Randal Rauser's Blog, page 40

Why Reason Always Requires Faith: Explained in 6 Minutes

The video freezes for a bit but I’m not bothering to re-record it! At least the audio is fine. And hey, it’s only 6 minutes.

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The Laws of Thought: Critical Thinking with Stephen Law

Stephen Law is a leading English philosopher, author, and editor for the journal Think. In his spare time, he beats the skins and climbs mountains. What I appreciate most about Stephen is his commitment to public philosophy, and that commitment is perfectly demonstrated in his new online course on critical thinking. You can check out the course here and read our brief exchange on critical thinking below.

RR: According to the old saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Alas, that was in the good old days. In our age, the lie has racked up 40,000 likes on Twitter before the truth even gets to the sock drawer. Stephen, what’s going on? Are we getting stupid? 

SL: I don’t think there’s reason to think we are getting more stupid. But we are exposed to a lot more material – via social media – and a lot of that material is unreliable. At the same time though, largely through my exposure to social media material, I now realise that much of what I used to assume was fairly reliable and impartial really wasn’t. So social media has pluses and minuses. I suspect the biggest downside introduced by social media is the all-to-familiar ‘echo chamber’ effect – on social media we tend to get exposed only to people with whom we agree – so our existing beliefs are only ever reinforced, never challenged.

RR: I am amazed, however, by how quickly people can be led to believe in rank absurdities. As we speak, the so-called QAnon cult is gaining popularity in the United States, a bizarre group that thinks Democrats and Hollywood elites are involved in a global satanic conspiracy to eat babies (among other nefarious deeds). And why do they believe this? Because some anonymous, shadowy figure named “Q” told them so. Millions believe Donald Trump won the American election despite his losing 60 court cases and, ahem, being a habitual liar. Suffice it to say, I was very happy to see you are launching a critical thinking course. It couldn’t be more timely. How would your course enable a person to be wiser when assessing various claims and navigating the world? [done]

SL: There are two important strands to critical thinking. One is developing intellectual skills – being able to spot fallacies, deconstruct an argument and expose its flaws, be aware of what cognitive biases are. The other strand is awareness – particularly self-awareness. When beliefs in which we have invested a great deal -perhaps emotionally, financially, socially – are challenged, it is an uncomfortable experience for us. The experience is called ‘cognitive dissonance’. This applies particularly to political beliefs, beliefs about religion, beliefs about friends and family, and beliefs about our careers/life projects. If I believe Chamonix is near the Matterhorn, and I discover I’m wrong, it’s an easy fix. I just change my belief. But if I worked for the tobacco industry my whole life, seeing clear evidence tobacco causes cancer is going to create a lot of dissonance. Or if I discover clear evidence my partner is a serial killer (Bundy, say), again, that’s going to be very difficult for me because of what I have invested in my beliefs about and attachments to that person. Consequently, I may well find ways to ignore, discount, or explain away the evidence against what I believe: ‘No, that research into tobacco is biased/unreliable/flawed/done by people who hate us’ etc. Being an effective critical thinker involves being aware of these deep investments we have, and not allowing them to distort our responses to new evidence and arguments. Of course, that is a REALLY hard thing to do. People who have developed only their intellectual skills, but lack the self-awareness, sometimes just use their intellectual abilities to protect their beliefs in ever more ingenious ways – to endlessly explain away evidence against what they believe, for example. So my course focuses on developing both the intellectual skills AND also that sort of self-awareness.

RR: I think it is hard to overestimate the value of what you are describing. Every day, people devote their time, money, and very lives to misguided projects. They continue down self-destructive paths. They prop up belief systems that are well past their expiration date. And before you know it, you discover that your mild-mannered sister-in-law has become a fervent QAnon evangelist on Facebook. So can you tell us a bit about the structure of the course? What can a person expect when they take it?

