I didn't follow Prop 8 very closely until its closing days and aftermath.
One of the odd one-way public dialogues in relation to Prop 8 and its aftermath is that opponents argue that gay marriage is a right, while proponents don't seem to pick up on rights-based arguments at all.
I was thinking about why that is. There are a number of ways of defining what a "right" is, but two main relevant ways. First is the modern legal definition, which, to simplify^, is the ability to call on the state to prevent someone else from interfering with a protected action. So, in relation to this definition, gay marriage activists are correct when they say they *had* a right under Californian law, but not that they *have* one. They are also correct in saying that their right was taken away.
When activists channel the spirit of the civil rights era, they are talking about rights in a different sense. They are talking about something akin to "natural" rights -- the rights that any person ought to have. The concept of natural rights was primarily put forward by religionists who (essentially) wished to legislate religious beliefs. The concept was eventually adopted by humanists who believed that there was a natural order to the world of laws, even if that order wasn't dictated by God. But the idea of natural rights hasn't been en vogue in some time, mostly because legal thinkers realized that people have very divergent views of what rights people ought to have, such that the concept of natural rights doesn't really work.
So, a couple of take-home points:
First, it's not terribly coherent to say, "we have a right, and it has been taken away." If referring to a legal right, the first clause is incorrect. If referring to a natural right, the second clause doesn't make any sense, and the first clause is entirely debatable.
Second, picking up on that debatability, it's a fruitless endeavor for activists to argue whether they have a right, and I think that's the reason why the argument doesn't get many responses. Instead, activists must argue *why* they ought to have a right. That's what the debate is really about.
And that, in my opinion, is why gay marriage activists lost. The pro-Prop-8ers mostly made arguments about why they thought gay marriage would be bad -- i.e., why it ought not be a right. The anti-Prop-8ers seem mostly to have made sheer assertions of right (together with character attacks) in lieu of convincing people why gay marriage ought to be a right.
That's a big shame, because the anti-Prop-8 tactics skirted the very debate about gay marriage that anti-Prop-8ers claim to want. Perhaps it seems demeaning to have to argue why gay marriage ought to be a right, but, again, that's what the debate is *about*. Personally, I think there are plenty of good reasons to recognize a right of gay couples to commit to each other in a legally binding sense.
But I cannot call that commitment "marriage," since that word has a distinct religious meaning in my lexicon: a union between a man and a woman. And I must confess that it absolutely baffles me why any gay activist would want his or her commitment to be called "marriage." I wouldn't want my religion to be called by the name the Russian Orthodox Church uses exclusively for itself, even if it meant recognition of my religion in Russia. I want to be accepted for who I am, with full recognition of my differences rather than having those differences papered over.
Perhaps this explains it better: Prop 8 supporters view marriage primarily as something akin to an entity, and not a status. If marriage is viewed as an entity (a union between a man and a woman), then requiring gay unions to be called "marriage" would be akin to, in relation to laws that gave rights only to white people, trying to solve the problem by requiring black people to be called white instead of simply extending the rights to all people.
Personally, I think that, from a legal perspective, we should just have a uniform legal recognition of lifetime unions, with people who enter into unions allowed to call their unions by whatever name they wish. If marriage is a religiously loaded term, which it obviously is, let's take it out of our government and put it in the private sphere where it belongs. It would be an administrative nightmare, to be sure, but I think it's the best way forward, allowing both sides to "win."
^ This is the definition of a Hohfeldian claim-right rather than a privilege-right / liberty-right. I think this is entirely appropriate for these purposes, but would welcome any thought why it might not be.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Mormonism, Intellectuals and "Blind Obedience"
One accusation that gets levied at Mormons is that members of the church purportedly face disciplinary trouble if they aren't willing to adhere to "blind obedience."
Nobody in the LDS church preaches blind obedience. Quite the contrary. We emphasize, more than most religions, the need to personally discover whether you believe the core tenets of our faith.
But there *are* certain core tenets of the LDS faith. There are of other faiths, too. If you walk into a Baptist church and preach that Jesus was the anti-Christ, you are going to get uninvited from coming back. The same principle applies to any organization or grouping. If I stop doing the type of work my law firm does, I'll get fired. It's not "blind obedience" -- it's deciding to be a member of an organization/movement/association/etc. that has some defining characteristic or another.
I'm especially sick of "intellectuals" whining about the problems "intellectuals" face in the church if they don't exhibit "blind obedience." You don't get excommunicated for questioning blind obedience; you get excommunicated for deciding and overtly demonstrating that you don't believe in the core tenets of Mormonism. And if you have stopped believing in Mormonism, why complain about being uninvited from the Mormon party? (I put "intellectuals" in quotation marks because if they're not intellectual enough to figure out that they have stopped believing in Mormonism, they don't get to call themselves intellectuals. They're David Brents.)
Nobody in the LDS church preaches blind obedience. Quite the contrary. We emphasize, more than most religions, the need to personally discover whether you believe the core tenets of our faith.
But there *are* certain core tenets of the LDS faith. There are of other faiths, too. If you walk into a Baptist church and preach that Jesus was the anti-Christ, you are going to get uninvited from coming back. The same principle applies to any organization or grouping. If I stop doing the type of work my law firm does, I'll get fired. It's not "blind obedience" -- it's deciding to be a member of an organization/movement/association/etc. that has some defining characteristic or another.
I'm especially sick of "intellectuals" whining about the problems "intellectuals" face in the church if they don't exhibit "blind obedience." You don't get excommunicated for questioning blind obedience; you get excommunicated for deciding and overtly demonstrating that you don't believe in the core tenets of Mormonism. And if you have stopped believing in Mormonism, why complain about being uninvited from the Mormon party? (I put "intellectuals" in quotation marks because if they're not intellectual enough to figure out that they have stopped believing in Mormonism, they don't get to call themselves intellectuals. They're David Brents.)
