Begging the Question

Developing a sound argument is a good idea all of the time, but the need for it is doubly apparent when discussing the existence of God. After all, what are the intertoobz good for?

Take for instance the claims - made to me by a colleague on Twitter - that “most of the arguments in favor of God don't beg the question“ and “Neither the cosmological argument nor the ID argument nor the morality argument beg the question“. If one accepts the definition (as another Twitterer contributed) “To beg the question literally means to assume the truth of an argument's conclusion in its premises“, then we can evaluate these claims to determine if they beg the question. I’ll focus on the Cosmological Argument for God (hereafter CAG) as an example.

First, the standard no-frills CAG from Wikipedia:

1. Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
   
2. A causal loop cannot exist.
   
3. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
   
4. Therefore, a First Cause (or something that is not an effect) must exist.

Consider the argument carefully. First, we notice that the word God does not appear. It is generally assumed that God is that first cause, but God is not a necessary conclusion of the argument. You’ll notice that a First Cause is all that can be concluded - and that’s assuming you accept the premises without objection, an assumption we could easily challenge. I’ve stated elsewhere that the assumption that “God is that first cause“ could just as plausibly be replaced by “A banana slug is that first cause” or “A stink beetle is that first cause” or “InfiniTwinkie is that first cause”. These alternative conclusions are just as well rationally and evidentially supported as a conclusion of God. Where do people arguing CAG go wrong? Clearly, the unstated premise that God must exist in order to be used in the conclusion is the problem, but how do you work out all of the premises and objections to them, and your counter arguments to the objections, so that you can arrive at a persuasive argument? The easiest way is to use Argument Maps - or alternatively - just write out the argument as stated, and notate the pros and cons, and their pros and cons, until the argument has no obvious holes. I'll try to demonstrate that below. For my example, I’ll adopt a fairly uncontroversial convention that C is the Claim or Conclusion that the claimant is trying to make, P1 through P99 are the Premises that lead to the Conclusion. Since the P and C symbols are used already, I’ll use S (“Support”) in place of “pros”, and O (“Objection”) in place of “cons”, so that S1 through S99 are the Support for any of the claimant’s Premises, O1 through O99 are Objections to the Claim or any of the Premises or Support that the claimant has offered. My other convention will be to label the various premises and objections in Domain Name-like notation so that we can keep track of what the statements refer to, in case further discussion is required. Finally a caveat: the Support and Objections that I use here are for illustration only. They are not deeply thought out nor meant to represent a knock-down argument for or against the Conclusion. I will only offer my S and O notation for Premise 1 and the Conclusion because my goals for this post are: 1) demonstrate an argument outline; 2) evaluate the conclusion of CAG to illustrate the general question-begging that exists in it.

Here we go:

• P1: Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
  • P1.S1: P1 is warranted because everything we observe in daily life has a cause - nothing “pops out of nowhere”
    • P1.S1.O1: personal experience is unreliable - this is not a matter that can be resolved subjectively. A more rigorous scientific approach is required.
    • P1.S1.O2: quantum mechanics indicates that particles do pop out of nowhere all the time. As for the first moments of the universe, at present it appears that this occurs in the physical realm of quantum mechanics, thus making it plausible that the universe did indeed come into existence probabilistically without a prior physical cause.
• P2: A causal loop cannot exist.
• P3: A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
• P4: Therefore, a First Cause (or something that is not an effect) must exist.
• P5: (assumed)That First Cause must be God
  • P5.O1: The existence of God is conjectural
  • P5.O2: Even were the existence of God to be established, there is no reason to think that it participated as a first cause for anything we can observe
• C1: Therefore God exists
  • C1.O1: The conclusion is rejected due to P5.O1 and P5.O2

Assuming that you fleshed out P1 through P4 to your satisfaction, exhausted all of the Pros and Cons to the argument, when you get to the unstated premise (which I list as P5) that the First Cause must be God, you arrive at the point where the question-begging occurs. If two believers are discussing this argument, the existence of God could be axiomatic to them, but take away the two believers, and where does that leave God? Take away every human being on the face of the earth, and all that’s left is an indication that beings on this planet once believed in various greater powers. A visitor from another world might investigate the nature of earth, and would find no reason to believe that any of these greater powers that human artifacts refer to existed in real life. None.

THAT’S what’s wrong with CAG, KCA, ID, the argument from objective moral values, and anything else that a believer might employ in an attempt to make belief in an actual God sound rational. God is not available to be used in these arguments. You have to assume the existence of God before you can use it in arguments that attempt to demonstrate its existence, and that, fellow travelers, is begging the question.

Stephen Law on EAAN

My prior 4 posts all had to do with Alvin Plantinga, who has developed the “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism“ (EAAN) - that seeks to refute a solely naturalistic worldview by showing it to be incoherent.

There’s a refutation of EAAN by Stephen Law at Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism Refuted. He does us a favor by summarizing it thus:

Let Naturalism (N) be the view that there’s no such person as God or anything at all like God, and Evolution (E) be the view that our cognitive faculties have come to be by way of the processes postulated by contemporary evolutionary theory. Then, argues Plantinga, the combination N&E is incoherent or self-defeating. This, he maintains, is because if N&E is true, then the probability that R – that we have reliable cognitive faculties (that is to say, faculties that produce a preponderance of true over false beliefs in nearby possible worlds) – is low. But, concludes Plantinga, anyone who sees that P(R/N&E) is low then has an undefeatable defeater both for R and for any belief produced by their cognitive faculties, including their belief that N&E.

In my last post, I posited that an argument against evolution due to it’s inability (if what Plantinga believes actually obtains) to produce true beliefs was not relevant because all that is needed is an organism’s ability to develop truer beliefs within its own lifetime, and the culture to pass down the truer beliefs via the features of culture. Now, I don’t know if this is what actually happens, as I am not an expert in the relevant fields, but I don’t see the EAAN as constructed being that convincing anyway, regardless of whether my conjectural account of truer beliefs is pertinent or not.

Now Stephen Law is willing to address EAAN as written, without resorting to conjectures such as mine. In a nutshell, he takes Plantinga’s claim that evolution cannot deliver true beliefs and develops an argument that the neurophysical structures that result from evolution can tend to contain true beliefs, thus eliminating Plantinga's central complaint. It’s all very technical propositional logic, but it’s interesting. Keep in mind that EAAN, Law's refutation, and my unfounded musings are all conjectural - but I think it indicative of the obscure paths we're will to take to make a point.

