A Response to Mr Millican

I know I'll regret this, as it will only produce a new wave of boring God-hating fanatics, each wrongly convinced they have something new to say, eager to beat their heads against this blog like moths besieging a light-bulb. But I post below a point-by-point response to a contribution (on the Dinner Jacket thread) from Peter Millican, one of my opponents in the Oxford debate. It opens with his words. My replies are marked **

 

'Dear Peter, Since you standardly give arguments for your positions, I take it you agree that arguments should be taken seriously: they're not (or shouldn't be) just hot air and bluster. So you are not an irrationalist who thinks "This is my view, and I don't care what reasons there may be for or against it!" If you *were* such an irrationalist, then I would simply ask why anybody else should care about your view? Certainly, anybody who wants their beliefs to be *reasonable*, or to reflect the way things really are, would then have good grounds for dismissing what you say. Personally, I do want my beliefs to be reasonable, and to reflect the way things really are. Obviously I don't have infallible insight into how they are, so I have to go on the basis of fallible evidence, looking at the weight of the arguments etc. How strong those arguments are *manifestly* isn't a question of mere choice, is it? If you think it is, then I'd be interested to see how you would argue for that claim (rather than resorting to blunt, dogmatic assertion). You have said: "How do I choose to believe? Simple. I prefer the implications of a created and law-governed universe, and welcome the obligations this places upon me. I really can't see any difficulty here." Is this right - you "really can't see any difficulty here"?? Isn't it *patently obvious* that, in general, preferring situation X to situation Y is a completely useless criterion for deciding which of them is actually true?

 

**Well, yes it would be in any area in which proof were available. The whole point about God is that there is no proof that He exists, and none that He doesn’t. What’s more, there isn’t ever going to be.

 

Mr Millican:  'Don't we (and you amongst us) castigate politicians for cynically filling their manifestos with incredible claims and promises that they themselves don't believe (even though they would certainly *choose* to believe them, if that were open to their choice)? Quite generally, if I were to discover that someone formed their beliefs on the basis of choice, rather than attempting to assess the relevant evidence objectively, that would completely undermine any confidence I might have in their reliability.'

 

**Perfectly true, in earthly matters. But on the question of God, not.  It is unique, in being a  question of great importance on which we have to admit that we lack the most important datum. Political claims (which as it happens are increasingly carefully costed because of growing public scepticism and the Internet’s nasty way of turning up long-forgotten speeches at inconvenient moments) can easily be tested by experience and research. They bear no resemblance to the promises offered by the God in whom I believe, and in whom you say you don’t believe.

 

 

If your beliefs about God are primarily a matter of what you *want* to be true, then I'm afraid you lose any legitimate pretension to being any sort of reliable authority on the matter:

 

***That suits me.  You mistake and hugely overestimate my ambitions. I have no desire to be regarded as an authority on a matter which I regard as one of personal choice. What sort of authority could that possibly be? The whole idea of authority is absent from this discussion, as I see it.

 

I have no hope of persuading (for instance) Peter Millican of the rightness of my beliefs.  Nor do I have any great desire to try. All I wish to do is to point out to him that his beliefs are as much a choice as mine, that he holds them because he wants to, and the most interesting thing about them is the question ‘why does he *want* to believe that?’.

 

No-one is making him do it. No logic compels him to do so. No facts compel him to do so. No evidence is conclusive upon the point. Nor will it ever be. He doesn’t even have to choose. He could be an agnostic, who at least didn’t make silly demeaning jokes about religious believers, and sneer at them for being irrational, when his own reason is so obscured by partisanship has failed to follow their arguments. But then of course he would still have the choice as to whether to live his life as if God exists, or as if He doesn’t.

 

He continues :’What you believe might then be of interest to a psychologist,’

 

***This is just rude, and unworthy of a serious person.

 

And goes on‘...  but not to someone who genuinely wants to know the truth about the relevant claims.’

 

***There he goes again, confusing knowledge with belief, an error I warned him against when I stood up in the debate to raise a point of information during his speech. We shall all *know* the truth when, or at some point after,  we die, or alternatively, if he is right, we shall not exist and shall know nothing and care less. In the meantime, we must choose on the basis of preference, there being no other grounds on which we can choose any of the available positions. We cannot know. Therefore we can only believe. And the basis for belief is our preference.

