Archive for the ‘Apologetics’ 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.

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 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.