Friday, 5 September 2008
New Atheism
I gave this blog an ambitious title. So here's a first shot at trying to justify it: my short smackdown of New Atheism.
Atheism is a belief system. Unlike agnostics, atheists believe in something that is not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: they believe in the non-existence of any deity. That's fine. It's a perfectly respectable and reasonable belief system.
Indeed, any belief system can be accorded respect if it meets two criteria. First, it can't be at odds with the rational world. Second, it's got to be internally logical. You could call these criteria external and internal sensibility. Atheistic belief systems have the advantage of being pretty darn externally sensible.
But New Atheists -- the Hitchenites, Dawkinsians, and the like -- manage to muck things up.
New Atheists have constructed a concept of religion that involves the masses unthinkingly adopting ideas from people who claim to know things that are unknowable. I'll call this the Moses Construction. The New Atheists cry that the Moses Construction (to them, "religion") is a travesty and is responsible for all sorts of nastiness. Stupid people everywhere are being duped by false prophets, they say. They're led to war on false pretenses, etc. And I have some empathy for their fight against what they call "religion" (even if I think it's simply human psychology at play and religion merely one of many vehicles).
But popular constructions of abstract concepts being what they are, most New Atheists can't seem to understand that the Moses Construction is just that -- a construction, and not religion itself. And here's where things go wrong, to the point of ridiculous, hypocritical internal insensibility.
First, it turns out that the avowed "atheism" of so many New Atheists is nothing more than the rejection of a specific, constructed (and generally inaccurate) belief system. That sort of "atheism" isn't a cohesive belief system at all, and it's certainly not progressive. It's just self-congratulatory rebellion by people who want to view others as their intellectual inferiors.
The second, and more important, problem is that the Moses Construction fits many New Atheists all too well. The New Atheist prophets (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.) make interesting and at times valuable arguments, but, stripped of their bravado, those arguments are nothing more than explanations of a belief system. You wouldn't know that from the religious fervor with which so many of their followers proselytize the "truth," however. Those followers are unthinking dogmatists through and through. The irony is rich and deep. Their belief system is exactly the type of Foucaultian construct they reflexively decry as "religion."
Talking with many New Atheists has, in an unexpected way, helped me understand Nietzsche better. The premiere dogmatists of any age are often the people who view themselves as the most progressive. They're so darn sure they're right about other people's wrongness that they seem to extend that same so-darn-surety to their own rightness. But that doesn't work. They end up becoming self-righteous dogmatists in the process. What do you know? Non-God is dead. And the New Atheists killed non-Him.
Atheism is a belief system. Unlike agnostics, atheists believe in something that is not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: they believe in the non-existence of any deity. That's fine. It's a perfectly respectable and reasonable belief system.
Indeed, any belief system can be accorded respect if it meets two criteria. First, it can't be at odds with the rational world. Second, it's got to be internally logical. You could call these criteria external and internal sensibility. Atheistic belief systems have the advantage of being pretty darn externally sensible.
But New Atheists -- the Hitchenites, Dawkinsians, and the like -- manage to muck things up.
New Atheists have constructed a concept of religion that involves the masses unthinkingly adopting ideas from people who claim to know things that are unknowable. I'll call this the Moses Construction. The New Atheists cry that the Moses Construction (to them, "religion") is a travesty and is responsible for all sorts of nastiness. Stupid people everywhere are being duped by false prophets, they say. They're led to war on false pretenses, etc. And I have some empathy for their fight against what they call "religion" (even if I think it's simply human psychology at play and religion merely one of many vehicles).
But popular constructions of abstract concepts being what they are, most New Atheists can't seem to understand that the Moses Construction is just that -- a construction, and not religion itself. And here's where things go wrong, to the point of ridiculous, hypocritical internal insensibility.
First, it turns out that the avowed "atheism" of so many New Atheists is nothing more than the rejection of a specific, constructed (and generally inaccurate) belief system. That sort of "atheism" isn't a cohesive belief system at all, and it's certainly not progressive. It's just self-congratulatory rebellion by people who want to view others as their intellectual inferiors.
The second, and more important, problem is that the Moses Construction fits many New Atheists all too well. The New Atheist prophets (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.) make interesting and at times valuable arguments, but, stripped of their bravado, those arguments are nothing more than explanations of a belief system. You wouldn't know that from the religious fervor with which so many of their followers proselytize the "truth," however. Those followers are unthinking dogmatists through and through. The irony is rich and deep. Their belief system is exactly the type of Foucaultian construct they reflexively decry as "religion."
Talking with many New Atheists has, in an unexpected way, helped me understand Nietzsche better. The premiere dogmatists of any age are often the people who view themselves as the most progressive. They're so darn sure they're right about other people's wrongness that they seem to extend that same so-darn-surety to their own rightness. But that doesn't work. They end up becoming self-righteous dogmatists in the process. What do you know? Non-God is dead. And the New Atheists killed non-Him.
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Spalding-Rigdon
One criticism of the Book of Mormon that still seems to make the rounds far more frequently than it deserves is the Spalding-Rigdon Theory (the SRT). According to the SRT, Sidney Rigdon is supposed to have stolen a manuscript from a man named Solomon Spalding. That manuscript is supposed to have been similar, at least in key respects, to the Book of Mormon. Rigdon is then supposed to have sent the manuscript to Joseph Smith, who is supposed to have used that manuscript as the basis for the Book of Mormon.
