William L. Rowe is one of the authors of the textbook we are using in that class. He is a philosopher and atheist and is a professor emeritus at Purdue University. There is an article of his in the book that discusses a few forms of atheism. Rowe points out that there are three ways that an atheist may view the theist. First, “the atheist may believe that no one is rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “unfriendly atheism.” Second, “the atheist may hold no belief concerning whether any theist is or isn’t rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “indifferent atheism.” And last, “the atheist may believe that some theists are rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “friendly atheism.”

To clarify, it may be good to point out that Rowe does not say that the friendly atheist accepts the theistic belief as true, but merely that the theist is not irrational in his or her beliefs. It may also be good to point out that he is discussing the rationality of religious belief and not the reasonableness of theistic belief. A distinction can be seen in an example: an individual may rack up tons of debt because he/she is planning on winning the lottery to pay it off. Yes these thoughts may in the strictest sense of the word be rational, but they are certainly not reasonable.

But here is where it becomes a little tricky. For in this case, both parties are privy to the same information yet they come to different conclusions. Can both be rationally held? Or must one be irrational by necessity? Rowe believes the former. Another author in a separate article in the book uses an example in science. Can two researchers be studying the same scientific question and come to separate conclusions and both be rational in their decisions? It seems that they can.

Rowe then goes on, “What sort of grounds might a theist have for believing that God exists? Well, he might endeavor to justify his belief by appealing to one or more of the traditional arguments: Ontological, Cosmological, Teleological, Moral, etc. Second, he might appeal to certain aspects of religious experience… Third, he might try to justify theism as a plausible theory in terms of which we can account for a variety of phenomena.”

Again, it is irrelevant whether or not you believe these arguments to be true, when considering their rationality. Rowe believes that the arguments put forth by theists are false, but he also thinks the arguments can be rationally held by the believer. He would therefore consider himself a friendly atheist, and I am inclined to agree with him at this point. I am still an atheist, but I no longer look at all religious people as morons. Hopefully I didn’t slaughter Rowe’s argument too much in my interpretation. But anyway, I figured I would toss this out to all of you to see what your thoughts were on the matter.

How do you view religious belief? If you are atheist, are you friendly or unfriendly?

But for me, The God Delusion and similar books essentially present atheism as a negation. They leave me feeling like I did when I first abandoned theism: the feeling that something had been lost; that the numinous had been emptied out of the world; that, rather than a newfound freedom to create a new way of living, I now found myself having to conform my beliefs and actions to a strictly rational, materialist worldview, one which seemed little less stifling than the God I had left behind.

It is with that caveat that I mention Hubert Dreyfus’ and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining, published earlier this year. Its project is probably best described as ‘post-theism’: Dreyfus and Kelley attempt to create a secular practice of living—a religion, if you will—where the sacred erupts in moments as diverse as examining an artwork or watching a baseball game.

Part of what makes their argument fascinating is the way it reclaims much of western culture and even religious thinkers for secularism: from Homer to the Gospel of John to Martin Luther, Dreyfus and Kelly draw on theistic thought while giving it a secular, decidedly nontheistic spin—a method I think is preferable and richer than dismissing it all out of hand. The book, based on their popular undergraduate class at Berkeley, is intended for the general readership, and is somewhat cursory in its argument. Despite that limitation, and some quibbles about their interpretations of Nietzsche, I found the book exhilarating—for me, it was the most thought-provoking book I have read on atheism since Martin Hägglund’s.

It also left me wondering, however, if these two strands of atheism—with the ‘post-theism’ of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida on the one hand, and the ‘rational atheism’ of Hume, Russell, and the ‘New Atheists’ on the other—are starry-eyed apples and glowering oranges. Do they merely serving different purposes, or are they actually incommensurable?

What do you think, SHAFT-ers?

Stenger, a philosopher and physicist, is a among the foremost “new atheist” thinkers. He has written several books about atheism and science, including the bestseller God: The Failed Hypothesis and the critically-acclaimed The New Atheism.

The event, which is being organized by our sister group SHIFT, will be free and open to the public, with free parking available in the visitor parking lot just east of the Union building (just north of OSH). Seating will be first-come-first-served. The doors to the auditorium will be opened 30 minutes before the event.

Here is a campus map to help you find the event.

It promises to be fun and intellectually stimulating, so I hope to see you there!

