Inquiring Infidel

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Skepticon II, a free conference on skepticism held in Springfield, Missouri. I had a fantastic time, and if anyone lives nearby and missed it this year, I highly recommend going to Skepticon III. There were many excellent speeches, but the one I found most interesting was DJ Grothe’s speech on morality. DJ is someone who thinks deeply about life’s big questions, as demonstrated by his Point of Inquiry podcast. He is also a great speaker and all-around good guy. So I was excited to hear that he was going to be speaking on morality, a subject that I have recently become very interested in. While I agreed with many of the points he made in his speech, I do not think he succeeded in showing how morality can exist without God.

1. Evolution can help explain ethics; it alone cannot justify ethics.
2. Justifying ethics requires critical reasoning.
3. Mere knowledge of evolution does not make people less moral.

In his speech he argued not only that you need reason to justify ethics, but how you can use reason to justify ethics. I strongly agree with all three of DJ’s conclusions, but do not think he provided any reasons to move beyond moral nihilism. Although I am a moral realist, I thought his arguments for moral realism were inadequate. I recognize that a short speech can at most sketch out a moral theory, but I don’t think he even managed to provide a good sketch of his beliefs on morality, let alone justify them.

The first part of DJ’s speech was his attack on evolutionary ethics. He made the excellent point that showing that the golden rule evolved would not establish it as moral any more than showing that xenophobia evolved would establish it as moral. As he said in his speech, “Evolution is inefficient, wasteful, [and] cruel.”

After explaining why he disagrees with grounding morality in evolution or in God, DJ briefly explained his view of morality. He stated that freedom from unnecessary suffering is something good to the individual, something that has value. He then went on to say that something everyone values is good in a more general sense. He defined his position as “well-being consequentialism” whereby the goodness of an action is determined by its effect on the well-being of individuals.

One problem I have with this is that he never explains why he thinks it makes sense to call this collective good a moral good. Everyone can value something without it being a moral good. For example, if everyone on earth valued the Mona Lisa, that wouldn’t make it morally good. Even taking things like this into account, there’s still the question of whether any of the remaining goods can be rightly called moral goods.

He addressed this a little bit when he was asked about the “is-ought distinction” which basically says that you can’t get from what is to what ought to be. DJ said that he buys into the is-ought distinction, but there can still be something that feels like the science of ethics. I saw this as a very poor response. Creation science may feel like real science to some people, but that doesn’t mean it is. This seems like a concession that DJ was not actually talking about morality all along and that while something similar to morality might exist, morality itself does not exist. I’m sure that DJ would disagree with that implication, but if so he should explain why he thinks morality exists in spite of the is-ought distinction.

Another problem is that he never defines “well-being.” He instead leaves it so incredibly vague that it’s almost like saying the goodness of an action is defined by whether something has good consequences. It seems so vague that you could use it to pretend you have a basis for your moral beliefs when instead you are really just relying on your moral intuitions (which may be completely unreliable since they are products of evolution). Is drinking alcohol good because it makes people happy and happiness is part of one’s well-being, or is it bad because it has negative health consequences?

And there is also the problem of what happens when something is good for someone’s well-being, but is bad for someone else’s. Instead of putting forward a means of saying what is moral when there are competing interests, DJ just says that when something is good for each individual’s well-being, it is good. But if you can only establish morality when something is good or bad for everyone, it becomes a useless concept. The morality of an action only matters if that action might actually take place. But if something makes everyone worse off, then who would have the incentive to do that action?

After the speech, I asked DJ how he defined well-being and how he determined morality when an action made some people better off and other people worse off. He named a couple things that he saw as part of well-being, but he never really defined exactly what he meant by it. We only talked for a few minutes, but hopefully we’ll be able to continue our conversation in the future. It may turn out that DJ has good answers to my objections, but based only on this talk, I am very skeptical of his view of morality.

Update: I just listened to the recent Reasonable Doubts podcast in which they interviewed DJ. While this post is primarily about DJ’s speech at Skepticon, he makes a few points in the podcast that I wanted to respond to.

He says that his response to moral nihilists is to say that just because something evolved doesn’t mean that it’s unreliable. Our eyes evolved, yet we think it’s reasonable to trust them. I agree that the fact that our view of morality evolved does not make it unreliable. But there’s a key difference between our moral sense and vision. While we have good reasons to expect that evolution will give us a generally reliable sense of sight, we do not have any reason to expect our evolved morality to generally match true morality. If predators looked like human babies and babies looked like predators, our species probably would not have survived as long as it has. However, if there are moral facts distinct from all other facts, why would evolution make our moral sense match these facts instead of whatever led to the greatest reproductive success? I think our senses and intuitions are pretty reliable in cases where we need them to be accurate, but are unreliable in other cases. For example, while my intuitions about physics are roughly accurate in the everyday world, science has shown that my intuitions about the very large and the very small are way off. And finally, I don’t see how someone could say it’s rational to trust our moral sense, but it’s irrational for someone to trust their sense of God (their sensus divinitatis).

When asked about how we can justify our ethics without looking at what is (in light of the is-ought distinction), DJ said that we can ground our morality in critical rational reflection. But this doesn’t make sense to me. If you can’t use what is to determine morality, what are you basing it on? I guess you could arbitrarily make up a few moral facts and then rationally determine the implications of those facts, but then there’s no reason to trust your conclusions.

When asked about moral duties, DJ says that we have to start at the beginning: what is valuable to us. I agree completely. He says that we value well-being, which he minimally defines as “limiting unnecessary suffering.” But I think you need to consider all things that we value. If you only look at one thing, then all of your moral conclusions are suspect because there are some times that limiting suffering is worse than the suffering itself. As an extreme example, hooking my brain up to a machine that makes me experience a virtual world in which every day is the same may prevent me from ever feeling suffering again, but it would also deny me other things that I value. A more complete definition of value is needed.