I still like my wholly unwarranted presumption that an organism’s ability to develop truer beliefs within its own lifetime, combined with the ability to establish a culture to pass down the truer beliefs, is all that's required to develop extremely accurate beliefs. So I guess I’ll have to nose around and see whether anyone has traveled down this path.

My First Look at Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

Gary Gutting continues to probe Alvin Plantinga at Is Atheism Irrational? by asking

...isn’t the theist on thin ice in suggesting the need for God as an explanation of the universe?

Plantinga replies weakly:

Some atheists seem to think that a sufficient reason for atheism is the fact ... that we no longer need God to explain natural phenomena...

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified.

It’s almost as if Plantinga didn’t take this interview seriously. He missed the point early in the interview when he gave a detailed criticism of Russell’s Teapot, but ignored the broad parody that it intends. The “a-moonist” example above is worse yet. He should have skipped this lunacy (pun intended) and gone straight to his claim that

The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience.

Okay then! We’ve finally arrived at what the estimable Dr. William Lane Craig calls “not really an argument”. If I may interpret this, he’s saying that there’s good reason to believe because you believe you’ve experienced something. Meh.

He then proceeds to give some (psychological) reasons why non-believers might not believe. Double meh.

At this point, Gutting nudges Plantinga into a discussion of materialism, and Plantinga takes the bait.

GG: ... atheists ... think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

Thus begins what I believe is a Reader’s Digest version of Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I’m going to wuss out and quote more of this verbatim in order to avoid clipping out important subtleties. Here he outlines his conception of beliefs:

First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.

He goes on to what (I believe) is the heart of his argument:

I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

So far, I believe he’s saying that the belief and the action are not materially related.

...This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior.

Gutting and Plantinga go on to banter about whether evolution can produce beliefs that are true, or merely adaptive - as Plantinga claims. The last few paragraphs of the interview are worth quoting in full:

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable. Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

That’s the end of the interview, with Plantinga concluding that an atheist can’t believe in evolution because it can’t produce true beliefs, thus is self-refuting. Well!

Let me take a crack at this. There are a lot of phrases and sentences that deserve specific criticism, but it’s not worth getting mired down in details because I think he’s wrong at a more general level.

My most recent thought is simply that evolution doesn’t have to produce beliefs that are true, only animals that survive and reproduce, and can eventually hone their beliefs. Then when an animal like Homo sapiens is successful enough to do more than just survive and reproduce, it just needs to have the potential to develop beliefs that are more true than not, and must be able to do this in the space of a lifetime. If these truer-belief-developing animals are able to survive in greater numbers than non-truer-belief-developing animals, then over time, most will have that potential, and - because this particular animal developed culture - culturally the practices that take advantage of this material potential to develop truer beliefs are institutionally reinforced, institutionally passed on to descendants, and further propagated. It is that tipping point where an animal can develop a mostly true belief, coupled with the development of culture, that speeds the adoption of mostly true beliefs which, over generations, get refined until they become almost-certainly-true-beliefs. Nothing magical required. If this guy’s a great philosopher of theology, I don’t see it.

Plantinga on Fine Tuning - or "How Vladimir Putin Fixed My Toilet"

I’m continuing my review of Is Atheism Irrational?. In Alvin Plantinga at The Stone I commented on his view that non-belief in a deity is not warranted. In that early portion of Gary Gutting’s interview, Plantinga offered a refutation of “Russell’s Teapot”, a maneuver that I believe missed the broader parody of unwarranted belief that the teapot represents.

In the next section of the interview, Gutting moves the conversation into other arguments against theism, specifically the problem of evil, an argument that Plantinga acknowledges might be the best one against theism. He offers no counterargument to it, but does claim that there are “about two dozen” good arguments for theism. When pressed, he cites fine-tuning. Before we even hear the term “fine-tuning“, however, Plantinga performs a classic waffle, by voluntarily offering this comment on theistic arguments that

None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.

Let that sink in. “None is conclusive” and “...is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.“ He’s saying to our faces that there’s no compelling theistic arguments. When I first read this interview in February, I came away feeling that Plantinga offered indirect, kinda squishy defenses of theism. Upon further review, I’m certain of it. To be charitable, this is Gutting’s interview, and he and his editor have certainly taken the scissors to it, so it may be that my impression is due more to the editing than Plantinga himself, but clearly, he admits there’s no single knock-down argument for theism.

When pressed, Plantinga cites fine-tuning as a good argument, and summarizes by saying:

fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.

Gutting gets criticism here by not simply asking “how so?”

I need to make a general comment here about the more famous arguments for the existence of God. As far as I know, arguments like fine-tuning, the cosmological argument, and the argument from objective moral values all posit that natural features and phenomena are insufficient to explain where a) fine-tuning, b) the universe, and c) objective moral values come from, therefore God must be the answer, therefore God exists. The transcendental argument for God (TAG) takes this general approach as well. The glaring problem with all of these is that the rhetorical transition from the premise(s) to the conclusion are accompanied by no argument or explanation as to why God should be the conclusion. None. For those who are not familiar with argumentation terminology, the argument or explanation that “authorizes” us to reach the conclusion is called the “warrant”, thus these arguments may be said to be warrantless. Add to this warrantlessness the fact that God is not established as an independent fact that we can use in the argument, and we end up with a really high-minded sounding but vacuous waste of words .

Let me put this a little differently. If it could be shown that there was something in the universe that could be independently verified as god-like, you still have an obligation to present the chain of reasoning that leads you to conclude that this verified god-like thing was the reason that fine-tuning exists. It’s like me claiming that Vladimir Putin replaced my toilet. Sure, he exists. Sure, he’s hypothetically capable of replacing my toilet. Did he replace my toilet? How would I convince you that he did? This is where these kinds of arguments seem to evaporate. My claim that Vladimir Putin replaced my toilet makes for a better argument than the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God, because we know Putin exists, and we have good reason to think he’s capable of replacing a toilet in spite of my not being able to link Putin to my repaired toilet. It's at least possible. We know nothing definitive about any gods that we might claim, except for the unsubstantiated claims that we make for them. Trying to associate any unestablished entity like God to some feature of the universe is nonsense.

