Is Richard Shumack Delusional?

Peter Boghossian engaged in a rather strange debate* with a guy called Richard Shumack a few years ago in which he laid out the characteristics of delusion.  To be deluded, Boghossian maintained, using the words of Karl Jaspers, you have to sincerely hold a belief that is implausible, and that belief has to be incorrigible.  In other words, you really need to believe what you say you believe (you can’t just be mouthing a commonly held belief and you can’t be just joking with someone).  You can’t be argued out of that belief.  And the belief must not only be false, it must be unbelievable by a reasonable person or the evidence must be heavily stacked against it.

The last two criteria are very closely linked, incorrigibility and implausibility, because the more you refuse to accept evidence against your claims and more questionable the “evidence” brought forward in support of your claims, the more implausible your claims are.

To show that your belief is not a delusion you need to demonstrate two things, 1) the claims associated with that belief are plausible and 2) you are willing to change the nature of your belief in the presence of contradicting evidence.

Boghossian showed, with some technical issues, a short clip with William Lane Craig talking about the nature of “faith”.  WLC quite clearly states that if “in some historically contingent circumstances” the weight of evidence turned against christianity, then it would not affect his faith because he has “the witness of the holy spirit in (his) heart”.  Under WLC’s interpretation of the “proper relationship between faith and reason”, faith trumps reason – or perhaps we could less kindly say that, when in a “proper relationship”, faith ignores reason, at least when reason indicates that the contents of faith are wrong.  Additionally, he makes an unsubstantiated claim (at least not in this context, it can be implied that the substantiation is biblical) that if a believer has intellectual doubts, then that can be attributed to Satan who is forever trying to destroy faith thus implying that any effort of reason that speaks against faith could always due to be satanic influences and providing a theological motivation for ignoring reason.

This is very much an indication that WLC is almost all the way to delusion – his beliefs appear to be sincerely held (he’s not a televangelist, so he doesn’t appear to be in it for the money like Kenneth Copeland [net worh $760M] or even Billy Graham [net worth $25M]), his beliefs are incorrigible by his own admission and the beliefs are inherently implausible because they include (amongst other things) belief in miracles which are, by definition, implausible.

The only thing that could save WLC from delusion would be truth of his claims under theism – if his god were to exist.

The debate, however, was not Boghossian vs. WLC, it was Boghossian vs. Shumack.  Shumack appeared to do well enough against the one prong of the Boghossian attack, his attempt to explain that if we are going to “know” something then we need to bring empirical evidence – so a tape measure to obtain the dimensions of a door, not divination, or a dog’s opinion, or the ceremonial sacrifice of a goat.

It should be noted however that this example was raised in the context of explaining that there can be better and worse ways of “knowing” things.  For measuring a door, a better way is to bring a tape measure.  If it’s a standard, unmodified door, then you can look up the standard – but to know whether it’s standard door, you need to measure it otherwise you’re just guessing.  Worse ways include guessing, using woo and asking someone who has no reason to know the dimensions of the door.

Shumack totally ignored the actual message and the motivation behind the example.  Instead, he talked about how there are other ways to “know” things that do not call upon empirical evidence – including the testimony of other people and one’s own personal anecdotal evidence – without acknowledging that some of these ways, if not all of them, are worse than empirical evidence.

He also ignored Boghossian’s follow-on from the door example, the argument that we all want to increase the number of true beliefs that we hold and reduce the number of false beliefs that we hold and that there are two processes that work against that: holding beliefs that are not based on evidence and holding beliefs based on what we believe to be evidence which is actually not evidence.  Note that I did not remove the term “empirical” from Boghossian’s argument because Boghossian didn’t use the term at this point.  Sure, he considers the tape measure to be a good device for obtaining evidence and that evidence would be empirical evidence, but he implicitly accepts that there are other kinds of evidence (not as good as empirical evidence, but evidence nonetheless).

Directly after, Boghossian approaches the meat of his presentation, in which he argues that religious belief is clearly delusional (so much so that religious belief requires an explicit exemption in the DSM-V’s definition of delusion).

Shumack did not address this at all.  Even when given time to reflect and put his words into an opinion piece, he hardly addressed the issue (and then only in passing while criticising “scientism”).

So, the key question was: Is Richard Shumack delusional?

Well, he’s a christian, so on those grounds he qualifies since christian beliefs are (when done properly) sincerely held, incorrigible and implausible.  Unless his god actually exists, of course, but Shumack didn’t make an effort to prove that his god exists.  His aim was to show that “theism can be held by reasonable or reliable epistemology“.

I’m going to look, therefore, at delusion in terms of these aims.  I’m going to assume that Shumack left that interaction with the belief that he succeeded in his aims (his article written later made no admission that he failed to do so and I am presuming that he is a sincere chap who would have acknowledged such a failure if he believed that he had suffered one).  The video is up on line, and he has probably reviewed it and even if he hasn’t the unwillingness to review evidence is problematic.  If there is evidence in the video of that debate that indicates that he failed to achieve his aim, then we can call his belief incorrigible.  All we need to do now is work out whether a belief that he achieved his aim is plausible or not.

To do so, we need to assess what he presented in light of what Boghossian had just said, specifically about better and worse types of knowledge.  Were any of the ways of coming to knowledge described by Shumack sufficiently good as to be called reasonable and/or reliable?  Note that I am going to discuss plausibility, given that believing in something plausible is reasonable and clearly (although after the fact) a belief that turns out to be reliable is thus shown to have been plausible.

Rather than relying on the video, I’m going to use his washup at Eternity News for two reasons.  First, it’s much easier to refer to than a video, and second, a piece of published writing can be polished and perfected while there is plenty of scope to misspeak while behind a speaker’s podium (Boghossian referred to Shumack as “Robert” for example, while his name is Richard).  If there is something that he said that was significantly better than in the written version, feel free to let me know.