Finally, DJ says, as he did at Skepticon, that from his vantage point, he can say that what the Nazis did is morally wrong, even if it made sense to the Germans. But anyone can say anything; the key is whether he has good reasons for saying that what the Nazis did is wrong. This depends on whether he has good reasons for believing that his view of morality is true. I could believe in a Magic 8-Ball based system of morality in which whether something is moral is determined by what a Magic 8-Ball tells me. If I ask it whether what the Nazis did was immoral and it says “It is certain”, then from my view of morality, I would be able to say definitively that what the Nazis did is wrong. If we have no good reasons to believe that a certain theory of morality is true, then we have no reason to believe that theory’s implications. Unless DJ has some other justification for his view of morality, I see no more reason to trust his theory as a reliable guide to morality than to trust the Magic 8-Ball based theory.

While atheists and theists often disagree on what constitutes evil, they can usually agree that unnecessary suffering is evil. If God brings about immense suffering without some greater good coming from it, it’s hard to see how he could still be good without the word ‘good’ losing all meaning. As I discussed in a previous post, it doesn’t work to just say that God has unknown purposes.

So animal suffering appears to pose a problem for an omnibenevolent God. If animals do not have eternal souls, what possible greater good could come from a deer dying in a forest fire? While this initially appears to be a tough question, philosopher Alexander Pruss explains, in a recent post at Prosblogion and his personal blog, why animal pain is not such a problem after all. But Pruss is far too modest in his conclusions. His argument can also explain why female pain is not a problem for the view that God is omnibenevolent.

The first argument Pruss addresses is that an omnibenevolent God could have created something that had the same effect as pain, but that did not hurt. When we touch something hot, instead of feeling pain and instinctively pulling away, God could give us the instinct to pull away without the pain. But, as Pruss points out, how do we know that God hasn’t done this? He writes that “if the pain-replacement, call it shpain, had the same motivational effects, we would observe the same kinds of aversive responses to shpain as to pain.” Animals would react to shpain exactly as they would to pain, but without the experience of pain.

Since the reactions to shpain and pain are the same, the fact that many animals act similar to us is no evidence that they actually feel pain. Of course I could argue that since my brain looks similar to a chimps brain when we get hurt, chimps probably feel pain.  But Pruss does not think this would work. He argues that there are differences between human and non-human brains. If animals feel shpain instead of pain, we would expect lots of similarities, but some differences, which is exactly what we find.

Pruss’ argument can also address the problem of female pain. If females experience shpain rather than pain, we would expect them to have a similar response to things that would cause men pain. But just because they look like they’re in pain doesn’t mean they actually are. Just like a dog’s whimper is no evidence that a dog is experiencing pain rather than shpain, a woman’s tears are no evidence that she is experiencing pain rather than shpain. Shpain has the same motivational effects and would cause women to talk like they were in pain, even though they’re not. Someone could argue that the similarity in how our brains react could provide evidence that women actually feel pain. But that is not the case. A 2003 study showed that when men and women receive the same painful (or shpainful) stimuli, the parts of the female brain that get stimulated are different than the parts of the male brain that get stimulated. While there are many similarities in how our brains react, there are also some differences, which is exactly what we would expect if women only experience shpain.

The second argument Pruss addresses is that even if some cases of animal pain were beneficial, God could still miraculously prevent pain in cases where it wasn’t necessary, for example when an animal is about to die. Pruss again responds by saying that maybe God does do this. This intervention may be as minimal as possible, so it doesn't disrupt anything. He may intervene to prevent the pain, but keep everything else the same. He may make it so their brains react similarly to how they’d react to pain, so that they’d display the outward signs of pain, even though they are only experiencing shpain. Of course this also applies to women. Even though it may look like a woman that is being beaten to death is in extreme pain, she may actually be feeling no pain at all.

At first the evidence that animals experience pain appears to be strong, as Michael Murray explains:

We also have independent evidence that many animals are capable of experiencing pain, evidence that parallels the evidence we have for thinking our fellow humans are capable of feeling pain: We witness pain behavior, not just reflex actions to noxious stimuli (protective pain), but subsequent pain-induced behavioral modification caused by bodily damage (restorative pain); we observe significant anatomical and neurophysiological similarity between humans and many animals (including all mammals and most vertebrates); endogenous serotonergic and opioid pain-control mechanisms are present in all mammals[Why would organisms incapable of feeling pain have endogenous pain-control systems?]; efferent and afferent nerves run throughout their bodies; analgesics and anesthetics stop animals from exhibiting pain behavior, presumably because these substances prevent the pain itself in much the way they prevent pain in humans; and there is compelling experimental evidence that the capacity to feel pain enhances survival value in animals, based on the self-destructive tendencies displayed by animals that have been surgically deafferented.

But as Alexander Pruss’ article shows, this evidence is exactly what you would expect if animals felt shpain rather than pain. Similarly, even though it may initially seem obvious that women feel pain, there’s actually no reason to think their pain is real (at least if God exists).

However, since I do not believe in God, I think that female pain is real. It just seems incredibly unlikely that evolution would result in men experiencing pain and women experiencing shpain. But since the Christian God is supposed to be omnipotent, this seems perfectly reasonable if Christianity is true.

I think Pruss’ argument provides just as good of a solution to the problem of female pain as it does to the problem of animal pain. While this still leaves male pain unaccounted for, I think this is a very significant step in solving the problem of evil.