Another pet peeve I have about these kinds of argument is that they allow the proponent arguing this way to abandon the hard work of finding out what really could be the explanation for the mystery under consideration, and lets them claim God Did It. This is both lazy and fallacious. The correct answer is to say "we don’t presently know the answers to a), b) or c)". You can even take a step in the apologist's direction and say a) yes, there must be a fine-tuner, b) you're right, there must be a creator, and c) of course, there must be a source for objective moral values. So what? None of this gets you remotely to the existence of the supernatural, or supernatural entities, or gods, or one omni-everything Swiss-army-knife can-do-it-all God that I think most Christians believe in. They are still arguments from ignorance.

Another thought, this time about Plantinga’s claim that

the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities. This isn’t at all easy to do, but it’s pretty obvious that the result wouldn’t anywhere nearly support straight-out atheism as opposed to agnosticism

He acts like no one has ever tried to “synthesize and balance the probabilities“ before.

There are much better sources for calculating probabilities than you'll ever hear from me - Richard Carrier, Jeffrey Jay Lowder, Eliezer Yudkowsy and Less Wrong all are immeasurably superior to what I can offer. Still, an example that pops into my head over and over is this. Assuming that God is a supernatural being, then assuming that a supernatural realm must exist, then assuming that we need that realm to sustain persistent entities, then we need these entities to be capable of interacting with our world, then we need one (God) to have all the attributes that we ascribe to him, then we need him to have the motive to create our universe, then we need him to have the means to create the universe, then we need him to actually create it and perform all of the other God-functions that we expect. Assuming that my individual prerequisites represent some chain of independent gates that we need to pass before we can logically conclude the existence of God is probable, then we have enough to start calculating a probability. Using a charitable .5 probability for all of the listed steps, we see the probability get reduced by half at every one. It works out to (.5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5), or 0.0078125. Less than one percent at best. So God ends up being very improbable, even when we give him an overly charitable 50-50 chance every step of the way. How does Plantinga think that the probabilities balance in the theist’s direction?

I’ll take a breather here, and leave something for another post. Next time, we may get into what appears to be Plantinga’s own Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism - an argument that I’m only vaguely familiar with. That will be fun.

In Praise of The Written Word

While reflecting on “Is Atheism Irrational?” I was struck at how reading Alvin Plantinga’s words allow me to really digest what he says and examine whether it makes sense - to an extent that I might never be able to if I were in direct verbal conversation. For example, Plantinga says

...fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.

Although he spent a paragraph leading up to this conclusion, he fails to (or chooses to not to) unpack what the apparent fine tuning of the universe means. First, refer to Douglas Adam’s parable of the puddle:

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'

Following Adams, we can say that we exist in a human-shaped puddle. we exist in a universe that supports our existence. We would thus expect any “tunable” parameters to be in the range in which our existence can be sustained, and we do. There’s nothing surprising about this, and absolutely nothing that implies a fine-tuner, or even a ((gasp)) god. Second, here is no reason to expect the “cause” to be a rational agent such as god is usually claimed to be. It may be a brute fact. It may be probability. The fact that we have insufficient information to say why it is this way is no reason to fabricate a cause.

It’s my freedom to read, hopefully digest and synthesize, and write down my conclusions on topics like this that makes me appreciate the written word.

Long live the written word!

Alvin Plantinga at The Stone

Gary Gutting is doing a series of interviews on religion at The Stone for the New York Times. His first one was with Alvin Plantinga, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and sometimes inspiration for the apologetics of Dr. William Lane Craig. The interview originally appeared in February, but I took the opportunity to re-read it this past week to see how it fares against my amateur counter-apologetics. The title (and subject) of the piece is “Is Atheism Irrational?”. I’ll try to summarize Plantinga’s significant points and comment on them - but I recommend reading the article to get the full context.



Gutting opens by stating that the majority of philosophers are atheist or atheist-leaning, and asks whether their views are warranted. Plantinga replies that arguments for theism can certainly be rejected as unsound, but that’s not sufficient for atheism. He then gives an example that because there’s no good reason to believe that there are an even number of stars in the sky, that doesn't give you warrant to believe that there are an odd number of stars.



You can find at least two things - that while technically defensible - render his reply unconvincing, maybe even irrelevant. First, his use of the term “atheist”. When taken literally - it simply means “not theist”. Even the dictionary defines it primarily as lacking belief, with a secondary definition being an active belief that there is no god. Yet Plantinga appears to take this secondary definition to make this part of his case. I suppose if you’re in the business of shoring up the theist edifice, then arguing against people who take the “strong atheist” position makes for more impressive rhetoric. Plantinga’s second problem is his example of “even-starism”. He attempts to draw a comparison from the warrant of this to the warrant for non-belief, yet the two aren’t even remotely comparable. In the case of even-starism, the choices are concrete and limited: there are either an even number of stars or an odd number of stars in the universe. There are no other alternative answers. The question of whether god exists is purely conjectural, and sufficiently ill-defined that further debate seems (and often is) pointless. It is a different knowledge domain than that regarding the number of stars in the universe. We know there are stars, but we don’t know if a god is even a sensible concept. We don't know how one can exist, whether it has any characteristics that we normally associate with it, or whether the god we’re describing resembles, or in fact is, one described by anyone having any belief in such things. It’s apples and oranges - the first example doesn’t imply anything about how we should evaluate the soundness of the second.



Gutting then questions Plantinga’s implication that lack of belief is unwarranted, to which Plantinga replies with Russell’s Teapot. Again, he’s deceptively indirect here. He states that there are good reasons to believe that there is not a teapot in orbit around the sun, assuming that Russell's example is meant to refer to a real man-made object that would have to be put in place by men. Yet Russell's Teapot - as I understand it - is meant as a parody - a broad metaphor for anything that cannot be detected. This counter example is not compelling. He appears to be rebutting a specific case that the originator never intended. You might call that a straw man.

---

The remainder of this interview centers on two other lines of thought - a traditional “good” argument for theism - fine tuning - and what appears to be Plantinga’s own Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism .

Until next time...