Shumack claims that “(c)hristian belief is based on all the ordinary ways of knowing” and he lists them: intuition, second- or third-hand eyewitness testimony, personal experience and, oddly, miracles. (His words, in context: “But here there’s a great irony. Scientism is revealed to be an extraordinary and unsustainable way of thinking about knowledge, whereas Christian belief is based on all the ordinary ways of knowing. Christians sensibly ground so many of their ethical and existential beliefs in intuition. Christians put their faith in Jesus in large part based on the eyewitness testimony to the historical events of his life, death and resurrection. Christians know God personally through the presence of the Holy Spirit and they experience his power through miracles like healing and visions.”)

What he leaves out are empirical evidence (my preferred type) and logical argument (WLC’s second favourite after personal experience).

Are these, in the absence of a presupposition as to the existence of a god, sufficient to make the belief in a god plausible?

The last shall be first, and in this case that is the humble miracle. It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that this was actually in Shumack’s list of “ordinary ways” but I want to address it anyway.  A miracle, as earlier stated, is implausible by definition.  If your belief in something is based on something else that itself is implausible, you’ve got a problem right from the get go.  If I witness a miracle, I have to first consider it an aberration, a freak confluence of events or a misunderstanding or misremembering on my part.  If I am told about a miracle, I have to apply the same doubts, and add to it any doubt relating to unreliability of the witness.  Note that when we consider a miracle as the path to knowing, we must remember that that path passes through either eye-witness testimony or personal experience.

So, we really only have three truly “ordinary ways”, unless we drastically redefine the term “ordinary”: intuition, testimony and personal experience.  I have to point out here that Shumack raised these three in the context of an attack on “scientism”, not an attack on science.  If the below seems a bit too close to science, that should not be a problem per se, unless the reader wants to accuse me of scientism on the grounds of sounding too reasonable.

Let’s look at intuition.  What exactly is intuition?  According to the dictionary (well, a dictionary) it’s “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning”.  Wikipedia says “Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired”. Well, that doesn’t augur well for Shumack’s initial aim (to show that theism can be held by reasonable or reliable epistemology), since reason itself has been jettisoned.  Is intuition reliable?  It’s certainly not 100% reliable, but perhaps it’s reliable enough for some things.  Is it reliable enough to know about what could be argued to be the most important thing you could ever know (were a god to exist)?

I would argue not.  Human advances have steamrolled over incorrect intuitions for millennia.  Logic exists to skewer intuitions and those holding them and make our thinking better and more ordered.  Consider Boghossian’s end-game regarding better and worse ways to know things.  Which is better, a) knowledge acquired without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, and/or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired, or b) with proof, evidence and conscious reasoning, and with an understanding as to how the knowledge was acquired?

Intuition might not be the worst way to start a trip towards knowledge, but it’s far from being the whole journey.  You certainly don’t want to rely solely on intuition, you want something more substantial to get you to knowledge.

So, what about testimony?  I’m going to be outrageously fair here and consider only eye-witness testimony, rather than second and third hand eye-witness testimony and firsthand testimony to gossip and hearsay.

While eye-witness testimony has been considered the gold standard in court cases (somewhat eclipsed now by forensic evidence), it has always been dodgy.  There is an increasing body of work which shows that humans are unreliable eye-witnesses but we don’t need to trawl through the scientific literature to make the point.  The point is adequately made for us by christians who have a bible in which there are four gospels, all of which differ to some extent or another.  The very need to include four perspectives relates to the unreliability of testimony.

Perhaps considering the gospels as eye-witness testimony might be thought of as a trap, but even if we consider the works as collations of reports of people who may or may not have been eye-witnesses, we are still relying on the ability (and will) of the authors to correctly relate what they have been told and the reliability of the original eye-witnesses whose tales have passed from person to person in an oral history tradition.

Add to this the fact that when a christian is accepting the testimony of another they are treating their source as an authority for some reason.  If these authorities have arrived at their knowledge via a questionable epistemology, then you are just putting off the problem of how to arrive at knowledge rather than solving it.

And then we have personal experience.  Personal experience is really no more than zero hand (rather than firsthand) eye-witness testimony, since it only works as a form of knowing when you relate your experiences back to yourself and try to understand them and to place them in a comprehensible context.  Above I pointed to the fact that there are problems with the reliability of eye-witness testimony and this is not entirely limited to people who are eye-witnesses and who are testifying to someone else.

All people are unreliable with regard to their own personal experiences, to a greater or lesser extent.  They can be misled, confused and ignorant.  They can leap to incorrect assumptions, especially if sufficiently motivated to do so – as well they might be if life eternal is on offer.  They can misinterpret their memories, muddle them up and even construct them out of whole cloth where required (my younger brother used to clearly remember our house burning down, despite it happening three months before he was born and a work colleague often confidently reports events that no-one else in the office has any recollection of, he’s so extremely non-synoptic that we could refer to him as “John”).

As with intuition, and similarly to the eye-witness testimony of others, personal experience is an adequate starting point on the way to knowledge, but to bridge the gap between opinion and knowledge, we must accept that our memories are questionable (when they aren’t better described as feeble) and that we are plagued by confirmation and other biases.  And, especially when what we think has happened is rather odd, we must seek confirmation if we are going to transform our personal experiences into knowledge of more than a memory (we will know that we remember, but we won’t know that what we remember happened as we remember it).  To be of any use, that confirmation is going to have to be via the collation and assessment of appropriate evidence.  In other words, via a sort of scientific process – perhaps not the hardest of hard science, but at least some sort of impartial evidence gathering and assessment process.