One argument that has come up a few times in my discussions with theists is the argument from desire. While I don’t think it works, I think many atheists are too dismissive of it. The argument from desire basically says that God exists because we have a natural desire for God (or the transcendent) and for each of our natural desires, something exists that can satisfies it. One objection is that this doesn’t prove that God exists. That is true, but given that nothing is provable with absolute certainty, this is an unreasonable demand.

We should be careful not to instinctively reject arguments merely because we disagree with their conclusion. For example, many atheists argue that since almost all things in our universe have turned out to have natural explanations, everything probably has a natural explanation. But this is similar to the argument from desire which says that because almost all our natural desires have something that can fulfill them, all our desires probably have something that can fulfill them. So I think the argument from desire deserves a closer examination.

Peter Kreeft formulates the argument from desire as follows:

1. Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
2. But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
3. Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
4. This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."

He argues that there are two types of desires: those that are innate, and those that are externally conditioned. While we have innate desires for food, sleep, and sex, we also have desires that are not innate, like “flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world championship.” While other desires vary, the natural desires exist in each of us, according to Kreeft. He goes on to say that “no one has ever found one case of an innate desire for a nonexistent object.” Kreeft believes that if we are honest, we will acknowledge that the second premise is true and that we do desire something more.

In a fascinating new documentary, director Darren Doane provides an in-depth look into a recent debate tour by Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson. While it certainly has some clips from their debates, it also offers insight into what the two men are really like when they’re not on stage. There are clips of their debates, them being interviewed on TV, them joking around with each other, their private lives, and the director asking them about their personal beliefs. Although the movie jumps from one thing to another, it never seems disorganized. While a debate movie seems like it could be boring, I thought every minute of it was interesting. The movie does not include long speeches, but instead just focuses on the core of their arguments.

The subject of their debate is whether Christianity is good for the world. Pastor Wilson argues that it is since it is objectively true, beautiful, and good. Hitchens argues that religion is not good because of all the evil acts that religion has led people to do.

If you don’t want to know any specifics about what happens in the movie, stop reading this review now. It’s not like there’s any dramatic conclusion for me to spoil, like Hitchens converting to Christianity, or Hitchens and Wilson becoming lovers, but I just thought I’d warn you in case you don’t want to know any details about what gets said.

One thing that surprised me about the movie was how well Hitchens and Wilson seemed to get along with each other. They joke around with each other and also recite quotes by P.G. Wodehouse, an author they both admire.

Hitchens shows off his apartment in D.C. as well as his extensive library, much of which is taken up by books on religion. Throughout the movie, a number of people recognize Hitchens on the street and thank him for his work. Hitchens comments that given how much hate mail he gets, there must be an even greater number of people who recognize him but don’t say anything because they think he’s a dick.

But Hitchens remains somewhat enigmatic. Early in the movie he remarks that “I try and deny people their illusions.” He says that the idea that faith is a good thing needs to be repudiated "because the most faith based people in the united states on September the 11th 2001 were undoubtedly the people who high jacked those planes.” But later he admits to Wilson that if he could eliminate religion, he wouldn’t do it. He says it is not just because he’d miss having religious people to argue with, as he made it seem in the Four Horsemen discussion. He says, "I don't quite know why I wouldn't do it."

The movie also gives a glimpse into Pastor Wilson’s personal life. It shows him having dinner and praying with his family. It also shows why Pastor Wilson is actually a Christian. He says that while he believes the defenses of the Christian faith are sound, that’s not why he’s a Christian. He believes the reason he is a Christian is that it was a gift of God that his parents happened to raise him that way. I found it notable that Pastor Wilson did not say he thought the arguments for Christianity were sound, merely that the defenses of Christianity were sound. Even if it cannot be definitively disproven, that doesn’t mean that there are good reasons for believing in it.

While most of the movie was about morality, it also touches on the issue of truth. Pastor Wilson says that "We can't know anything apart from the revelation of God" and the fact that people can’t find God doesn’t mean that God can’t find them. Hitchens rightly points out that it’s a little contradictory to say that you can’t know God and also say that you know that he has revealed himself. If our reason is unreliable, then how can we know whether or not something is a revelation by God?

But Pastor Wilson also made an excellent point about the search for truth. He references G.K. Chesterton’s comment that the purpose of an open mind is to close on something. He sees it as self defeating to always have a mind that’s completely open. I agree with him, and this made me think about QualiaSoup’s excellent video on open-mindedness:
 

 
Hitchens made his usual arguments about the absurdity of biblical morality. Pastor Wilson responded by saying that it was indeed good for people to kill the Amalekites because God told them to do so. He then tries to turn this around by arguing that it doesn’t matter under atheism either because the universe doesn’t care what happens to Amalekites. But I don’t see why this matters. The universe is an inanimate object. I don’t care about what a rock thinks about murder, so why should I care what the universe thinks? It seems like morality had to be based, to some extent, on people. If there was no one else in the universe, what could you do that would be evil?

Pastor Wilson repeatedly criticizes Hitchens for critiquing Christianity by appealing to a shared moral sense without giving a firm grounding to his view of morality. While I think Pastor Wilson overreaches with some of his comments, I think his criticism is valid. Hitchens appeals to a shared moral intuition, but Pastor Wilson points out that sometimes our intuitions conflict. If we see it as good to conquer other tribes or countries, does that make it moral? Did the fact that people once thought slavery was a moral institution mean that it once was? Is there any reason to think that evolution would shape our moral sense to reflect any reality other than what would lead to the survival of our genes?