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Update 6/1/2014:
From the You Learn Something Every Day Department: I found out today that Bertrand Russell first formulated his Teapot example in 1952, seven years before the Russians had put Sputnik into orbit around the earth. So Plantinga's criticism of The Teapot seems even more off-point now. Bertrand Russell, speaking in 1952 when human capability to put a teapot into orbit did not exist, was well justified in lacking belief that such an artifact was in fact in orbit. I bet Plantinga didn't know that either!

Consensus on God?

Richard Carrier explains the role of Expert Opinion in his latest post "On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus". Upon reaching the reference to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, it dawned on me just how riddled with problems concepts like "conventional wisdom" ("CW") and popular opinion are.

Take the idea that God, gods, or the supernatural exists. In the world today, I presume the majority believe in a higher supernatural power or realm. This despite the lack of a jot of evidence or a tittle of rational argument that something supernatural exists. What are the chances that this majority are correct? First assume that most of us are not capable of making a correct judgement about things that we are not expert on. This eliminates the vast vast majority of subjects that we laymen can discuss concretely and accurately. In fact, using myself as an example, 20 years in software development qualify me to claim expertise on some areas of software development, but in the overall population of software developers, I might rank in the 70th or 80th percentile. Could you go to me for software development expertise? In a certain context, absolutely. In all contexts? No, only in some cases. Can we infer something from this specific example to possible expertise on the subject of God?

First, we can say that no one has practical experience in the field of God. Face it, it is conjectural. If you were to set out on a program of research to find God, you’d have to define what you’re looking for in terms that could yield a sensible result. Questions like these will immediately muddy the waters: do we search for a general higher power, an ultimate highest power, a power described by existing sacred texts, a power described by philosophers to cover the general case? What constitutes good evidence that we’ve observed God? Can other researchers duplicate the tests and achieve the same results? How do we infer God’s concrete nature from these results? How do we map our observations and the inferences we make onto the current philosophical, theological, religious and/or spiritual landscapes - or do we carve out a new (scientific?) landscape in which to repose our findings?

Compare this conjectural research project with the current state of thought about God. There are philosophers that consider the nature of God - a specific instance like Yahweh, or the general case as in “the ground of all being. There are theologists that take specific formulations such as Yahweh, and supporting texts (the Bible, adjunct Jewish texts, apocrypha, commentary on all of the above) and develop theses about right belief, right living and so on. But where is there someone who can be called an expert? The pastors, deacons, bishops of any particular church are not experts with concrete God experience. They are practitioners in running churches, helping church-goers live in accordance with right beliefs and practices, nurturing the religious community, organizing and delivering charity (good for them!!!). Not one of them can bring a God experience to a neutral third party for evaluation, and have that deemed to be evidence for the existence of God.

This has always bothered me, and Dr. Carrier formalized the problem by pointing out how and when expert opinion is to be valued. A church, and the general congregation that accepts and reinforces the beliefs and practices of that church, are all non-experts. They have no claim to authority in a global sense, although the individual could choose to allow other individuals to assert authority over them for various reasons. Outside the church, those beliefs and practices are of lesser interest. Moreover, anyone claiming expertise must (after Carrier) be familiar with the best arguments against their claims, and be able to address them. When you start to evaluate the claims that affirm and negate the existence of God - and more generally, the supernatural - you then have a series of alternatives that can be judged for their effectiveness in explaining phenomena in the world. By this point, you then conclude that physical evidence for the supernatural does not exist, and rational argument for its existence is fundamentally circular, bare assertion, argument from personal incredulity, or appeal to emotion.

Where does that leave us when looking for experts on God? We don’t have experts on God. We have people who claim authority - as individuals or as representatives of a religion or sacred text - but no one that we can really acknowledge as an expert. So we return to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem:

When “each voter has an independent probability p of voting for the correct decision” then:

If p is greater than 1/2 (each voter is more likely to vote correctly), then adding more voters increases the probability that the majority decision is correct. In the limit, the probability that the majority votes correctly approaches 1 as the number of voters increases.

On the other hand, if p is less than 1/2 (each voter is more likely than not to vote incorrectly), then adding more voters makes things worse: the optimal jury consists of a single voter.

Since individually, the vast vast vast majority of us are not experts on God, then a consensus on God is of no value to us, and there are no experts to then refer to.

...a consensus on God is of no value to us...

Crude Apologetics

In the blog post that inspired my prior piece on physical and mental worlds, Jeffrey Jay Lowder refers to an exchange between he and a Dangerous Idea commenter “Crude” about the nature of Naturalism, and it’s efficacy in explaining the world. The Dangerous Idea thread can be viewed here, while the prime mover for all this was at Axis of Jared.

I often find these exchanges interesting as much for their similarity to other blog/Twitter/Facebook dialogues as for any novel new apologetics that I might encounter. In this instance, “Crude” switches between criticisms of naturalism and atheism often enough to give me the impression that he (or she) couldn’t quite zero in on exactly what in Lowder’s comments was worthy of criticism. But he had sound bites, and wasn’t afraid to use them.

I'll apologize in advance for using soooo muuuuch of the material on Dangerous Idea in this post. It's for my benefit - to condense and focus the flow of arguments so that their strengths and weaknesses can be observed close up.

To give some context, this Lowder reply to Dangerous Idea commenter Legion of Logic gets Crude's attention :

Metaphysical naturalism entails that there is a physical universe, whereas theism does not. So the fact that matter exists is evidence favoring metaphysical naturalism over theism.

Crude engages with Lowder:

That doesn't seem right at all. First, it seems trivially false when we see the list of theisms on offer (polytheism of the sort that involves Zeus, etc, would swing right against it - those gods were apparently physical beings), and second, 'naturalism' is notoriously hard to define (I always refer to the SEP entry of naturalism to illustrate this.) Third, you'd need to define 'matter' and 'physical universe'.

Crude’s claim that “the list of theisms on offer“ is a counterargument to naturalism sounds like he accepts “the list of theisms on offer” at face value - that they are a real part of the physical world. This is completely off-the-wall. If this is supposed to serve as a counter-argument to naturalism, it's utter nonsense.