In attempting to support their claims, SRT advocates talk about the "best fit" of evidence. One Stanford professor in particular has amassed a lot of data to try to demonstrate that the SRT is the "best fit" for the origination of the Book of Mormon.
This emphasis on evidence is, it turns out, deeply ironic. And there's no need to be overly intellectual about it to see where these SRT people get it wrong. It's pretty simple.
Let's look at the most objective analysis available: let's say Spalding had sued Rigdon and Joseph Smith in tort for plagiarism (we'll keep the legalistic part of the analysis simple, notwithstanding that plagiarism probably isn't a cause of action as such in many jurisdictions).
Now before any "scientists" get up in arms about this analytical approach, let me make clear that this is the best framework for examining the SRT, for two reasons. First, the standard for deciding a tort case is which argument has a preponderance of evidence (there's no presumption of innocent until proven guilty). So you're just looking at which side has the stronger evidence, as you would in a scientific analysis. Second, and more importantly, framing the analysis as a tort case forces one to think about the evidence objectively, as an impartial judge would do -- something which even alleged scientific observers seem unable to do consistently.
The Spalding "case"
So if Spalding had sued Rigdon and Joseph Smith for plagiarism, would he have won on the merits (ignoring procedural issues like the statute of limitations)? Let's look at the evidence.
The Book of Mormon was published in 1830. Allegations were first made in 1834 that the BoM was a ripoff of the Spalding manuscript. The only evidence for the existence of the Spalding manuscript at the time was hearsay. In the roughly 175 years since the allegations first arose, the manuscript still hasn't been found.
Let's take an analogous situation. Radiohead published their album "In Rainbows" in 2007. Let's say in 2011 a Mr. Spilling comes forward and says, "hey, wait a minute -- those are my songs!" But Spilling can't produce any written lyrics or music or any recordings supporting his claims. All he has to go on is his word and the words of a few of his friends (one of whose father worked in a music studio that Thom Yorke's buddy may or may not have visited at some point in his life).
So, in short, the defendant (Radiohead) has direct evidence of authorship (the publication of the work in question), while the plaintiff (Spilling) has only circumstantial evidence from friends that he originally generated the work.
Case over. Thrown out of court. Plaintiff to be ridiculed during appearances on second-rate daytime talk shows (while flicking through channels several years ago, I once saw exactly that happen to a woman who claimed Michael Jackson had plagiarized her work).
It boggles my mind that, in all their talk of evidence, SRT supporters routinely fail to acknowledge that circumstantial evidence is useless without the most basic and most relevant bit of evidence in favor of the SRT: the Spalding manuscript itself. We don't even get to begin debating the authenticity of the manuscript, because it can't be produced!
The lack of the Spalding manuscript is enough for any reasonable person to ignore the SRT in good conscience, just as one would be very reasonable to ignore Mr. Spilling and accept Radiohead's assertion of authorship of In Rainbows.
Just in case that isn't enough . . .
But lest any SRT supporter think I am dodging the issue, I am happy to take on anything such supporter might try to pass off as evidence. I think it's safe to say that there are two main categories of such passing-offs of alleged evidence:
1) the presentation of various after-publication statements, together with the assertion of (1) the rectitude and insight of the people who made after-the-fact statements that might support the SRT and (2) the moral depravity of the people who made after-the-fact statements that would debunk the SRT; and
2) the analysis of meaningless data -- meaningless because it relies on dubious and/or subjective assumptions, leading to questionable (at best) conclusions.
The guy from Stanford provides some great examples of the latter category. For instance, he analyzes the frequency of the occurrence of the phrase "children of men," which he (dubiously and subjectively) claims would have come from Sidney Rigdon, in BoM passages which he (dubiously and subjectively) claims would have corresponded to Sidney Rigdon's and not Joseph Smith's belief systems at the time they were written! Inferring the preferred phrases of people who have been dead for 100+ years based on their inferred religious views at certain times in their lives doesn't yield good evidence. In fact, it can hardly be called evidence at all. That the process is asserted as scientific inquiry by slapping on a statistical analysis is a mockery.
There's no disputing that the best and only meaningful evidence -- the publication of the BoM by Joseph Smith's hand -- points to Joseph Smith as the author of the BoM. Whether you believe that he authored it through a divine translation process or straight from his head is another matter. But asserting the SRT or some other theory of the origins of the BoM is nonsense, *especially* if one is interested in evidence and best fits.
Monday, 14 January 2008
The Non-God Delusion
Here is basically what I think about rationality applied to religion, in the form of a (casual) book review.
I read "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins last June. It's essentially an extended proselytizing tract for atheism. As one might expect from a book of that type, it doesn't advance a lot of new arguments (although Dawkins does offer his unique insights), but is rather an attempt to make existing arguments accessible for the masses. And on that front it has been successful; it is generally well written and has sold very well.
As with so many books of its type, it's mostly quite sensible. The problem is that its core conclusion -- that God is so unlikely to exist that belief in God is just silly -- is directly based on the two things it gets wrong. And I am not talking about differences of opinion -- I am talking about categorical errors in Dawkins' reasoning that seemed quite obvious to me (and Dawkins' apparent ignorance of which, given the book's rallying cry of rational scientific thought, I found to be fairly ironic).
The two errors are related, but they're worth dividing conceptually. First is that Dawkins sets up a straw man: he relies on one of the most well-documented fallacies of logic in order to argue that only a certain conception of God can possibly work for theists (a conception which he then more sensibly argues does not work). Second is that he misuses probabilistic reasoning.
Dawkins' Ontological Error
Dawkins' main argument is based on a core premise: if God exists, God must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection. Dawkins then argues that all evidence (of which there is a lot) indicates that the world was not created in such a manner, and it is thus so unlikely that God exists that one would be irresponsible to believe in God.
