Global warming? Nah, that's crazy. The Biblical Apocalypse? Absolutely!

36% of Americans believe that the severity of recent natural disasters is evidence that we are in what the Bible calls the end times.

The Gap for God

Suppose that members of a religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of producing.  That is, suppose that Christians maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity of the Koran.  Could God, the almighty creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find it?  I take it that the answer is obviously yes.  Even if you think there is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person must also acknowledge that it could have been better.  And there’s the problem. 

If the capacity of that god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. “We know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.” Or, “The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.”

Given the disparity between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not resemble the one we are in.  The story doesn’t make internal sense.  A far better explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate what the evidence shows.  And that same enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable.  Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t possibly be faulted for failing to believe.  

Some Varieties of Disproof

Sometimes, we reject a claim about reality because it doesn’t fit with other claims about which we have better evidence overall.  Your aunt, who has smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day for 20 years, is diagnosed with lung cancer.  She has a job working in a building where there has been construction that has created a lot of dust over the last several weeks and she insists that it is the dust, not the smoking, that is the cause of the cancer.  Or perhaps she, like millions of Americans, believes in hexes.  And she’s suspicious that her neighbor across the street, with whom she has had a lot of personal friction over many years, has something to do with the cancer.  The hateful thoughts radiating from the house across the street have made her sick, she thinks.  In either case, the evidence we have for the smoking being the cause of her cancer is better, and with some thought and investigation, we could conclude with confidence that the smoking hypothesis is proven, and the other theories are disproven.  Let’s call this Inductive Disproof.

A brief note about proof:  Many people who haven’t reflected on the topic much have the sense that we should reserve the term “proof” only for those cases where we have the most substantial level of deductive certainty.  We can prove, for instance, that 2 + 2 = 4, or that bachelors are unmarried.  But we shouldn’t use the term proof for other matters of less confidence.  Furthermore, their sense is that we should only use “proof” about indefeasible conclusions, claims that we would not change our minds about under any circumstances.  For other matters, like smoking and cancer, the connection between a high calorie diet and obesity, and who won last year’s Superbowl, we should describe the status of our beliefs in some other way. And many of the same people who feel this way about proof have the same impulse about “knowledge.”  We only know those things, they say, that we can prove.  No other less certain matters should be called knowledge. 

For a number of reasons, I think it is a mistake to reserve “proof” for only indefeasibly certain matters.  First, if we raise the bar on “proof” this high, then there remains little or nothing that we know.  On this view, we don’t know that smoking causes cancer, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the sun rose yesterday, that Obama is the President, that violent crime is on the decline in the United States, that people who have a low fat, high fiber diet with lots of exercise tend to live longer than those without, and so on.  Too many things that we comfortably and normally claim to know must now be described in some other artificial manner.  Second, we can have our cake and eat it too; we can readily acknowledge that there are things we know and that we have proven, but our conclusion is defeasible.  We can say that even though the evidence supports the conclusion overall, we are prepared, under the right circumstances, to change our minds in the light of new information.  We know that the force of gravity, for instance, on the surface of the Earth is 9.8 meters/sec2.  (The extreme proof/knowledge advocate must insist awkwardly and artificially, “No, we don’t really know that, we only have a massive amount of evidence and justification for it.”)  A more natural way to proceed here is to say that we know, and have proven, many things beyond the deductively certain.  But we are always ready to incorporate new evidence into our theories about what is true and change our minds if that becomes warranted.  Third, people who press for the extreme proof/knowledge view are quite vulnerable to the Going Nuclear problem. Fourth, the extreme proof/knowledge view often fall into the Sliding Scale Fallacy.  And fifthly, to make the extreme proof/knowledge advocate happy, we can easily make a distinction that is widely accepted and acknowledged in the sciences between inductive and deductive proof/justification.