My favorite online course has been a series of lectures on morality by Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel. The first installment explores the “moral side of murder” and introduces utilitarianism. Other episodes discuss the role of government, gay marriage, economic justice, and countless other issues through the lens of various moral paradigms.

In a debate last month, atheist author Sam Harris made an interesting secular argument for the afterlife. It’s known as the simulation argument, and it was first formulated by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. Bostrom contends that it’s likely we live in a simulated world, and this conclusion rests on pretty sound assumptions. I’ll let him explain the logic in his own words:

The formal version of the argument requires some probability theory, but the underlying idea can be grasped without mathematics. It starts with the assumption that future civilizations will have enough computing power and programming skills to be able to create what I call “ancestor simulations”. These would be detailed simulations of the simulators’ predecessors—detailed enough for the simulated minds to be conscious and have the same kinds of experiences we have. Think of an ancestor simulation as a very realistic virtual reality environment, but one where the brains inhabiting the world are themselves part of the simulation.

The simulation argument makes no assumption about how long it will take to develop this capacity. Some futurologists think it will happen within the next 50 years. But even if it takes 10 million years, it makes no difference to the argument.

Let me state what the conclusion of the argument is. The conclusion is that at least one of the following three propositions must be true:

1. Almost all civilizations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.

2. The fraction of technologically mature civilizations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.

3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

How do we reach this conclusion? Suppose first that the first proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of civilizations at our level of development eventually become technologically mature. Suppose, too, that the second proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of these civilizations run ancestor simulations. Therefore, if both one and two are false, there will be simulated minds like ours.

If we work out the numbers, we find that there would be vastly many more simulated minds than nonsimulated minds. We assume that technologically mature civilizations would have access to enormous amounts of computing power.

So enormous, in fact, that by devoting even a tiny fraction to ancestor simulations, they would be able to implement billions of simulations, each containing as many people as have ever existed. In other words, almost all minds like yours would be simulated. Therefore, by a very weak principle of indifference, you would have to assume that you are probably one of these simulated minds rather than one of the ones that are not simulated. (New Scientist, 2006)

It’s important to note that Bostrom’s trilemma does not necessarily show that we are living in a simulated reality, only that it’s one of three possibilities. “In reality,” he writes, “we don’t have much specific information to tell us which of the three propositions might be true. In this situation, it might be reasonable to distribute our credence roughly evenly between them.”

Still, I get the impression that he leans toward the third proposition, that of simulated reality, given his discussion of the other options.

Proposition one is straightforward. For example, maybe there is some technology that every advanced civilization eventually develops and which then destroys them. Let us hope this is not the case.

Proposition two requires that there is a strong convergence among all advanced civilizations, such that almost none of them are interested in running ancestor simulations. One can imagine various reasons that may lead civilizations to make this choice. Yet for proposition two to be true, virtually all civilizations would have to refrain. If this were true, it would be an interesting constraint on the future evolution of intelligent life.

Building on Bostrom’s argument, Sam Harris suggests that some of these simulated worlds will include an afterlife, because these simulations would likely reflect the religious beliefs of their creators. A Mormon would then simulate a reality in which Mormonism is true, a Hindu would simulate a reality in which Hinduism is true, and so on.

What do you think of these arguments, and, if correct, what would their implications for our everyday lives be?

Dr. Sherlock’s conversion story

Q & A

Dr. Sherlock began his talk by saying that one should only belong to and believe in a religion if that religion is true. And by true, Sherlock means that which comports with a “mind-independent reality.”

So for a religion to be true, then, it cannot simply be useful and invoke warm feelings. Religion should be rational. There needs to be a conversion of the heart, sure. And Sherlock shared a few profound, emotional religious experiences he enjoyed within a Catholic context. But there must also be a conversion of the mind—something he always felt was lacking in his testimony of Mormonism.

Those who knew Sherlock well weren’t terribly surprised at the news of his becoming a Catholic. He joked that he was among the last to know of his own conversion! Sherlock had long been familiar with and largely convinced of Catholic theology. Because he subscribed to several Catholic tenets, Sherlock, even as a self-identifying Mormon, rejected the corporeality and plurality of gods (beliefs many Mormons regard as essential).

Why then did he ever identify as a Mormon, given these heresies? “Life intervened.” he said. Family and career—these things forced him to shelve his doubts. Only in the past year or so has he been able to fully attend to that critical inquiry. And from it, he’s concluded that Catholicism makes better sense of religious and scientific questions alike, from the problem of evil to the Big Bang. That’s more or less the thesis of his talk.