But there is a problem with this line of reasoning, and let's just say it how it is: Dawkins' premise is inane. It begs the question. It can't possibly be a starting point for a rational argument about the existence or non-existence of God.
To see why, let's first look at the line of reasoning which Dawkins' ironically mirrors.
The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument (the OA) was(/is, in some circles) an attempt to prove the existence of God rationally; Descartes' version is perhaps the most famous. I'll boil the OA down into what I think is a fair summary:
God is the greatest entity that can be conceived.
It is greater to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, God exists.
There are two problems with the OA.
OA problem one: "great" is subjective
The first problem is simple: who is to say that existence is greater than non-existence? A number of logicians have, in parody (usually), argued exactly the opposite (e.g., creating the universe while not existing is greater than creating it while existing) to illustrate the simple principle that the validity of a logical conclusion is only as good as that of the premises on which the conclusion is based. If the premises are subjective value statements, the conclusion won't be worth much. Consider the following argument:
The best NFL team in the world uses a dolphin as its mascot.
The Miami Dolphins use a dolphin as their mascot.
Therefore, the Miami Dolphins are the best NFL team in the world.
Obviously, the conclusion of this argument is very debatable -- as is the underlying premise in the first sentence. Now, you might think, "wait a minute; the conclusion for this argument is subjective, while the conclusion for the OA is objective." But the conclusion for the OA only appears to be objective; the conclusion is only as strong as its weakest premise, which is a subjective one. This becomes clearer if you transform the OA slightly:
X is the greatest NBA team that can be conceived.
It is greater for an NBA team to win every game it plays than to lose any games.
It is greater for an NBA team to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, X exists and has won every game it ever played.
Here, you have a seemingly objective conclusion that obviously doesn't work because it is based on a flawed premise.
OA problem two: assuming existence
As you read the NBA argument above, you no doubt asked yourself (probably so quickly that it was purely reflexive): is there an NBA basketball team that has won every game it ever played? You realized that there isn't, so X doesn't exist. The argument didn't prove any valid point; it merely raised the question it was trying to prove, and you answered the question in your own mind.
This illustrates the even deeper problem with the OA: it assumes what it is trying to prove. It defines God as the entity that has all the greatest conceivable qualities, one of which is existence. So, at its core, the OA argues that the entity that exists (and has all the other greatest qualities) exists (and presumably has all the other greatest qualities). That's fine if there is an entity that exists and has all the other greatest qualities, but what if there isn't? This type of argument begs the question.
To look at it another way, consider the following arguments, in the form of "X was the first person to do Y, therefore, at least one person has done Y":
1) X was the first person to orbit the Earth. Therefore, at least one person has orbited the Earth.
2) X was the first person to land on Mars. Therefore, at least one person has landed on Mars.
3) X was the first person to give birth to more than 70 children. Therefore, at least one person has given birth to more than 70 children.
We know that there is a single person who fits X in the first example: X is Yuri Gagarin, and so the conclusion is true. However, with regards to the second example, there is no person who fits the bill of X. X is an "empty name" -- it doesn't refer to anything -- and so the conclusion is false (if there was no first person to do it, no other person could have done it, either). Turning to the third example, the highest documented number of children a person has given birth to is 69. However, records on that sort of thing don't go back very far and cover only limited geography, so it's possible someone had 70+ children at some point in human history. Thus, we can't really know whether X refers to somebody, and so we can neither prove nor disprove the conclusion.
In other words, the conclusions above that a person did Y are true only to the extent that X refers to something. If X doesn't refer to anything -- if it is an empty name -- then the conclusion isn't true. The existence of X is a key underlying question, the answer to which affects the validity of the conclusion.
Similarly, the OA is true only if God refers to an actual entity; it's not true if God is an empty name. The existence of God is a key underlying question, the answer to which affects the validity of the conclusion. So the OA works only if God exists, which gets us nowhere. We have to look elsewhere for any rational argument for or against the existence of God. (I tend to think there isn't one.)
Dawkins' use of the OA
Despite the fact that Dawkins himself devotes a few (somewhat long-winded) pages to discussing the OA, he seems to be entirely ignorant of his own adaptation of it as the only support for the flawed premise that underlies his core argument.
Remember, Dawkins' premise is: if God exists, God must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection. Here is what he says in his sole attempt to defend it:
"I am continually astonished by those theists who . . . seem to rejoice in natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't need to do anything at all! Peter Atkins . . . takes this line of thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins's lazy God is even lazier than the deist God of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: deus otiosus -- literally God at leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless. Step by step, Atkins succeeds in reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist."
Does this sound familiar? I noted above that most logicians who have made this argument do so in parody. But Dawkins, shockingly, seems to take it seriously, despite it being such an obvious form of the OA:
God is the laziest entity that can be conceived.
Not existing is lazier than existing.
Therefore, God doesn't exist.
Obviously, as a form of the OA, this argument is subject to the same problems set out above: first, it is based on a subjective premise, and second, it is only true if God refers to an empty name, so it assumes the non-existence of God in the first place.
Dawkins' use of this argument to develop his core premise is embarrassing on its own. But it is all the more galling given his harsh criticism of the OA: "The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically, so I must take care to refrain from bandying words like 'fool'." I will also take care to so restrain myself, given the intellectual hypocrisy of Dawkins' attempt to spoonfeed unthinking masses the very sort of stuff he so ardently decries.
In sum, Dawkins' premise that God, if he exists, must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection, is a gross error. It assumes what it purports to show. Given the fundamental flaw in Dawkins' premise, one can already be certain that any further conclusion based on it will be equally flawed; as mentioned above, the validity of a logical conclusion is only as good as that of the premises on which the conclusion is based.