Hitchens responds by saying that humans have an innate sense of right and wrong and it seems silly to think that the Jews got all the way to Mt. Sinai thinking that murder and theft were fine until God told them otherwise. Like many atheists, Hitchens dodges the question. The issue is not how it is possible to believe in morality without God, for, as some religions demonstrate, it’s possibly to believe weird things without a good reason. The issue is whether there is a rational basis for believing that a given action is moral or immoral.

However, Hitchens correctly points out that things aren’t any better under religion. “Religious morality is just as relative, just as subject to evolution.” While religion used to say that sinners would burn in the fiery pits of hell, many of them have shifted to seeing hell as merely separation from God. Pastor Wilson defends Christian morality by saying that morality is grounded in the nature of God. However, as I pointed out in an earlier post, that doesn’t really help.  If God's nature does not fit some external standard of morality, then his nature is good merely because it is God's.  So then murder is wrong just because that's what God's nature happened to be, and you end up with an arbitrary basis for morality.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie and highly recommend seeing it if you get the chance.  The full video isn't online, but here's a clip of the first 13 minutes of it:

Saturday night the House finally passed the health care bill by a vote of 220 to 215.  There were 39 Democrats who ended up voting against the bill, and only one Republican who voted for it.

That Republican was Rep. Joseph Cao (pronounced Gow) of Louisiana who represents an extremely liberal district.  His district is about as liberal as Missouri's 1st district.  It's so liberal that the only reason a Republican won was that William Jefferson, the Democratic incumbent, was insanely corrupt.  Sometimes politicians can pretend they made an innocent mistake, but this is a little hard when federal agents find almost $100,000 in cash in your freezer.  The district was so liberal that despite all of this, Jefferson was heavily favored, and Cao only won because the election was held in December, leading to embarrassingly low turnout.  While Republicans were able to force Cao to vote against the stimulus bill, voting against health care would have been political suicide for him.

Unfortunately, in order to win the support of Cao and a few moderate Democrats, Democratic leaders allowed the Stupak amendment to be voted on and passed.  This amendment prevents the public option from covering abortion.  It even prevents people who receive affordability credits from purchasing any private plan that covers abortion.  It still allows people to buy additional "abortion plans", but how many people are actually going to get an additional plan that just covers abortion?  How many people really expect to have an abortion sometime in the future and make plans accordingly?  What will end up happening is that poor women who get their insurance through the health care exchange will be unable to get an abortion, even when one is desperately needed.

This language was inserted into the bill primarily to receive the blessing of the Conference of Catholic Bishops.  Democratic leaders had been working for days trying to find something the church would accept because there was a group of Democrats who wouldn't vote for the bill unless it had the church's endorsement.  I'm a little uncomfortable with important legislation needing the Catholic church's seal of approval in order to pass.  And considering how much of the funding for the anti-gay marriage ads in Maine came from the Catholic church, it seems like the church has become very effective at getting their moral beliefs written into our laws.

Besides this, the bill appears to be pretty good. It contains a public option, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cover 36 million additional people and would reduce the budget deficit by more than $100 billion dollars over 10 years. However, it still has a tough road ahead. It first has to pass the Senate, where it will need 60 Senators to prevent a filibuster and bring it to the floor. There are some means, such as reconciliation, that have previously been used to get bills passed with a bare majority, but Democrats seem unlikely to go this route. Then a group of members from the House and Senate will get together in a conference committee to hash out the differences between the House and Senate bills. The resulting bill then has to be voted on in both houses. This could be problematic because many Democrats have pledged to vote against a bill that does not have a public option, and the Senate bill may not have one. Also, some House members voted for the bill with hopes that the anti-abortion language would later be taken out and may vote against the bill if it’s in the final version. But if it's taken out, a group of moderates may vote against the bill. If the bill makes it through all of that, it finally reaches the President’s desk.

While we're still a long way from health care reform being signed into law, the vote last night was an important first step.

On Tuesday, Maine voted to deprive people of the right to marry the one they love. Mainers struck down a law that was passed in May which gave gay couples the right to get married. It was expected to be a close vote, but many experts were expecting gay rights to squeak out a narrow victory. Instead, about 53% of voters decided that only straight people should have the right to marry.

This is depressing news. Despite many recent victories in the fight for equal rights, this vote makes clear that we still have a long way to go. This isn’t Oklahoma or Idaho; Barack Obama won Maine by 17% of the vote. If gay marriage can’t even win in liberal states like California and Maine, equal rights nation-wide look a long way off.

I see absolutely no reason that people should only be permitted to marry those of a certain gender. I’ve heard dozens of arguments for why only straight people should be able to get married, but they are all completely unconvincing. In the end, people do not oppose gay marriage because they have studied the evidence and found that it will have harmful consequences; they oppose it because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. I see no reason why I should respect these people’s beliefs any more than I respect the beliefs of those who used the Bible to support banning interracial marriage.

Of course, no matter how much I disagree with their views, everyone is entitled to a vote. What bothers me most about the situation in Maine is the amount of money that religious groups across the country gave in order to convince Maine voters to take away rights from gay people.  In a recent article, Nate Silver examined where the money was actually coming from.  While gay marriage supporters raised 43% of their money from within Maine, gay marriage opponents raised only 26% of their money within the state.  While the pro-gay marriage side received contributions from 3,766 Mainers, only 422 contributed to the campaign against gay marriage.  While the pro-gay marriage side got most of their money from small donors, much of the anti-gay marriage money came from religious groups.  Over 80% of the in-state funding came from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, and almost all of the out-of-state funding came from the National Organization for Marriage, which has ties to the Mormon church.

And just as in California, this money was used to run ads playing to the fears of voters.  These ads threatened that unless gays were prevented from marrying, there would be a flood of lawsuits, religions would lose their tax exemptions, and young children would be taught in school that it's okay to be gay.