SL: It combines: 1. the basics of understanding arguments and how they work – with lots of illustrations, including from science, 2. classic fallacies (I go into a little more depth than some online resources), 3. cognitive biases and how to ‘de-bias’, 4. evidence including when we have strong vs weak evidence (with lots of fun examples, including bloodletting), cognitive dissonance, explaining away, and – this bit you might appreciate – when it’s reasonable to take appearance at face value and when it’s not (I don’t mention religious experience but obviously it is relevant). Some bits (e.g. I cover undercutting defeaters) are fairly non-standard in a critical thinking course, but they are the bits I have found most fun and most generally useful.

Check out Stephen Law’s critical thinking course here.

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Is Craig’s Moral Argument Defensible?

For years, William Lane Craig has repeated a bad argument that the existence of objective moral values entails the existence of God. He did it again yesterday:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.#Apologetics #MoralArgument https://t.co/V5G7ysRpg4

— Reasonable Faith (@RFupdates) January 30, 2021

The problem is that premise 1 is false since there are non-theistic accounts of objective moral values such as Platonism. And Craig knows this, so what are we to think of this? Is he just being dishonest?

A short article by Amy Hall of “Stand to Reason” offers a defense of Craig. The version of the argument that she defends including both objective moral values and duties. I am not taking issue with the point on objective moral duties here, but only with Craig’s argument that specifies objective moral values which is the most controversial aspect of his argument. With that in mind, Hall’s first point is the only one relevant for this conversation. Let’s take a look:

“First, atheistic moral platonism seems unintelligible. What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value justice just exists? It’s hard to make sense of this. It’s easy to understand what it means to say that some person is just, but it’s bewildering when someone says that in the absence of any people justice itself exists. Moral values seem to be properties of persons, and it’s hard to understand how justice can exist as an abstraction.”

Hall makes two claims here. First, she claims very strongly that moral platonism seems to be “unintelligible”, i.e. incoherent. However, at the end of her comments, she says, more modestly, that it is simply “hard to understand”. That is the difference between “I can see that your position is not even a candidate for truth” and “I’m not sure what you mean.” And that’s a big difference. So which is it?

Regardless, moral Platonism is no more unintelligible/incoherent than the many attempts to ground objective moral values in a divine agent (e.g. divine conceptualism). And as for the more modest claim, are we really going to ignore all the positions that are “hard to understand”? Where do you suppose that approach would leave a raft of Christian claims like the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation?

To sum up, Hall is to be credited for at least acknowledging the problem. Unfortunately, her defense of Craig’s continued insistence on that first premise is nothing more than special pleading.

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An Update on My Biblical Genocide Book

I began writing this book one month ago today: December 26, 2020. I am now at 85,000 words and hope to finish the final two chapters in the next ten days or so. My special contribution to this debate is captured in my subtitle: “Biblical Genocide in the Light of Moral Intuition“. (I will announce the title later.)

Here are the chapter titles (which, as with all else, is still as yet subject to revision):

Foreword: There is No Magic Key

Introduction: The Blood-Soaked Soil of Canaan

Chapter 1: Killing the Joneses

Chapter 2: Joshua and the International Criminal Court

Chapter 3: Taming a Dangerous Text

Chapter 4: Moral Intuition and Moral Reasoning

Chapter 5: Moral Knowledge through Intimate Acquaintance

Chapter 6: Scenes from a Genocide: On the Canaanites of Central Africa

Chapter 7: Interpreting the Bible: Five Guiding Principles

Chapter 8: The Genocide Apologists

Chapter 9: The Just War Interpreters

Chapter 10: The Spiritualizers

Chapter 11: The Providential Errantists

Chapter 12: Why is it all so complicated?

 

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My Biblical Violence Book: A Quick Update

My blog has been relatively quiet of late and the most significant reason is that I began writing a new book on December 26. As of today, January 16, my manuscript on biblical violence is 68,000 words. My goal is to have the manuscript ready for copy-editing and typesetting by the end of the month with the hope that I can publish it under my own imprint in early March. So at this point, I am devoting all my spare time to getting the book done while the rest of my time is taken up by the duties of a new semester and the occasional film for some recreation. (I highly recommend the documentary Boys State which I just watched on Apple+. A very enjoyable film.)

