logic, he has no basis for claiming that things would be bad if atheists were right.

EVOLUTON AND MORAL WORTH

6/23/2017

Often, critics of atheism argue that if we evolved from bacteria, it follows that we cannot have any more moral worth than those bacteria – and that evolution is therefore incompatible with such notions as that of human rights.

Now, if the argument is simply that, because we evolved from bacteria, we have no more moral worth than they do, it is obviously a non-sequitur. It’s the same as if one claimed that because Adam was made from the dust of the ground, he has no more value than that dust – or that Eve is at best worth one lousy rib. However, those who make the above argument are likely to insist that evolution presents us with something different: It’s not merely that we came from bacteria, it’s that we are “just like bacteria” in certain important respects. Adam was endowed with a soul, whereas the descendants of bacteria presumably are not.

But what is it about the soul that’s supposed to make a difference? Two possibilities come to mind. First, a soul is non-physical, whereas if naturalism is true, we are purely physical beings. Second, a soul is supposedly immortal. Let’s consider each one of these in turn.

Does being made of matter make one morally insignificant? I don’t see why it should. For suppose that what naturalism says is true, so that we humans, with our consciousness, our feelings, our desires, and so on, are no more than complex arrangements of matter. The fact remains that we are conscious, that we have hopes and dreams, that we care about others – in other words, that most of what we take to be important in our lives remains. What difference can it make, then, whether the ultimate substance that makes this possible is material or immaterial? And what’s so special about non-physical “stuff” anyway?

What about being immortal? If naturalism is true, then presumably our lives are finite. But does that mean that therefore it doesn’t matter what happens to any of us? That it is therefore okay to, say, torture innocent people to death? I doubt even the strongest critic of naturalism really believes such a thing. At any rate, how would immortality change anything? If life is worthwhile, that is because the temporal spans that it is made of are themselves, on the whole, worthwhile. And if so, then that’s true whether or not life continues indefinitely.

The fact that we evolved from bacteria does not mean we are “just like bacteria”. There are characteristics that we possess which bacteria lack – and those make us morally different from bacteria.

PRESUPPOSITIONALISM AND INDUCTION

5/3/2017

I've previously written about presuppositionalist arguments regarding logic and knowledge. But another one of their arguments concerns the problem of induction. This is the logical problem posed by Hume of how to justify inferences from observed matters of fact to unobserved ones.

Briefly, the problem is this. Consider how you know or are justified in believing that if you (say) let go of a pencil in mid-air under normal circumstances, it will fall. Well, one thing you can point out is that in the past, unsupported pencils, as far as we know, have always fallen – and therefore, it is reasonable to suppose they will continue to do so. This is an inductive inference: from the fact that all observed A's have been B, one concludes that probably all A's – or at least that most A's – are B. However, the fact that pencils have always fallen is logically compatible with one not falling the next time the experiment is carried out, and even with none falling ever again. So how can one justify the inference?

In order to do so, one must maintain that nature is uniform in some way, so that future pencil drops will be like past ones. However, the problem is that the only evidence one has for such uniformity, it seems, is that that's what has been observed so far. In other words, the argument for the uniformity of nature itself appears to be based on an inductive inference. Induction, according to this argument, can therefore only be justified if one first assumes induction. And that, of course, is circular reasoning.

The presuppositionalists claim that atheists cannot justify their acceptance of induction – and that therefore they have no basis for believing in science, among other things. To believe in scientific reasoning on an atheist worldview, they say, one must engage in the above kind of circular reasoning. If on the other hand one starts out with the existence of a God who created a lawful world – a world that behaves in a uniform way – then one's belief in induction is justified. Therefore, only on the theistic worldview can science – as well as everyday inductive inferences – make sense.

This argument may not be quite as bad as the presuppositionalist one regarding deductive logic, but it is still a bad argument, as will now be demonstrated.

To begin with, merely claiming that the justifiability of induction presupposes some x is not so much to solve the problem as it is to ignore it. True, the presuppositionalist might argue that if induction is justified, then there must be a God. But that's not going to convince the inductive skeptic. So even if the argument worked, it wouldn't be a solution to the problem of induction.

