The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

"It's the Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man"

Eugene Volokh responds to Michael Shermer's blog item about evolution and "intelligent design" at the Huffington Post. In particular, Volokh argues:

[H]ow exactly do scientists come to the conclusion that “God had no part in this process [i.e., evolution]”? What’s their proof? That’s the sort of thing that can’t really be proved, it seems to me -- which makes it sound as if scientists, despite their protestations of requiring proof rather than faith, make assertions about God that they can’t prove.

Well, imagine the following exchange:

CHILD: Did the Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man play a part in evolution?
BIOLOGIST: Er, no.

Would Volokh criticize our biologist for his answer in such a case? I suspect (and hope) not. But if not, then why does the question of God's hand deserve greater deference?

UPDATE: Pharyngula has more. (Via Brian Leiter.)

The God Who Wasn't There

Blogger Brian Flemming's documentary film The God Who Wasn't There is set for national theatrical release June 17. Looks interesting.

I have it from The Raving Atheist that the DVD has also been released and is available for sale. (DVD, then to theaters? There must be some crazy marketing scheme here that I don't understand.) The DVD  includes commentary by Earl Doherty, Richard Dawkins and TRA. Looks even more interesting.

The documentary purports to show that Christ "is most likely a fictional character, a legend never based on a real human being."

More on Harris

Benjamin Rutter reviews Sam Harris' book The End of Faith for The Revealer.

In lieu of a complete post here, I've lodged a comment over there.

Raising Thinkers, Not Believers

One of the greatest evils of religion is its imperative to indoctrinate one's children before they can think for themselves.

It's no more commendable when it's an atheist parent doing the indoctrinating.

We shouldn't be in the business of "raising atheists." We should be in the business of raising good kids who can think for themselves. They will arrive at the right metaphysics on their own.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Guardian Piece on Dennett

Guardian profiles Dan Dennett here.

Apparently, Dennett has a book upcoming (to be titled "Breaking the Spell") that "will attempt to extirpate supernaturalism." Though I wouldn't want to understimate Dan Dennett, in respect of that stated goal, the book, of course, will fail.

The Fruits of Bible Study

Isaac Asimov once said, "Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."

Perhaps he was right:

In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can't be bothered to read what he has to say.

(Via The Revealer.)

A Modal Solution to the Problem of Evil?

Brian Weatherson has a smart post on the problem of evil (a topic that's now ambient in the discourse regarding the tsunami disaster), and suggests that the problem has a relatively simple solution.

The solution is based on three highly arguable premises, though for sake of discussion I will grant all of them:

• a deity cannot intervene in a world of its creation without changing its essential nature;
• all such a deity can do is choose to bring any given world it deems ought to exist;
• such a deity would create "all and only the worlds such that it is better that they exist than [not]...";

It is then argued that notwithstanding the evil we find in our world, it is nonetheless better that our world exist than that it doesn't. Therefore, the problem of evil doesn't obtain.

But, is it really better that our world exist than not?

Note that this is a distinct question from whether our world ought to continue to exist, given that it does.

Consider the following analogy: a married couple knows with 100% certainty that if they try to get pregnant this evening, the child that will result (call this child Adam) will have a life that consists of 50.0000001% pleasure and 49.9999999% pain. (For convenience, assume Adam's marginal hedonic effect on the world will have the identical ratio). As it happens, this is the only chance the couple will have to get pregnant, and they know this too with 100% certainty.

Question: From the perspective of these parents, is it better that Adam be brought into existence than not?

I don't think it's at all clear that the answer is "yes." One might want to answer, "Well, by definition, the answer is 'yes,' because by definition one alternative is better than another because the one has net positive utility."

But there is a competing intuition (isn't there?) that 49.9999999% is a daunting share of pain for a person to have to go through life with. This intuition, I think, runs in favor of human lives that preponderate heavily in favor of high positive-to-negative hedonic ratios. (Perhaps this intuition is related to the fact that we seem far more motivated to avoid pain than to seek pleasure.) And it's just not clear that loving parents would want to bring a life into the world whose positive qualities preponderate so narrowly.

In any case, it's a hard question.

An easier question is the second one--whether it's better that Adam should continue to exist than not once he in fact does exist. The intuition here runs far stronger in favor of a "yes" answer. Actually, that's too weak. No loving parent would say, "You know, Adam's life is only going to be narrowly net positive, so let's euthanize him," or like that. It's unthinkable--far more unthinkable than the prospect of simply opting not to conceive Adam in the first place (which isn't unthinkable at all).