Crude’s criticism of Krauss is equally unclear:

it seems like if it were in fact the case that 'physical universe' was required by naturalism, then Krauss' speculations - even such as they are, non-ultimate - would seem to strike against *naturalism*, not theism. After all, there'd be a point at which there was no physical universe, just laws or a system or a force. But if the mere existence of laws or a system or a force is compatible naturalism, then it's hard to see what isn't - you can even get classical theism under an umbrella that big.

I’ll take a guess that he’s reducing Krauss’ conception of the universe at the absolute beginning to “mere existence of laws or a system or a force“ without explaining how he arrives at this. So, it's a straw man, or a guess, maybe something else. I don't see what his point is, so I can't accept it as a counterargument either. Wasted words.

...then...

[Lowder]:

Assume for just a moment that the universe is factually necessary (as opposed to logically necessary, metaphysically necessary, or factually contingent). How do you go from "the universe is factually necessary" to "atheism is still out in the cold."

[Crude]:

A brief googling tells me that you're talking about a Swinburne conception here, with the 'factually necessary' being a brute fact. If that's accurate, then you're right on back to inexplicable magic, and the issues of metaphysical necessity and contingency are left unresolved.

Again, it appears Crude reduces this rather hastily, to bad effect (“you're right on back to inexplicable magic“). In any discussion, the participants will rely on some axioms that they hope are generally accepted by all. In this exchange, Lowder assumes physical entities that we know about, or can eventually know about, are all that exists. By extension, any originating cause of the world would be physical (my words, not his). Crude (I assume he’s taking the Theist position) assumes God in place of the physical things that Lowder presumes. Crude attacks Lowder by ridiculing the axioms for natural explanations as “magic”, while ignoring the fact that magic is the essence of the Theist project. The irony is deep here.

Bottom line? Crude doesn’t like Lowder’s axiom(s), while privileging his own with no justification. He can't make a persuasive argument that way.

Bonus gripe: the “Atheism is still out in the cold” claim is off-topic. The contention between these two is (my words) "Naturalism vs. Theism as an explanation for the world". Atheism (the broadly defined lack of belief in theism) is a natural byproduct of Naturalism, but only addresses a single topic - god. We know (kinda sorta) what Crude means - he doesn't like the general non-belief position - but it's a distraction when he himself appears to be unclear what the topic is.

....more....

[Lowder]:

I agree with that there are theisms on offer which entail the existence of gods (lower case 'g') who are/were physical beings. But that point is not of obvious relevance to my argument, which was an evidential argument against God (capital 'G'), not those other types of supernaturalism.

[Crude]:

Well, yes, I think it's entirely relevant to your argument - since it runs against atheism. I also pointed out the problems with your view re: the God of Classical Theism.

Finally, why are these even 'types of supernaturalism'? I think the natural/supernatural distinction is almost entirely arbitrary here.

I get what Lowder says, and don't get what Crude is saying. He says (simplified) "oh yes it does" without elaboration, then appears to play dumb regarding "those other types of supernaturalism", which are the "the list of theisms on offer" that he just got done touting as a counterargument to Naturalism.

[Lowder]:

This revised version of the argument brings out the problem for S even more clearly.

[Crude]:

Not really. In fact, it just highlights the problems you're getting at each and every step.

Sheesh ... "I know you are, but what am I?" That's not a counterargument. Again.

[Lowder]:

1'. E is known to be true, i.e., Pr(E) is close to 1.

[Crude]:

First, we're right on back to needing to explain what counts as E. Second, if you define E in a restricted way, idealism still exists as a live possibility. Third, I pointed out that if E is defined as matter, etc, then we're in the situation of atheists arguing that naturalism was out and out false in the past.

Crude's throwing out a hypothetical that Lowder didn't make ("if you define E in a restricted way"). Twice. "if E is defined as matter, etc, ". It appears that Crude is going off on a tangent. Whether he's doing so purposely is not clear.

[Lowder]:

2'. S is not intrinsically much more probable than N, i.e., Pr(S) is not much greater than Pr(N).

[Crude]:

And now we're back to the issue of 'N' being pretty vacuous as a definition, and very little principled difference between S and N in the relevant senses.

Taken out of context here, Crude has a point. If N and S are equally probable, then neither interlocutor has an advantage. But it's not meant to stand alone. Lowder presents 4 statements, with the first three as premises to a conclusion. So Crude missed the point.

[Lowder]:

3'. Pr(E | N) =1 > Pr(E | S).

[Crude]:

A view I've called into question on multiple fronts.

Crude failed to address the conclusion (4) of Lowder's original comment. He just really missed the point. Here's what Lowder said:

Let E = the existence of physical entities, N = metaphysical naturalism, and S = metaphysical supernaturalism.

1'. E is known to be true, i.e., Pr(E) is close to 1.
2'. S is not intrinsically much more probable than N, i.e., Pr(S) is not much greater than Pr(N).
3'. Pr(E | N) =1 > Pr(E | S).
4'. Other evidence held equal, S is probably false, i.e., Pr(S | B & E) < 1/2.

What Lowder could have said to clarify was that premise 3 indicates a) all the evidence we have is expected on N, b) little or no evidence we have is expected on S. Crude did not understand the notation, or chose to ignore it.

In conclusion, it appears that these two were talking past each other. I don't think that Lowder was as concise as he sometimes is - a plain English explanation of the above argument may have helped, for example - but Crude seemed to willfully miss the point more often than not.

Another worthy example of bad apologetics.

Physical and Mental Worlds

Jeffrey Jay Lowder defines Metaphysical Naturalism at the Secular Outpost - and in the process defines “physical world” and “mental world”. Let me use those two concepts as brushes for painting my own picture of reality.

Physical world: those things which can be observed, inspected and reasoned about by all potential observers, and to which all potential observers hold a similar understanding. Space, time, matter, energy, and their characteristics, behaviors and relationships are all things that fit this category. We can know what they are, and how they behave, separately and in combination.

Given a group of Homo sapiens in the world today, they will largely agree that objects fall towards the Earth, the sun shines in the sky during the day, water is wet, the Earth is relatively solid, and you shouldn’t let flames burn you. One hundred, one thousand or one million random people will almost certainly agree with these statements about the physical world. Anyone disagreeing with these trivial claims will find it nearly impossible to come up with a persuasive argument that something to the contrary is true. Therefore, we often refer to claims such as these as “facts”.

