Atheism and Theism – Page 5 – Maverick Philosopher

Can an Atheist be Moral?

This is another one or those questions that never goes away and about which reams of rubbish have been written.

In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes:

If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39)

Harris then goes on to point out something that I don't doubt is true, namely, that atheists ". . . are at least as well behaved as the general population." (Ibid.) Harris' enthymeme can be spelled out as an instance of modus tollendo tollens, if you will forgive the pedantry:

1. If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.

2. Atheists are not less moral than believers.

Therefore

3. Religious faith does not offer the only real basis for morality.

Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more 'moral,' i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?

Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code?

Peter Kreeft on the Benefits of Theistic Belief

This is an outstanding five-minute video by Peter Kreeft of Boston College. (HT: J. I. Odegaard) It presents the theistic worldview and its naturalistic alternative about as clearly as is possible within a few minutes. It doesn't argue for or against, but it does present the benefits of theism.

It is in the Prager U series.

As the universities of the land, including so-called Catholic universities, abdicate their authority and collapse under the weight of their own political correctness, substituting trendy nonsense and decadent junk for genuine learning, we need to build alternative centers to carry on the great traditions.

There is some discussion of Kreeft in the entries referenced infra.

God and Proof

This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago.

My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration. A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6). The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument. Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling. One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2). A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5).

Can one prove the existence of God? That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God? I don't think so. For how will you satisfy condition (5)? Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God. How do you know that the premises of A are true? By argument? Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3. Will you give arguments for these premises? Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises. A vicious infinite regress is in the offing. Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.

At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence. You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause. And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident. But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident? You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness.

Paging Baron von Muenchhausen.

I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God. But one can reasonably believe that God exists. The same holds for the nonexistence of God. No one can prove the nonexistence of God. But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.

Of course, when I say that no one can prove the existence of God I mean no one of us. Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to. And when I said above that a probative argument is such that all its premises are known to be true, I meant, as any charitable reader would have assumed, "known by us."

The same goes for naturalism. I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents. But I can reasonably believe it. For I have a battery of powerful arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy (4).

"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"

He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not. Surely it would be foolish to say that atheists, the lot of them, are irrational people.

Either God exists or he does not. But both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable.

To end with a psychological speculation: those who hanker after proofs of God and the soul or the opposite are insufficiently mature to live with doxastic insecurity.

Our life here below is insecure physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and in every way, including doxastically. We need, and sometimes crave, security. Our pursuit of it can be ordinate. For example, the wise make provision for the future by saving and investing, taking care of their health, buying insurance, planning how they will react to certain emergencies, etc. Fools, by contrast, live as if there is no tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, they either perish of their folly or suffer unnecessarily.

But there is also an inordinate pursuit of security. It is impossible in this life totally to secure oneself in any of the ways mentioned, including with respect to belief. One must accept that life is a venture and an adventure across the board.

Neither the Existence Nor the Nonexistence of God is Provable

A post of mine ends like this:

To theists, I say: go on being theists. You are better off being a theist than not being one. Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable. But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite. In the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

About "Don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite," Owen Anderson asks:

How would we know if that claim is itself true? Isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?

To formulate my point in the declarative rather than the exhortative mood:

P. Neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God is provable.

How do I know (P) to be true? By reflection on the nature of proof. An argument is a proof if and only if it satisfies all of the following six requirements: it is deductive; valid in point of logical form; free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii; possesses a conclusion that is relevant to the premises; has premises each of which is true; has premises each of which is known to be true.

I say that an argument is a proof if and only it is rationally compelling, or rationally coercive. But an argument needn't be rationally compelling to be a more or less 'good argument,' one that renders its conclusion more or less rationally acceptable.

Now if my definition above gives what we ought to mean by 'proof,' then it is clear that neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God can be proven. Suppose you present a theistic or anti-theistic argument that satisfies the first five requirements. I will then ask how you know that the premises are true. Suppose one of your premises is that change is the conversion of potency into act. That is a plausible thing to maintain, but how do you know that it is true? How do you know that the general-ontological framework within which the proposition acquires its very sense, namely, Aristotelian metaphysics, is tenable? After all, there are alternative ways of understanding change. That there is change is a datum, a Moorean fact, but it would be an obvious mistake to confuse this datum with some theory about it, even if the theory is true. Suppose the theory is true. This still leaves us with the question of how we know it is. Besides, the notions of potency and act, substance and accident, form and matter, and all the rest of the Aristotelian conceptuality are murky and open to question. (For example, the notion of prime matter is a necessary ingredient in an Aristotelian understanding of substantial change, but the notion of materia prima is either incoherent or else not provably coherent.)