Anyway, back to work. This book won’t write itself.

By the way, I won’t be fielding any questions on the book. It will be out soon enough.

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Anecdotes vs. Testimony

Testimony forms a big part of apologetic argument. It may be the testimony of a person who says their life was personally changed by Jesus because they were delivered from an addiction. Or it could be the testimony of a person who says they were supernaturally healed of an ailment following a prayer. Or it could be the testimony of a first-century witness to the risen Jesus which was later recorded in the library of documents that we call the New Testament.

Testimony is valuable evidence, especially when it has been tested by way of a credibility assessment. The form that a credibility assessment takes will vary depending on several factors such as whether one has direct access to a witness or whether one is limited to their written statement. Suffice it to say, however, that both written statements (e.g. affidavits) and formal interviews are powerful evidence in a courtroom and they can likewise form important evidence in one’s apologetic.

With that in mind, beware of people who seek to poison the well against your use of testimony in your apologetic by characterizing that testimony as an “anecdote”. This is an important attempt at marginalization given that one common definition of the word “anecdote” is “an account regarded as unreliable or hearsay”. And assuming that you’ve done your homework, you will not be appealing to testimony as an unreliable piece of friend-of-a-friend hearsay, but rather as carefully vetted testimony.

To conclude, be sure that your use of testimony is not merely anecdotal. And be sure to call out and correct the attempt to frame your use of testimony as anecdotal.

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An Interview with Elephant Philosophy

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The Problem of Evil: My Friendly Debate with Alex Malpass

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Atheism and Antitheism

In this article, I continue my survey of concepts commonly associated with atheism by considering anti-theism. For the previous installment on atheism and secularism, click here.

For the last fifteen years or so, the public face of atheism has been synonymous with the new atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. In other words, it has often been pugilistic, aggressive, and expressed deep hostility (and condescension) toward the idea of God.

Hitchens, in particular, was keen to express in no uncertain terms his deep-seated hostility toward God, one which was expressed both in a desire that God not exist, and an unqualified opposition toward God should it happen that God does exist. Thomas Mallon observes, “Preferring ‘antitheist’ to ‘atheist,’ Hitchens liked to draw comparisons between Christianity and North Korea, both mental kingdoms offering their inhabitants the chance to commit ‘thought crime’ and to deliver ‘everlasting praise’ of the leader.” Indeed, Hitchens would often equate God to the celestial equivalent of a despot who monitors your every action. Needless to say, in Hitchens’ view, we’re better off without any such being. Thus, he would declare, “I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influences of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.”

That which Hitchens refers to as antitheism has also been referred to as protest atheism. In a recent speech former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams describes protest atheism as follows:

“The God of Jewish and Christian faith is seen as an agent who has the power to prevent the world’s evil yet refuses to do so, so that there is the appearance of a moral incoherence at the heart of this tradition. Or he is seen as an arbitrary tyrant whose will is inimical to the liberty of human creatures; or else as an impotent and remote reality, a concept given a sort of ghostly existence by human imagination. In all these instances, it is clear that the refusal of belief in God is something essential to human liberation. We cannot live with a God who is responsible for evil; we cannot grow up as human beings if what is demanded of us is blind obedience; we cannot mortgage our lives and our loving commitment to an animated abstraction. Atheism here is necessary to maturity, individually and culturally.

“Even those who argue at length about the simply [sic] conceptual inadequacies, as they see it, of Western religion, classically, writers in the Bertrand Russell style, will frequently deploy the language of moral revolt as well. “Protest atheism”, as it is often called, has become a familiar element in the armoury of modern intellectual life, perhaps more often repeated than expounded, but culturally very powerful.”