The news might not be all bad though.  It is looking like a referendum in Washington state which would increase domestic partner rights will probably pass, though the vote is much closer than people predicted.  And even though change is coming much more slowly than I would like, it is coming.  I hope that 50 years from now people will look back with shock that there was once a time when the government told you what sex your partner had to be, just like people growing up today are shocked that only 50 years ago, the government got to determine what race your partner had to be.  I think that day will become a reality, but there is still a lot of work left.

I leave you with this touching gay marriage ad from Ireland:



Update: Just to be clear, I do not think that everyone who opposes gay marriage is a bigot.  However, there are certainly some people who oppose gay marriage out of bigotry, though I don't claim to know how many.  I have some regrets about titling this post as I did because it seems to imply that everyone who voted against gay marriage is a bigot.

I just joined the Atheist Blogroll, which you can see in my sidebar.  It seems like a pretty good way of finding blogs to read, and maybe it will cause a few people to check out my blog.  If you have a blog and would like to join, contact Mojoey at Deep Thoughts.

By the way, I'm working on a couple posts right now and should have something new up in the next couple days.

If God does exist, does it make sense to trust him? Most atheists would probably look at all the evil acts that God did in the Bible and say that it would be silly to trust a God like that. Most Christians would probably say that based on their personal experiences with God, they have come to trust him and that if he did everything the Bible says he did, he must have had good reasons. In a way this makes sense. If you trust someone deeply, you will give them the benefit of the doubt. And even if some of them sound implausible, Christians have come up with all kinds of different explanations for why God might have done the things the Bible says he did. So I think that any discussion of trust should start with how much trust God has actually earned. If there’s no reason to trust God to begin with, then you don’t even have to bring up his seemingly evil acts.

Suppose we know that God does exist. Suppose we know of good reasons why it was moral for God to do all those things he did. Suppose God communicates with us constantly and seems to do good things that make our lives better. Would it then make sense to trust God? Is it even possible for God to earn our trust? A while ago I probably would have said yes, but now I’m not so sure.

The first step is looking at why we come to trust people. It all starts with how much trust we have for people in general. If my experiences have shown that people are pretty trustworthy, I should trust a stranger more than if I thought that most humans were evil. But how much we trust someone depends on other things like the context that we met them in. We assign teachers, drug dealers, people in suits, and people who look like gang members different initial levels of trust based on what we think we know about the trustworthiness of these groups. While this can be a good thing, sometimes these biases are irrational. Many people are racist or xenophobic without any actual evidence supporting their biases.

What about God? For one thing, we have no experience with other all-powerful supernatural beings. Even if humans are trustworthy in general, that doesn’t mean that the same holds for supernatural beings. Given that there doesn’t seem to be any reason a priori to think a good God is more likely than an evil God, I don’t think we have an a priori reason for trusting him.

But as we get to know someone better, our level of trust changes. If someone tries to steal my wallet and is not a magician, I start trusting them less. But if I see someone giving up their time or money to help someone else, I start trusting them more. While this seems like a good way of figuring out whether someone is trustworthy, you have to be careful. If you ask an email scammer to send you $10 to prove he’s honest and he does, that doesn’t mean you should send him your life’s savings. While small selfless acts may cause us to trust someone, we still shouldn’t trust that person totally or we could be easily swindled.

So what has God sacrificed? Many Christians will say that he sacrificed his son/himself. But since God is all powerful, he could have brought about the same result without having Jesus die. It’s a little like if a judge stabbed himself in the leg with a pencil and then decided not to send someone to jail. The pencil has nothing to do with whether the act is benevolent. But also, if Jesus is God, he would be infinitely capable of dealing with pain and dying on the cross wouldn’t hurt him at all. Even if he could strip himself of his ability to deal with pain, his act would be no more benevolent than the judge’s self-mutilation. It would also raise the interesting question of whether God could take away all his powers and kill himself.

A Christian might say that it’s still benevolent because God forgave our sins. Laying aside the fact that most Christians think that this gift was conditional upon believing in God, this is still not the kind of self-sacrificing act that should make us more likely to trust someone. God is essentially giving up nothing of value, and then asking us to give up something we value very much: our ability to live our lives the way we see fit. So sacrificing to God would be worse than giving your life’s savings to the scammer. God has sacrificed less to earn your trust and is asking for more.

Certainly this isn’t the only way someone can earn your trust. If you get to know someone very well and you see what they’re really like, you might start to trust them. If you see someone at their most raw and uninhibited, you can get a better idea of whether they’re trustworthy. For example, if you meet a politician after he’s had a few beers you might get a better idea of what he’s like than if you listen to every single one of his speeches. While we can be easily fooled, this can at least give us some idea of how trustworthy someone is. This works because humans are not perfect at deception, as the success of poker players at reading tells demonstrates. But since God is all powerful, he is infinitely skilled at deception. So we could not tell whether our interactions with him show us what he is really like, or whether he is merely deceiving us.

One other good way of seeing whether we should trust someone is seeing what other people we trust think of him. At first this seems like it could be a good reason to trust God, but then you have to think about why other people trust God. If there is no good reason to trust God even in the best case scenario when God communicates with us constantly and seems to make our lives better, what basis do those people have for trusting God? If everyone I knew believed something but I knew that they had no good reason for believing it, that wouldn’t give me a reason to believe it. If everyone I knew trusted in the U.S. government, but I knew that the only reason they did so was they thought blind patriotism was good, that wouldn’t give me any reason to trust the U.S. government.