Is Richard Shumack delusional to think that he can know anything via intuition, testimony and personal experience without taking scientific-like steps to bridge the gap between his opinions (and presuppositions) and actual knowledge?  Yes, I think he might be a tad delusional.

The only thing that might save him, allowing him to be either accidentally in possession of knowledge or even correctly in possession of knowledge (via a divine boost to the reliability a personal experience vis a vis interactions with the holy spirit), would be the existence of his god.  Unfortunately however, he made no real attempt to show that his god exists.

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* Note that I call the debate strange because of its structure – 30 minutes for Peter Boghossian, 15 minutes for Richard Shumack, 30 minutes for structured questions for clarification and then a Q&A free-for-all.  Usually a debate gives each debater equal time to present their case.  Perhaps Shumack felt that he could smash his case in less time than Boghossian needed (along with less technology).  He did, after all, have god on his side …

Theological Zombies to the Rescue!

I was listening to Skydive Phil’s debate with Randal Rauser recently and it occurred to me that I have a solution to the Problem of Evil.

I went part of the way in Theological Zombies already, but in that I was mostly aiming at the problem associated with the absence of compossibility, or to put it less abstrusely, the problem of a supposedly good, all-knowing, all-powerful god creating this universe in which many of the sentient beings with whom god apparently wants to have a loving relationship (being saved) will end up being damned (being sent to hell, being extinguished or merely being set apart depending on the type of god).

Phil and Randal were talking specifically about the suffering of animals and how that is inconsistent with the existence of a tri-omni god.  They danced around some of the standard defences, that animals are simply fleshy automatons (Descartes’ solution) or that animals don’t feel pain as we do (WLC’s solution) or that demons might be to blame (Plantinga’s silly argument, but only as a possible defeater raised in order to avoid a logical problem) or that the suffering of animals is somehow necessary to achieve a greater good (as I recall Randal tended to lean this way).

Now, in the Theological Zombies argument I present a way in which everyone can be saved.  The fact that there are worlds in which you may be saved but others are cannot is resolved by observing that god is not limited to creating one single universe.  As many universes as are needed can be created and largely populated with zombies that act precisely like other people would in the same circumstances, people who would either be saved in a universe with less suffering or who need a universe with even more suffering in it to be saved.  Therefore, the only beings in this universe who are not zombies are those for whom salvation is compossible with all the other real, non-zombie inhabitants.

If that means that god needs to create billions and billions of universes, that’s ok, because god is not limited in power, or by time, or anything (except perhaps logic).  But it does mean that anyone in this particular universe who is real and is being saved in it is a bit of a scumbag by virtue of it not being possible to be saved in any universe with less pain and suffering in it.

While I was specifically focusing on how Theological Zombies could avoid the problem with consigning so many people to hell or whatever, I can see now that the same argument applies to animals.  For those humans being saved in this universe, it is not necessary that real animals need to suffer.  All that is needed is for there to be theological zombie animals which act precisely as a real animal would if it were to suffer.  Which makes the people who are being saved in this universe even worse scumbags since they need those animals to suffer in order to be saved.

The positive thing though is that for the relatively low cost of accepting that pretty much nothing in this universe is actually real, and that you are a total scumbag who needs innocent animals to suffer, you can believe in whatever god you like and avoid the Problem of Evil altogether.

Plantinga, if he wants, is welcome to use this as one of his defeaters – at least it’s a lot less silly than pain and suffering demons.

This is Brand New Information

Actually, it's not.

In his debate with Justin Schieber, (see also notes here), Max Andrews makes the claim that a mind is the best way to account for the origin of "brand new information".  In For Your Information, I discussed how for there to be information of the sort of that Andrews talks about in his thesis it is necessary to have someone who cares, for example by presupposing a god-like being external to the universe or multiverse.

Now I want to look at the "brand new information" claim, as separate from the need for a transmitter, channel medium and receiver of such information.

Remember that information in this context is an inverse measure of the probability of what is being considered, or its "surprisingness".  A linked concept is entropy, which is the lack of order and predictability.  Effectively, what creationists are arguing when they claim that the universe has information is that its current condition is surprising - in other words, this is just another way of framing the "fine-tuning" argument.  The notion that the universe has a surprising amount of information is, therefore, tautological.  (There's an endless loop in this: "The result here was more surprising than we had expected, which was a surprise in itself.  This added surprise to the result, making it even more surprising and the realisation that the result could be more surprising than we initially found it to be was another surprise.  Finding that there was one more layer of surprise was also, in itself, yet another surprise.  And this only added to the surprise.  By this point, our eyebrows had lifted so high that our heads were banging on the ceiling.  Which we hadn't expected at all.")

The other way of looking at information is to consider how many questions need to be answered to fully specify what is under consideration.

These perspectives can easily lead to confusion, in much the same way as consideration of entropy can lead to confusion.  When we look at a white kitchen bench, from which all the various implements and so on have been removed, we could say that it is very ordered.  Then we put a neat pile of flour on it.  In a sense this too would be very ordered, because the flour is tightly located in its neat pile.  Say though that we compulsively spread the flour thinly over the benchtop so that it has an even covering of 1mm.  This too seems to be very ordered.

Entropy is a measure of disorder, but more strictly it’s a measure of how many states a system can be in.  And this always increases in a closed system (as expressed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics).  When we think about it this way, we can see that the pile is low entropy - because when we ask about where a particular bit of flour is, we can always be answered with "in the pile".  There are limited states in which the bit of flour can be found (it's not zero entropy, because there are different positions in the pile for the bit of flour to be found).

Compare this with the situation in which there is no flour on the bench and the bench is completely empty.  The answer to the question "where is this particular bit of flour?" is "what do you mean? what bit of flour? there is no flour!"   This might confuse things a little, but we can easily see that there are no locations in which flour might be, so entropy in this case is zero.