But even worse, if the idea is that one has to accept whatever must be presupposed in order for inductive inference to be justified, then all we need to accept is the existence of a lawful world. The existence of a God who created such a world is superfluous. After all, there is no logical impossibility in the existence of a lawful yet uncreated universe. Thus, one might as well be a presuppositionalist, not with respect to God, but with respect to the uniformity of nature, and then proceed to argue in much the same way as above.

This is sufficient to show that the presuppositionalist argument is wrong. But so far nothing has been said as to why one is in fact justified in making inductive inferences. If a reasonable case can be made in favor of such inferences, it will show that not only is the presuppositionalist argument wrong, but in addition that the main premise it is based on is false.

I think a reasonable case logically justifying induction can be made. In fact, I think there are several distinct ones available, corresponding to criticisms that have been made to different aspects of the problem. Here I'll present the simplest one.

Consider again the fact that every time a pencil (or any heavier-than-air object) has been let go in mid-air under normal circumstances it has fallen – that is, that all the observed instances of such an event have been like that. What is the best explanation of this fact? Certainly not that it is mere coincidence! It would be statistically impossible for that to be the case. It seems the best explanation is that there is some law of nature that makes such occurrences either naturally necessary or at the very least highly probable. But if that is the best explanation for what we've observed, then we are justified in believing that other instances will very probably be like the observed ones. For if there is an underlying law that explains why all observed pencils, etc., have behaved in this way, then we have good reasons for holding that other objects will do so as well.

Note that this argument does not depend on induction (in the narrow sense with which the problem of induction is concerned). Rather, it is an argument to the best explanation – an abductive argument. It is not that we have observed x many instances supporting uniformity in nature and inductively infer that there will probably be other such instances. It is that the best explanation of there having been that many instances displaying uniformity is that there is an underlying principle that causes such uniformity. Thus, there is a non-circular justification for accepting the existence of laws of nature. And it has nothing to do with God.

Now, presuppositionalists might object that the above argument does not guarantee the correctness of any inductive inference, for two reasons. First, the natural laws that explain the uniformity we've observed might only be probabilistic. They do not necessarily say that the next pencil I let go of will fall, but perhaps only that it is highly likely it will fall. Second, and worse, the existence of the laws themselves has not been proven with certainty, but again only with a high degree of probability. It is much more likely that the uniformity we've observed is a result of natural laws, but it is not strictly speaking impossible that it has all been mere coincidence.

All of that is true. However, that the uniformity we have observed has no explanation is so utterly unlikely that for all practical purposes it can be ruled out. So while it is the case that the argument, even if correct, does not strictly speaking guarantee the existence of laws, it makes the conclusion so probable that we can treat it as certain. And as to the laws themselves being probabilistic, observation shows that if they are (as the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics maintains), they result in events that at the level of everyday objects are so close to deterministic that once again it makes no practical difference. Thus, while it may be true (if the standard interpretation of QM is correct) that an unsupported medium-sized object near the surface of a planet might not fall towards it, the likelihood of such an event happening is so incredibly low that it almost certainly has never happened in the entire 14-billion-year history of our universe.

Now let's compare this with what presuppositionalists themselves can say based on their argument. They believe not only that there is a creator who has made a lawful universe, but that this creator is the God of the Bible – a work they interpret literally, since it is part of God's way of revealing things to us. But in that case, how confident can they be that an unsupported pencil will fall? It's clear that their confidence level should be far, far lower than that based on the above considerations. After all, their God is the author of the natural laws, and can therefore suspend them at any moment. Worse, according to the Bible, he has in fact done so on numerous occasions: among other things, he has turned water into wine, caused a man to walk on water, and stopped the earth's rotation without bringing about the worldwide catastrophe such an event should have caused – and all that in just the last few thousand years! It follows for this reason alone that the presuppositionalist should be considerably less confident than the atheist in making inductive inferences.

But in fact, the presuppositionalist's position is even weaker than that. For, as Michael Martin pointed out, if God can have a morally sufficient reason for allowing natural evils such as cancer and earthquakes, then he could very well have a morally sufficient reason for, say, making it the case that from this moment on pencils will no longer fall – or that they will behave in an entirely random manner. It follows that belief in the biblical God should actually create doubts regarding the justifiability of induction.

Notes:

For Michael Martin's paper on this topic, see: "Does Induction Presume the Existence of the Christian God?"

Another online paper on this is Alex Malpass's "Induction, God and Begging the Question"