Now back to varieties of disproof.  Sometimes we reject a claim because it is internally inconsistent or logically contradictory.  We know that Smith is not a married bachelor for instance, or that a three sided figure labeled ABC is not a square, because married bachelors and three sided squares are logically impossible.  Deductive disproofs of the existence of God in this category have either argued that a single attribute that is typically given to God like omnipotence is impossible, or that some combination of properties like infinitely just and infinitely merciful are mutually inconsistent.  Let’s call these Single Property Deductive Disproof and Multiple Property Deductive Disproof.  There is an an extensive philosophical literature stretching across centuries offering these sorts of disproofs for God.  See: 

  

Bibliography of Philosophical Atheism

Divine Attributes:  The State of the Discussion

God is Impossible

Sometimes we reject a claim because the concepts that it employs and the model of reality that is embedded in the concepts has become impoverished, bankrupt, useless, or inapt at describing reality.  Consider three theories about a sick person who is exhibiting swollen lymph nodes, gangrene, fever, malaise, and seizures.

  

He might be possessed by evil demons, he might have an imbalance in his four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—that could be rectified with leeches, or he might have a bacterial infection of yersenia pestis—Bubonic Plague.  The Bubonic Plague theory along with modern virology in which it is embedded turns out to be far better at recognizing the ailment, treating it, curing it, preventing it, making predicitions, and so on.  If we successfully cure the patient by means of virology and the Bubonic Plague hypothesis, it’s not so much that we have disproven the evil demon possession claim in any deductive or logical sense.  It’s still logically possible that there could be evil demons disguised at the yersenia pestis bacteria in his blood.  But holding onto the evil demon claim and the baggage that comes with it just becomes increasingly useless, and extraneous in our model of reality.  

At some point we leave some ideas behind because they just don’t fit with the rest of what we know about reality.  It strikes me as natural and sensible to say that we know that those symptoms are caused by yersenia pestis now.  We have proven that the illness is caused by the bacteria, and not by evil demons.   Let’s call this sort of case Theoretical Disproof. 

So on this way of carving things up, we have at least fours kinds of disproof:  Inductive Disproof, Single Property Deductive Disproof, Multiple Property Deductive Disproof, and Theoretical Disproof.  There are others, and there are different ways of mapping out the epistemological landscape.  But this will suffice for now. 

As I see it, the God hypothesis, where God is described in the ways that the vast majority of modern believers describe him, fails because of arguments of all four types.  More details about can be found in the over 300 posts on this blog written over the years, in my recent book Atheism and the Case Against Christ, and in the book I’m now working on Atheism:  Proving the Negative.  There are some other accounts of God that escape those four varieties of Atheological Disproof, but those, as far as I can tell, just end up being vaccuous, trivial, or unmotivated—God is love, God is the development of human self-awareness, God is energy, God is reality.

So the challenge for the theist, as I see it, is to first come up with a description of God that is internally, logicall coherent.  It must attribute properties to God that are individually coherent, and that are logically consistent with each other.  And this description must navigate around the broad set of Deductive Atheological arguments that have undermined the God concept.  Furthermore, the description needs to it needs to be sufficiently superlative to warrant the "God" label," and, one would hope, it would have some semblance to the supernatural being that billions of traditional believers have advocated for centuries.  Then the theist reconcile the claim that this being is real with the a posteriori facts as we know them—the theist must deal with the Inductive Disproofs for God.  The theist needs to address the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and a host of other serious inductive challenges that have come up over the centuries. 

But even all of that wouldn’t be sufficient to justify theism, as I see it.  We could construct some account of evil demons that is internally logically consistent.  And we could add enough provisos, tweaks, and emendations to the story to accommodate all of the details of modern virology.  Evil demons are clever and sinister, you see, and part of their malevolent deception of us is that they are disguising their activities to look like bacterial infections, cancer, and so on.  How do you know, afterall, that viruses and bacterial infection aren’t just the way that evil demons do us harm?  Like evil demonology, theology has been rendered superfluous and vacuous by the rest of what we have learned about biology, geology, history, psychology, anthropology, astronomy, and cosmology. 

The theist, as I see it, has to do more than sketch out some scheme whereby it might be possible that God employed evolution to create us, for example.  The theist needs to give us some substantial positive evidence for thinking that it is true.  Possible, as I have argued many times, it not probable or reasonable or justified.  

Are we proving the negative yet?   

What Exactly Do You Want From Me?

Following Feldman, let’s define epistemic peers as two people are epistemic peers “when they are roughly equal with respect to intelligence, reasoning powers, background information, etc.” 

