Archive for the ‘Philosophy of Religion’ Category

Here is philosopher Stephen Law on the role of “prior commitments” or “presuppositions” in evaluating miracle claims:

The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is associated particularly with the scientist Carl Sagan . By “extraordinary evidence” Sagan means, of course, extraordinarily good evidence – evidence much stronger than that required to justify rather more mundane claims. The phrase “extraordinary claims” is admittedly somewhat vague. A claim need not involve a supernatural element to qualify as “extraordinary” in the sense intended here (the claims that I built a time machine over the weekend, or was abducted by aliens, involve no supernatural element, but would also count as “extraordinary”). It suffices, for our purposes, to say that whatever “extraordinary” means here, the claim that a supernatural miracle has occurred qualifies.

Some theists (though of course by no means all) have challenged the application of Sagan’s principle to religious miracles, maintaining that which claims qualify as “extraordinary” depends on our presuppositions. Suppose we begin to examine the historical evidence having presupposed that there is no, or is unlikely to be a, God. Then of course Jesus’ miracles will strike us as highly unlikely events requiring exceptionally good evidence before we might reasonably suppose them to have occurred. But what if we approach the Jesus miracles from the point of view of theism? Then that such miraculous events should be a part of history is not, one might argue, particularly surprising. But then we are not justified in raising the evidential bar with respect to such claims. So theists may, after all, be justified in accepting such events occurred solely on the basis of a limited amount of testimony, just as they would be the occurrence of other unusual, but non-supernatural, events. The application of Sagan’s principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” to the Jesus miracles simply presupposes, prior to any examination of the evidence, that theism is not, or is unlikely to be, true. We might call this response to Sagan’s principle the Presuppositions Move.

Law doesn’t like this move at all, but I’m not sure what specific argument he has in mind here. His blog post is part of a forthcoming article in Faith and Philosophy, so I’m eager to see what the rest of his argument looks like.

Disregarding presuppositionalism as an apologetic strategy (which is a different discussion altogether), I can say I’ve certainly encountered what Law calls the “Presuppositions Move” before in discussion of miracles, but it’s usually more nuanced than Law makes it out to be. There are a few different ways we might approach this issue.

First, it’s a trivial observation that we filter how we perceive the persuasive value of “evidence” through our deeply held background beliefs or what we take to be our justified prior commitments. If a scientist encounters data that doesn’t fit with the dominant theory in his field, he’s usually going to work out some way to explain the data within the theory rather than immediately claiming that the theory ought to be overturned. Perhaps the “Presuppositions Move” is meant to warn skeptics that they ought not hold their background beliefs to such an absolute extent that they wouldn’t let any supposed miracle count as evidence against their anti-supernaturalist precommitment. In other words, perhaps the move is meant to point out to skeptics that they may be poisoning the well by planning (consciously or unconsciously) to discount the possibility of miracles to begin with. This is true, but ultimately insignificant as a general argument against skepticism, because this sort of move cuts both ways. The religious apologist might be tempted to do the same thing. He might too readily accept the evidential value of a miracle claim because it agrees with his supernaturalist precommitments. So interpreted this way, the Presuppositions Move does nothing more than point out a valuable but trivial epistemological truism: do your best to avoid confirmation bias, evaluate evidence objectively, don’t treat your background beliefs as absolutely unchangeable, and so on.

There’s a second way the Presuppositions Move might go that proves a bit more useful, but not by much. Here the apologist for miracles might be taken to mean that the skeptic ought to examine those pretheoretical beliefs that are the types of beliefs that don’t easily admit to justification, like root level metaphysical beliefs about possibility, etc. This way is a bit more difficult to pin down because it’s hard to identify what types of beliefs fall into this category and to set out the criteria for identifying them. One example is belief about metaphysical possibility: do I believe that the natural world is closed or open? In other words, suppose I’m agnostic about whether there is some supernatural reality that exists on a different metaphysical plane than the natural world. Given my agnosticism, do I believe that it is even possible for something outside nature to interact with the natural world? Beliefs about this topic and others like it are often governed by intuitions or hunches. I think people often don’t realize the power their unexamined intuitions have over how they interpret their experiences. If the skeptic is interpreting the evidence for miracles based on his own strongly-held but ultimately baseless intuition, then that’s certainly illegitimate, because despite his intuition there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to limit metaphysical possibility in this way. But of course no skeptic will think he’s doing this, just as no Christian ever thinks he’s doing it either if the roles are reversed.