Yet even if you realize there’s no good reason to trust God, you could still say that if God rewards you for doing what he says, it makes sense to keep doing it. If God somehow demonstrates to us in an unmistakable way that he is rewarding us for our actions, then maybe this would make sense. If I gave a $10 bill to a poor person and then a $100 bill appeared in my wallet and God told me he’d keep doing that, I’d start giving out a lot more $10 bills. But God still wouldn’t earn my trust. I see trust as a confidence that someone is generally honest and a good person. There could be a practical benefit to doing what an evil dictator says, but that doesn’t mean you should trust him.

One final reason someone might trust God is for the psychological benefits. It seems like it would be disturbing to believe that God exists, but have no idea whether he’s good or evil. While there are probably cases where it could make you happier, trusting in people merely for psychological benefits can be very dangerous. Many people had a profound trust in Jim Jones and this may have made them happy, but this misplaced trust had disastrous consequences.

Even if God exists, and even if he does the things Christians claim he does, it still doesn’t seem like there’s any rational way to justify trust in God. God controls our reality, and if he wants to create a world in which he makes us think he’s nice in order to get us to do evil, he can do so without any effort whatsoever. So the question is not whether we can still trust God despite the genocide he ordered in the Bible. The question is whether there’s any good reason for trusting him in the first place.

I just read an intriguing paper by Erik Wielenberg entitled Skeptical Theism and Divine Lies. The entire paper is worth reading, but I’ll try to summarize his arguments and offer my thoughts. And judging by the stuff he has on his faculty web page, he seems like a pretty good guy overall:



In his paper, Wielenberg argues that people who try to get around the problem of evil by saying that just because we can’t think of a justification for a particular evil doesn’t mean that there isn’t one must also accept that just because we can’t think of a justification for God lying to us doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. Although this would not disprove God, it would show that we have no good reason for thinking that God is telling us the truth. Of course a believer could instead reject skeptical theism, but that would make it very difficult to respond to the problem of evil.

Calling God’s honesty into question would cause serious problems for Christianity. Wielenberg quotes Nicholas Wolterstorff's observation that “deep in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is the attribution of speech to God. To excise those attributions from those religions would be to have only shards left.” Wolterstorff also noted that the “traditional principles guiding biblical interpretation in the Christian tradition” is the principle “that God never speaks falsehood.” Wielenberg then quotes Richard Swinburne discussing how mankind needs God to reveal things like the atonement and heaven and hell. If Christians can’t rely on God to be honest, then how can Christians possibly know anything about God or the afterlife? The self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that apologist William Lane Craig loves to talk about might not be so self-authenticating after all.

But it would also be problematic to reject skeptical theism, as it seems to be the only half-decent answer to the problem of evil. Many non-believers argue that if there is an evil act that seems completely irreconcilable with an omnibenevolent God, then it probably is. At the very least, the great number of seemingly unjustifiable evils provides evidence against the existence of God. A skeptical theist would respond by saying that our knowledge is extremely limited and just because we can’t think of a justification doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have one. Given how little we actually know, this seems like a somewhat reasonable response, though in cases like the Holocaust, it seems impossible that the good could outweigh the bad without the word good losing all meaning. But at least the skeptical theist response is logically coherent.

Wielenberg explains that one problem with accepting skeptical theism is that God could have a justification for anything. A Christian might believe that they don’t have to worry about global warming or a nuclear holocaust because God will protect them. But under skeptical theism, this would be irrational. God might have some justification for killing everyone on earth in the most painful way imaginable. He could even have some justification for then sending everyone on Earth to an eternity in hell. We have no reason to take God at his word, for he could have an unknown reason for lying to us.

Wielenberg’s core argument is essentially this:
Premise 1: If skeptical theism is true, we have no reason to deny that God telling a lie has some justification we don’t know about.
Premise 2: If we have no reason to deny that God telling a lie has some justification we don’t know about, then we do not know any proposition based solely on God’s word.
Therefore: Skeptical theism implies that we do not know any proposition based solely on God’s word.

So a skeptical theist must accept that they cannot know even core tenants of Christianity like the claim that Christians can get eternal life. Of course it’s hard to imagine how God could be justified in lying to us about something like that. But as skeptical theists say, just because we can’t think of a justification doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Maybe there’s some justification for the Holocaust that we can’t even begin to understand, and maybe there’s some justification for God deluding us into thinking we will live forever when instead we will rot in the ground.

I was glad to see that Wielenberg addressed what I see as a likely response from Christians: “So what?” Why is it so horrible if God does lie occasionally? That was basically the reaction I anticipated some Christians having when I first heard about my friend Ben’s project of mapping a debate with a number of Christians on whether God is lying about hell.

A believer could still say that at the very least if God tells them something, they can know that God wants them to believe it. So divine revelation is not God revealing the truth, but God revealing what he wants us to believe. However, even this is uncertain. If we do not know God’s purpose for telling us something, we do not know how God wants us to respond. For all we know, he could want us to respond by being angry at God, for maybe this will lead to the most good in the end. So God telling us something gives us no basis for believing it or even for acting as if we believe it.

Another possible response Wielenberg addresses is that this argument does not show that God is morally imperfect, so at least everything will end up fine in the end. But since under skeptical theism there may be moral goods that God is trying to achieve which are beyond our understanding, we cannot know anything about our fate. For all we know, there is some overriding good that could be achieved by torturing all believers eternally and letting only atheists into heaven.

So while skeptical theism may enable Christians to escape the problem of evil, it ends up destroying mainstream Christianity. If Isaiah 55:9 and Ecclesiastes 8:17 really do indicate that God may have unknowable reasons for his actions, and Stephen Wykstra is right that skeptical theism “is not an additional postulate: it was implicit in theism (taken with a little realism about our cognitive powers) all along,” then Christianity itself is incoherent.