 

Mr Millican proceeds :’But I suspect you're not actually such an irrationalist, because you then go on to say: "Human knowledge and reason don't exclude the possibility that there is such a universe, there is a great deal of evidence that there is such a universe (though there is no conclusive proof). I am free to choose one of three things - active belief, active disbelief or agnosticism." Please could you come clean and be quite explicit? Do you think you are free to choose in this case *only* because "there is a great deal of evidence" in favour of your view? Or would you be free to choose belief even if the vast majority of the evidence were against it?’

 

***That’s another thing about this issue. You can even disagree about what constitutes evidence. The religious believer sees an endless daily parade of evidence for his belief in a designed and purposeful universe. The non-believer is unmoved by such things   . It would be difficult to quantify such evidence, even into ‘majority’ or ‘minority’. Personally, if there were so much as a tiny, tattered, trampled scrap of evidence suggesting that God exists, I would seize upon it as enough, so very much do I wish there to be a God and to see His face.

 

Evidence is not a synonym for proof. Likewise I would acquit an accused person, were I on a jury, if there were the smallest scrap of reasonable doubt, so strongly do I desire justice and so much do I treasure justice's essential companion, the presumption of innocence. A ‘majority’ of evidence, in any case a strange concept,  is of no significance in arriving at proof. It may simply be that you have not discovered the rest of the evidence on the other side, or it has been kept from you. Certainly anyone sitting on a Jury would be wise to take that view. In both cases, interestingly, we cannot *know* for certain. In both cases, a desire for justice will motivate us to prefer a particular verdict.

 

 

Mr Millican continues :’If the former, then despite all that you have said you need to address the arguments on the other side - the arguments that suggest there is very poor evidence for theism.’

 

**No I don’t particularly. These arguments are limitlessly self-serving and unpersuasive to me, just as mine are self serving, and unpersuasive to the God-haters. Though i admit it, and they don't. The dispute lies elsewhere, in our hearts, where it has been since the beginning of this very old argument. This point is so simple, and so modest, and demands so little from my opponents – an acknowledgement that either of us might be right – that I used to be endlessly baffled by the unwillingness of my opponents and my allies to accept it. But I understand the problem now. My allies, whose faith is far stronger than mine, see it as too modest and too feeble. They ‘know’ or believe they ‘know’ there is a God. Some of them ‘know’ they are ‘saved’. They are not impressed by my view that I know no such thing.

 

My opponents correctly see in it a rather nasty reproach – one I know perfectly well is accurate because it once applied to me. The reproach is ‘ you very much hope that there is no God, and you have good reasons to hope that. And this is because of God’s characteristic as the embodiment of justice and judgement.’ Of course you’re not going to admit that in public, are you? Well, I admit openly that I used to think that, in the long years when I believed (and chose to believe)that there was no God. And I go further. It was my principal reason for choosing that belief. But I wouldn’t have said so then, either. It would never do for it to get out. What if everyone had been like me? The idea was intolerable. 

 

 

Mr Millican again: ‘ If the latter, then again your view is completely irrationalist, and I see no reason whatever to take it seriously if what I want is to discover the truth (and I, and I think most people, do). By the way, it is extremely unfair to suggest that your opponents have closed minds in relation to theism. I would not suggest that traditional theism is utterly impossible, but just very unlikely - on the basis of arguments that I have considered seriously and deeply for many years.’

 

***Well in that case you put yourself in the agnostic class. But do you live as an atheist, or do you live as a theist?
Do you live as if there is justice woven into the universe through all eternity, or as if there isn’t? Only you know the answer to that. But if the former, then why are you arguing against belief in such justice?

 

As for the accusation of irrationality, which I suspect is intended to be mildly abusive, it is actually an obtuse misunderstanding of my position. My whole point is that reason cannot take either of us a thousandth of an inch beyond agnosticism.  Nor can facts. Both sides have the same difficulty. The choice of belief or disbelief is necessarily beyond reason. How then do we take it? We choose what we prefer.   

 

And he concludes:  ‘It is far more closed-minded to say: "I don't care about the arguments: I'm just going to believe what I prefer to believe, regardless of the weight of evidence!"’

 

Once again, where is the objective machine that weighs this evidence? Where can I see it? Against what absolute standard is it calibrated?

 

As for closing our minds, I think, by changing mine on this subject twice in my life, I have rather proved that this is not a problem from which I suffer. I just wish he would grasp my point, that the only interesting thing about this argument, and the only one which will yield any increase of knowledge or understanding, is the recognition that we cannot know if there is a God or not, that we have motives for our beliefs, and that the honest admission that this is so allows us to discuss the matter intelligently.