There’s a third way of interpreting the Presuppositions Move that’s more interesting and fruitful, but I’ll hold that one until my next post.

My lovely wife has requested that I explain the tagline of this blog, since she felt that “slouching towards eternity” could be interpreted in a negative way. So here goes.

The tagline itself is a play on a line from a poem by W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.” I was an English major as an undergrad, and I always loved Yeats. Here’s the full text of the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Don’t ask me to give you a detailed explanation of what this poem means, because I can’t. I haven’t seriously read English literature since my college days. Commentators say Yeats meant it to refer to the chaos of Europe after World War I, and that seems about right. At the very least the events of the second stanza represent some terrible power gaining control of the world during a time of great upheaval and ushering in a new age. The last line is particularly famous, and it’s been picked up and used elsewhere, such as in a book by Robert Bork. I don’t hold any affinity for Yeats’ political passions that informed the poem, but I do like the line itself. I actually intended it to have two meanings: one personal and one philosophical.

On the personal side, I liked “slouching towards eternity” because it represents my own struggle in being the type of Christian I want to be. It’s actually a testimony to God’s grace: I don’t approach him by the goodness of my intentions and graciously offer myself to be his loyal servant. At best, on my own power and under my own sinful motivations I throw a few bones in his general direction. I can talk a good talk about seeking the kingdom of God but if it’s left up to me I just don’t do very well. Any desire for God that I find in myself is a desire that was put there by God himself. He draws me to him kicking and screaming, as it were, and that’s grace.

On the philosophical side, most of the posts on this blog will probably be about philosophy of religion and the intersection of philosophy and faith. I have a Ph.D. in Christian philosophy, and it’s one of my passions. However, I also know that as a “route” to God, philosophy is woefully inadequate. By sitting in my chair and pontificating about reality I can approach a hazy notion of God’s existence at best, to say nothing of what he’s like or what he wants out of human beings. To truly know about God, we have to let him define himself, which I think he has done most completely in the person of Jesus Christ and the record we have of him in Scripture. So, theology is superior to philosophy because it deals directly with what God has revealed about himself rather than relying on the imperfections of human reason. Hence philosophy is a discipline that “slouches” toward eternity, as it were.

Now, I know things are much more complicated than this with regard to the relationship between theology and philosophy. Theology, for one, can’t get along at all without the proper use of reason, so in that sense it’s dependent on the philosophical discipline of logic. This is true, but the point remains: I can’t get to God merely by thinking my way to him. He has to reveal himself to me, and he has to draw me to himself since my sinful heart is always trying to run the other direction.

And yes, if you detected the influence of Reformed theology on both of these positions, you’re right. The first reason is informed by the doctrine of irresistible grace, and the second reason is influenced by the reformed objection to natural theology.

Here is yet another post inspired by a spirited conversation with the scrappy Lutheran known as John Fraiser. We recently engaged in a philosophical kerfluffle over whether God knows what it’s like to be Napoleon (or a bat, or a pimp, or the present king of France, or Schrödinger’s cat, or anyone God does not happen to be). The debate arose after jointly considering Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument against materialism in the philosophy of mind, but the topic soon led to whether any such arguments could be applied to God’s knowledge.

I affirmed that God did indeed know what it is like to be Napoleon. John gave a negative answer, and the contest commenced. Although this important question is clearly pressing on the hearts of many Americans during these troubled times, the goal of this post is not to give an answer but to clarify what the arguments are and where the disagreement lies. After explaining the arguments, I will address some tentative reasons for why I take the (clearly) correct position.

Here is John’s argument, reconstructed as I understand it:

(1) It is a necessary condition of having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon that one believe he is Napoleon.
(2) God believes no falsehoods, so God does not believe He is Napoleon.
(3) Therefore God does not have a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon.

The first premise is the hinge on which John’s argument turns. According to this premise, one can reasonably imagine what it is like to have some of Napoleon’s experiences. For example, one can imagine what it is like to stand on a hill in Waterloo and order your cannons to fire on Wellington’s cavalry, or what it is like to be short, or what it is like to keep your hand in your coat while posing for a portrait. Although we are limited in what we can imagine of Napoleon’s experiences and properties, God can imagine what it is like to have all of Napoleon’s experiences and properties. However, this act of imagining (on our part or God’s) does not deliver a complete knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon, for to have that one must also believe that he is Napoleon. In other words, having a first person perspective on what it is like to be Napoleon is a requirement if one wants to truly know what it is fully like to be Napoleon. So in addition to imagining having the various experiences and properties of Napoleon, one must imagine that he believes that he is Napoleon. This is something of a contradiction, since in the very attempt to imagine one is acknowledging that he is not Napoleon at all. Hence only Napoleon knows what it is like to be him, since only he possesses a first person perspective.