To take a second example, suppose I give a cosmological argument the starting point of which is the seemingly innocuous proposition that there are are contingent beings, and go on to argument that this starting point together with some auxiliary premises, entails the existence of God. How do I know that existnece can be predicated of concrete individuals? Great philosophers have denied it. Frege and Russell fanmously held that existence vannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals but only of cncepts and propositional functions. I have rather less famoulsy argued that the 'GFressellina' view' is mstaken, but this is a point of controversy. Furtrhertmore, if existence cannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals, how can individuals be said to exist contingently?

The Appeal to Further Arguments

If you tell me that the premises of your favorite argument can be known to be true on the basis of further arguments that take those premises as their conclusions, then I simply iterate my critical procedure: I run the first five tests above and if your arguments pass those, then I ask how you know that their premises are true. If you appeal to still further arguments, then you embark upon a vicious infinite regress.

The Appeal to Self-Evidence

If you tell me that the premises of your argument are self-evident, then I will point out that your and my subjective self-evidence is unavailing. It is self-evident to me that capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain cases. I'll die in the ditch for that one, and pronounce you morally obtuse to boot for not seeing it. But there are some who are intelligent, well-meaning, and sophisticated to whom this is not self-evident. They will charge with with moral obtuseness. Examples are easily multiplied. What is needed is objective, discussion-stopping, self-evidence. But then, how, in a given case, do you know that your evidence is indeed objective? All you can go on is how things seem to you. If it seems to you that it is is objectively the case that p, that boils down to: it seems to you that, etc., in which case your self-evidence is again merely subjective.

The Appeal to Authority

You may attempt to support the premises of your argument by an appeal to authority. Now many such appeals are justified. We rightly appeal to the authority of gunsmiths, orthopaedic surgeons, actuaries and other experts all the time, and quite sensibly. But such appeals are useless when it comes to PROOF. How do you know that your putative authority really is one, and even if he is, how do you know that he is eight in the present case? How do you know he is not lying to you well he tells you you need a new sere in your semi-auto pistol?

The Appeal to Revelation

This is the ultimate appeal to authority. Necessarily, if God reveals that p, then p! Again, useless for purposes of proof. See Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation.

Move in a Circle?

If your argument falls afoul of petitio principii, that condemns it, and the diameter of the circle doesn't matter. A circle is a circle no matter its diameter.

Am I Setting the Bar Too High?

It seems to me I am setting it exactly where it belongs. After all we are talking about PROOF here and surely only arguments that generate knowledge count as proofs. But if an argument is to generate a known proposition, then its premises must be known, and not merely believed, or believed on good evidence, or assumed, etc.

"But aren't you assuming that knowledge entails certainty, or (if this is different) impossibility of mistake?" Yes I am assuming that. Argument here.

Can I Consistently Claim to Know that (P) is true?

Owen Anderson asked me how I know that (P) is true. I said I know it by reflection on the concept of proof. But that was too quick. Obviously I cannot consistently claim to know that (P) if knowledge entails certainty. For how do I know that my definition captures the essence of proof? How do I know that there is an essence of proof, or any essence of anything? What I want to say, of course, is that it is very reasonable to define 'proof' as I define it — absent some better definition — and that if one does so define it then it is clear that there are very few proofs, and, in particular, that there are no proofs of God or of the opposite.

"But then isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?"

Yes, if one operates with a different, less rigorous, definition of 'proof.' But in philosophy we have and maintain high standards. So I say proof is PROOF (a tautological form of words that expresses a non-tautological proposition) and that we shouldn't use the word to refer to arguments that merely render their conclusions rationally acceptable.

Note also that if we retreat from the rationally compelling to the rationally acceptable, then both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable. I suspect that what Owen wants is a knock-down argument for the existence of God. But if that is what he wants, then he wants a proof in my sense of the world. If I am right, that is something very unreasonable to expect.