The point here is that it's plausible to weight the ratio of pain to pleasure in the world as I did in Adam's prospective life. If so, then despite our clear will to persevere in the world in which we find ourselves now, it's nonetheless arguable that from the perspective of a benevolent deity ex ante (which perspective I take to be analogous to that of our prospective parents), this world ought never to have been brought into existence.

When Otherwise Good Minds Turn to Mush

ANTESCRIPT: The title of this post must be referring to my own mind, because the body of this post, which I wrote based on reading a biased sampling of the responses given in the article discussed, is completely wrong. (See the complete set of responses here. Thanks to commenter Alison for the correction and pointer.)

This article from the New York Times (via Pejmanesque) doesn't help my disposition any.

It reports on the answers "scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers" gave in response to the question

What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

You just know what kinds of answers this question is meant to elicit. ("Hmmm, let's see, love, forgiveness...oh, now let's see--oh yes, of course: that an invisible being created a universe!")

And you also know that believers find such tissue-thin responses doxastically felicitous. ("Hallelujah! Even scientists admit they believe things they can't prove! Science be praised! My nonrational but epistemically completely unjustified and unmotivated belief has been preserved!") Particularly when they are provided by Trained Scientists.

So, obviously, this is an ideological trap--one that seeks to project a seeming rapprochement between science and religion.

One, alas, that even the eminently reasonable Richard Dawkins has fallen into:

I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life...anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.

Now, this does I admit sound quasireasonable. It's true, after all, that we don't have demonstrable proof of that hypothesis.

But most of us don't have demonstrable proof of anything. I know very well, for instance, that Fermat's last theorem is true, but I certainly can't prove it. (In fact, in the hyperdemonstrable sense of 'proof' seemingly being used here, I can't even "prove" that my ears aren't made of broccoli. At least arguably.)

Moreover, surely it can't be the case we positively lack any good inductive or abductive reasons to believe Dawkin's hypothesis. (We have every bit as much epistemic grounds to extend natural selection cosmos-wide as Newton did gravity.) But then Dawkin's belief is very far from suffering the same feeble level of justification as, say, the notion that there's a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people-eater orbiting Alpha Centauri. And while we certainly can't "prove" the negation of latter sort of belief, we nonetheless routinely prescribe medications to those who believe such things.

That all being the case, what on earth is the point in answering a question that by design seems to privilege both types of belief equally?

None--save perhaps inadvertently to provide talking points for the advocates of theism's strange doctrines.

Why, God?

Reuters reports on the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their loved ones in the tsunami catastrophe, and who must now be asking themselves, "Why, God?"

Curiously, the question both presupposes faith and betrays the gravest doubt: those who truly believe that their loved ones are now enjoying an eternal, blissful afterlife should be pleased.

That actual attitudes uniformly run quite to the contrary (thank Reality) shows that deep in the fundaments of their consciousness all believers comprehend the utter meaninglessness of such tragedy.

Two Types of Atheist?

Richard Posner distinguishes two types of atheist:

The first is a person who does not have a sense that there is a God—who, in short, is not a religious person. The second is a person who adheres to the doctrine that there is no God. That is a metaphysical proposition that does not interest me. [] There is no fruitful debating of God’s existence.

By the phrase 'person adheres to the doctrines,' then, Posner is referring to the sort of person sufficiently passionate about the idea to be willing to debate the metaphysical proposition.

The problem is that these positions don't seem to stake out opposite, or even mutually exclusive, poles. One could lack the sense that there is a deity and also be somewhat interested in the competing arguments.  Or (psychologically less realistic) one could even have the sense that there is a deity but through attention to the arguments come to believe that the sense is delusory. (Side note: I'm assuming one's attentiveness to the arguments is probably going to covary with one's avidity in debating the proposition.)

Also, note that neither one of these dimensions tracks the degree of one's subjective certainty about the matter. So someone who lacked the sense that there is a deity and someone who "adhered" to the doctrine that there is no deity could give the same answer ("no") to the question "Is there a God" with the same subjective probability.

(Apropros of me, the above is a rather niggling point. Posner's post is mainly concerned with the far more interesting question of whether "religious beliefs shouldn’t be allowed to influence public policy." My thumbnail analysis of why Posner is wrong in that discussion is that he purports to dispose of his normative question by brute appeal to political description.)

UPDATE: Posner expounds on themes from his original post.

Oddly, he makes the confusing statement that he "doesn't feel the presence of God in [his]  life" in the same way a eunuch doesn't feel the presence of sex.

I think a better comparison--one that actually tracks at least some of relevant features of god belief--would be to the way regularly functioning (i.e., sane) people don't feel the presence of one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people-eaters.