And let say that “When people have had a full discussion of a topic and have not

withheld relevant information, we will say that they have shared their evidence about that topic.”

Many theists appear to believe that atheists and agnostics shouldn’t be atheists and agnostics.  They are, the theist says, mistaken, unreasonable, misguided, or unjustified.  This theist will have some negative attitude of culpability towards epistemic peers who share evidence.  (And the same is true for many atheists, including myself, about their attitude towards theists and agnostics.) 

What the atheist will have to say next to the theist in these circumstances will depend upon her answer to these questions: 

Do you think 1)  that once all the relevant arguments, evidence, and background issues are adequately considered, a reasonable person is obligated to conclude that God is real, or that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, or some other central tenets of modern orthodox monotheism are true? 

Or do you think 2) that once all the relevant arguments, evidence, and background issues are adequately considered, it is epistemically permissible for a reasonable person to believe that God is real, or that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, or some other central tenets of modern orthodox monotheism?

Endorsing 1), as I see it, will also commit a person to saying that to be an atheist or agnostic, once he has considered all the relevant arguments, evidence and background issues is unreasonable.  Evidence sharing epistemic peers who are atheists and agnostics ought not believe what they believe. 

Endorsing 2), as I see it, places no similar demand or charge of epistemic culpability on the non-believer.  If you think merely that it is not unreasonable to believe, given all of the relevant evidence, then you are allowing that a reasonable, evidence sharing peer might well draw a different conclusion and be within her epistemic rights, as it were. 

So theists, which is it?  Do you think that I have made some serious error with regard to the total available evidence concerning God and that I ought to change my mind?  Or do you merely think that your believing on the basis of the available evidence is epistemically permissible, but someone could opt not to believe and he would be similarly inculpable?    

Atheist countries more peaceful

Epiphenom is a great blog.  This post is is fascinating:  Atheist countries more peaceful.

It's well established that education and religiousness are inversely correlated.  The trick, of course, is figuring out what the cause is.  Does education cause religiousness to fall off?

And this is my 300th post!

1/6 of World Population Nonreligious

New study of world religions out from Pew Forum.  16% of world population nonreligious.

End of the World

As I read it, this cookie says to expect a catastrophic flood of milk that will wipe the Earth clean of sinners.  

Be Counted

Atheist Census.  Get yourself counted.

Sound like anyone we know?

Some random, but connected info about mental illness and religion.  Given what we know about mental illness and about the best arguments that advocates have been able to muster for God, our first thought when we encounter someone with intense religious convictions should not be to take his/her arguments or reasonings too seriously but to ask, "What are the symptoms of mental illness that she is exhibiting?"  The behaviors of the most religious among us:  hyper-religiousity, hyper-moralism, evangelism, hypergraphia, visions, voices, circumstantiality, disassociated states, states of religious ecstasy, euphoria, and moral elevation.  And when otherwise serious academics get involved in protracted and complicated defenses of religious belief, how is that not comparable to infamous Harvard psychiatrist John Mack getting swept up by the UFO abduction testimonies of his patients?



Geschwind syndrome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Geschwind syndrome
Classification and external resources
ICD-10	None
ICD-9	None
eMedicine	Overview/1186336

Geschwind syndrome, also known as "Gastaut-Geschwind" is a characteristic personality syndrome consisting of symptoms such as circumstantiality, hypergraphia, altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality, meaning a decreased interest), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses), hyper-religiosity and/or hyper-morality or moral ideas that is present in some epilepsy patients. This syndrome is particularly associated with temporal lobe epilepsy occurring in the left hemisphere of the brain. For identification, the term "Geschwind syndrome" has been suggested as a name for this group of behavioral phenomena. There has currently been both support^[1] and criticism^[2][3] in suggestion of this syndrome. Currently the strongest support arises from many clinicians who describe and attempt to classify patients with seizures with these personality features. The term Geschwind's Syndrome comes from one of the two people who first characterized the syndrome: Norman Geschwind. His associate was Stephen Waxman, who also did a great deal of work in the field. Note that Geschwind's Syndrome can be seen both in the inter-ictal (between seizures) and the ictal (during seizures) states.