There is no getting around the need for a decision. In the end, after all the considerations pro et contra, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live.

Life is a venture and an adventure. You cannot live without risk. This is true not only in the material sphere, but also in the realm of ideas.

Christopher Hitchens, Religion, and Cognitive Dissonance

Hitchens says somewhere that he didn't suffer from cognitive dissonance of the sort that arises when a deeply internalized religious upbringing collides with the contrary values of the world, since he never took religion or theism seriously in the first place. But then I say religion was never a Jamesian live option for him. But if not a live existential option, one that engages the whole man and not just his intellect, then not an option explored with the openness and sympathy and humility requisite for understanding.

So why should we take seriously what Hitchens says about religion? He hasn't sympathetically entered into the subject. He hasn't fulfilled the prerequisites for understanding. One such prerequisite is openness to the pain of cognitive dissonance as suffered when the doctrines, precepts and practices of a religion taken seriously come into conflict with a world that mocks them when not ignoring them. But in Hitchens by his own account there was not even the possibility of cognitive dissonance.

Consider two working class individuals. The first is a sensitive poet with real poetic ability. His family, however, considers poetry effete and epicene and nothing that a real man could or should take seriously. The second is a lout with no appreciation of poetry whatsoever. The first suffers cognitive dissonance as his ideal world of poetic imagination collides with the grubby work-a-day-world of his unlettered parents and relatives. The second fellow obviously suffers from no comparable cognitive dissonance: he never took poetry seriously in the first place.

The second fellow, however, is full of himself and his opinions and does not hesitate to hold forth in the manner of the bar room bullshitter on any and all topics, including poetry. Should we credit his opinions about poetry? Of course not: he has never engaged with it by practice or careful reading or the consultation of works of literary criticism. He knows not whereof he speaks. His nescience reflects his lack of the poetic 'organ.'

Similarly, a fellow like Hitchens, as clever as he is, lacks the religious 'organ.' So religion is closed off from him and what he says about it , though interesting, need not be taken all that seriously, or is to be taken seriously only in a negative way in the manner of the pathologist in his study of pathogens.

Companion post: David Lewis on Religion

Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus

A world-wide bestseller, apparently. A religious novel that emerges from the wasteland of Soviet atheism. God just won't stay dead.

One of the things that leftists and evangelical atheists never understand is that, even if religion is pure buncombe, wholly lacking in transcendent reference, it yet supplies people with immanent meaning. People want their lives to have meaning, a meaning that cannot be had by the pursuit of name and fame, loot and land, food and sex. Not everybody of course: there are 'human' robots among us. But most people at least some of the time in however confused and obscure a fashion.

The want and the need are not going away. How would a leftist or an evangelical atheist like Dawkins supply it? By the erection of an idol? The State? Science?

You can read about Vodolazkin here and here.

Me, I'm heading over to Amazon.com right now to order me up a copy. Wonderful company. So not all corporations are evil? Did it arise in some communist paradise? In North Korea? In Cuba? The service is astonishingly good. They promise me a book in two days and I'll sometimes get it a day early. Who built Amazon? Obama? The government? Imagine the government in charge of all book distribution . . . it's easy if you try . . . See link below.

Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism?

Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity?

Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as follows.

A haecceity is a property H of x such that: (i) H is essential to x; (ii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in the actual world; (iii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in any metaphysically possible world.

So if there is a property of Socrates that is his haecceity, then there is a property that individuates him, and indeed individuates him across all times and worlds at which he exists: it is a property that he must have, that nothing distinct from him has, and that nothing distinct from him could have. Call this property Socrateity. Being abstract and necessary, Socrateity is obviously distinct from Socrates, who is concrete and contingent. Socrateity exists in every world, but is exemplified (instantiated) in only some worlds. What's more, Socrateity exists at every time in every world that is temporally qualified, whereas Socrates exist in only some worlds and only at some times in the worlds in which he exists.

Now suppose you are a classical theist. Must you accept haecceitism (as defined above) in virtue of being a classical theist? I answer in the negative. Franklin Mason answers in the affirmative. In a comment on an earlier post, Mason gives this intriguing argument into which I have interpolated numerals for ease of reference.