This has strange consequences when we apply it to God. God certaintly doesn’t believe He is Napoleon, for He believes no falsehoods. But if premise (1) is true, then God is forever separated from what it is fully like to be any human other than Jesus Christ. This means that, in a very significant sense, God doesn’t know what it’s like to be me. He simply cannot imagine in the most important sense what it is like when I kiss my wife, or wrestle with my children on the living room floor, or even what it is like when I pray to Him or worship Him.

This seemed problematic to me, so I offered two counterarguments. Here is the first:

(4) God’s omniscience entails that He knows all truths that are possibly known.
(5) “What it is like to be Napoleon” is a truth that is possibly known.
(6) Therefore God knows what it is like to be Napoleon.

This seemed a bit ambiguous, so I issued a second argument, adjusted for clarity:

(7) Since God is both omniscient and omnipotent, He can perform any mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(8) “Knowing what it is like to be Napoleon” is a mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(9) Therefore God can know what it is like to be Napoleon.

Implicit in (8) is a rejection of John’s premise (1). I rejected (1) because it seems arbitrarily limited by human experience. Of course you and I can’t imagine what it is like to be Napoleon or what it is like to believe that we are Napoleon, but it doesn’t seem right to say that it would be logically impossible for God. God’s powers of imagination aren’t limited. He possesses unlimited cognitive capacity. Further, He created the cognitive environment in which human beings think, believe, and experience, and thus has privileged access to that cognitive environment and the types of things therein. If I create characters for a novel I am writing, I am in complete control over the mental world in which they live, and I have access to that mental world in ways my characters do not. This way of rejecting premise (1) needs to be worked out in more detail, but I think it is the defender of (1) that bears the burden of proof. It just doesn’t seem intuitively plausible that no mind could ever completely grasp what it is like to be Napoleon without accepting the Napoleon identity.

Further, I argued that the vagaries of human experience means that even Napoleon doesn’t know what it is like to be Napoleon, at least in the fullest sense. The human psyche is a deep and mysterious well. We all have questions about who we are and we are often aware that mysterious forces drive our choices and contribute to our own sense of personal identity. God, however, knows everything about Napoleon. He understands the deep reasons for his internal drive to conquer Europe, and so on. There are no deep psychological mysteries to the Ancient of Days.

These are only starting points for a response, but I think I’m on the right track. The key issue is how God’s imagination can overcome the third person perspective that seems to limit one’s ability to fully imagine what it is like to be another person. This challenge is significant, but to say that God can fully imagine what it is like to be Napoleon without believing He is Napoleoon does not seem to be on the same level as saying that God can make 2 and 2 equal 5. He can’t make 2 and 2 equal 5, but this is no limitation on His sovereignty or His power, for it is no true limitation to say that God can’t perform nonsense. It just isn’t clear that having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon is logically contradictory or nonsensical in the same way.

Here is a continuing rumination on a conversation I had the other day with the erudite John Fraiser about the new atheism. For the most part, I abhor the new atheism. I think it is a cheap, irrational, and culturally unhealthy movement marked by the ironic combination of poor argumentation and philosophical triumphalism. The new atheists pair terrible arguments with preening braggadocio and hateful rhetoric, spawning legions of internet fanboys who mimic their poisonous style. If I want my faith challenged, I’d much rather read Hume or Ayer or Mackie. They actually force me into serious reflection on my faith, and I don’t have to suffer continual Dawkinsian-style insults. The new atheist movement is not a good one, and I think it’s a shame that they’ve been able to wield such cultural influence.

Nevertheless, there are things I like about the movement. Or perhaps I should say that the new atheism may have unintended consequences that I like. Here is a review for a new book that apparently makes the argument that at least one way Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al serve Christendom is by holding believers’ feet to the fire in regard to intellectual honesty. This is true and valuable, because I think many Christians tend to be intellectually lazy. From their perspective, they’re already in possession of “truth with a capital T”, and therefore they don’t think they need to think very much about their faith. When the new atheists point out that religious believers don’t have a solid intellectual foundation for their faith, they are partially correct. There are unfortunately very many Christians who are utterly incapable of giving a coherent reason for why they believe in Christianity (a fact that has no bearing on whether Christianity is true or rationally acceptable, however, a point I made to Uncle Skeptic on my old blog).

