Doubting Marcus

Hidden Gods and Billionaire Bachelors

For millennia humans have pondered the most profound of all questions: What do Bill Gates and god have in common? If you, like me, guessed being a retired monopolist then according to Michael Rea, and cosigned by Victor Reppert, you are wrong:

Suppose Bill Gates were to go back on the dating scene. Wouldn’t it be natural for him to want to be with someone who would love him for himself rather than for his resources? Yet wouldn’t it also be natural for him to worry that even the most virtuous of prospective dating partners would find it difficult to avoid having her judgment clouded by the prospect of living in unimaginable wealth? …But, of course, Bill Gates’s impressiveness pales in comparison with God’s… Viewed in this light, it is easy to suppose that God must hide from us if he wants to allow us to develop the right sort of nonself-interested love for him.

You see, god can’t make it too obvious because we might all be golddiggers. The problem with this analogy, other than Gates generous philanthropism making god look bad, is that it conflates believing in god and accepting god as just or worthy of worship. Rea highlights Biblical passages supporting his cause while ignoring that, depending on a believer’s individual theology, Cain, Lucifer, demons, etc. knew of god but chose not to obey even in the slightest way. Clearly then these are these are separate issues.

Besides making for easy bad jokes, arguments like this reveal the ubiquitous plague in theology that is failing to think probabilistically. Rea argues divine silence isn’t a problem because divine silence “might just be an expression of God’s preferred mode of interaction” which could actually be true. Accepting for the moment that Rea’s version of god is possible, it could be true that such a being exists, wants us to love it but refuses to provide substantial evidence but if you are being rational you can’t just assume that because it’s possible it’s true.

You must weigh this “or else it wouldn’t be true love” response to divine silence against competing hypotheses like a god exists but doesn’t want a relationship with humans and—gasp—that no gods exists so divine hiddenness is really just an expression of there being no gods. Without a strong reason to believe Rea’s counterfactual is true, divine hiddenness must lower the probability of his particular god hypothesis in relation to these alternatives because his theory doesn’t predict that evidence and other theories are far superior at accounting for this evidence.

The Easter Truth Hunt

Every year on Easter I follow a bit of a ritual. First, I forget it’s Easter. Then, I am reminded of painting eggs as a child and finally I remember the Easter Challenge. In previous years I’ve been tempted to actually apply the Easter Challenge—an effort to try to get Christians to tell a coherent, sequential and complete narrative of the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection without excluding anything from any of the four gospels—but now it seems I’m jaded on the point of the challenge.

While it’s usually worthwhile to point out obvious shortcomings, it seems to me that attempts at reconciliation for the Easter Challenge, and many other challenges presented to religious and pseudoscientific, miss the point of how we determine truth. Going from impossible as stated, and therefore extremely improbable, to possible as stated but still vanishingly improbable isn’t really an accomplishment . Still, some believers seem content in doing just that and those who would challenge them also seem to fail to realize determining truth needn’t be done—and normatively shouldn’t be done—solely in absolutes.

Imagine a prosecutor saying “The defendants stories flatly contradict on what happen and in the timeline of events. Therefore the stories can not all be true.” only to be challenged by the prosecutor who argues “I object! If you make highly improbable assumptions and selectively interpret their words it isn’t strictly speaking impossible, only highly improbable that their stories are all true.” No reasonable jurist would then think “…well so long as it’s not impossible that their stories are all true that’s a good reason to believe they are indeed true.”

Yet this exact game seems to play out, on repeat, for a plethora of unlikely claims. So instead of focusing on what is or is not possible (which is really only a nonspecific declaration that something fails to meet a certain probability threshold) when you explicitly think about the relative probability of claims harder to let proving the impossible get in the way of highlighting a claim is extremely improbable. When you do this, the point of the Easter Challenge fades away as proving something is not a billion to one odds against but a million to one still means there’s a 99.9999% chance that it didn’t happen and means, frankly, that it isn’t even worth considering seriously.

Great Moments in Self-Refutation

Over the weekend I was linked to this Scott Klusendorf discussion of Peter Singer’s restricted approval of infanticide when the baby is severely disabled. But forget the pro-life arguments, ignore the misunderstandings of Singer’s positions instead just notice in this harsh condemnation of killing very disabled newborn infants we are told 1) The value of life doesn’t fluctuate over time 2) Newborns are just as valuable as adults. Among the criticism Klusendorf ensures us:

[Singer’s] Darwinian worldview leaves us philosophically and morally bankrupt, with no reason to act ethically in any context.

Meanwhile in the Bible:

…the Lord spoke to Moses, saying… If your valuation is of the male from twenty years even to sixty years old, then your valuation shall be fifty shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary. Or if it is a female, then your valuation shall be thirty shekels. If it be from five years even to twenty years old then your valuation for the male shall be twenty shekels and for the female ten shekels. But if they are from a month even up to five years old, then your valuation shall be five shekels of silver for the male, and for the female your valuation shall be three shekels of silver. If they are from sixty years old and upward, if it is a male, then your valuation shall be fifteen shekels, and for the female ten shekels. - Leviticus 27 1-8

The bearded old man agrees with Singer that the value of life changes over time and, by exemption, also seems to think newborns have any value at all. I know, I know “That was the Old Testament!” and “Context!!!” but it still sometimes astonishes me that the endorsement of controversial views by materialists like Singer get pilloried by Christians when the same actions (really far worse actions) are endorsed by the allegedly perfect standard giver.