Dawkins' Probability Error
Notwithstanding that his premise about the necessary nature of God erroneously relies on a false (and intellectually corrupt) proof of God's non-existence, Dawkins admits: "[t]hat you cannot prove God's non-existence is accepted and trivial." But Dawkins sees this as a technical point -- it is true "only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything." He goes on to say -- and this is the thrust of his argument -- that "[w]hat matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable."
So, to summarize Dawkins' position again for ease of reference, Dawkins first sets up his (faulty) premise that if God exists, God must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection. He then goes on to make the argument that existing evidence (of which there is a lot) indicates that the world was not created in such a manner, and it is thus so unlikely that God exists that one would be irresponsible to believe in God.
As noted above, this argument is prima facie inconclusive since its premise is faulty. It is like asserting that 2+3>6 or 5+3>6 because of the underlying premise 3>6. Dawkins may, in fact, be right, or he may not be, but his argument gets him nowhere unless we have some other method of verifying the correctness of his argument (as we do with the simple mathematical examples).
But there is another problem with Dawkins' probabilistic reasoning -- one that would still exist even if he altered his premise.
Let's look at where Dawkins begins his probabilistic line of reasoning. To illustrate the alleged improbability of God, Dawkins starts with Bertand Russell's (whose history of Western philosophy I'm currently reading) teapot-in-space analogy. Russell said:
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
Dawkins applies the teapot principle to various hypothetical entities. Presumably, he says, you don't believe in the tooth fairy. But although you can't prove that the tooth fairy doesn't exist, you wouldn't describe yourself as a tooth fairy agnostic. You would be an a-fairyist (like a-theist) because you think the probability of the tooth fairy existing is so low as to be unimportant. The same would go for the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any number of other potential entities.
Dawkins then applies the teapot principle to the definition of God he (erroneously) presumes must be the necessary one. He explains at great length why that version of God is very unlikely to exist (especially responding to intelligent design). Which is fine. But what it doesn't say is much, if anything, about the probability of the existence of God generally (just as my rational conclusions about hypothetical likely non-candidates to be George Bush or the tooth fairy do not say much about the likelihood of their existence or non-existence).
Much more interestingly, in transforming Russell's argument from one about possibility to one about probability, Dawkins (seemingly inadvertently) exposes the flaw in Russell's (and Dawkins' adopted) analogy: the degree to which one can be "thought to be talking nonsense" by asserting the existence of X is a corollary of the specificity with which X is defined. If, in Russell's example, X were "an object that our most powerful telescopes cannot reveal," the probability of X's existence would approach 100%. Where X is "a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit," the probability of X's existence would approach 0%. And there are infinite potential Xs somewhere inbetween.
So Russell's teapot principle only holds true when the hypothetical object whose existence is questioned is defined very specifically. The exact reverse holds true when the object is defined very broadly.
Dawkins' application of the teapot principle doesn't work because he defines God narrowly (as discussed above) -- in fact, he uses a definition of God against which he has some strong arguments up his sleeve. This is not strong probabilistic reasoning.
Admittedly, Dawkins rightfully says that if a definition of God becomes too broad, it loses meaning. But there is plenty of room for a conception of God somewhere between the 0% and 100% ends of the probability spectrum. (Personally, I think the Mormon conception fits the bill quite well, but I'll leave that for another post.)
Fixing Dawkins' Errors
For the sake of completeness, let's discuss what Dawkins should have said had he put his thinking cap on.
Hume noted that "the only way to prove anything a priori is through an opposite contradiction." In other words, you can define the properties of something by showing what it cannot be conceived of being -- for instance, "I am a married bachelor." You can conceive of God existing. You can conceive of God not existing. So you're not going to get anywhere vis-a-vis the existence of God through a priori reasoning.
Now, you might be able to rule out (or come close to ruling out) certain immediate characteristics of a hypothetical God via a priori reasoning. For instance, if God exists, it seems incredibly unlikely that he hurls lightning bolts from the sky. Or, in other words, a conception of God that involves him hurling lightning bolts from the sky is almost certainly wrong. (We can figure this out a priori not because we know anything about God, but because we know where lightning bolts come from, at least at some level of causality.)
So what Dawkins could have said is that it is unlikely that God (if he exists) created the world in a manner that did not involve what we call natural selection. Or, in other words, a conception of God that involves him creating the world in that manner is probably not right.
That would have been fine. But Dawkins overreached in his open zeal to spread his atheist dogma and ended up using the very logomachist trickery he found so offensive in an attempt to advance an inadvancable argument. One can rationally narrow down the likely characteristics of God (if he exists), but one cannot argue a priori that God does not exist. Yet Dawkins employs exactly such a priori reasoning in order to rule out every conception of God except the one that makes his probability argument look good. Skillful legerdemain.
If one relies only on rationality, I think that one must be agnostic (which is why I view pseudo-rational atheists like Dawkins quite like I view pseudo-rational theists). We can't rationally know whether God exists. Admittedly, some belief systems in God may run contrary to rational thought; but, as we have seen, so can some belief systems in the non-existence of God. Those belief systems can, and in my opinion, should, be subject to critical thought. On the other hand, other belief systems in the existence of God (such as mine) as well as in the non-existence of God comprise beliefs about what lies outside the reach of the rational world.*
"The God Delusion" and its scriptorial acceptance in some circles are fantastic examples of how atheism is so very much like theism. The atheist belief system propounded in those circles is cult-like, built on the backs of charismatic figures such as Dawkins, whose assertion of beliefs as truth is taken as gospel by unthinking masses. There is more than a little irony in Dawkins' acrimonious attitude towards theists, since his acrimony derives from perceived theist attributes that he embodies all too well. Dawkins, the dogmatist, refuses to recognize his God belief for what it is -- a belief in an unknowable area, a hypothesis in relation to which probabilistic (or any other kind of) reasoning says very little. (While I, a theist, am happy to recognize exactly that.)