The same applies to space and energy.  Empty space (truly empty space) has zero entropy, presumably nothing (no space) with nothing in it would also have zero entropy.  A system involving space in which energy is clumped very tightly has low, but non-zero entropy and a system involving space in which energy is spread evenly has high entropy - and the more space there is, the more entropy there can be in the system.  (It might be tempting to think of the universe as being driven by the second law of thermodynamics but this law is more descriptive than prescriptive.  It describes the nature of the universe, it doesn't necessarily determine it.)

Entropy and information are conceptually linked.  The more order there is in a system, the less "surprisingness" there is in it.  The more disorder there is, the more "surprisingness" there is and therefore the more entropy in a system, the more information there is associated with that system.

This means that, in its initial state, the universe contained very little information - because it was in a very low entropy state, or rather because it was in a very low entropy state compared to the current entropy state of the universe (there is no upper limit for the entropy of an open or an expanding system) which means there was a much less information in the early universe than there is today.

Now this is a point on which some apologetic fine-tuning enthusiasts appear to want to have their cake and eat it too - such as the people at BioLogos.  Admittedly, it's a subtle point when one argues about the information associated with the initial conditions of the universe, including the "degree of its entropy".  Effectively, they are arguing that there was a surprisingly large amount of information in the initial conditions including the fact that there was amazingly small amount of information (ie, low entropy).  Note that Guth's argument doesn't help them particularly because even though it explains away the low entropy, it does so at the expense of suggesting that the "initial conditions" may not have been initial conditions after all ("the universe need not have a beginning").

Let's get back to the "brand new information" claim.  Well, there's more information all the time, because entropy is (as a whole) increasing all the time, as per the second law of thermodynamics.  Plus the universe is expanding, so that the Berkinstein limit for the universe is increasing, and thus the potential for entropy is also increasing.  Perhaps it could be argued that there was a sudden jump in entropy from zero (when there was nothing, including no space and no time) to non-zero (when the universe was in a hot dense state, prior to the big bang), but this was to what is considered to be an extremely low state of entropy - so this is not particularly surprising given that we've noticed that the universe tends towards increased entropy and it would be natural, if there were to be an increase from nothing, that this increase would be to "very close to nothing".  The sudden appearance of large swathes of entropy would indeed be disturbing, but that's not what the data indicates.

But perhaps this isn't what Andrews and his fellow fine-tuners mean.  I don't think it is.

I think they are thinking of the pre-universe as being a sort of tabula rasa, a clean slate, a blank page, a clear bench and then - shazam - meaningful stuff appears.  Not just an extremely low entropy concentration of energy, but also some sort of predetermined, inbuilt rule book detailing how energy and space-time should interact in order that humans should emerge about thirteen and a half billion years later.  This is akin to not only putting a pile of flour on the bench, but also precoding it miraculously form a very specific form of bread.  Which works perfectly if we consider ourselves to be as important as bread in the analogy and not something more simple, like a meaningless spot of mould in an obscure crack on the bench that would be totally invisible to the non-existent owner of the kitchen.

Consider a different sort of tabula rasa.  A white expanse on which there is one fleck of black.  Say that this expanse could be broken up into a million billion data points and the fleck covers one and only one of these.  That single fleck represents a lot of information, because it's very surprising that only one point on the grid is black - it's one in a million billion.  But can we really say that this information could only originate in a mind?  No, I don't think so.  The wind could have dropped that fleck there.  It could be a tiny bit of ant poo.  While it might take some effort to uniquely identify which spot on the expanse contains that fleck, it's not necessarily of great import.

But again, I don't think that this is what these apologists really mean.

What I think they mean is that if you sat down and decided to not only design a universe, but to design this one, specifically this one, then you would need a lot of information.  Imagine the amount of data required to accurately model the universe in all its detail!  It would be staggeringly huge amounts of information.

But this is exactly the same (in principle, if not in scope) as trying to model the state of the Earth's weather systems.  The reason our weather models fall over after a few days is because inaccuracies creep in.  We don't have enough information to adequately model weather indefinitely (and we never will), the only accurate model of the Earth's weather system is wrapped around the Earth - being the weather.  But we only try to predict the weather into the future, we don't try to design a specific set of weather conditions from first principles.  The fact that there are huge amounts of information associated with the weather at any given moment does not confer importance to that state at that time.

Similarly, you'd have to do some very impressive work if you created a universe from scratch and wanted, as a result, to have some dishevelled, rather grumpy person writing about how you didn't exist some thirteen or so billion years later.  But again, that is presupposing a creator and an intent.  Without the creator and the intent, there is no special information and nothing to get so excited about.

Barnes' Objections to Fine-Tuning

It occurs to me that now Barnes has his book out, he may well be invited to speaking opportunities or debates and when he is, he may fall back (WLC style) on his standard arguments.  In a debate, you can't go into huge detail with respect to each of your points, although you can do what is known as a Gish Gallop (proof by verbosity) and spurt out so many factoids and positional statements that your opponent cannot hope to rebut all of them in an intellectually satisfying way.

My suspicion is that Barnes will, if given the opportunity, rely on this technique.  I base this suspicion on his interview with Luke Muehlhauser at the Pale Blue Dot podcast, in which he listed "11 objections" to fine-tuning.

Right, first off, there weren't 11 "objections", at best there were 10.  The final "objection" wasn't an objection at all, it was the staff answer for the vast majority of people pushing the fine-tuning agenda: "god did it".  And there weren't really 10 anyway, since a few of them fall into distinct categories.  And not all of them were objections to fine-tuning per se, for the most part they were objections to the staff answer.  One wasn't even an objection.

Let's look at the broad categories:

Denial: there is no fine-tuning, so there's no problem.