Note that we do NOT attempt to answer “non-physical” questions (purpose, meaning, emotion) when describing a physical world.

Mental world: an individually-held set of understandings, attitudes, beliefs about physical things (both external and internal to the observer), as well as understandings, attitudes and beliefs about what is, what has been, and what could be in the physical world, or in any imaginable world.

We also perceive pain, conceive of purpose, meaning, emotion in this world.

Some Differences:The physical world that we observe - Space, time, matter, energy, and their characteristics, behaviors and relationships - does not necessarily include all that there is. This is important to keep in mind. For example, physicists have models and hypotheses that somewhat predict the existence of “extra dimensions” , and (separately) multiverses. These are not observed in everyday life, and there’s no good reason for the layman to believe such things are true. Yet, physicists research and test these ideas because there are reasons to think that the models and hypotheses will lead to better understanding of our universe.

In the mental world, there are less reasons to constrain one’s thoughts to that which can be observed, measured and reasoned about. That’s where the idea that the supernatural exists first arises. There was a time when Homo sapiens didn’t have the mental and physical tools to explain phenomena that they observed, so entities with human or animal traits (since that was what they were familiar with) were imagined to explain the phenomena. In more sophisticated imaginations, these entities were explained to exist in a realm beyond the natural, presumably to address their hiddenness . The “supernatural” was thus born.

How does one reconcile the physical world with their personal mental world? I can’t speak for everyone, but

“A wise man apportions his beliefs to the evidence.” ― David Hume

seems to be an effective rule of thumb.

Conclusion: Nothing we observe today leads us to believe that a supernatural realm exists. No one has taken evidence to the National Science Foundation that resulted in a new understanding of the physical world. Faeries, ghosts, angels, demons and gods have no basis in fact. If they do, the evidence should be held up to scrutiny. So, it seems clear to me, and to hundreds of millions of others, that supernatural claims arise in the mental world, and vanish when held up to scrutiny in the physical world.

Believers cannot point to anything in the Physical World and demonstrate the existence of god. They can say “you can’t explain that“, or assert that such-and-such phenomena could only be the handiwork of god, but they can’t make a persuasive case that their assertions are probably true. They can’t take you to someone who can show any research and artifacts, or demonstrate any formulas and measurements that indicate that a deity is responsible for any feature of the universe. Their claims rely on the mental world. Without the mental world, their concepts have no existence.

In contrast, the non-believer can demonstrate physical facts, or take the believer to chemists, physicists, geologists, anthropologists, etc, who can demonstrate and explain features and phenomena in the world that most of us lack the time and tools to understand on our own. Sure, we can’t explain why the universe is here. “Why” questions are not the province of science. Science can tell you “what”. Still, scientists won't give you pat answers for what brought the universe into being, or what caused life to emerge from non-life, because their hypotheses about these haven't been tested and refined well enough to indicate a probable answer. They're working on it, though, with the intention of bringing us closer to the truth. Believers never do that. Their claims never hold up to scrutiny.

If that changes, it will be an interesting day.

The No Good Reason To Believe God result

In The Wrong God Hypothesis I asked the question “could the possibility that there is indeed a god, and we all have in fact got it wrong about god, be a plausible explanation [for the god question]?“

It doesn’t take long to unwind this. The non-believer cites 1) a lack of evidence and 2) a lack of true, valid arguments as reasons for not believing in a deity. So, even if a freely acting, rational agent - such as a deity is presumed to be - does in fact exist, we still have no good reason to believe that he/she/it exists due to 1) and 2) above. The possibility that a deity could exist and there not be a present way to infer or deduce its existence, is the same (as far as I can tell) as its non-existence. If it has no discernable effect on the world, why should we care?

I suppose at this point, people go down the path of Pascal’s wager, but that doesn’t seem to be a good bet, since we know there’s a distinct possibility that we’re wrong about whatever we think of as god. We're most likely betting on the wrong horse.

So where are we?

We’re back at not having sufficient reason to believe in god. Whether or not it exists is not meaningful when there's no way to be affected by its hypothesized existence.

Don’t worry - be happy!

The Wrong God Hypothesis

Justin Schieber - of Reasonable Doubts podcast and debating fame, made a claim on Twitter that

Given theism ... we have some reason to expect God to reassure us when we need it most.

to which I wondered out loud “what if the believer expecting reassurance is believing the wrong god?” Call this the “Wrong God Hypothesis”. This sounds very Bronze Age, in a “my tribe’s god is the one true god, and all other tribes worship false, or lesser gods” way, but what if? It may not be compelling to a philosopher like Justin, but the thought that we all had it wrong powered me further away from my religious belief in the ’70’s into the 2000’s, where my information was more complete, my thinking tools were better, and I was more confident and, hopefully, mature.

I’m not questioning Justin’s claim, but of all the possible worlds that could exist, including the one that I presently believe to be true - nature - could the possibility that there is indeed a god, and we all have in fact got it wrong about god, be a plausible explanation?

I’ll explore this further to see if this makes sense.

The OT explained

In the Old Testament, Yahweh is depicted as the hapless, ne'er-do-well younger neighbor kid to the cool gods like El.

A hapless, ne'er-do-well band of Canaanite outcasts adopts him as their mascot, and zany highjinks ensue.

I think that's the general theme.

Better Arguments

Keith Parsons tackled the question “Can the Arguments of the “New Atheists” be made Stronger?“ in response to criticisms of the same by Ed Feser. It subsequently lit off a loosely-related firestorm in the comments section that resulted in a series of posts by Feser and Parsons - but that’s not the point here - yet.

Parsons makes a real nice point that I quote in full:

...the gravamen of Dawkins’ contention [that “religious beliefs are based merely upon faith and not upon evidence”] can be re-stated as the charge that there is a great disparity between the assurance with which major religious claims are generally asserted and the actual epistemic credentials of those claims. Creedal claims are often presented as so manifestly true that those who willfully reject them are regarded as deserving of temporal or eternal punishment, or perhaps as invincibly ignorant. In this case we might expect that those creedal propositions are as well established, as irrefragable and apodictically certain as claims can be. Yet this seems not to be the case. Every such set of tenets is doubted by very many ostensibly rational, intelligent, and well-informed people. This alone is reason to think that the strength of the claims of religion is often overblown. Further, if creedal claims are manifestly true, it must be the case that each of the propositions constituting those claims is (a) clear, coherent, internally consistent, and compatible with other creedal claims, (b) either obviously true or established beyond a reasonable doubt, and (c) such that if established by reasons, those reasons should be readily apparent to any serious inquirer, since if the reasons for believing a proposition are too obscure, abstruse, or arcane, this could be a legitimate reason for not accepting it. However, it is highly doubtful that conditions a, b, and c are met with respect to the creedal claims of any religion.