* Saying these beliefs are "outside the reach of the rational world" is not to say that I think the existence of God is not a question that could, theoretically, be verified by scientific analysis; I would be the first to promote such an analysis, but I just don't think a conclusive one is possible. Saying these beliefs are "outside the reach of the rational world" is also not to say that I think rationality cannot inform religion; it tells us what is improbable on one end of the spectrum of probabilities and meaningless on the other. But there is a lot of area between the near-0% teapot and the near-100% generic object.
P.S. I'm aware that I use some terms perhaps slightly ambiguously -- e.g., "rationality" where I mean both rationality and empiricism. This is more or less a stream-of-consciousness post in its earliest form and, to the extent I can, I will clean things up over time.
I read "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins last June. It's essentially an extended proselytizing tract for atheism. As one might expect from a book of that type, it doesn't advance a lot of new arguments (although Dawkins does offer his unique insights), but is rather an attempt to make existing arguments accessible for the masses. And on that front it has been successful; it is generally well written and has sold very well.
As with so many books of its type, it's mostly quite sensible. The problem is that its core conclusion -- that God is so unlikely to exist that belief in God is just silly -- is directly based on the two things it gets wrong. And I am not talking about differences of opinion -- I am talking about categorical errors in Dawkins' reasoning that seemed quite obvious to me (and Dawkins' apparent ignorance of which, given the book's rallying cry of rational scientific thought, I found to be fairly ironic).
The two errors are related, but they're worth dividing conceptually. First is that Dawkins sets up a straw man: he relies on one of the most well-documented fallacies of logic in order to argue that only a certain conception of God can possibly work for theists (a conception which he then more sensibly argues does not work). Second is that he misuses probabilistic reasoning.
Dawkins' Ontological Error
Dawkins' main argument is based on a core premise: if God exists, God must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection. Dawkins then argues that all evidence (of which there is a lot) indicates that the world was not created in such a manner, and it is thus so unlikely that God exists that one would be irresponsible to believe in God.
But there is a problem with this line of reasoning, and let's just say it how it is: Dawkins' premise is inane. It begs the question. It can't possibly be a starting point for a rational argument about the existence or non-existence of God.
To see why, let's first look at the line of reasoning which Dawkins' ironically mirrors.
The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument (the OA) was(/is, in some circles) an attempt to prove the existence of God rationally; Descartes' version is perhaps the most famous. I'll boil the OA down into what I think is a fair summary:
God is the greatest entity that can be conceived.
It is greater to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, God exists.
There are two problems with the OA.
OA problem one: "great" is subjective
The first problem is simple: who is to say that existence is greater than non-existence? A number of logicians have, in parody (usually), argued exactly the opposite (e.g., creating the universe while not existing is greater than creating it while existing) to illustrate the simple principle that the validity of a logical conclusion is only as good as that of the premises on which the conclusion is based. If the premises are subjective value statements, the conclusion won't be worth much. Consider the following argument:
The best NFL team in the world uses a dolphin as its mascot.
The Miami Dolphins use a dolphin as their mascot.
Therefore, the Miami Dolphins are the best NFL team in the world.
Obviously, the conclusion of this argument is very debatable -- as is the underlying premise in the first sentence. Now, you might think, "wait a minute; the conclusion for this argument is subjective, while the conclusion for the OA is objective." But the conclusion for the OA only appears to be objective; the conclusion is only as strong as its weakest premise, which is a subjective one. This becomes clearer if you transform the OA slightly:
X is the greatest NBA team that can be conceived.
It is greater for an NBA team to win every game it plays than to lose any games.
It is greater for an NBA team to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, X exists and has won every game it ever played.
Here, you have a seemingly objective conclusion that obviously doesn't work because it is based on a flawed premise.
OA problem two: assuming existence
As you read the NBA argument above, you no doubt asked yourself (probably so quickly that it was purely reflexive): is there an NBA basketball team that has won every game it ever played? You realized that there isn't, so X doesn't exist. The argument didn't prove any valid point; it merely raised the question it was trying to prove, and you answered the question in your own mind.
This illustrates the even deeper problem with the OA: it assumes what it is trying to prove. It defines God as the entity that has all the greatest conceivable qualities, one of which is existence. So, at its core, the OA argues that the entity that exists (and has all the other greatest qualities) exists (and presumably has all the other greatest qualities). That's fine if there is an entity that exists and has all the other greatest qualities, but what if there isn't? This type of argument begs the question.
To look at it another way, consider the following arguments, in the form of "X was the first person to do Y, therefore, at least one person has done Y":
1) X was the first person to orbit the Earth. Therefore, at least one person has orbited the Earth.
2) X was the first person to land on Mars. Therefore, at least one person has landed on Mars.
3) X was the first person to give birth to more than 70 children. Therefore, at least one person has given birth to more than 70 children.
We know that there is a single person who fits X in the first example: X is Yuri Gagarin, and so the conclusion is true. However, with regards to the second example, there is no person who fits the bill of X. X is an "empty name" -- it doesn't refer to anything -- and so the conclusion is false (if there was no first person to do it, no other person could have done it, either). Turning to the third example, the highest documented number of children a person has given birth to is 69. However, records on that sort of thing don't go back very far and cover only limited geography, so it's possible someone had 70+ children at some point in human history. Thus, we can't really know whether X refers to somebody, and so we can neither prove nor disprove the conclusion.