It’s almost as if they are just making stuff up.

No, You Are Not Allowed to Look it Up

Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian has us atheists and same-sex marriage supporters figured out. You see he spends considerable time arguing against same-sex marriage so he repeatedly encounters people pointing out verses in the Hebrew Bible which demand behaviors no one considers acceptable anymore or make prohibitions which are just silly.

Gilson has realized when we do this, we think, to highlight the hypocrisy of picking out verses against same-sex couples we are really just displaying our own ignorance. As it is only because we don’t know the context of those verses that we are able to laugh at such seemingly arbitrary commands in, say, Leviticus 19:19 for not mixing different threads or growing two kinds of seeds in the same field. Indeed he has it all figured out when he quotes someone quoting someone else on why it totally made sense:

But Jonathan Morrow explains it all clearly enough in Think Christianly. On page 166 he quotes Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart:

These and other prohibitions were designed to forbid the Israelites to engage in fertility cult practices of the Canaanites. The Canaanites believed in sympathetic magic, the idea that symbolic actions can influence the gods and nature…. Mixing animal breeds, seeds, or materials was thought to “marry” them” so as magically to produce “offspring,” that is, agricultural bounty in the future.

If that sounds like a specious reason and you are considering looking it up, don’t! For as he tells us:

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Science, Science, Science and Then a Miracle Happened

The distinguished lab coat of science should be more appealing than the cloak of the divine but selling miracles wrapped in science has always struck me as odd. There are many people who are determined to stress reliable methods were used to determine the facts surrounding a miracle while simultaneously holding that it is rational to believe the alleged miracle which followed those events was a violation of the natural rules which science and history completely depend on.

This has become a rather wide phenomenon, you see this in creationists somewhat in creationists who argue for Noah’s ark being scientifically believable, but perhaps most prominently this duality of thinking is present in the debate about Jesus’ resurrection. There some theologians impress upon us how good the evidence is that there was an empty tomb while still holding it reasonable to believe the resurrection itself was a miracle. Besides unfailingly being based on misunderstandings of history, science and often requiring lies, it seems more than a bit of an oddity to spend the bulk of your time appealing to science only to conclude with “and then a miracle happened.” I think people who do this have failed to see they undercut their own criteria for what makes a belief reasonable.

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In Defense of Biblical Literalism

I’ve known a wide variety of Christians in my life and I’ve seen probably as many interpretations of the Bible as there are Christians. Many of them, being liberal or moderate believers, often chastise atheists like myself for taking certain passages literally. They argue, in effect, that we are taking a naive view of scripture as totally literal but it seems to me this is the only consistent way to interpret the Bible. This may seem odd coming from someone who just a week ago said I was giving up trying to complete reading the Bible. However a recent minor flare-up in the Youtube community sparked my interest in this topic again.

Taking the Bible literally of course doesn’t mean taking verses out of their textual or historical context but it does mean if the Bible says “God commanded the town be burnt to the ground” it means what it says just as it means what is says when it proclaims Jesus is divine. In fact unless Christians accept at least some parts of the Bible as literally true, at the very minimum some of the stories about Jesus, then there’s no good reason to call oneself a Christian nor to prefer the Bible to any other work. If it is all metaphor, allegory and philosophical insight then the Bible is no different from a novel by Charles Dickens or the Tao Te Ching. If it is agreed that some parts must be taken as true then the question becomes how do we determine which parts should be taken as true? Therein lies the problem, I’ve never seen a consistent, systemic way of interpreting the Bible that rejects the barbarism of the Hebrew Bible and the doctrine of hell but embraces the passages of love and forgiveness and there’s good reason to think such an approach doesn’t exist. However, if the approach taken to interpreting the Bible is not consistent, essentially allowing believers to make it up as they go along, then why take it seriously at all?

This is the fundamental problem of liberal and moderate Christianity but naturally this criticism doesn’t just apply to the Bible but to all alleged holy books. Yet as a practical matter of how best should we go about weaning people off immoral behavior with textual religious support this approach may be wanting. This despite the fact that even those that consider themselves literalists also reject portions of their scripture (when was the last time you recall anyone endorsing stoning?). Of course taking the approach of the literalists we also end up with absurd ideas like people walking on water, snakes talking and a diverse population coming from inbreeding. Kind of makes the whole venture look pointless… primarily because it is.