When an intellectually shallow Christian encounters the arguments of the new atheists, he must either (1) reevaluate the epistemic foundations of his faith and think critically about Christianity in a way he hasn’t done before, (2) stick his head in the sand and ignore their arguments, or (3) accept their arguments, leading to a crisis of faith and possibly unbelief. The new atheists want the results of their efforts to be (3), but I think they miscalculate that many Christians will take option (1). New atheist arguments, febrile as I find them to be, can have a strengthening effect on the church by driving individual Christians to a stronger and more rational intellectual position.

Likewise, although it’s certainly tragic when someone takes option (3) and apostasizes, it’s probably better for the church. Those who leave the faith because they read Richard Dawkins or develop an obsessive fascination with the mountain of atheist polemics online probably never had a very strong faith to begin with. If I read one more “deconversion” story where someone says they were a believer for 20 years but then started reading infidels.org and “realized” God was just a fantasy drilled into their head by pastors and Sunday School teachers, I just might puke. If your faith is this shallow and your cognitive capacities so susceptible to cheap rhetoric passing for logic, you probably have no business being in a church anyway. That’s not to say that there aren’t intelligent Christians who honestly wrestle with their faith and eventually leave it behind for intellectually respectable reasons (see here for a tragic and heartbreaking example), but there are plenty of gullible churchgoers who accept their newfound atheism for reasons that are probably just as unwarranted as the reasons they accepted Christianity to begin with. Hence the new atheism gives the church a bonus by separating the sheep from the goats.

Note to the new atheists: what we need isn’t less religion, but better theology.

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on September 12, 2008. The original is here.]

Here is Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam is false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Before we take this quote too seriously, we should consider the fact that this is the same Richard Dawkins who claimed that raising a child Catholic is worse than sexually abusing him. Credibility issues aside, what can we make of statements like the one above? This sort of reasoning is very prevalent in the writings of the new atheism of Dawkins, Harris, et al. But this is a typical Dawkinsian non-argument. There is no there there. What is the point of such statements other than to offer intellectual kudos to those who already disbelieve in any particular religion? Consider the following variation on the above quote:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think representative democracy is the best form of government and that Islamic theocracy is the worst, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Or how about this one:

If you were born in 1980 and you think the world is round instead of flat, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in 1089, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

If you can understand the silliness of the two latter statements, you should be able to understand the silliness of the first. You don’t necessarily judge an individual’s justification for her beliefs by the cultural soup from which those beliefs arise. Consider the following three facts:

(1) I live in a culture where a majority of the people believe Christianity is true.
(2) My parents taught me to believe that Christianity is true.
(3) I believe that Christianity is true.

And these:

(4) Aziz lives in a culture where a majority of the people believe that Islam is true.
(5) Aziz’ parents taught him to believe that Islam is true.
(6) Aziz believes that Islam is true.

Now, it’s obvious that facts (1)-(3) have no bearing on whether Christianity is true or not, just as (4)-(6) have no bearing on whether Islam is true or not. Let’s add one more fact to our list:

(7) If I had been born in Aziz’ family, I would have believed that Islam was true instead of Christianity.

Dawkins’ contention is that if I am aware that facts (1)-(7) are true, then I should conclude that I am a victim of “childhood indoctrination.”

But why? The circumstances under which I form a belief are different animals from the reasons I have for holding that belief. I suppose that by Dawkins using this sort of reasoning he means to hold up a simple truism: we shouldn’t believe something just because it is widely believed in our own culture. This is obvious, but trivial. Dawkins is attempting to twist this simple truism into some sort of cudgel against religious belief. But just because it is true that some religious people hold their beliefs because they were raised in a religious culture, and because they themselves have not done enough reflection to have good reasons for their beliefs, does not mean that all of them do. And just because some parents indoctrinate and propagandize their children into religious belief does not mean that all of them do. I think most religious parents attempt, to the best of their ability, to give their children good reasons for why they think their religious views are right and others are wrong. That some parents fail miserably at this task is probably a contributor to the apostasy rate of children of religious believers, but that too is a different discussion altogether.

Consider again my above variations on Dawkins’ statement. Suppose someone were to use my first hypothetical statement to mock Dawkins for believing that representative democracy is superior to Islamic theocracy. What would his response be? I think he would simply point out that representative democracy is the best form of government for Reason A, Reason B, Reason C, and so forth. If he is justified in doing this, why is the religious believer not justified in doing the same thing? Facts about what someone would believe in a possible world in which they were raised in a different culture are irrelevant to the justification for the beliefs they hold in this, the real world. If we were to adopt this sort of skepticism, then it wouldn’t just be religious beliefs that we would have to be skeptical about, but our moral beliefs, our political beliefs, and any other beliefs that fall short of being justified by naked logic or direct experience. Once again, for all his blustering and cuteness, the darling of the new atheists poses no convincing argument against the justification of religious belief. Dawkins always disappoints.