Overall, I think that Wielenberg presents a strong argument, one that all believers should carefully consider.

Earlier this week, Barbara Bradley Hagerty did a piece on atheism for NPR entitled “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists.” In it, she describes what she sees as a major split between New atheists like Christopher Hitchens and old school atheists like Paul Kurtz. There certainly are differences of opinion within the atheist community, but I think she greatly exaggerates them.

There are no atheist dogmas that we are fighting over; the dispute she talks about is primarily about tactics. Just because people have different views about what are the most effective ways of promoting a positive atheistic worldview doesn’t mean that there’s a civil war going on. All groups have some disagreements over tactics. For example, I’m sure there are some people in the pro-life movement who see it as counterproductive to show people pictures of bloody aborted fetuses, but they’re all still united in their shared goal of reducing the number of abortions.

Personally, I don’t see myself as a member of either camp. I don’t agree with everything Hitchens says, and I don’t agree with everything Kurtz says. But I think they both have important points to make.

I disagree with some New atheists who think that all religion is inherently evil. Certainly some religions have done immense harm to society, and we have a moral imperative to prevent the severe abuse that is sometimes done in the name of religion. But there are other religions like Jainism that do not cause people to harm others. I think that they are still delusions in the sense that they are false beliefs, but they may be relatively harmless delusions. I don’t see any more reason to actively fight against them than I do against non-religious beliefs that I see as harmless delusions, like contra-causal free will and Platonic realism.

I also think that some of the arguments the prominent New atheist authors use are philosophically weak and are easy to rebut. For example, I do not think that Dawkins’ “central argument” in The God Delusion is very strong. This bothers me because I fear that someone who thinks that they should expose themselves to at least one atheist book may read The God Delusion and then come away with an even stronger belief in God after finding problems with a couple of his arguments. Dawkins does make some very good arguments as well, but when someone finds a couple flawed arguments, they may just assume that the rest are flawed as well. But despite their flaws, and we’re all flawed somehow, I think the New atheists have done a very valuable service by getting the atheist message out there. While I may think that people like Graham Oppy make stronger arguments for atheism than Dawkins or Hitchens, you don’t get your message out in the mainstream media by writing philosophically rigorous criticisms of theistic arguments.

But I also have strong disagreements with some of the old atheists. I do not think we should keep our beliefs to ourselves, and I do not think that religion should be accorded some special status as an issue that it is taboo to discuss. I also definitely do not think that science and religion should be treated as Non-overlapping magisteria. As long as religions make testable claims like saying that prayer works, science has a right to test those claims. I also believe that blasphemy really is a victimless crime. While there probably are conditions where it could be counterproductive, it can also be a powerful demonstration of the religious freedom and free speech rights that our country was founded upon, as well as sending an important message to believers that not everyone shares their views. Trying to avoid offending any believers would be a fool’s errand, for there are some people who are offended by the mere existence of atheists.

Yet, I do agree with some of the points Paul Kurtz makes in the piece. Atheism itself is simply a lack of belief in God. In order to make the world a better place, we need to go beyond simple disbelief and explore issues of morality.

While the people who get the most media attention are the New atheists and their strongest opponents, I think there are actually quite a lot of atheists like me who are somewhat moderate. I don’t think atheists should be shy about their beliefs, but I also think that bashing religious people for the fun of it isn’t the way to get people to take your arguments seriously. I like making people really think about what they believe and why. People should look closely at whether they have good reasons to believe that their religion is the one that happens to be true. There’s no perfect way to do this; sometimes it helps to be understanding, and sometimes it helps to show how silly their beliefs really sound to someone not brought up in the religion. For example, it’s true that the God most people believe in is a magical invisible being who grants wishes. If I realized that one of my core beliefs seemed silly, I'd really want to research it to see whether or not it’s true.

But it’s also important to be understanding. I’ve had plenty of false beliefs over the years, and it’s never fun to have your own ignorance exposed. However, I still welcome learning that one of my beliefs is false because that’s the only way I come to know what’s true and because it can be dangerous to act on false beliefs. Just because there is tons of stuff I’m wrong about does not mean I’m a stupid person, and the people I appreciate the most are those who point out my errors with kindness and humility. At least that’s what I think is the best approach.

Atheists are never going to agree on everything, just like theists are never going to agree on everything. But the two things atheists share are a lack of belief in God, and the desire to make the world a better place.

The issue of morality comes up a lot in debates between atheists and Christians. Christians say that it’s impossible for there to be morality without God and we have no right to say a murderer did anything wrong, while atheists say that it’s impossible for God to be omnibenevolent when, according to the Bible, he has killed millions of people. As is often the case in formal debates, it becomes more about scoring political points than really investigating the issues. I think people on both sides should give a little more thought to the basis of their moral beliefs.

It seems to me that most people make moral judgments primarily based on intuition. Both atheists and theists intuitively feel that there is something deeply immoral about killing or raping someone. They also intuitively feel that things like kindness, honesty, and generosity are good. I think abortion polling illustrates that many religious people rely on intuition rather than their religion when it comes to religious matters. For example, in a poll from earlier this year, 50% of Catholics said that abortions should be legal in most cases and only 16% said it should be illegal in all cases, despite the Catholic Church’s clear stance that abortion is deeply immoral.