[edit]See also

• Temporal lobe epilepsy
• Neurotheology

[edit]References

1. ^ Blumer D (1999). "Evidence supporting the temporal lobe epilepsy personality syndrome". Neurology 53 (5 Suppl 2): S9–12. PMID 10496229.
2. ^ Devinsky O, Najjar S (1999). "Evidence against the existence of a temporal lobe epilepsy personality syndrome". Neurology 53 (5 Suppl 2): S13–25. PMID 10496230.
3. ^ eMedicine - Psychiatric Disorders Associated With Epilepsy : Article by William J Nowack

• Waxman SG, Geschwind N (December 1975). "The interictal behavior syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy". Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 32 (12): 1580–6. PMID 1200777.

[edit]External links

• God on the Brain (BBC)
• "IS THERE AN EPILEPTIC PERSONALITY?", William Barr, Ph.D., ABPP (NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, New York, NY, September 22, 2003)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschwind_syndrome

And some more serious research from Advances in Neurology:

"The Geschwind syndrome," Benson DF.  

Department of Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine 90024.

A characteristic personality syndrome consisting of circumstantiality (excessive verbal output, stickiness, hypergraphia), altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses) is present in some epilepsy patients. For identification, the term "Geschwind syndrome" has been suggested as a name for this group of behavioral phenomena. Support for, and criticism against, the existence of this syndrome as a specific personality disorder has produced more fire than substance, but the presence of an unsettled, ongoing controversy has been acknowledged. At present, the strongest support stems from the many clinicians who have described and attempted to manage seizure patients with these personality features. Carefully directed studies are needed to confirm or deny that the Geschwind syndrome represents a specific epilepsy/psychiatric disorder.  

Hypergraphia is an overwhelming urge to write, where patients often produce tens or hundreds of thousands of words in manuscripts, letters, fiction, or grand philosophical theories of everything.  

Philosophy departments, not surprisingly, are often a locus for people with many of these symptoms/disorders.  We frequently receive large tomes, meticulously typed, in the mail referred to our faculty for consideration.  An author, who feels the urgent need to share his profound metaphysical and theological insights, wants to be recognized for the special knowledge he has uncovered.  A hyper-evangelism, or need to share these special insights with the world and acquire converts, is also often part of the author's maladies.  In the age of emails, I'll receive 5-100 emails a week from people suffering from these disorders.

Moral elevation, or intense feelings of compassion, fellow feeling, joy, adulation, and uplift, is the subject of some recent research.  Here is Jonathan Haidt's bibliography on the topic:  http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/elevation.html

And some more useful references:  

http://www.psych-it.com.au/Psychlopedia/article.asp?id=262

And some more Oprah fans:  

What's really interesting here are the evolutionary explanations for why these sorts of moral feelings may have been selected for in human and proto-human populations.  

 

You don't REALLY believe THAT, do you?

  Stephen Pinker:  

"It might be in that America one of the two political parties seems to defiantly oppose the world science view. But I suspect that isn't the best way of understanding it, because they still look for oil using the assumptions about the age of the Earth that we all believe in; when they get sick they go to a doctor and they worry about the evolution of drug resistance just as we do. They're not Amish, they don't return to the land. So in a sense they have already bought into the scientific world, but there are just a few highly symbolic issues that define your moral and political identity that they stake out a position on, and I think that is very different from scientific ignorance. In fact, one study done by a former graduate student at my department at Harvard showed that people who endorse the theory of evolution don't understand it any better than those that deny it. We shouldn't confuse the moralisation of a small number of hot-button issues with hostility with the scientific world view in general."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/02/science-writing-debate-pinker-gleick-greene-frank-foer?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038

There are those things that we say we believe, there are those things that we think we believe, and there are those things that we believe in believing in.  And then there is what we really believe.  When it comes down to one's real life, you don't really believe in Young Earth Creationism, most likely, no matter what you say you believe.

What harm can believing do?

When we indulge the religious urge, contrary to arguments and evidence, we foster irresponsible, unreliable, and problematic believing overall.  We foster silly beliefs and set ourselves and others up for harm.  Religious beliefs are not a private or harmless matter:

Scamming Elderly Asians on the Rise

MIT The Tech Book Review of Atheism and the Case Against Christ

Book review here:  http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N57/atheism.html

Round Up of Some Research on Religion from Science Daily

Study Explores Distrust of Atheists by Believers
Distrust is the central motivating factor behind why religious people dislike atheists, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia psychologists.