No further comment from me is necessary, except to say that these three points are worth remembering when examining claims of any kind, no matter who makes them.

Miraculous

I use the word "miraculous" occasionally. It doesn't mean that I believe in miracles. It means that I find a phenomenon wonderful and unexpected, maybe inexplicable. Take the human brain, for instance. Thought is a wonder. It is amazing. I don't understand it, so I refer to it as "miraculous", but that doesn't mean that I think it's truly a miracle.

It's hard to give up words and idioms that carry supernatural connotations. I will probably not try very hard to give them up unless they cause problems in my life. In the case of human thought, I think it's miraculous, I just don't take an extra step and attribute it to a supernatural cause. That's all.

Nothing is simple

Jeffrey Jay Lowder quotes philosopher Richard Swinburne’s statement:

it is always simpler to postulate nothing rather than something

while making objections to Swinburne’s formulation of the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God.

Since the question "why is there something rather than nothing" always interests me, my attention for the moment is on just this snippet of Swinburne’s argument.

I think Swinburne has ignored the forest while focusing on the trees, in an attempt to invoke Occam's Razor. To my eyes, he appears to have committed a false dichotomy.

When you’re asking the question “why is there something rather than nothing?”, you're asking a question about why one particular state of affairs - that of the absence of anything - is preferable to all other alternative states of affairs that might pertain. It's not a question of contrasting A with B, it's a question of contrasting A versus the set {B,C,D,E,F,G...} - where that set contains every logical state that could exist. Since we know our universe exists - time, space, matter, energy, predictable behaviors - we have good reason to believe that other possible states of existence could pertain as well. They could be less complex or more complex, with different attributes and behaviors in different quantities and relationships.

Since the set “every other possible state” contains a quantity of states that we don’t know the upper limit on, then we might be justified in saying that the quantity approaches infinity - although we don't know how closely. That makes the relative occurrence of a state of “nothing” in the set named “all possible states” equal to a number that approaches the infinitesimal - although here too we don't know how closely. Therefore a state of something is (nearly) infinitely more probable than a state of nothing.

---

Bonus thought: since “nothing” means the absence of anything - space, time, matter, energy, Miley Cyrus - whether “nothing” occurs is irrelevant to observers in an actual space-time like we enjoy because it “occurs” for zero duration. You could have some real absurdist fun telling people how nothing occurs infinitely many times all around us.

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Scientific American has a good article worth book-marking, called 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. The first answer recaps what a scientist means when they use the term "theory". Worth getting familiar with.

Forward

If I were to write a book about myself, it might start with a forward like this:

Depending on where you were born, your parents, community and culture will instill in you a general set of beliefs and behaviors. In my childhood, along the Mason-Dixon Line, the politics were slightly capitalist and Republican, and the religion was Christianity. My dad was not a committed church-goer while my mom was, and outside of church, God and Christ were rarely discussed. I didn’t get much of that from neighbors or school mates either. This afforded me room to be myself and think for myself, something I’m thankful for to this day. I had the chance to observe the world, compare and reflect on candidate explanations for these observations, and understand to a small degree why some explanations fit the data better than others, and should therefore be trusted more than others. I didn’t think of it in those terms, but that’s what was happening.

I remember a friend in high school who relayed to me that “Bible scholars” thought that Jesus was going to return in 1975 (am I dating myself?) I found it interesting, but it didn’t spur me into a religious fervor. I just watched and went on with my life.

That attitude - that religion is interesting but not essential - has more-or-less stuck with me my whole adult life. With the exception of one brief 6 or 8 month immersion in a Pentecostal church, I was one of the spiritual-but-not-religious types.

I’ve said elsewhere that a verse-by-verse reading of the Old Testament is what disabused me of the belief that the Bible was literally true. And if it’s not literally true, then a believer is left trying to understand the metaphors and allegories that it presents, or eventually comes to understand it as a culturally valuable myth. So after setting the Bible down and walking away, I retained a vague suspicion that there was an underlying supernatural basis for things that the Bible tried to convey. I started to understand religions of any sort as attempts to get down to underlying truths about reality. Maybe God was less a person and more a spirit, or he/she/it was the universe itself, or it didn’t exist at all, but a unifying substrate to apparent reality did. I gently glided across all those currents for over two decades without falling out of the boat and drowning in any one of them.

Soon after 9/11, I began a serious look at how people use language to change people’s opinions about topics. At first - predictably - it was the war with the terrorists and the invasion or Iraq. Then it turned to general political matters, THEN to religion. So it hasn’t been more than 8 or 10 years since I’ve developed a more rigorous intellectual approach to the existence of gods, the costs and benefits of religions, a general world view of what reality is, and whether there’s anything beyond it that’s worth spending time thinking about.

On this journey, I’ve come to realize that people are a varying combination of intelligence, knowledge, education, independence, disposition, confidence and a whole lot of other factors that - before taking into account external influences - would lead them to believe or disbelieve in the existence of the supernatural. And I suspect that the combination of characteristics that create fertile ground for skepticism and non-belief, is rarer than not. When faced with conventional beliefs in god(s) that have been carried down by societies over the millennia, I understand how and why belief is more common than non-belief. But I'd like to help that change.

Notes on Craig's Cosmological Argument

While discussing William Lane Craig’s five arguments to believe in God (here and here ... originally at Faux News ), I said:

...you can’t conclude that god is the best explanation for any of the proposed “mysteries” that Craig lists, because God does not exist independently of his arguments.

I’ve always felt that the argument from first cause was the single most interesting approach for a believer to claim the existence of God, simply because the questions of existence - Why? For what purpose? How? - are unsettling in their enormity and implication. Not knowing is scary. It is a great human endeavor - individually and as a species - to overcome that fear, and replace ignorance with knowledge. Where we can’t obtain knowledge, we can at least try to identify what qualifies as “not knowledge” so that we don’t clutter up our heads unnecessarily. Thus this post.