Chance: there is fine-tuning, but it comes down to chance that this universe had fine-tuning.

Necessity: there is fine-tuning, but that is just part of the way the universe is.

Design: there is fine-tuning and that was intentional.

Barnes basically Gish galloped through the first of his 10 objections which were (in Muehlhauser's words):

Chance: It’s just a coincidence

Chance (overlaid by an appeal to ignorance): We’ve only observed one universe, and it’s got life. So as far as we know, the probability that a universe will support life is one out of one!

Denial: However the universe was configured, evolution would have eventually found a way

Denial: There could be other forms of life

Necessity: It’s impossible for life to observe a universe not fine-tuned for life

Necessity and Chance/Design: Maybe there are deeper laws; the universe must be this way, even though it looks like it could be other ways

Chance: Maybe there are bajillions of universes, and we happen to be in one of the few that supports life

Design: Maybe a physics student in another universe created our universe in an attempt to design a universe that would evolve intelligent life

Chance: This universe with intelligent life is just as unlikely as any other universe, so what’s the big deal?

Denial: The universe doesn’t look like it was designed for life, but rather for empty space or maybe black holes

Design: Fine-tuning shows there must be an intelligent designer beyond physical reality that tuned the universe so it would produce intelligent life

Let's look at the necessity first.  It is simply a truism to say that, in order for intelligent observers to observe a universe (from inside the universe), that universe must be conducive to intelligent observers.  If the intelligent observers in question are alive and require certain stringent conditions to be met in order to remain alive then, during the period in which they observe the universe, the universe will meet these stringent conditions.  This will be the case irrespective of whether the universe is designed or not.

The necessity argument is not an argument against fine-tuning, nor is it really an argument against design.  At best it is an argument against the argument for design, since it effectively says "all universes with intelligent observers in them would appear designed from the inside, no matter whether they were designed or not, so mere observation of apparent design does not constitute evidence of design (nor does it constitute evidence against design)".

And if fine-tuning of the universe is a necessity, the question arises as to why it is necessary.  Is it mere happenstance that the universe is necessarily the way it is, or is that by design?

There is an argument that is a combination between necessity and something else, in which the deepest laws establish fine-tuning in our universe.  But the provenance of those deepest laws then becomes the question; were they established by design or do they just happen to be that way?  This isn't really a separate argument, it's merely a pointless deferral of the argument.

Then there is denial.  Denial is difficult to maintain, since there are so many elements of the universe which appear to be fine-tuned.  Nevertheless, there have been some people who have argued that at least some of the claims regarding fine-tuning are bollocks (even I have dabbled: gravitational constant - claimed by WLC, the speed of light - claimed by Josh the Searcher).  There are papers that point out that one of Barnes' favourite examples doesn't hold water (fine-tuning of the strong force).  Vic Stenger wrote a book attacking many of the claims of fine-tuning.  But even if denial worked, we'd still be left with an appearance of design and we could ask questions about whether this appearance was due to chance, necessity or design.  If it was necessity, then this is no real argument against design and ends up resolving down to chance or design anyway, as alluded to above.

That leaves us with chance and design.  At the end of the day, there are only two fundamental answers to the problem of fine-tuning, either it is mere chance that the universe is the way that it is or it was designed that way.  And only one of those is an objection to design.

To be continued in Chance or Design?

Knowing God

In a relatively recent William Lane Craig debate, this time with Alexander Rosenberg, Craig repeated his claim that the “Problem of Evil” is resolved, in part, because God could not make a better world.  (Note that in Hidden Premises, I addressed another aspect of Craig’s defence against the Problem of Evil, a defence that is revolves around Craig’s denial of omnipotence on the part of his god.)

This second argument is based on the claim that the levels of evil that are manifest in this world, presumably both man-made and natural evil, are necessary to produce the maximum number of people who may come to know him.

This argument, while relatively simple to put into words, is so convoluted on closer inspection that it is difficult to know where to start dismantling it.  Given that this is a theist argument, it might be most appropriate to work backwards.

I’m not going to assume a sub-optimal god since there are already arguments to dismiss such a notion, including one from Craig.  So, we start with an optimal god, who has the features that we are all familiar with: being omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent.

Craig argues that while we humans might struggle with such questions, his god is able to identify the optimal mix of good and evil required to maximise the number of people who would come to know him (Craig’s allocation of gender appears to be based on tradition rather than evidence).  In other words, Craig’s god has crunched the numbers and determined that the Holocaust was a necessary event which resulted in more knowers of god than could have been achieved by allowing a relatively small number of men to be eliminated (for example those who planned the Final Solution).  He would presumably have performed similar calculations for:

·         The Black Death

·         Spanish Flu

·         Malaria

·         Tuberculosis

·         World War 2 in general

·         The American Civil War

·         The English Civil War

·         Stalin (or Marx)

·         Mao (or Marx)

·         Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

·         The Rape of Nanking

·         The Boxing Day Tsunami

·      The Catholic Church (covering a multitude of sins)

Any horrible event that you can think of, according to Craig, has happened because god has determined that by allowing those evil things to happen optimises the number of people who will come to know him.  (Note that I use the word “evil” in this article to represent suffering as well as the more vaguely defined theological evil.  If the reader is an atheist, just read the word as “suffering”.)

This brings me to my first question, why does god want the optimal number of people to come to know him?  I don’t know whether Craig has ever made his explanation of this explicit.  One could assume that it’s because god is loving, as Craig indicated in his closing statements in the second debate with Quentin Smith:

A loving God would not leave it up to us to figure out by our own ingenuity and cleverness whether or not he exists. Rather a loving God would seek to reveal himself to us and draw us to himself. And this is exactly what Christian theism teaches. Jesus of Nazareth said, "If any man's will is to do God's will, then he will know whether my teaching is from God, or whether I am speaking on my own accord" (John 7.17). And Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit of God would be given by him to convict and draw persons into loving relationships with himself.