Death Anxiety Increases Atheists' Unconscious Belief in God

New University of Otago research suggests that when non-religious people think about their own death they become more consciously skeptical about religion, but unconsciously grow more receptive to religious belief.

God as a Drug: The Rise of American Megachurches

American megachurches use stagecraft, sensory pageantry, charismatic leadership and an upbeat, unchallenging vision of Christianity to provide their congregants with a powerful emotional religious experience, according to research from the University of Washington.

Spirituality Correlates to Better Mental HealthRegardless of Religion, Say Researchers

Despite differences in rituals and beliefs among the world's major religions, spirituality often enhances health regardless of a person's faith, according to University of Missouri researchers. The MU researchers believe that health care providers could take advantage of this correlation between health -- particularly mental health -- and spirituality by tailoring treatments and rehabilitation programs to accommodate an individual's spiritual inclinations.

Highly Religious People Are Less Motivated by Compassion Than Are Non-Believers

"Love thy neighbor" is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

Deeply Held Religious Beliefs Prompting Sick Kids to Be Given 'Futile' Treatment

Parental hopes of a "miraculous intervention," prompted by deeply held religious beliefs, are leading to very sick children being subjected to futile care and needless suffering, suggests a small study in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Are Religious People Better Adjusted Psychologically?

Psychological research has found that religious people feel great about themselves, with a tendency toward higher social self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than non-believers. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is only true in countries that put a high value on religion.

1, 2, 3, . . . Ready or Not, Here I Come!

I’ve been thinking about the arguments for atheism from divine hiddenness.  Here’s a way to argue for atheism in that vein with some similarities to Drange and Schellenberg and with several improvements on the argument of my own. 

Imagine two scenarios, both where it would appear that God is hiding. 

Scenario A:  God isn’t real and we fail to find good evidence for supernatural beings.

Suppose that beings humans find themselves in this situation: 

There is no supernatural being of any sort.

Furthermore,  

 a.  there are no empirical indications of a supernatural beings

b.    none of the conceptual arguments for supernatural beings are compelling

c.    we have made substantial efforts to uncover supernatural beings. 

d.    none of our attempts to discover supernatural beings have succeeded

e.    the available evidence concerning supernatural beings are inadequate.

f.     there is a presumption that supernatural beings are the sort of entity that, if one were to exist, then it would manifest in some fashion that is detectable by beings with our cognitive faculties. 

g.    the presumption that supernatural beings would manifest in some way has not been defeated.

h.    naturalized models of supernatural belief formation are well justified by the evidence and they provide a better alternative account of the origins of supernatural beliefs.   

Question:  What is the reasonable conclusion to draw about supernatural beings in this situation? 

Would non-belief be epistemically inculpable in this situation?  That is, if humans  conclude that there are no supernatural beings, would that conclusion be unwarranted? 

What about believing in a supernatural being?  And would being an agnostic be epistemically culpable or inculpable in this situation? 

It seems to me for a number of reasons that disbelief in supernatural beings would be justified.  Disbelief would not be epistemically culpable.  Furthermore, believing in a supernatural being in this situation would be epistemically culpable and irrational.  I even think that being agnostic in this situation, particularly given the point in h., would be unreasonable/culpable. 

That is:

Belief in situation A:  irrational. 

Agnosticism in situation A:  irrational. 

Disbelief in situation A:  reasonable/rational. 

Scenario B:  God is Real, but Hiding

Suppose that humans find themselves in this situation: 

God exists and possesses the power and the knowledge to make himself known to humans. 

Yet for reasons unknown to humans, God insures that: 

a.    there are no empirical indications of God

b.    none of the conceptual arguments for God is compelling

c.    we have made substantial efforts to uncover God, 

d.    none of our attempts to discover God have succeeded

e.    the available evidence concerning God is inadequate.

f.     there is a presumption that God is the sort of entity that, if God were to exist, then God would manifest in some fashion that is detectable by beings with our cognitive faculties. 

g.    the presumption that supernatural beings/God would manifest in some way has not been defeated.

h.    naturalized models of supernatural belief formation are well justified by the evidence and they provide a better alternative account of the origins of supernatural beliefs.   