I’d encourage you to listen to his entire talk. SHAFTers will appreciate many things Sherlock said, like his exhortation to believers to read atheist thinkers like Dawkins and Nietzsche. I agreed with a number of his criticisms of Mormonism, like that—at least in its popular iteration—Mormonism is too emotional and anti-intellectual.

I was underwhelmed by some of Sherlock’s arguments, however. I don’t, for instance, think that Catholicism fares better on the problem of evil than Mormonism. If anything, it probably fares worse. I think Sherlock was also guilty of cherry-picking Bible verses to make the case for the Catholic god; a Mormon could just as easily adopt a similarly selective reading of the Bible to defend their understanding of god(s). And finally, he was too quick to make definitive statements about Mormon doctrine, saying “Mormons have to believe X” (which is ironic, given how unorthodox a Mormon he was).

Those minor disagreements aside, I really enjoyed the talk and wish Sherlock well in his new faith tradition.

I look forward to your take on his talk and conversion.

The presentation is this Wednesday, March 2, at 4:00 PM in Old Main 121. You won’t want to miss it. But if you cannot make it, I’ll likely post a recording of the talk later this week.

All things?

This photograph was taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter who covered apartheid and humanitarian crises. It depicts an emaciated Sudanese girl crawling toward a UN refugee camp while a vulture looks on, hoping for an easy meal. In 1993, it was published in the New York Times and, the following year, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Some were highly critical of the photograph—or rather, the photographer. Florida’s St. Petersburg Times wrote that Carter “might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”

Carter came to regret his having been behind the camera that day. And just months later, he committed suicide. He taped one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and ran the other end to the passenger-side window. Carter then started the truck, rolled up the windows, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He was 33.

His suicide note read: “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners …”.

This video argues (and I think persuasively) that atheism is best described as the “lack of belief in god.”

Something is awry in his argument from analogy, I think. That a particular number was the winning lottery number doesn’t strike me as “extraordinary.” There had to be a winning number—why not that one? Still, Craig’s objection is an interesting one. I’ve also heard him argue that, granting the existence of an omnipotent being, nothing is truly extraordinary.

Plantinga retired from Notre Dame earlier this year, so a lot of people are discussing his legacy. I’m in no position to assess his legacy, but I know that he’s a huge name and that we ought to be better acquainted with his philosophy.

Here, I will only present two of his most famous arguments: the free will defense and the evolutionary argument against naturalism.

The free will defense is a theodicy—a response to the logical problem of evil. His argument, in brief, is as follows:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.

Many philosophers think Plantinga answers the logical problem evil. There are some limitations to the argument, though. First, it doesn’t account for natural evils like earthquakes (though Plantinga argues that apparent natural evils may in fact be moral evils committed by fallen angels). And second, it doesn’t solve the evidential problem of evil—that certain kinds and amounts of evil are incompatible with god.

Another popular argument posed by Plantinga is the so-called evolutionary argument against naturalism. What it attempts to show is that evolution and metaphysical naturalism, when coupled together, are self-defeating. Naturalists hold reason in high esteem, but Plantinga contends that they shouldn’t if evolution is true. If our minds are the product of evolution, then we have little reason to trust their epistemic reliability. Evolution doesn’t care about what’s true, it only cares about what will further our survival and reproduction. Charles Darwin himself expressed this concern:

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

On the other hand, if there exists a loving god who created us, then we can have confidence in our cognitive faculties (or so Plantinga would have us believe).

I’ve heard Dr. Kleiner, SHAFT’s resident Catholic philosopher, espouse the evolutionary argument against naturalism, but I’m not impressed by it. I may not fully understand the argument, however, so I’ll withhold my tentative criticisms for now.

I’ll end my introduction of Alvin Plantinga with this video:

In the video, an interviewer asks Plantinga why he believes in god. His response is surprisingly simple.

…I don’t think traditional arguments for God’s existence… are all that powerful… but it just seems to me that there really is such a person [as God]…

…When I look at the mountains, when I look at the treetops in my backyard, when I go to church, when I read the Bible, and on many other occasions I just find myself convinced that there really is such a person as God… It’s more like a personal experience than an argument or a philosophical proof…

Induction, for the purposes of this post, is a form of reasoning that makes inferences about what will happen from what has happened. Science relies heavily on induction in making generalizations and predictions. But Hume believes that we can reason absolutely nothing about the future from the past. To do so presupposes the uniformity of nature—that the future will resemble the past.