In other words, the conclusions above that a person did Y are true only to the extent that X refers to something. If X doesn't refer to anything -- if it is an empty name -- then the conclusion isn't true. The existence of X is a key underlying question, the answer to which affects the validity of the conclusion.
Similarly, the OA is true only if God refers to an actual entity; it's not true if God is an empty name. The existence of God is a key underlying question, the answer to which affects the validity of the conclusion. So the OA works only if God exists, which gets us nowhere. We have to look elsewhere for any rational argument for or against the existence of God. (I tend to think there isn't one.)
Dawkins' use of the OA
Despite the fact that Dawkins himself devotes a few (somewhat long-winded) pages to discussing the OA, he seems to be entirely ignorant of his own adaptation of it as the only support for the flawed premise that underlies his core argument.
Remember, Dawkins' premise is: if God exists, God must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection. Here is what he says in his sole attempt to defend it:
"I am continually astonished by those theists who . . . seem to rejoice in natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't need to do anything at all! Peter Atkins . . . takes this line of thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins's lazy God is even lazier than the deist God of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: deus otiosus -- literally God at leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless. Step by step, Atkins succeeds in reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist."
Does this sound familiar? I noted above that most logicians who have made this argument do so in parody. But Dawkins, shockingly, seems to take it seriously, despite it being such an obvious form of the OA:
God is the laziest entity that can be conceived.
Not existing is lazier than existing.
Therefore, God doesn't exist.
Obviously, as a form of the OA, this argument is subject to the same problems set out above: first, it is based on a subjective premise, and second, it is only true if God refers to an empty name, so it assumes the non-existence of God in the first place.
Dawkins' use of this argument to develop his core premise is embarrassing on its own. But it is all the more galling given his harsh criticism of the OA: "The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically, so I must take care to refrain from bandying words like 'fool'." I will also take care to so restrain myself, given the intellectual hypocrisy of Dawkins' attempt to spoonfeed unthinking masses the very sort of stuff he so ardently decries.
In sum, Dawkins' premise that God, if he exists, must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection, is a gross error. It assumes what it purports to show. Given the fundamental flaw in Dawkins' premise, one can already be certain that any further conclusion based on it will be equally flawed; as mentioned above, the validity of a logical conclusion is only as good as that of the premises on which the conclusion is based.
Dawkins' Probability Error
Notwithstanding that his premise about the necessary nature of God erroneously relies on a false (and intellectually corrupt) proof of God's non-existence, Dawkins admits: "[t]hat you cannot prove God's non-existence is accepted and trivial." But Dawkins sees this as a technical point -- it is true "only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything." He goes on to say -- and this is the thrust of his argument -- that "[w]hat matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable."
So, to summarize Dawkins' position again for ease of reference, Dawkins first sets up his (faulty) premise that if God exists, God must have created the world in a supernatural manner that did not involve natural selection. He then goes on to make the argument that existing evidence (of which there is a lot) indicates that the world was not created in such a manner, and it is thus so unlikely that God exists that one would be irresponsible to believe in God.
As noted above, this argument is prima facie inconclusive since its premise is faulty. It is like asserting that 2+3>6 or 5+3>6 because of the underlying premise 3>6. Dawkins may, in fact, be right, or he may not be, but his argument gets him nowhere unless we have some other method of verifying the correctness of his argument (as we do with the simple mathematical examples).
But there is another problem with Dawkins' probabilistic reasoning -- one that would still exist even if he altered his premise.
Let's look at where Dawkins begins his probabilistic line of reasoning. To illustrate the alleged improbability of God, Dawkins starts with Bertand Russell's (whose history of Western philosophy I'm currently reading) teapot-in-space analogy. Russell said:
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
Dawkins applies the teapot principle to various hypothetical entities. Presumably, he says, you don't believe in the tooth fairy. But although you can't prove that the tooth fairy doesn't exist, you wouldn't describe yourself as a tooth fairy agnostic. You would be an a-fairyist (like a-theist) because you think the probability of the tooth fairy existing is so low as to be unimportant. The same would go for the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any number of other potential entities.
Dawkins then applies the teapot principle to the definition of God he (erroneously) presumes must be the necessary one. He explains at great length why that version of God is very unlikely to exist (especially responding to intelligent design). Which is fine. But what it doesn't say is much, if anything, about the probability of the existence of God generally (just as my rational conclusions about hypothetical likely non-candidates to be George Bush or the tooth fairy do not say much about the likelihood of their existence or non-existence).
Much more interestingly, in transforming Russell's argument from one about possibility to one about probability, Dawkins (seemingly inadvertently) exposes the flaw in Russell's (and Dawkins' adopted) analogy: the degree to which one can be "thought to be talking nonsense" by asserting the existence of X is a corollary of the specificity with which X is defined. If, in Russell's example, X were "an object that our most powerful telescopes cannot reveal," the probability of X's existence would approach 100%. Where X is "a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit," the probability of X's existence would approach 0%. And there are infinite potential Xs somewhere inbetween.
So Russell's teapot principle only holds true when the hypothetical object whose existence is questioned is defined very specifically. The exact reverse holds true when the object is defined very broadly.
Dawkins' application of the teapot principle doesn't work because he defines God narrowly (as discussed above) -- in fact, he uses a definition of God against which he has some strong arguments up his sleeve. This is not strong probabilistic reasoning.
Admittedly, Dawkins rightfully says that if a definition of God becomes too broad, it loses meaning. But there is plenty of room for a conception of God somewhere between the 0% and 100% ends of the probability spectrum. (Personally, I think the Mormon conception fits the bill quite well, but I'll leave that for another post.)