Question:  What is the reasonable conclusion to draw about supernatural beings in this situation? 

Would disbelief be epistemically inculpable in this situation?  That is, if humans  conclude that there are no supernatural beings, would that conclusion be unwarranted?  Notice that the evidential situation for humans is exactly the same in both scenarios.  So the answers to our questions about what is the reasonable conclusion to draw must be the same, with some interesting side notes.  Ironically, despite the fact that God is real in this situation, it seems to me that disbelief, given the evidential situation would be justified.  That is, the atheist in the world where God is real but hiding, would have a well-justified but false belief.  We couldn’t find epistemic fault with the conclusion that this atheist has drawn.  The apocryphal story about Bertrand Russell is relevant.  After a lecture about atheism, a member of the audience asked him, “Prof. Russell, what are you going to do after you die and then in the afterlife you show up at the Pearly Gates and God and Saint Peter are all there and it’s obvious how wrong you are?”  Allegedly without missing a step, Russell said he’d say to God, “Not enough evidence, God!  Not enough evidence!” 

Furthermore, if someone were to believe in God in this situation, it would be irrational and unjustified.  Ironically, she would happen to get it right.  That is, she’d have  a true belief.  But her evidence did not justify her conclusion.  Her belief would have all the virtue of thievery over honest toil, to quote Russell again.  She’d be like a psychic who accidentally predicted the winning lottery numbers.  Her getting the numbers right by accident doesn’t vindicate her method or improve the reliability of her method of derivation. 

Furthermore, if agnosticism was unreasonable and unjustified in scenario A, it would be here too.  That is, the agnostic who suspends judgment in scenario B, where a-h are also true, would be unjustified. 

The interesting question here concerns the reasonable limits to agnosticism.  Under what circumstances should one be an agnostic.  It seems to me that a-h, if they are true, are enough to warrant moving from agnostic to atheism.  Some other examples are suggestive:  Suppose we insert Bigfoot or Leprechauns into scenario A. 

Suppose there are no Leprechauns.  And suppose further that we have searched diligently, no compelling evidence in their favor has been found, Leprechauns are the sorts of things that would be revealed in some way to our cognitive faculties if we were to search and encounter them, and furthermore, we have other natural explanations of why people have believed in Leprechauns.  In that situation, you should not be agnostic.  Being agnostic would be irrational. 

Many agnostics have the view that God is not like Leprechauns, so there is a disanalogy here.  God is unlike Leprechauns in ways that require us to be agnostic about him, but atheist about the Leprechauns.  I think there could be a plausible argument here, but I’m not sure.  The central issue for these agnostics, I think, would be to deny that condition g. has been met in the case of God.  There are good reasons to think that the presumption about God’s manifesting to our cognitive faculties in h. is defeated in the case of God but not in the case of Leprechauns. 

The really interesting question to me right now is, what are those reasons that defeat the presumption?  Why should we think that God is not the sort of thing that would be manifest to our cognitive faculties in any of the relevant ways?  Pretty clearly, on lots of theistic hypotheses, God is the sort of thing whose existence or non-existence makes some manifest difference in the world.  The world or the arguments, would look different if there were no God in some way that we could discern.  The existence of gods of that sort is undermined by this argument.  But if there were a supernatural being whose presence or absence would not be manifest to our cognitive faculties, then our not finding any manifestations would not be adequate grounds to conclude that no such being exists. 

This agnostic might argue for this thesis:  There may yet be some sort of supernatural being that we can have no cognitive access to and that we can form no positive thesis about.  We should be agnostic about that being because the absence of evidence for it isn’t indicative either way about its existence. 

My question here is this:  What exactly are we being agnostic about in this case?  Which hypothesis am I suspending judgment about?  Is it this:  there may yet be some truths about which I can form no idea, I can have no comprehension, and that elude my cognitive faculties altogether. 