There is a temptation to respond that we know that the future will resemble the past, because past futures have resembled past pasts. This begs the question, however. It assumes the very thing it attempts to prove, and is thus circular.

Atheists need to understand the implications of Hume’s argument. Hume is not saying that we cannot know with a certainty that, for example, the sun will rise tomorrow. He instead says something far more radical: that we have no reason whatsoever to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. The fact that the sun has risen every day of recorded human history is immaterial; again, the future need not resemble the past.

So are we atheists who trust science guilty of the same faith that we accuse religious people of having? In a later post, I’ll introduce a few possible solutions to the problem of induction. But I’d first like to hear your thoughts.

The video was inspired by the work of moral philosopher Peter Singer, and particularly by his most recent book The Life You Can Save. At the book’s website, you can take a pledge (as urged in the video) to help end global poverty. If you call yourself a humanist, I hope you take the pledge.

The sorry fact is that many of us won’t actually bother to donate. I may be among the hypocrites, we’ll see. But others’ inaction is no excuse for our own.

So what miracles are there today? Celestial cameos on burnt toast and coffee stains don’t compare to the attestations of god in the Bible. From a Mormon perspective, too, there is a relative dearth of miracles. In the early church, reports of angelic visitations, demonic encounters, faith healings and speaking in tongues were commonplace. And whereas Joseph Smith regularly received revelations, god seems to have put today’s church leaders on hold.

It appears that god is hiding, and that is problematic for theists who believe that god is loving and concerned about our belief in him. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

A god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who does not even make sure his creatures understand his intentions—could that be a god of goodness? Who allows countless doubts and dubieties to persist, for thousands of years, as though the salvation of mankind were unaffected by them, and who on the other hand holds out frightful consequences if any mistake is made as to the nature of truth? Would he not be a cruel god if he possessed the truth and could behold mankind miserably tormenting itself over the truth?

This is known in the scholarly literature as the problem of divine hiddenness. J.L. Schellenberg in his landmark book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993) re-articulates this problem into what he calls “the argument from reasonable nonbelief.” Schellenberg suggests that the absence of evidence for god is evidence of god’s absence, such that nonbelief in god is reasonable. And why, if god wants a personal relationship with his creation, would he make nonbelief reasonable? There are people (myself included) who would believe in god were there sufficient evidence. Even the world’s most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, has stated that he wants to believe in god, but cannot.

It would make sense, then, for god to come out of hiding. But some believers worry that this would render faith in god useless. Andrew over at Irresistible (Dis)Grace had a thoughtful response to this concern:

I think the issue is that “belief in god” and “faith in god” imply something a little more than what people often want it to mean.

I think the scriptures even point out the distinction. See, when someone [argues that God's showing himself would nullify faith], then they seem to mean that what it means to believe in god is to believe he exists. According to this argument, if you believe in God (the right one, supposedly), then that is the prize.

But is that the prize?

No. As James 2:19 points out, even the demons believe that there is a god (and apparently, they believe in the right one). But do demons have the prize? No.

The issue is that believing in the existence or nonexistence isn’t the critical distinction. Rather, I think that belief and faith in god entails something more substantive…something like a trust in his ways and laws. Obedience to him. The following of him.

In this way, I don’t think that if God showed himself, faith would be nullified. Instead, if this life were a test to see who would follow and who wouldn’t, we would be on equal footing (because we would know that god exists) and the only thing that would matter is whether we would follow or not.

And shouldn’t that be the test—not whether we believe in god, but whether we follow him? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

It isn’t often that Noam Chomsky comments on religion; he is most prolific where it concerns linguistics, political philosophy, and international affairs.

Chomsky is an atheist, though he is reticent to adopt that label. When asked in an interview whether he was an atheist, he responded: “I would first want an explanation of what it is that I’m supposed to not believe in, and I’ve never seen an explanation.” On several issues, Chomsky agrees with the New Atheists. He has called religious belief “irrational” and generally regards it to be “a dangerous phenomenon.” He disagrees, however, with many New Atheists (like Hitchens and Harris) about the nature of Islamic fundamentalism. Chomsky famously debated Hitchens on the subject in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, and there is currently an online campaign to get him to debate Harris.