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So what we have so far is that god is this all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, loving being that is seeking to obtain relationships with an optimal number of humans.

Cynically, we could say that the “optimal” number of humans who will enter into relationships with god is an arbitrary number, perhaps 144,000 (to be honest though, that number is not arbitrary, it’s a number from the Bible).  It might not be optimal for god to have a higher number, so the evil could arguably be there to prevent too many humans from qualifying for the relationship with god.  This wouldn’t work as an argument, of course, because of the collateral damage involved.  God surely does not need more than 7 billion people to suffer evil so that he can select 144,000 from them.  In his debate with A.C. Grayling, Craig indicated that this is not his argument anyway.  By “optimal” he apparently means “maximal”:

… God might have good reasons for permitting a lot of this natural evil in a world with free creatures. And I think, as a Christian, that it’s related to the Kingdom of God, if God wants to bring the maximum number of people freely into his Kingdom. And I don’t find it at all implausible to think that natural evil and, and moral evil could be a part of the circumstances in which he uses to do this.

Here, Craig introduces another element, namely that god wants an optimum, i.e. maximum, number of humans to enter freely into a loving relationship with him.  This links back to another of his arguments, namely that the evil that exists in the world is a direct consequence of giving humans free will.  This is a moderately good argument but only for the evil in the world that is directly related to the action of humans.  It says absolutely nothing about natural evil.

I can understand, given that god wants a maximal number of us to enter into a loving relationship with him, that he would want the decision to enter into such a relationship to be made freely.  Anything else would be some form of divine rape.  So, we can take the “freely” as a given.

However, when we think about the idea that god wants the maximum number of us to enter into this relationship with him, it becomes a little less clear as to why he is so hell-bent on killing us.  If he’d prevented the Black Death, and Spanish Flu and the wars (excepting of course the wars that he specifically commissioned), then there would be a lot more of us today.  If he’d prevented the Dark Ages, or just made them significantly shorter, then by now we could have been exploring the galaxy, colonising other planets and humans could number in the trillions, rather than just the billions.  It begins to look like “optimum” is a more reasonable claim with regard to god’s intentions than is “maximum”.

By far the greatest problem that I have with Craig’s argument is that it tries to wriggle out of answering what his kind tell us is the biggest question of all – why are we here?

An atheist, if asked that question, is likely to either say that there is no inherent meaning in our being here or answer the question in terms of how the universe and more specifically humans developed.  If in a somewhat less serious mood, the atheist might answer with “because I was born here”, “because I have not died yet”, “because it’s better than the alternative” or something similarly droll.

A theist like Craig, on the other hand, seems to answer with “so that we might enter into a loving relationship with god”.  But hold on a second, that’s begging some rather large questions.  Firstly, a question raised earlier, why would god want to enter into a loving relationship with us? And secondly, why did god make us in the first place?  And thirdly, why did god make us the way he did rather than making us another way?

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The second question is an enormous problem for theists, even if they don’t recognise it themselves:

·         Did god make us specifically in order to allow a maximum number of us to freely enter into a loving relationship with him?

·         Or did he make us for some other, poorly defined reason and only subsequently decided to enter into this relationship with us?

·         Or is there another option?

Neither of the first two options is particularly satisfying.

If god made all of us with the intention of forming this relationship with as many of us as possible, but not all, then the rest of us – the ones who are not destined to enter into this relationship – are chaff and due to his omniscience, god would have known, and would still know that this is the case.  Does Craig actually think that some proportion of humanity, the extent of which is currently unclear, is deliberately and knowingly made dispensable in his god’s great plan - and that the rest of us are just here to make up the numbers?

As an alternative, it could be argued that we were just the bi-product of another plan and the divine relationship that we have all been offered was tacked on as an afterthought.  This, to be frank, seems rather more feasible.  The numerous imperfections of creation would make a lot more sense if god initially only thought of humanity as a disposable element of a grander plan, and that we either demonstrated sufficient worth to justify a qualified opportunity for salvation or god introduced some sort of recycling measure.

The problem here, of course, is that such an idea diverges widely from standard theology in which the human is very much a central component in god’s plan.

Is there a third option?  Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, came up with what might sound like another option – a graduated relationship.  It’s conceivable that, if there is a god, that god would have different levels of relationship with humans much as we have different levels of relationship with other humans.  At one extreme there would be the atheists and false believers who have a one way relationship with god knowing them and at the other extreme, the true believers who are in line for a deep and intimate relationship with god.

In this option, none of us are chaff, we are just destined for a different sort of relationship.  It’s even possible that, for some reason, god wanted this variation across relationships.  It would at least explain why some people are inordinately blessed with success and happiness while others are trapped in an endless cycle of failure and disappointment.

However, even in this option, there is still no satisfying explanation as to how it came about that god created humanity in the first place.  (And again, it’s not standard Christian theology.)

I suspect that, if pushed and prodded enough, Craig will fall back on a variation of the anthropic principle – there must have been a good reason for god to have made us, since we are here.

For Craig, however, this argument fails because he repeatedly rejects the anthropic principle in order to make space for his god.  It’s intellectually dishonest to later resurrect the anthropic principle as an explanation for bizarre behaviour on the part of that god.  For atheists, it also fails because it is the standard anthropic principle with the unnecessary addition of a god, and a universe created by a god requires a lot more explanation than a universe that arises without one.

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Finally, why did god make us the way he did and not another way?