It doesn’t seem to me that suspending judgment is the right way to describe the attitude we should take about those proposals.  We should suspend judgment, it seems to me, about whether there are extra terrestrial forms of life in our universe.  That is a clear proposal about which our evidence is split or about which we do not have enough evidence yet to draw a conclusion.  The mercurial transcendental entity that the agnostic proposes is utterly unlike alien life.  We have no access, and we can have no access, perhaps in principle, to such an entity.  It would seem that we cannot hope to form any sort of propositional attitude at all about it, not even enough to suspend judgment about it. Furthermore, it is relevant to point out that this agnostic is taking a conservative attitude about the possibility of something that is utterly unlike any of the divine beings that are typically proposed or believed in.  This agnostic seems to have tacitly agreed that in situation A or B, the only reasonable conclusion is to be atheist, not agnostic, about the overwhelming majority of the gods that humans have believed in.  This agnostic is a very wide atheist, but not quite as wide as the widest atheist.  It just not clear to me that suspending judgment in this case even makes sense or is the epistemically responsible position.  

NPR Interview: Atheism and the Case Against Christ

Got interviewed today:

Matt McCormick on Capital Public Radio talking about Atheism and the Case Against Christ

Do We Need Religious Belief for Happiness and Emotional Security?

I'm pressed for time, so this is just going to be a brief note with some ideas that I need to develop later.  It's widely believed by theists, skeptics, and atheists alike that religious belief serves an indispensable emotional function by giving people a sense of hope, emotional security, and happiness.  So despite all of the powerful arguments in favor of atheism, or at least undermining objections to theism, that doubters present, this response recurs:  "Ok sure, the reasons for believing in the resurrection, God, or other gods are lousy, but what's wrong with someone who still believes, keeps it to themselves, and who derives some personal contentment and emotional security from it?  Why do you have to pick on them?"

Here's the thing:  First, it's not at all clear that the widely accepted link between believing and emotional benefits is true.  Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, has been arguing on the basis of secularism in northern Europe that nonbelievers are actually happier.

Here are a few sources:
Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns

Here's a video of Zuckerman:
Zuckerman: Atheists, Agnostics, and the Irreligious

Here's Zuckerman on bias and discrimination against atheists in the U.S.:  Washington Post: Why Do Americans Still Dislike Atheists?

Do we need God to have a happy society?

Second, humans are notoriously bad at predicting or knowing what will make them happy.  See Dan Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness  Ask people what the effects of a horrible accident or losing a loved one will be on them and they will estimate the effects as much more devastating than they actually are when those traumas occur.  Our basic levels of happiness, contentment, and personal satisfaction reassert themselves in time, even after events in our lives that we estimate will have a long, irreversible negative effect on us.  

So it seems to me that these two issues need to be connected and that we need to re-evaluate the alleged emotional and pragmatic justification for religious believing.  If Zuckerman is right, then it appears that there isn't even a emotional justification for believing.  Getting rid of religious belief might, contrary to what people think, make us happier, healthier, and more emotionally content.

Stanford Event: The F Word

A link to details about my Nov. 8 speaking event:

McCormick Lecture: Stanford University

Science! It works, bitches.

People are suspicious of science.  Presidential candidates take great care to not be too enthusiastic about it, or to flatly deny what we know is true from science.  Science doesn’t address our human side.  It is dangerous; Frankenstein mythology pervades our fiction.  Science produces the things that give us cancer, nuclear weapons, power plant disasters, genetically modified organisms, clones, designer babies, and other heartless abominations.  It creates the substances that kill us with cancer, deform our babies, and clog our arteries.  

But if we were to form a clear, objective view about the institution in the course of human history that has done more for human happiness, longevity, health, wealth, comfort, prosperity, and flourishing, there is only one answer:  science.  Nothing else we have ever engaged in has made such a positive contribution to everything that matters most to us.  Complaining about the awful things that science does to us is like complaining about the brand of caviar you’ve been given while taking an opulent, luxury cruise on the Queen Mary.  

Here’s just one bit of the evidence:  

Human mortality improvement in evolutionary context  Oskar Burger, Annette Baudisch, and James W. Vaupel

Abstract

Life expectancy is increasing in most countries and has exceeded 80 in several, as low-mortality nations continue to make progress in averting deaths. The health and economic implications of mortality reduction have been given substantial attention, but the observed malleability of human mortality has not been placed in a broad evolutionary context. We quantify the rate and amount of mortality reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees. The bulk of this mortality reduction has occurred since 1900 and has been experienced by only about 4 of the roughly 8,000 human generations that have ever lived. Moreover, mortality improvement in humans is on par with or greater than the reductions in mortality in other species achieved by laboratory selection experiments and endocrine pathway mutations. This observed plasticity in age-specific risk of death is at odds with conventional theories of aging.