One doesn’t simply find antitheism or protest atheism among the polemical new atheists. One of the most highly respected atheist philosophers today, Thomas Nagel, appears to endorse antitheism in his book The Last Word:

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

There can be no doubt that many atheists are antitheists. But there can also be no doubt that atheism is conceptually distinct from antitheism. (Note again Hitchens’ own observation that he is better thought of as an antitheist than an atheist, an observation which maintains a conceptual distinction between the positions.)

Indeed, not only is atheism not necessarily opposed to the idea of God, but a given atheist could actually wish that God exists. Hitchens himself recognizes as much when he says there are “atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret.” There are many reasons atheists might wish theism were true including the hope of an afterlife and the guarantee that justice will be satisfied or a perception that God is required to secure objective meaning, value, and/or purpose.

It must be said that Christians are at least partially responsible for the common conflation of atheism with antitheism. The problematic equation traces back to the teaching, which is all too common in some Christian circles, that declares all atheists to be actively suppressing a natural knowledge of God. In a short video on the topic, Christian apologist Greg Koukl provides the analogy of a person trying to hold a beach ball under water. Just as it is nearly impossible to hold the ball beneath the surface for any length of time, so it is nearly impossible for the atheist to restrain the overwhelming evidence for God’s existence and nature. The only way they manage to accomplish the feat of maintaining apparent disbelief is through concerted, strenuous effort to suppress God’s natural revelation which is borne by an inexplicable hostility toward God.

I call this thesis that atheists are in rebellion against God the Rebellion Thesis and in my view, it is both false and does great harm to Christian-atheist relations. But that is a conversation for another day. The only point I want to make here is that whatever one might think of the nature of antitheism in individuals like Christopher Hitchens or Thomas Nagel, the fact remains that many other atheists have no hostility to the concept of God. Indeed, as Hitchens observed, some do wish it were true and they relinquish belief only with regret.

Thomas Mallon, Introduction in Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and in Practice (London: Atlantic Books, 2012).

This kind of hostility toward God or rebellion against God is nothing new. One sees it reflected, for example, in a famous passage from Fyodor  Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov when the atheist Ivan describes to his pious religious brother Alyosha his deep rebellion against God: “I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity, I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”

Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 55.

Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Continuum, 2012), 282.

Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) , 130. Nagel reiterates this perspective in Mind and Cosmos. For a sympathetic interpretation of Nagel’s comments see the discussion in my book Is the Atheist My Neighbor?

Hitchens, “Introduction,” in The Portable Atheist, xxii. For an example see my interview with Jeff Lowder in Is the Atheist My Neighbor? (Cascade, 2015).

David Owens writes: “Religious worldviews may not be true, but we may not be able to do without them unless we can find some other way of imbuing the cosmos with meaning.” “Disenchantment,” in Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise M. Anthony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 165-6.

Greg Koukl, “Are Atheists Just Suppressing the Truth in Unrighteousness?” Stand to Reason Blog (October 5, 2015), http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2015/10/are-atheists-just-suppressing-the-truth-in-unrighteousness.html (Accessed on July 1, 2016).

I critique this concept in Is the Atheist My Neighbor.

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Is the problem of evil less of a problem if evil is not a thing?

Some theists attempt to lessen the problem of evil by arguing that evil has no independent ontological existence: instead, it is merely the absence of good.

Let’s consider that defense for a moment by trying out the logic in an analogous case. Imagine that Mr. and Mrs. Jones leave town for the weekend and they allow their son Jack to watch the house. When they return, they immediately notice that there is a large hole in the living room wall. “Jack,” Mr. Jones angrily says, “Where’d that thing come from?”

Jack replies with a smile: “Dad, that hole isn’t a ‘thing.’ It’s merely the absence of wall.”

What do you think Mr. Jones will say in reply? I’m guessing he’ll say “Okay smart guy, where’d that absence of wall come from?!” (Then he’ll cuff Jack on the ear.)

You see, the problem isn’t with the metaphysics of holes. It’s with the damage to the wall. And the problem of evil isn’t with the metaphysics of evil. It’s with the damage in creation vis-a-vis suffering.

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