My personal summary of the argument from first cause is that it can conclude that there was a cause to the universe, but that’s all. The argument **as stated** does not even attempt to support the claim that God exists or of how God might create a universe. It doesn’t add to our knowledge, thus we can’t make judgements about what the possible cause could be. We don’t have the tools and techniques to address it yet. It could be that it’s the wrong question, we just don’t know.

Assuming it is the right question, then the argument is laid out in either of the following forms:

• Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
• A causal loop cannot exist.
• A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
• Therefore, a First Cause (or something that is not an effect) must exist.

According to the argument, the existence of the Universe requires an explanation, and the creation of the Universe by a First Cause, generally assumed to be God, is that explanation.

In light of the Big Bang theory, a stylized version of argument has emerged (sometimes called the Kalam cosmological argument, the following form of which was created by Al-Ghazali and then strongly supported by William Lane Craig):

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
• The Universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the Universe had a cause.

There is, of course, lots of discussion to be had about both forms of this argument, some of it to the effect that

1. our concept of causation is incomplete or incorrect;
2. the idea that the universe is “contingent” may be wrong - it may be impossible for the universe to not exist;
3. what we call “the universe” may just be part of a larger (or even infinite) ensemble;
4. the claims about causal loops and actual infinities might be wrong;
5. it could be chance - the ways that things could exist are nearly infinitely more numerous that the way that things wouldn’t exist;

There are probably other lines of discussion to follow, as well. Regardless, let’s compare what Craig said in his article to the second form of the argument listed at Wikipedia (and also often attributed to Craig).

Craig most recently said (I paraphrase for clarity):

1. The universe cannot be uncaused.
2. The cause must come from a transcendent reality
3. There is an entity (assumed to exist in that transcendent reality) that is enormously powerful (assumed that it can create universes)
4. The entity is an unembodied mind
5. (assumed) this entity is God
6. (assumed) this God is the Christian God.

If we grant premise 1, what reason do we have to believe that premises 2 through 6 are true?

None.

He gives no reason to accept any of what he says.

As many folks have pointed out over the years, Craig is not attempting to persuade non-believers, he’s really just giving a pep talk to believers.

Just for the fun of it, though, we can annotate Craig’s argument a bit, for future reference.

1. The universe cannot be uncaused.
   • as I stated in an earlier paragraph, our concept of causation could be incomplete or incorrect ...or...
   • the idea that the universe is “contingent” may be wrong - it may be impossible for the universe to not exist;
   • what we call “the universe” may just be part of a larger (or even infinite) ensemble;
   • the claims about causal loops and actual infinities might be wrong;
   • it could be chance - the ways that things could exist are nearly infinitely more numerous that the way that things wouldn’t exist;
2. The cause must come from a transcendent reality.
   • this is a bare assertion. There is no reason to believe such a claim.
   • If we assent to this claim, then we must ask “how can this reality exist prior to our reality?”
   • And “doesn’t this insert an infinite regression into the argument?”
   • And “if this transcendent reality can exist without being created, then what’s to say this reality couldn’t exist without being created?” (a.k.a. “Special Pleading”)
3. There is an entity (assumed to exist in that transcendent reality) that is enormously powerful (assumed that it can create universes)
   • Who created this entity?
4. The entity is an unembodied mind
   • This is another bare assertion. What warrant are we given to believe such a claim?
5. (assumed) this entity is God
   • This is yet another bare assertion. What warrant are we given to believe such a claim?
6. (assumed) this God is the Christian God.
   • This is still another bare assertion. What warrant are we given to believe such a claim?

If you have any doubt as to how Craig’s argument fails, you might bookmark this.

Fine-tuned putdown

I enjoy a good put down as much as anyone. Pharyngula commenter drl2 made me smile with a goodie this morning as I continued to read through the comments on PZ’s takedown of WLC Craig’s tired old list of arguments for the existence of God at Faux News.

In an exchange on why the fine-tuning argument is a sham, he summarizes with this zinger:

So while it’s true that there are probably an infinite number of universes in which we couldn’t exist, there’s a good chance there’s also an infinity of possible worlds where WLC could still be a slick-talking moron.

Nice!

What's Wrong With Arguments for God?

Those non-believers that came to their non-belief by observing what’s wrong with the world - as compared against the conjecture that it was created by God - or analyzed the arguments for God and found them fallacious, absurd, or otherwise double-plus-ungood, can probably guess what’s wrong with all of Dr. William Lane Craig's reasons to believe in God, but it doesn’t hurt to re-state it occasionally.

In a nutshell, you can’t conclude that god is the best explanation for any of the proposed “mysteries” that Craig lists, because God does not exist independently of his arguments. He can't be found by looking for him directly. He can only be imagined. If he can only be imagined, what good is he as an explanation?

Say, for instance, if Galileo had peered into the heavens and seen God staring back, you might consider that evidence that god exists. If every astronomer since Galileo peers into the heavens and sees God staring back, you might say that God most probably exists.

If Darwin had set sail on the Beagle and found that every species of plant and animal sprang into existence within the last few thousand years, you might infer that they where created simultaneously. If every biologist and botanist since Darwin found only evidence of recent creation, this might lend further credence to that inference. When the DNA of all animals is eventually found to be perfect, containing no junk and no mutations, you might further infer creation by something perfect that knew what it was doing. It could be the same entity that Galileo observed. It might be God, and that might bolster the argument further.

I could go on, but I don’t really need to - the examples become repetitive very quickly. Everything that every branch of science observes leads us to believe that our patch of existence expanded into its present form about 13.7 billion years ago. No where has a God hypothesis - any God - risen to become even a remote contender as an explanation. The imperfect - and predictable - way that the universe evolves and that life evolves indicates wholly natural origins.

God may be used as an explanation for mysteries when people like Dr. Craig speak, but he never appears independently from Craig's (or anyone else's) arguments. It’s as if apologists can’t think of plausible explanations to life's complicated questions, but the most fantastical explanation imaginable is perfectly acceptable.

It’s a mystery that believers don’t see this