[1] When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals he would get. Thus [2] he didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were. Thus [3] there must be a way to individuate all possible individuals that in no way depends upon their actual existence. [4] Such a thing is by definition a haecceity. Thus [5] there are haecceities.

I don't anticipate any disagreement with Mason as to what an haecceity is. We are both operating with the Plantingian notion. We disagree, however, on (i) whether there are any haecceities and (ii) whether classical theism is committed to them. I deny both (i) and (ii). In this post I focus on (ii). In particular, I will explain why I do not find Mason's argument compelling.

My reservations concern premise [1]. There is a sense in which it is true that when God created Socrates, he knew which individual he would get. But there is also a sense in which it is not true. So we need to make a distinction. We may suppose, given the divine omniscience, that before God created Socrates he had before his mind a completely determinate description, down to the very last detail, of the individual he was about to bring into existence. In this sense, God knew precisely which individual he would get before bringing said individual into existence. Now either this description is pure or it is impure.

A pure description is one that includes no proper names, demonstratives or other indexicals, or references to singular properties. Otherwise the description is impure. Thus 'snub-nosed, rationalist philosopher married to Xanthippe' is an impure description because it includes the proper name 'Xanthippe.' 'Snubnosed, rationalist, married philosopher,' by contrast, is pure. (And this despite the fact that 'married' is a relational predicate: necessarily, to be married is to be married to someone or other.) Pure descriptions are qualitative in that they include no references to specific individuals. Impure descriptions are nonqualitative in that they do include references to specific individuals. Thus 'person identical to Socrates' is a nonqualitative description.

Now if God has before his mind a complete pure description of the individual he wills to create then that description could apply to precisely one individual after creation without being restricted to any precise one. (Cf. Barry Miller, "Future Individuals and Haecceitism," Review of Metaphysics 45, September 1991, p. 14) This is a subtle distinction but an important one. It is possible that Socrates have an indiscernible twin. Call his 'Schmocrates.' So the complete description 'snub-nosed, rationalist philosopher, etc.' could apply to precisely one individual without applying to Socrates, the man in the actual world that we know and love as Socrates. This is because his indiscernible twin Schmocrates would satisfy it just as well as he does. The description would then apply to precisely one individual without being restricted to any precise one. So there is a clear sense, pace Mason, in which God, prior to creation, would not know which individual he would get. Prior to creation, God knows that there will be an individual satisfying a complete description. But until the individual comes into existence, he won't know which individual this will be.

As I see it, creation understood Biblically as opposed to Platonically is not the bestowal of existence upon a pre-existent, fully-formed, wholly determinate essence. It is not the actualization of a wholly determinate mere possible. There is no individual essence or haecceity prior to creation. Creation is the creation ex nihilo of a new individual. God creates out of nothing, not out of pre-existent individual essences or pre-existent mere possibles. Thus the very individuality of the individual first comes into being in the creative act. Socrates' individuality and haecceity and ipsiety do not antedate (whether temporally or logically) his actual existence.

Mason would have to be able rationally to exclude this view of creation, and this view of the relation of existence and individuality, for his argument to be compelling. As it is, he seems merely to assume that they are false.

Could God, before creation, have before his mind a complete impure description, one that made reference to the specific individual that was to result from the creative act? No, and this for the simple reason that before the creative act that individual would not exist. And therein lies the absurdity of Plantingian haecceities. The property of identity-with-Socrates is a nonqualitative haecceity that makes essential reference to Socrates. Surely it is absurd to suppose that that this 'property' exists at times and in possible worlds at which Socrates does not exist. To put it another way, it is absurd to suppose that this 'property' could antedate (whether temporally or logically) the existence of Socrates.

We are now in a position to see why Mason's argument is not compelling. If [1] is true, then [2] doesn't follow from it. And if [2] follows from [1], then [1] is false. Thus [1] conflates two distinct propositions:

1a. When God created the world, he knew precisely which pure complete descriptions would be satisfied.

1b. When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals would exist.

(1a) is true, but it does not entail

2. God didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.

(1b) entails (2), but (1b) is false.

I conclude that classical theism does not entail haecceitism. One can be such a theist without accepting haecceities. This is a good thing since there are no haecceity properties!

Does Evil Prove the Nonexistence of God?

I'll grant you that it does if you grant me that truth, existence, order, conscience and twenty of so other phenomena prove the existence of God. And let's not leave out the moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe.