Fixing Dawkins' Errors
For the sake of completeness, let's discuss what Dawkins should have said had he put his thinking cap on.
Hume noted that "the only way to prove anything a priori is through an opposite contradiction." In other words, you can define the properties of something by showing what it cannot be conceived of being -- for instance, "I am a married bachelor." You can conceive of God existing. You can conceive of God not existing. So you're not going to get anywhere vis-a-vis the existence of God through a priori reasoning.
Now, you might be able to rule out (or come close to ruling out) certain immediate characteristics of a hypothetical God via a priori reasoning. For instance, if God exists, it seems incredibly unlikely that he hurls lightning bolts from the sky. Or, in other words, a conception of God that involves him hurling lightning bolts from the sky is almost certainly wrong. (We can figure this out a priori not because we know anything about God, but because we know where lightning bolts come from, at least at some level of causality.)
So what Dawkins could have said is that it is unlikely that God (if he exists) created the world in a manner that did not involve what we call natural selection. Or, in other words, a conception of God that involves him creating the world in that manner is probably not right.
That would have been fine. But Dawkins overreached in his open zeal to spread his atheist dogma and ended up using the very logomachist trickery he found so offensive in an attempt to advance an inadvancable argument. One can rationally narrow down the likely characteristics of God (if he exists), but one cannot argue a priori that God does not exist. Yet Dawkins employs exactly such a priori reasoning in order to rule out every conception of God except the one that makes his probability argument look good. Skillful legerdemain.
If one relies only on rationality, I think that one must be agnostic (which is why I view pseudo-rational atheists like Dawkins quite like I view pseudo-rational theists). We can't rationally know whether God exists. Admittedly, some belief systems in God may run contrary to rational thought; but, as we have seen, so can some belief systems in the non-existence of God. Those belief systems can, and in my opinion, should, be subject to critical thought. On the other hand, other belief systems in the existence of God (such as mine) as well as in the non-existence of God comprise beliefs about what lies outside the reach of the rational world.*
"The God Delusion" and its scriptorial acceptance in some circles are fantastic examples of how atheism is so very much like theism. The atheist belief system propounded in those circles is cult-like, built on the backs of charismatic figures such as Dawkins, whose assertion of beliefs as truth is taken as gospel by unthinking masses. There is more than a little irony in Dawkins' acrimonious attitude towards theists, since his acrimony derives from perceived theist attributes that he embodies all too well. Dawkins, the dogmatist, refuses to recognize his God belief for what it is -- a belief in an unknowable area, a hypothesis in relation to which probabilistic (or any other kind of) reasoning says very little. (While I, a theist, am happy to recognize exactly that.)
* Saying these beliefs are "outside the reach of the rational world" is not to say that I think the existence of God is not a question that could, theoretically, be verified by scientific analysis; I would be the first to promote such an analysis, but I just don't think a conclusive one is possible. Saying these beliefs are "outside the reach of the rational world" is also not to say that I think rationality cannot inform religion; it tells us what is improbable on one end of the spectrum of probabilities and meaningless on the other. But there is a lot of area between the near-0% teapot and the near-100% generic object.
P.S. I'm aware that I use some terms perhaps slightly ambiguously -- e.g., "rationality" where I mean both rationality and empiricism. This is more or less a stream-of-consciousness post in its earliest form and, to the extent I can, I will clean things up over time.
Tuesday, 8 January 2008
Apologies for Mormonism
So most pundits following the U.S. presidential primaries are saying that tomorrow marks Mitt Romney's last best hope for the Republican primary. Although there are few, if any, elements of Mitt's platform that I would support, I was a fan of his candidacy (albeit not potential presidency) from the outset thanks to the public discussions on Mormonism I thought it would generate.
And it has, indeed, generated many public discussions on Mormonism. I have followed many of these discussions closely and participated in some of them (mostly in response to major news articles). I am going to clean up some of my thoughts and post (over the next few days/weeks) what I think of as a "best of" compilation of my Mormon apologies.
I think you can boil down most of the accusations levied against Mormonism and Mormons in these discussions into the following (with some crossover):
1) LDS beliefs are weird (an accusation made by other religious people) or especially weird (one made by non-religious people).
2) The LDS church is racist.
3) The LDS church ignores darker moments of its history.
4) The LDS church is essentially a rich corporation that takes money from people.
5) The LDS church brainwashes people.
6) The LDS church is a cult (an accusation that is often tied to those above).
I'll address each of those accusations in turn (together with any others anyone would like).
But before I delve into those accusations, and to set up my response to the first issue in particular, I am going to post a book review of Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion." I have to admit I think it's a pretty good review, although I may edit it over time to make it clearer. :)
And it has, indeed, generated many public discussions on Mormonism. I have followed many of these discussions closely and participated in some of them (mostly in response to major news articles). I am going to clean up some of my thoughts and post (over the next few days/weeks) what I think of as a "best of" compilation of my Mormon apologies.
I think you can boil down most of the accusations levied against Mormonism and Mormons in these discussions into the following (with some crossover):
1) LDS beliefs are weird (an accusation made by other religious people) or especially weird (one made by non-religious people).
2) The LDS church is racist.
3) The LDS church ignores darker moments of its history.
4) The LDS church is essentially a rich corporation that takes money from people.
5) The LDS church brainwashes people.
6) The LDS church is a cult (an accusation that is often tied to those above).
I'll address each of those accusations in turn (together with any others anyone would like).
But before I delve into those accusations, and to set up my response to the first issue in particular, I am going to post a book review of Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion." I have to admit I think it's a pretty good review, although I may edit it over time to make it clearer. :)
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