This question is predicated on god’s supposed omnipotence and omniscience, it is not sufficient to say “I don’t know how god could achieve his ends without causing as much evil as he does”, with the option of saying “God could not achieve his ends without causing as much evil as he does”.  It might be the case that in a universe like ours, the evils that plague us might drive us closer to god, but an omnipotent and omniscient god is not obliged to make a universe like ours.

Surely for an omnipotent god, the maximum number of beings that can enter into a relationship with that god is every single being he creates.

In Craig’s conception of god, the maximally great being sits outside of space and time, so there’s no clear reason why he could not have created a mini-universe for each human that he wanted to enter into a relationship with and run that mini-universe for as long as it took to get that relationship to manifest.  If I, as a puny human, can imagine such a regime, then there’s no excuse for god not thinking of it.

A slightly less wasteful version would be to populate a universe with real humans who are destined to enter into a relationship with god and a vast number of simulacrums whose only function is to assist the saved to achieve their destiny.  The real humans would be trapped in a cycle of reincarnation, able only to escape once they achieve an acceptable standard of performance.

This brings us to another option, perhaps Craig’s god has done precisely that – created a universe specifically for the saved, in which they can thrive find their way to a perfect relationship with their god.  (Note that Craig in this scenario would be a Buddha-like character, soon to leave the cycle of reincarnation but calling out to other saved to embrace their “Craig” nature.)

If this is god had created a universe like this, then the unsaved would not be real in the same way as, say, Craig would be real. 

We’d not have souls, we’d not have Free Will and we’d not perceive god.

And this would make us … well, atheists.

Planting a Special Plea for Warrant

Putting out a Warrant for Plantinga

If William Lane Craig were the Crown Prince of Christian Apologists then Alvin Plantinga would be one of his key advisors.  A couple of times now I have found that arguments coming out of WLC’s mouth had actually originated in the brain of Plantinga.  Given the damage that could be wrought by an apologist with some intelligence and formal training, I thought that Plantinga might be worth a closer look.

This led directly to me listening to a couple of longer presentations by Plantinga, for example an Unbelievable interview hosted by Justin Brierly in which Stephen Law also took part and a “debate” between Plantinga and Daniel Dennett.   This article draws quite heavily on the latter.

The engagement between Plantinga and Dennett was titled “Debate: Science and Religion: Are they compatible?” but it was not really a debate.  It was structured like this:

·         Plantinga (43 minutes) – defence of the proposal that science and religion are compatible, consisting in the main of a basic sketch of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism together with a reference to the Irreducible Complexity argument of Michael Behe.

·         Dennett (35 minutes) – attack on the proposal that science and religion are compatible, basically by indicating that religion can only be considered compatible with science if one accepts gratuitous claims and that any compatibility that religion has with science exists only to the extent that the claims of religion are not testable

·         Plantinga (10 minutes) – response to Dennett

·         Question and Answer session (17 minutes)

Plantinga spent a lot of time going over his probability theory, a version of which I have already addressed elsewhere, but I want to focus on two things he said.  The first is this little chunk of Christian goodness:

…if theistic belief is true then it probably doesn’t require propositional evidence for its rational acceptability.  As I argued in this book, Warranted Christian Belief, if theistic belief is true, then very likely it has both rationality and warrant in the basic way; that is not on the basis of propositional evidence.  If theistic belief is true then very likely there is a cognitive structure something like John Calvin’s sensus divinitatus, an original warranted source of theistic belief.  This way, belief in God, like belief in other minds, has its own source of rationality and warrant and doesn’t rely on arguments from other sources for these estimable qualities.  The demise of the theological argument, if indeed evolution has compromised it, is perhaps little more of a threat to rational belief in God than the demise of the argument from analogy for other minds is to rational belief in other minds.

To put this in context, you might want to know what Plantinga means by “warrant”:

According to Plantinga, warrant involves four factors:

·         the mechanisms producing the belief must be functioning properly;

·         they must be operating in a cognitive environment for which they are suited;

·         they must be operating according to a design plan or aspects of a design plan aimed at arriving at the truth; and

·         the objective probability must be high that operating in this manner will reach the truth.

(James B. Freeman in Acceptable Premises: An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem p44)

Plantinga has argued for a new definition of knowledge, being warranted true belief as opposed to justified true belief (although it could be argued that Plantinga is merely arguing that “warrant” is a better form of justification to those in traditional theories of justification).  I touched on “justified true belief” when discussing my world view (when I did so, I was describing an empirical variant of coherentism, not that I would necessarily consider myself an “empirical coherentist”).  Because Plantinga wants to replace standard forms of justification with warrant, we might be justified in looking more closely at what both mean.

KNOWLEDGE
Warranted True Belief	Justified True Belief
That which is known is believed	That which is known is believed
That which is known is true	That which is known is true
The belief in that which is known is warranted	The belief in that which is known is justified

Comparing warrant and justification:

Warrant	Justification
Belief is generated correctly	The believer is not deluded
Belief is generated in a suitable environment	The believer is using suitably collated data
Belief generation must be operating according to a “design plan” aimed at arriving at the truth	The believer is using an appropriate method for processing available data to reach a conclusion
Objective probability that the truth will be arrived at via the belief generation mechanism is high	If the believer is not deluded, is using suitably collated data and is using an appropriate method to process available data, then the probability of the believer arriving at the truth will be high

 Plantinga doesn’t really seem to be adding anything to justification, unless his use of the term “design plan” is meant to be literal (which he denies) or if his fourth point is intended to be more than a summation of the previous three.  He does, however, seem to be taking two things away.