You can reasonably ask how there could be a God given the fact of natural and moral evil. You can also reasonably ask how there could not be a God given the transcendent moral heroism and selflessness of Kolbe and others like him.

I'll grant you that evil argues the nonexistence of God if you grant me that evil also argues the existence of God. (Click on the first hyperlink and locate the argument from evil for the existence of God.)

My point is that there are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God.

A Look at Some Unintelligent Design Reasoning in Dawkins

Here is an old Powerblogs post from some years ago. Still seems right to me. A student in the area wants to discuss Dawkins and his New Atheist gang with me. So I'm digging up and reviewing all my old Dawkins materials. The New Atheism is already old hat. A movement for cyberpunks and know-nothings. The old atheism of J. L. Mackie et al. is respectable and I respect it.

…………………..

Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have a piece in The Guardian entitled One Side Can Be Wrong. I will quote a bit of it and try to determine what exactly the argument is, and whether it is cogent and tells against Intelligent Design. The link in the text is my interpolation.

Similarly, the claim that something – say the bacterial flagellum – is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself – even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

Observe first of all that there is a difference between what Dawkins and Coyne impute to the proponent of ID, namely, "the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved" and what they should have imputed to him, namely, "the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved by natural selection." The proponent of ID, as I understand the position, need not deny evolution construed as the fact of common descent with later forms of life arising from earlier ones by numerous successive and slight modifications. What the proponent of ID questions is the mechanism of this descent, namely, natural selection. The question is whether there are forms of organizational complexity that cannot be accounted for by natural selection.

Once this is appreciated, it is easy to see that if something is too complex to have evolved in one way, by natural selection, it does not follow that it is too complex to have evolved in another way, i.e., by being created by an intelligent designer.

Dawkins and Coyne, however, think that ID is involved in an error of reasoning. What the proponents of ID are doing is giving a circular explanation. To be explained is a complex entity, the bacterial flagellum say. But the entity invoked in the explanation is itself a complex entity. So complexity is being explained in terms of complexity — which is circular. Thus they write,

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. [. . .] the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.

But this shows a complete misunderstanding of what the proponent of ID is doing. It would be circular to try to explain complexity in terms of complexity. But it is not circular to explain one form of complexity in terms of another. The complexity that needs to be explained is the complexity that seems to have been designed. To invoke a crude analogy, it is not the complexity of a pile of rocks that needs personal explanation, but the complexity of a cairn, a pile of rocks whose assembly shows that they mark the trail. Now I cannot account for a pile of rock's being a cairn by invoking natural processes; I need to invoke an intelligent designer, a person such as a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Of course, this person is even more complex than his product. But there is no circularity since material complexity is not being explained by material complexity but by the thoughts, intentions and actions of a person. Material complexity is being explained by personal complexity. Hence there is no circularity in the explanation.

It is also worth pointing out that if A explains B, the explanation can be good even if A remains unexplained. Why so many wildfires this year? Because of a profusion of brush which in turn was caused by unusual spring rainfall. If this is a good explanation, its goodness does not require an explanation of why there was an unusual amount of rainfall.

So as far as I can see the proponent of ID is not committing any logical error. Dawkins is simply mistaken to accuse the IDist of "thoroughly rotten" logic. Of course, the IDist is violating a rule of natural science, namely the rule that everything be accounted for naturalistically, i.e., in terms of the space-time system and the laws that govern it. Thus living processes must be explained using the same laws as govern nonliving processes. One is no longer playing the scientific game if one invokes irreducible mentality or irreducible vitality.

But to violate the rule I just mentioned is not to violate any logical rule.

And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

If natural science must play by the rule mentioned above to be natural science, then ID is not natural science. To invoke an irreducibly intelligent designer (whether or not identical to God as traditionally conceived) is to invoke something that is not a mere part of the space-time system. But it is equally true that naturalistic evolutionary biology is not strictly science either since it rests on philosophical assumptions that cannot be justified scientifically. Naturalism, the thesis that nothing (or perhaps nothing concrete) exists apart from the space-time system is a philosophical thesis. Cognate doctrines such as physicalism and scientism are also philosophical, not scientific doctrines strictly speaking. So I conclude as follows:

If ID should be removed from the science classroom and relocated in church, then Dawkins' evolutionary biology should also be removed from the science classroom and relocated in the philosophy lecture hall. For neither is science strictly speaking. But before Dawkins is allowed in the philosophy lecture hall he must take some logic courses. (You will have noticed above how refers to a syllogism as false — that is logically inept.)

