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.

This Just In: Sky is Blue; Sam Harris Promotes Islamophobia

I didn’t realize Sam Harris’ blatant Islamophobia was still being disputed but, among others, Glenn Greenwald has stirred up a ruckus on the interwebs by pointing this out again.* Admittedly though I probably didn’t realize this because I long ago ceased caring about anything Sam Harris has to say about anything.

Nevertheless, the central point that Harris promotes an irrational levels of fear of Islam is one worth highlighting. Though I disagree with the Al-Jazeera article overt comparison between historical scientific racism and “new atheism” acting as a cloak for Islamophobia, there is little doubt that Harris advocates hysterical hatred for Islam. As Greenwald notes, position for position Harris aligns himself with the worse kinds of discriminatory policies against Muslims from banning the construction of mosques, to torture, to profiling, to gratuitous war (which he thinks Muslims should be grateful for!) and he even goes so far as to say the people making the most sense about Islam are fascists.

On a similar note, I’ve long since stopped paying attention to Richard Dawkins, and though much in the recent Salon article on the thinking “new atheists” is utter trash, pointing out, among other central signs of irrational hatred, Dawkins support for the reactionary site Islam Watch and far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders is lends heavy support to Dawkins as in the same camp with Harris.** Still, I hate to repeat the old cliche but such political views are not a consequence of atheism but stem from an independent understandings of morality and politics which every atheist must determine for themselves.

The only way this is a issue for atheists as a whole then is because Harris and Dawkins have quite a following so such views get more time and respect than they otherwise deserve. The problem is, much like the efforts to explicitly define the morality within atheist circles for the better, other than separation of church and state it makes no sense to declare atheist values. Being an atheist just doesn’t commit one to being a liberal or reactionary, so any effort to make all atheists, or at least organized atheists, shun someone for such political views is likely doomed to failure.

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*Yes yes I know “Islamophobia” isn’t an optimally constructed word however “religionist against Islam” which would have been semantically more accurate sounds far more absurd and at this point it makes no sense to fight words well within common use.

**The last line is particularly laughable “Proving that a religion — any religion — is evil, though, is just as pointless and impossible an endeavor as trying to prove that God does or doesn’t exist. Neither has been accomplished yet. And neither will.” Ironically only someone who doesn’t understand reasoning or morality at all could advocate either position he triumphantly declares. This is nothing more than anti-intellectualism cloaked in the cover of emphatic agnosticism.

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.

Logic and “Necessity”

Can you demonstrate the existence of anything in reality purely through logical argument? No.

At this point I am slightly tempted to brush my hands together and walk away as this seems quite obvious to me but it wasn’t always this way. If you don’t think carefully about what logic is, it’s easy to be think logic can prove something, say a god, exists.

However, logic is not the ultimate guide of what really is, it’s an abstraction about reality. Like any abstraction, there’s no guarantee that something that seems to fit within the system is representative of reality. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the way we commonly demonstrate a logical statement is wrong, not by offering another logical argument, but by pointing to a counterexample in reality. The reason we know “The sidewalk is wet, therefore it rained” is wrong is because of possible counterexamples which could occur in reality. Likewise, the generalities derived from valid arguments, which have become the building blocks of logic, are just those which withstood attempts to deliver counterexamples from reality.

As such logic itself can’t necessitate anything about reality. Any attempt to say “x must necessarily exist” purely because of a logical argument is an attempt to use our abstractions about reality to dictate the truth about reality. This is exactly backwards. Reality has no obligation to match our abstractions.

The only way to know if logical arguments matches reality is to actually look and see. So, for example, even if we were to take seriously the claims of proving the logical necessity solely through logical arguments of some being this would still only be one bit of evidence in its favor, we’d still have to look and see if what such a entity matches up with our observations of reality. To argue that once something was “proved” we have no need to look and see would be to argue that the only thing that is evidence is logical arguments.

…See also James Lindsay.

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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My Favorite Terrible Arguments of 2012

Over the course of a year you come across many shockingly poor ideas and arguments in practically every known field. However, some of these claims are so awful I think they deserve special recognition for their unintentional comedy so after the jump are my favorites from the many fields I follow in everything from pseudoscience to economics. And the winners are…

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Prayer “And a Pony”

If you can have prayers granted to fulfill your desires why stop at just what you prayed for? If prayers are actually granted then every prayer could be improved by asking for whatever you wanted plus pray that everyone gets a pony, after all everyone likes ponies. The common retort that you also have to work towards what you pray for—god doesn’t hand out free lunches y’know—means little as you could legitimately be working for everything you pray to receive, including even this theoretical pony.

The problem is, like wishes and daydreams, prayers are completely free. Even assuming you can’t pray for superpowers or anything that violates the laws of physics, and that the genie rules apply so you can’t pray for more effective prayer, no matter what you pray for you could always add “and a pony” or its serious equivalent onto the end of the prayer thereby instantly improving the prayer.

Instead of praying “I want to find a job that pays 20% more than I currently make” you would ask for that better job and a hefty severance package from your current job. Got it? Now pray for a pony too. If there are no restraints on what can be asked for it is only logical to ask for everything you desire now.

I suspect some might reply that only reasonable prayers are answered but at that point you are declaring quite specific knowledge of the mind of god, not to mention insulting the many millions of unfortunate humans who have prayed for food, water or other basic necessities whose prayers weren’t granted. Of course, I don’t think there are good reasons to believe prayer works but if you are convinced it does because of your failure to escape confirmation bias then surely you shouldn’t be stopping at praying for that new car you were eying, or even at world peace, as world peace and a pony for everyone would be better. Maybe even two ponies for everyone.

Cleverly Designed: Gods, Artists and Bayes (2 of 2)

I previously outlined an argument which says we can rule out design as an explanation for life if designers have a massive amount of options but without design there are only a few options, one of which we are observing. That is to say if gods have millions of ways to create life, one of which is evolution, but unguided nature only has a few ways to create life, also one of which is evolution, the the correct inference when you observe evolution is to believe life wasn’t designed. The clever response to this claim I only recently heard is to say whatever we observe could have happened by non-design as well as by design.

So, this argument goes, if we observed tigers can’t reproduce but the species continues to exist and we found a factory which produces tigers in the center of the Earth that wouldn’t count as evidence tigers were designed. After all, it could just be a brute fact about reality that there is a factory underground that produces tigers. In fact, it is possible reality could randomly produce anything you observe. It certainly isn’t logically or physically impossible for this to be the case and therefore no matter what we observe it would be compatible with non-design.

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Cleverly Designed: Gods, Artists and Bayes (1 of 2)

If gods have countless ways to create something that could only come about naturally in a handful of ways, what should we conclude when we observe the phenomenon occurring in a way it can naturally? This is the question which underlies a very clever argument made by someone I know for unguided evolution. To answer this question of the design of life let us consider something we know has human designers: art.

I’m terrible at creating visual art. I can’t draw, paint, sculpt or take a decent photo and, while I occasionally think highly of myself, I’m below average and inefficient at using Photoshop to make up for these deficiencies. Still, because I’m totally incompetent in all other mediums if you see visual art I created it is guaranteed to be the product of Photoshop.

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