That is, human life expectancy and mortality rates have improved more in the last four generations than they have in any period in human history.  To quote the Io9 article, “In fact, the changes are so dramatic, that a 30-year-old hunter-gatherer had the same mortality rate as a modern 72-year-old.”  We have seen greater improvements in the last 4 generations than in the previous 8,000 generations of humans.  

This evidence just concerns the length of life and some of the causes of death, but consider the multiplication effect.  Science makes concrete improvement in the quality and comfort of our lives with advances in technology, medicine, chemistry, agriculture, and a dozen other fields so that a day in your life is orders of magnitude better by every measure of quality than a day in the life of a hominid hunter-gatherer.  Then science quadruples the number of days you will have to experience those benefits too by radically extending life expectancy.  Given infant mortality rates for primitive people, disease, ignorance, scarcity, superstitions, natural disasters, and other risk factors, you most likely wouldn’t have survived infancy if you had been born 10,000 years ago.  Now you will live into your 80s or 90s (the average lifespan continues to rise).  Many of us will then die of cancer or heart disease after a life of unprecedented comfort and pleasure in human history.  But ironically, the complaint will be that science is the culprit in our deaths for producing cancer causing agents in our environments, or substances that are bad for our hearts in our food.  

Fans

I got interviewed by the local CBS affiliate today about some of my fans:  Professor Gets Threats Over His Book and Blog

Admittedly she's being a bit sensationalist for the sake of the news, but the opportunity presents itself to say a few things.

First, Americans, and probably lots of other cultures that measure high on the religiousness scale, do not like having religious doubters in their midst.  For believers, being around an atheist or someone who doesn't buy into religious doctrines, it is a lot like having a vegetarian at the table with a bunch of meat eaters.  His very existence is enough to make them feel judged, pressured, or disrespected.  Most Americans are enthusiastic about freedom of religion, but in practice the real exercise of that freedom that they are comfortable with is adopting some flavor of Christianity.  Adhere to some more exotic religion, and some people's tolerance for dissent gets stretched.  And if someone rejects religious belief altogether, that's more than many can bear.  The multitude of hostile, personal, nasty, and disrespectful comments I've gotten on this blog over the years is a testimony to this hyper sensitivity.

Americans also have a heightened sensitivity about religious matters that resembles what we see in some of the more volatile Middle Eastern cultures.  The very act of asking questions, doubting, pressing objections, or being reluctant to accept flimsy theological justifications themselves are seen as inherently disrespectful, hostile, strident, and angry.  For years, reviews of atheist books in the mainstream press have focused, almost to the exclusion of all other considerations about their content, on the angry, intolerant tone of the authors.  Reviews of atheist books very often condemn and dismiss because of the tone rather than because of substantial objections to the content of the arguments.

The other problem is that there are a wide range of common psychiatric disorders where hyper religiosity, hyper moralism, evangelism, and religious urgency are symptoms.  There are no psychiatric disorders, at least that I can find, that list skepticism, doubt, or a refusal to accept religious doctrines as primary symptoms.  So, simply put, there is a significant population of mentally ill people out there who focus their anti social tendencies, their anger, and even their propensities to violence on vocal non-believers.  Authors like PZ Meyers, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Michael Martin, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer are the targets of shockingly threatening, hostile, and violent communications.

There is also good evidence from evolutionary psychology now that the religious urge has a neurobiological foundation deep in the history of natural selection for humans.  The growing consensus is that we are wired by evolution to be religious.  So it is not at all surprising, although it is lamentable, that so many people believe, and they believe with an enthusiasm and level of sensitivity that leads them to be hostile to non believers and skeptics.  Atheists are perhaps the most reviled minority in the country, according to recent polling data.

So if we are committed to the basic principles of democracy, including a sensitivity to free speech, many of us should do some serious soul searching about our feelings of intolerance towards non believers.