But some people do not merely go by intuition and end up adhering to a certain system of morality. Some theists try hard to behave as they think God wants them to, and some atheists try to behave as they think they should based on some variety of utilitarianism (or some other ethical theory). Of course, people may still be relying on their intuition when choosing a religion or an ethical theory. If a believer intuitively believes that it is wrong to prevent gay people from getting married, he will probably be less likely to join an extremely conservative church. If an atheist feels that people have a moral obligation to help the poor, he’s probably not going to adopt Social Darwinism. But I think that many people do not go further and try to figure out why God’s will or a certain brand of utilitarianism is the standard of morality.

I think that many atheists have a very weak foundation for their morality (of course, this does not mean that atheists cannot be moral people, as people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have been incredibly generous). Some atheists believe that something like happiness or preference satisfaction has intrinsic value and this serves as the foundation for morality. The problem with this is that there’s no reason to think that intrinsic values exist, and people’s behavior can be explained without resorting to a strange entity that we have no evidence for. I think that atheists who reject God because he’s a strange entity that we have no evidence for, but believe that intrinsic values exist without any evidence are being inconsistent.

However, morality is an even bigger problem for Christians. Atheism itself does not make any claims about morality and if there is no such thing as objective morality, that does not invalidate atheism. However, an important part of mainstream Christianity is that God is omnibenevolent. If God could not possibly be good in a meaningful way, that would pose a serious problem for Christians. The Euthyphro Dilemma asks whether God commands things because they are good or whether they are good because God commands them. If God commands things because they are good, then God is not the source of morality and Christians have the same problem of having to explain the foundation of morality that atheists do. But they also have the added problem of trying to reconcile this morality with God’s actions in the Old Testament (such as Numbers 31). If God is the source of morality, then God’s morality is arbitrary and God could have made murder good and love bad if he had wanted to (and he could have made us intuitively see murder as good). Most people try to get around this problem by saying that God’s nature itself is good, but then you have the problem of whether God is good because his nature has the properties of moral goodness, or whether the properties are good merely because God has them. There have been attempts to reconcile this problem, but I don’t think any of them work. Wes Morriston, although himself a theist, sees serious problems with the answers believers typically give to the Euthyphro dilemma. If you have a chance, I encourage you check out two articles that he has recently written on the subject: http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/GodGood.pdf and http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/WhatIfGod.pdf.

But even if all current models of morality do not work, that wouldn’t prove that morality does not exist any more than proving to ancient people that Zeus did not exist would have proven that there could not be a God that actually does exist. However, I actually do think there is a moral theory that has a good chance of being correct: desirism. It’s a relatively recent theory so it needs to be subjected to more scrutiny before concluding that it’s correct, but it seems to avoid the common pitfalls of other moral theories. Basically desirism says that desires are the only reasons for action that exist and that a good desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires. For example, a desire to rape is a bad desire because either the desires of the rape victim to not be raped are thwarted, or the desires of the rapist to rape are thwarted. We all act based on our desires. It’s not like there’s something intrinsically good about kindness that forces us to be kind against our will, we are kind because we have the desire to be kind (and that is a good desire). Divine morality would not prevent someone who desired to kill someone from killing that person if they did not desire to go to heaven or please God. Similarly, divine command theory does not somehow force someone to be moral regardless of their desires. However, there are means such as the legal system, praise, and condemnation which can give people a strong desire not to do evil acts. The threat of hell is not the only means of inducing someone to act morally. I’ll try to explore desirism in a little more depth in future posts, but if you want to read more about it, I suggest checking out this article on desirism.

Basically, I’m just someone who’s really interested in learning about stuff like religion and philosophy in his spare time. I’ve always been an atheist, so unfortunately I cannot regale you with any exciting deconversion stories. There’s no one thing that “caused” me to be an atheist, or one single barrier keeping me from believing; I simply have never found any good reasons to think God exists.

I was baptized Catholic, but my parents became less religious when I was very young and I stopped going to church. So I’ve never gotten to experience what it’s like to believe in God. I occasionally thought about philosophic or religious issues when I was growing up, but I generally focused on other things. When I did discuss religion with other people, no one seemed to have any good reasons for believing that God existed or that their religion was true. I wasn’t terribly passionate about my disbelief; I just saw no better reason to believe in God than in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

When I learned about agnosticism in high school, I started labeling myself as that because I thought that there was no real way you could know one way or another whether God exists. Then in college I started calling myself an atheist once I learned more about what it means. I had always thought that atheists were people who claimed to know with absolute certainty that there was nothing supernatural and that is why used to avoid calling myself an atheist. The definition of atheism is still controversial, but most people see it as either a lack of belief in God, or a belief that God does not exist. Although I think the former definition makes more sense, I am an atheist under either one. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that some supernatural entity exists because I know just a tiny fraction of all there is to know. But I don’t know of any good reasons to think that God does exist, and given the infinitely many possible Gods that could exist, I think the odds that any of the religions happened to get it right are extremely low.

I got more interested in religion in 2008 when my dad started talking to me about religion and trying to get me to become Catholic. I asked him why he believed and I looked into some of the reasons he gave. None of them were convincing. My dad had gotten very active in the church and got a lot of emails from right-wing religious groups. He would occasionally forward them to me and I would offer my take on them. Then there was one particularly dishonest email he sent me from Focus on the Family that really set me off. We ended up getting in a long discussion on religion and that led to me reading up on it a little bit more. I found the arguments for religion fascinating to read, but unpersuasive. Reading up on religion has caused me to learn more about a wide variety of subjects, from philosophy, to biology, to history, to physics, to psychology. I really enjoy exploring all the incredible aspects of our world. Eventually, I decided to take a stab at writing about some of these things, so I started this blog.

If you disagree with something I say in one of my posts, please leave a comment. I’m sure there are plenty of things I’m wrong about, and it’s always good to find out what they are.