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on August 3, 2007. The original is here.]

From my beach reading, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise:

2069 June 08 GMT 1537. Message 6943. Sequence 2. Starglider to Earth.

The hypothesis you refer to as God, thought not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.

If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.

The speaker here is “Starglider,” a robotic alien probe that passes through our galaxy on an information-gathering mission. Clarke means Starglider to be an immensely intelligent entity, a sentient logical computer with the accumulated knowledge of a thousand intelligent species at its disposal. As much as I admire Clarke and enjoy his writings, I find it difficult that a super-intelligent being would propound such a sophomoric argument for the non-existence of God (and I assume that Clarke means Starglider to be speaking for himself here). Starglider’s statement first jumped out at me because of its conspicuous similarities with Dawkins’ 747 argument, against which I have been voluminously blogging lately. Indeed, the argument is downright Dawkinsian in its cheeky assumptions about its own cogency, as if it decisively ends the debate.

I won’t address the issue of whether a Creator-God, “must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product” or not. Dawkins makes this same claim as a necessary premise of his argument, and I’ve already spent far too much time showing it to be problematic, due to the fact that it is vulnerable to some fairly simple counterexamples. I do want to make a few relevant points, however, as this type of argument is very common among Dawkins and his fellow proponents of the “new atheism,” particularly of the blogosophere troll variety. “Who designed the Designer?” is a common war whoop of those who think that theism can be easily swept away with loud but mediocre argumentation. For abbreviatory purposes, I’ll call this argument WDD (“Who designed the Designer?”).

First, forms of WDD like Dawkins’ and Clarke’s seem to assume that belief in God’s existence is only legitimate if it does some necessary explanatory work over the world. I suppose this is right as far as scientific explanations of phenomenon go, but are all beliefs like this? Is no belief rationally acceptable if it fails to come at the end of some sort of abductive argument from known facts? In other words, does God’s existence even need an explanation to be accepted as true? I don’t think so. One can argue for God’s existence on other grounds than explanatory ones, just as one can believe numerous propositions on non-explanatory grounds. I see a boll weevil in front of me. Do I accept the proposition, “A boll weevil is in front of me,” because that proposition explains some known fact? Not really. My perceptual experience serves as an appropriate foundation for my belief about the boll weevil. In other words, I don’t infer that the proposition is true from other facts or premises. My perception occasions the belief, and my belief in the boll weevil is justified.

Clarke thinks that Starglider’s simple argument should bring an end to the debate. Which debate? He might mean the debate over whether God exists or not, but surely this isn’t right, because we all hold many beliefs about the world that are quite independent of any explanatory power they provide. It’s true that we often make abductive or transcendental arguments to conclusion C because C is the best explanation of a set S of known facts. But it would be inordinately silly to say that a proposition P is rationally unacceptable simply because it fails to provide an explanation over some set S of facts. If we did that, there wouldn’t even be a set of facts to explain, because then accepting those facts would be rationally unacceptable unless they explained some other set of facts, which in turn would need to explain some other set of facts, and so on ad infinitum. But any (foundationalist) system of knowledge needs facts that aren’t explained by any other facts and that are acceptable a priori. Logical laws are good examples. For many, perhaps the majority, of committed religious believers, belief in God comes not at the end of some chain of inference but through a direct encounter with Him, thus making belief in Him properly basic.

So by “debate” I suppose that Clarke/Starglider means the debate over whether God can be invoked as an explanation of the natural world or of some feature of it. But even here I think Clarke is wrong, and this is my second point. Theistic apologists do not naively claim that everything needs an explanation and that thus the cosmos, or biological design, or whatever, need an explanation and “Presto!” God is the explanation. Atheist objectors often set up this sort of straw man and then accuse the theist of being inconsistent by saying that the universe needs an explanation but God doesn’t. I can only suppose that atheists who raise and then assail such a gargantuan straw man have been watching too much TBN and have not been reading their serious Christian philosophers.