On the Worth of Wit

Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Twelve, 2012, p. 91:

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Witty unto the end. But in the end, what does wit get you? One last vain flash of brilliance and then extinction — or judgment.

On the Poverty of the Contemporary Atheist Movement

A fine statement by Dr. Michael Valle of Scottsdale Community College.

Edward Feser on Jerry A. Coyne

In Omnibus of Fallacies, Ed Feser applies his formidable analytic and polemical skills to that sorry specimen of scientism, Jerry Coyne. The First Things review begins like this:

Faith versus Fact is some kind of achievement. Biologist Jerry Coyne has managed to write what might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre. True, the competition for that particular distinction is fierce. But among other volumes in this metastasizing literature, each has at least some small redeeming feature. For example, though Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing is bad as philosophy, it is middling as pop science. Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great was at least written by someone who could write like Christopher Hitchens. Though devoid of interest, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is brief. Even PZ Myers’s book The Happy Atheist has at least one advantage over Coyne’s book: It came out first.

Why do I refer to Coyne as a "sorry specimen of scientism?" Is that a nice thing to say? See here, for starters.

Hitchens on Falwell

The following entry has been languishing in the queue for years. I just now finished it for what it's worth.

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Which is worse, the fundamentalism of a Jerry Falwell or the snarling hatred of religion of a Christopher Hitchens, who, in his anti-Falwell diatribe, shows just how far someone who is a leftist about religion can sink?

Readers of this blog know that I have little patience with fundamentalist forms of religion. But whatever one thinks of Falwell's views, he was a decent human being capable of compassion and forgiveness. (I recall with admiration the kindness and forbearance he displayed when he confronted his tormentor, the pornographer Larry Flynt, on Larry King Live.) Can one say that Hitchens is a decent human being after his unspeakably vicious attack on a dead man while he was still warm? I have in mind the matchbox quotation. In "Faith-Based Fraud," Hitchens wrote:

     In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism
     on American civil society in September 2001, he [Falwell] used his
     regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely
     exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were
     a divine punishment of the United States.

The problem with Falwell's statement was that he was in no position to know that the 9/11 attacks were divine punishment. What is offensive about such statements is the presumption that one is en rapport with the divine plan, that one has some sort of inside dope as to the deity's designs. In his credulousness and self-confidence, Falwell displayed a lack of respect for God's transcendence and unsearchableness. But this is just part of what is wrong with fundamentalism, which is a kind of theological positivism.

It is also offensive to hear some proclaim in tones of certainty that Hitchens is now no longer an atheist. They know that God exists and persons survive bodily death? They know no such thing, any more than Hitchens knew the opposite. Convictions, no matter how strong, do not amount to knowledge. (Here is a quick little proof. Knowledge entails truth. So if A and B have opposite convictions, and convictions amount to knowledge, then one and the same proposition can be both true and not true, which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.)

But although Falwell's 9/11 statement can be criticized, he can't be criticized for making it. He had as much right to make that statement as Hitchens had for his cocksure proclamation that no God exists, not to mention his assaults on Mother Teresa and who all else. After all, that was Falwell's view, and it makes sense within his system of beliefs. There was certainly nothing treasonous about Falwell's statement, nor did it "entirely exculpate the suicide-murderers." Perhaps Falwell was a theological compatibilist, one who finds no contradiction in people acting freely in accordance with a divine plan.

So while we should certainly not follow Hitchens' nasty example and trash the dead, we should not go to the other extreme and paper over the foul aspects of Hitchens' personality. And we should also give some thought to the extent to which his viciousness is an upshot of his atheism.

For in the end, the atheist has nothing and can be expected to be bitter. This world is a vanishing quantity and he knows it; and beyond this world, he believes, there is nothing. That is not to say it isn't true. But if you are convinced that it is true, then you must live hopelessly unless you fool yourself with such evasions as living for some pie-in-the-future utopia such as Communists and other 'progressives' believe in, or for some such abstraction as literature.