It’s difficult to take Plantinga at his word when he writes:

it is perhaps possible that evolution (undirected by God or anyone else) has somehow furnished us with our design plans

and also refers to “belief-forming and belief-maintaining apparatus of powers … working the way it ought to work”.  He could mean this usage to be figurative, in the sense that a materialist atheist with cancer might say “my body isn’t dealing with this problem the way it ought to” meaning “certain cells in my body are reproducing without limitation, leading to the growth of tumors which are not recognised as alien and thus not removed by my body’s defences and this state of affairs will lead to my dying earlier than otherwise would be the case – an outcome which I consider to be suboptimal”.  However, I don’t think so.  I think Plantinga means for the four factors underlying warrant to be understood (by the right audience) approximately as follows:

·         Warranted true belief is generated using a design plan which is intended to arrive at the truth, if

·         the design plan was well crafted so as to lead to a high probability that truth will be arrived at, when

·         the belief is generated according to that design plan, and

·         the belief is generated in an environment which is appropriate for the design plan

If I am correct, Plantinga’s warrant can be summed up as “Warranted true belief is a belief that God expressly designed humans to have”.  Now, iff knowledge (which is defined as warranted true belief) is defined as God given, then the existence of God is a fundamental fact, a basic truth, because without God there is no knowledge.

Note that I used “iff” deliberately, rather than “if”.  The term “iff” means “if and only if”.

This is what we atheists call a theological argument.  Plantinga, on the other hand, calls this a “philosophical” argument.

Try reading through the extract from Plantinga’s presentation again.  I’ll help by converting the phrase “if theistic belief is true” to “if God exists” (see Plantinga’s definition of naturalism as discussed in Planting a Tiger for a justification).  The word “it” becomes “belief in God” in two instances.

…if God exists then belief in God probably doesn’t require propositional evidence for its rational acceptability.  As I argued in this book, Warranted Christian Belief, if God exists, then very likely belief in God has both rationality and warrant the basic way; that is not on the basis of propositional evidence.  If God exists then very likely there is a cognitive structure something like John Calvin’s sensus divinitatus, an original warranted source of belief in God.  This way, belief in God, like belief in other minds, has its own source of rationality and warrant and doesn’t rely on arguments from other sources for these estimable qualities.  The demise of the ontological argument, if indeed evolution has compromised it, is perhaps little more of a threat to rational belief in God than the demise of the argument from analogy for other minds is to rational belief in other minds.

Now some readers might divine from this that Plantinga is saying that you don’t need evidence to believe in God and that believing in God, even in the absence of evidence, would be “very likely” rational.  Some might just read it as saying that logical arguments (resulting in propositional evidence) don’t affect the existence or non-existence of God.  The latter is of course true.

I might have a very good argument that Kim Kardashian does not exist, for example, no-one I know has ever met her.  The brilliance of this argument, however, has no effect whatsoever on the existence or otherwise of Kim (or indeed any other possible form of Kardashian).

However, I suggest that Plantinga really means the former – the very weak claim that iff God exists, then believing in such a God would be rational even in the absence of evidence.  But he goes further.  Time for the second chunk of Christian goodness from that “debate”:

And even if contrary to fact, there were scientific evidence for unguided evolution and hence for atheism, that would by no means settle the issue.  Suppose there is scientific evidence against theism, it doesn’t follow that theism is false or that theists have a defeater for their beliefs, or that theistic belief is irrational, or in some other way problematic.  Perhaps there is also scientific evidence or otherwise for theism.  But second and more important, as I mentioned, if theism is true, it is likely that it has its own intrinsic and basic source of warrant …

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Plantinga said, in a “debate” in which he was arguing that religion and science are compatible, that if there is scientific evidence against theism (noting that evidence against a hypothesis is the only scientific evidence worth having, since hypotheses only survive in their original form as long as there is no evidence against them), then the theist can just ignore that inconvenient scientific evidence and instead rely on the possibility that there might possibly be some evidence for theism or, alternatively, rely on a completely hypothetical sense (sensus divinitatis), for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence at all, as your basic source of “warrant”.  Remembering of course that a warranted true belief looks like this:

“I believe that God made me in such a way that I will believe that God exists, therefore God exists”.

This is, in context, an admission that religion is fully compatible with pseudoscience, but not actual science.

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Just in case anyone is in any doubt, in science if you have evidence against your hypothesis (and by that I mean proper evidence, not false evidence), then your hypothesis is false.  End of story.

You can have evidence which does not support your hypothesis which might not necessarily be a hypothesis killer, but this is usually due to poor framing of the hypothesis or difficulty with obtaining experimental data.  Years of not finding evidence for the Higgs Boson did not disprove the hypothesis that it exists because no evidence against existence of the boson was obtained either.

If you only accept evidence which supports your hypothesis and you ignore any other sort of evidence, then you have pseudoscience.  That approach puts you in the same category as the 9/11 Truthers, Alien Abduction enthusiasts, Loch Ness Monster spotters, astrologers, mediums, water dowsers, shamans, homeopathy practitioners, homotoxicologists, quantum healers, moon landing hoaxers, Holocaust deniers, millenarianists, flat earthers, Nibiru cataclysmists, rumpologists and theists.

Many of the claims of a pseudoscience are not strictly testable but sometimes theists, like the Intelligent Design crowd, make outlandish claims and these can be shown to be false:

God must exist because the eye cannot have evolved naturally – shown to be false

God must exist because irreducible complexity is impossible via evolution – shown to be false

God must exist because evolution is false since it’s ridiculous to imagine that humans evolved from monkeys – shown to be false (the subordinate claim about human descent from monkeys being ridiculous is agreed but it’s irrelevant to the evolution argument since monkeys and humans have a common ancestor – the link isn’t actually proof, per se, but an explanation)

What science can do, and does, is chip away at all the “God must exist because ...” arguments.  Eventually, the theist is left with no undefeated claim for the necessity of God.

What the average theist can then do, and obviously does, is retreat into a form of special pleading (“my hypothesis is special and has God in it, therefore it doesn’t need evidence”).