The Trinity Challenge for Easter

Creating a complete and noncontradictory account of Jesus’ resurrection from the four gospels has been an ongoing challenge from nonbelievers to Christians every Easter for a few years now. This type of challenge highlights the fundamental and mutually exclusive  nature of the gospels with regards to perhaps the key event in the life of Jesus but another major problem in traditional Christianity comes to my mind on Easter: the doctrine of the trinity. The idea that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit are God yet the three are distinct persons has officially been with Christianity since the Nicene Council but has never been shown to be anything but incoherent. Yes there have been attempts to explain how 3 persons can be one substance but when they rise above mere word games they all devolve into modalism or some form of polytheism, both of which are banished within the majority of Christian denominations.

The problem is if the Son is equivalent to God and the Father is equivalent to God then the Son and the Father are necessarily identical (If S=G and F=G then S=F). The alleged events of Easter brings this problem into focus because the Son was sacrificed by the Father to the Father but if they are both God then the memespeak is correct and God chose to “sacrifice myself to myself to save you from myself.” However according to the Bible Jesus was admittedly not omniscient and also prayed to a “you” separate from himself in the Garden of Gethsemane. If these are attempted to be overcome by saying Jesus was both fully human and fully divine then the Father and the Holy Spirit, which were not at any point fully human, then they are not identical to Jesus.

I have to admit the reconciliation of these problems seems so hopeless to me that even the mention of them almost seems unfair, as if I’m picking on Christianity, but in fairness the original Easter Challenge is similarly unresolvable. Nevertheless I am going to ask for clarification of what it is exactly Christians believe. I am not asking that Christians explain the doctrine of the trinity coherently, that almost certainly can not be done, I’m merely asking that they clarify the relationships within the trinity for the Easter events and to follow that to it’s full logical conclusion about the sacrifice, the death of Jesus and the implications of the resurrection. For example, if Jesus is God then Jesus necessarily sacrificed himself to himself but also because Jesus died before his resurrection then God died, which makes the resurrection all the more impressive. Simple enough, right? Good luck.

Can you follow who did what to whom on Easter to it’s logical conclusion?

We All Make Assumptions Part 2

*Part 1 - an explanation of my epistemology

Is there a real difference between the assumptions made by atheists like myself and Christians who accept Van Tillian presuppositionalism? One might argue that ultimately all epistemologies have to start with some assumptions so one is just as circular as another. This, I believe, could hardly be more incorrect. Suppose I begin my search for knowledge with the assumption that an evil daemon exists which is manipulating me and as such that some things are exactly opposite of what they initially seem. This would obviously make reasoning rather difficult if not impossible, and hence limit the ability to build a set of beliefs, but more importantly this isn’t in any way similar to far more basic the assumptions which underlie my particular brand of evidentialism.

Just to recap my particular assumptions are:

• I exist
• My senses aren’t always wrong
• Physical evidence is a way to justify beliefs

These aren’t conclusions about how the world operates but rather a basic framework for discovering how it does. Let’s compare these to the assumptions of Van Tillian presuppositionalism:

• A god exists (and that we have any idea what ‘god’ refers to)
• This god has interacted with humans
• The product of that interaction is Christian scripture

I’d hope it is easy to see that these kinds of assumptions are not equivalent. Even if granted that these Van Tillian assumptions merely serve as an apparatus to gather knowledge, as the assumption that physical evidence is a way to justify beliefs serves in my view, far more broad conclusions are drawn and they aren’t generic items to build a belief system, they are a belief system. Additionally I believe that without realizing it this view has already assumed the two assumptions of my form of evidentialism. Without assuming that you exist there is no way to extrapolate to any idea and without assuming that your senses are sometimes accurate you could never accept that there is a world to be interacted in or that the Christian scripture actually exists or even if it exists that it doesn’t say the opposite of what you believe it does. Moreover none of the assumptions that underlie evidentialism are facts about historical events or the existence of other minds. If, as it’s sometimes claimed, I were just assuming whatever I so pleased as a baseline I could assume, for instance, that the natural world is all that exists and that there are no gods but I don’t do so.

In fact almost no epistemologies not based in religion begin with such bold assumptions because these aren’t just be assumptions, they are far-reaching conclusions about reality. The goal of epistemology and theories of justification is to acquire accurate knowledge about reality not to impose conclusions. This is part of the fundamental difference between assuming an entire worldview and assuming the tools to construct a worldview. To borrow a bit of coherentist jargon presuppositionalism begins with an unalterable thoroughly fleshed out web of beliefs while most epistemologies try to construct one of many possible web of beliefs given a few far more basic starting points.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, I object to the idea that the first assumption in presuppositionalism is even logically coherent given the lack of an ontology for god. Until there is some coherent description of what this god is to say rely on god for anything is unreasonable. Still even if ‘god exists’ is coherent I believe that the Christian god is logically impossible because it is self-refuting in numerous ways, as is Christian scripture (by the way which Christian scripture?), and despite the claims of presuppositionalists no being can be the foundation of logic. All epistemologies seem to have their problems but hardly any approach this level of encompassing foundationalism and self-contradiction. We all make assumptions but some of them are more bold, less justified and far more self-contradictory than others. Van Tillian presuppositionalism is quite possibly at the apex of this unholy trinity.