Arguments of this sort usually go a different way. Consider a simple cosmological argument that claims that the physical cosmos needs some sufficient explanation for its existence. Here various versions of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) come into play. For now let’s assume a simple one that claims that matter and energy lack the ability to either (1) bring about or (2) sustain their own existence. If the theist defends a version of PSR that says this, the WDD peanut gallery will immediately claim that he is being inconsistent by claiming that the cosmos needs an explanation but God doesn’t.

Is this right? Yes and no. No, because the theist usually argues in some way that the cosmos is very probably contingent, and contingent entities need necessary explanations. In other words, the cosmos is the type of thing that can’t exist on its own as necessary de re, but the God of traditional theism is by definition the entity (the ground of being) that exists necessarily de re. But also Yes, because it isn’t clear (to me anyway) that the cosmos doesn’t exist necessarily de re. It seems extremely implausible that this would be the case, but I just don’t know how one would go about trying to prove it true or false. It’s true that the physical cosmos seems contingent, but I just don’t know how it could be proven either way. This is how counterarguments to cosmological arguments of this type usually run. Sophisticated atheists will just point out that we don’t know that the universe doesn’t exist necessarily as a brute fact. But this is a far cry from assuming that it does exist as a brute fact and then brashly asking “Who upholds the Upholder?” Things are much more complicated than that, and Dawkins, the fictional Starglider, and the loud internet trolls who oversimplify the issue against theists are doing nothing but making themselves look like philosophical lightweights.

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on June 28, 2007. The original is here.]

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

- Carl Sagan [HT to Space.com]

The above image is a photo of Earth seen from a distance of 4 billion miles. It was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1991. I haven’t read Pale Blue Dot, the book by Sagan from which the corresponding quote is taken, but if the passage above is a good representation of the ideas that Sagan presents in the book, then I think we can identify two philosophical assumptions on his part that are of dubious merit.

First, it seems that Sagan sees a proportional correspondence between significance and size. That is, Sagan somehow thinks we humans are insignificant because we are so small and fleeting when compared to the spatial and temporal vastness of the universe. As with everything Sagan wrote, his prose here is gracefully poetic and rhetorically powerful, but when we reduce the message to its foundational assumption it seems strange. Why should size or duration be good indicators of significance, especially when it comes to valuating human significance? If I am less significant because, when compared to the cosmos, I take up much less space and exist for an infinitesimally briefer duration of time, why not also say that a 20 pound toddler has 5% of the significance of a 400 pound man? Even from a naturalist perspective it should seem obvious that human traits like consciousness, self-awareness, creativity, love, free will, appreciation of beauty, etc. are much more significant than 20 trillion square miles of mindless mass and energy. A galaxy may be a thing of superlative beauty, but it lacks the ability to either consider or appreciate that fact, while even a small child can behold the heavens and delight in them, not knowing what she sees but knowing what she sees is good. As Emerson said, the sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Second, it seems odd that Sagan would use human insignificance as a springboard for moral condemnation of tyrants and military despots. If, as Sagan contends, we are ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things, why couldn’t the tyrant come to the opposite conclusion from the same data? Why couldn’t he say that humans are simply clouds of atoms that have evolved with the unhappy ability to reflect on their own existence, mere material entities whose existence is worth nought when compared to the unimaginable scope and power of the rest of the material entities in the universe? On this basis he might just as easily conclude that he ought to make the most of his short time on Earth by conquering and pillaging as much of this small rock as he can manage. His conclusion would be as equally valid as Sagan’s, if not moreso. No, Sagan is wrong here. It does no good to chart a brighter course for mankind on the hopeless foundation of human insignificance.

[This post originally appeared on my old blog on November 9, 2009. The original is here.]

From Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence:

Does this [view that science has done away with minor supernatural entities because they play no explanatory role in the world] mean that the progress of the natural sciences has given us equally good measure to deny God’s existence? Not necessarily. Scientific progress would supply such reason only if theistic assumptions were in direct competition with naturalistic causal explanations. The reason we shouldn’t believe in demiurges and sprites is because they are entities whose existence was to have been vindicated by citing their role in explaining the very phenomena that the natural sciences can now explain better. For most theists, God no longer plays that role. God isn’t introduced to explain why a volcano erupted, or a hailstorm destroyed the crops, but instead for a variety of functions (e. g. as the author of the moral law) other than that of actively intervening in earthly affairs so as to continually cause all that occurs in the natural world. That sort of God would be one whose postulated existence would be in direct competition with the causal explanations offered by the natural sciences. But theists needn’t take such a view, and so needn’t fall prey to the argument that has entitled us to dismiss the minor supernatural characters (leprechauns, trolls, etc.) from our ontology. (114-115)