Nobody will be reading Hitchens in a hundred years. He'll be lucky if he is still read in ten years.

Have you ever heard of Joseph McCabe (1867-1955)? Not until now. But he too was a major free-thinker and anti-religion polemicist in his day. Who reads him now?

Gary Gutting on Richard Dawkins’ Logical Mistakes

Here.

Atheism we will always have with us. But in a few years the puerile and uninformed fulminations and excesses of the New Atheists will be forgotten.

Galen Strawson: It is Certain that the Christian God does not Exist!

Here, in The New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

Thomas Nagel writes that “whether atheists or theists are right depends on facts about reality that neither of them can prove” [“A Philosopher Defends Religion,” Letters, NYR, November 8]. This is not quite right: it depends on what kind of theists we have to do with. We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.

Galen Strawson

Strawson is telling us that it is certain that the God of Christianity does not exist because of the suffering in the world.

How's that for pure bluster?

What we know is true, and what we know with certainty we know without the possibility of mistake. When Strawson claims that it is certain that the Christian God does not exist, he is not offering an autobiographical comment: he is not telling us that it is subjectively certain, certain for him, that the Christian God does not exist. He is maintaining that it is objectively certain, certain in itself, and thus certain for anyone. From here on out 'certain' by itself is elliptical for 'objectively certain.'

And why is it certain that the Christian God does not exist? Because of the "extraordinary suffering" in the world. Strawson appears to be endorsing a version of the argument from evil that dates back to Epicurus and in modern times was endorsed by David Hume. The argument is often called 'logical' to distinguish it from 'evidential' arguments from evil. Since evidential or inductive or probabilistic arguments cannot render their conclusions objectively certain even if all of their premises are certain, Strawson must have the 'logical' argument in mind. Here is a version:

If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
Evil exists.
If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

It is a clever little argument, endlessly repeated, and valid in point of logical form. But are its premises objectively certain? This is not the question whether the argument is sound. It is sound if and only if all its premises are true. But a proposition can be true without being known, and a fortiori, without being known with certainty, i.e., certain. The question, then, is whether each premise in the above argument is objectively certain. If even one of the premises is not, then neither is the conclusion.

Consider (5). It it certain that evil exists? Is it even true? Are there any evils? No doubt there is suffering. But is suffering evil? I would say that it is, and I won't protest if you say that it is obvious that it is. But the obvious needn't be certain. It is certainly not the case that it is certain that suffering is evil, objectively evil. It could be like this. There are states of humans and other animals that these animals do not like and seek to avoid. They suffer in these states in a two-fold sense: they are passive with respect to them, and they find the qualitative nature of these states not to their liking, to put it in the form of an understatement. But it could be that these qualitatively awful states are axiologically neutral in that there are no objective values relative to which one could sensibly say something like, "It would have been objectively better has these animals not suffered a slow death."

The point I am making is that only if suffering is objectively evil could it tell against the objective existence of God. But suffering is objectively evil only if suffering is objectively a disvalue. So suffering is objectively evil and tells against the existence of God only if there are objective values and disvalues.

Perhaps all values and preferences are merely subjective along with all judgments about right and wrong. Perhaps all your axiological and moral judgments reduce to mere facts about what you like and dislike, what satisfies your desires and what does not. Perhaps there are no objective values and disvalues among the furniture of the world. I don't believe this myself. But do you have a compelling argument that it isn't so? No you don't. So you are not certain that it isn't so.

And so you are not certain that evil exists. Evil ought not be and ought not be done, by definition. But it could be that there are no objective oughts and ought-nots, whether axiologically or agentially. There is just the physical world. This world includes animals with their different needs, desires, and preferences. There is suffering, but there is no evil. Since (5) is not certain, the conclusion is not certain either.

Now consider (2): If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil. Is that certain? Is it even true? Does God have the power to eliminate the evil that comes into the world through finite agents such as you and me? Arguably he does not. For if he did he would be violating our free will. By creating free agents, God limits his own power and allows evils that he cannot eliminate. Therefore, it is certainly not certain that (2) is true even if it is true. Reject the Free Will Defense if you like, but I will no trouble showing that the premises you invoke in your rejection are not certain.

Pure ideologically-driven bluster, then, from an otherwise brilliant and creative philosopher.