Oh, and the most important thing you need to know about Chomsky: I have an email from him.*  

*That sounds cooler than it actually is. Chomsky makes an effort to respond to all of his fan mail. Still, seeing an email from him in my inbox made me giddier than a 12-year-old girl at a Justin Bieber concert.

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

God: theism or atheism?

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Logic: classical or non-classical?

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Newcomb’s problem: one box or two boxes?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Proper names: Fregean or Millian?

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Time: A-theory or B-theory?

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don’t switch?

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

The reason for his lecture was not disabuse SHAFTers of their disbelief. Dr. Huenemann is an atheist who doesn’t consider theism “a live option.” Rather, Huenemann worries that many atheists (and people in general) aren’t very thoughtful about their basis for morality.

If you weren’t able to attend the lecture, or—like me— you just want to listen to it again, the lecture and the question/answer period are provided below.

Huenemann’s lecture

Q&A

A bit about Flew, from The Telegraph:

Flew always described himself as a “negative atheist”, asserting that “theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience”, a position he expounded in his classic paper Theology and Falsification (1950), reputedly the most frequently-quoted philosophical publication of the second half of the 20th century.

He argued that any philosophical debate about the Almighty must begin by presuming atheism, placing the burden of proof on those who believe that God exists. “We reject all transcendent supernatural systems, not because we’ve examined or could have examined each in turn, but because it does not seem to us that there is any good evidence in reason to postulate anything behind or beyond this natural universe,” he proclaimed. A key principle of his philosophy was the Socratean concept of “follow the evidence, wherever it leads”.

When Flew revealed that he had come to the conclusion that there might be a God after all, it came as a shock to his fellow atheists, who had long regarded him as one of their foremost champions. Worse, he seemed to have deserted Plato for Aristotle, since it was two of Aquinas’s famous five proofs for the existence of God – the arguments from design and for a prime mover – that had apparently clinched the matter.

After months of soul-searching, Flew concluded that research into DNA had “shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved”. Moreover, though he accepted Darwinian evolution, he felt that it could not explain the beginnings of life. “I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature,” he said.

But believers waiting to welcome this most prodigal of sons back into the fold were to be disappointed. Flew’s conversion did not embrace such concepts as Heaven, good and evil or the afterlife – let alone divine intervention in human affairs. His God was strictly minimalist – very different from “the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam”, as he liked to call them. God may have called his creation into existence, then, but why did he bother? To that question, it seemed, Flew had no answer.

Flew’s interests were prolific and wide-ranging, and he applied his linguistic analysis approach to studies of psychoanalysis, psychical research, crime and evolutionary ethics, among other topics.

In political philosophy, Flew defended classical liberalism against the fallacies of egalitarianism, arguing that socialism and social democracy are based on assumptions about the world that are demonstrably false.

He became a leading critic of the Harvard philosopher John Rawls, who had attempted to reconcile liberty and egalitarianism in his critically acclaimed Theory of Justice. In Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (1981), Flew rejected Rawls’s claim that, since people do not acquire their natural talents through moral merit, these talents stand at the disposition of “society”. Moral qualities, Flew argued, are not needed to entitle us to profit from our abilities.

In Sociology, Equality and Education (1976), Flew attacked the malign influence of the egalitarian ideology in education. In the 1990s he was the author of a series of pamphlets for the Adam Smith Institute calling on the then Conservative government to return to educational selection, to widen parental choice and to embrace a more challenging curriculum for brighter children.

Flew was the author of some 23 works of philosophy, including God and Philosophy (1966), Evolutionary Ethics (1967), An Introduction to Western Philosophy (1971), The Presumption of Atheism (1976), A Rational Animal (1978), Darwinian Evolution (1984), Atheistic Humanism (1993) and Philosophical Essays of Antony Flew (1997).

Flew’s volte-face on the existence of God was all the more remarkable given the volume of his writing in the atheistic cause and his vehement denial of internet rumours in 2001 that he had renounced his atheism. His response was entitled Sorry To Disappoint, but I’m Still an Atheist! In 2007, however, he was able to publish There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind.

Dr. Richard Carrier, a friend of Flew’s, has written at length about Flew’s conversion to deism. Carrier contends that Flew was persuaded by suspect scientific arguments and that his book (There is a God was largely ghostwritten by Christian authors.

Common Sense Atheism beat me to the video.