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I'm back, bitches. I've been roused from my slumbers by a friend's link to the Not Ashamed campaign against the marginalisation of Christianity in the UK. It's fronted by George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

A great cloud of witlessness

Apparently, it's getting harder to be a Christian in this country. So, what's the problem? The campaign's choice of heroes of the faith makes it clear that the essence of Christian practice is stopping gays getting the same rights as everyone else, getting yourself special exemptions from workplace dress codes (keeping up with the Muslims, I suppose), and proselytizing on the taxpayers' time. The Ministry of Truth examines these bold martyrs in detail (I've previously discussed the cases of Olive Jones and Gary MacFarlane myself) and concludes that they probably should be ashamed, really.

Now, I've had a rough time over the last few months, hence the lack of posting, and some Christians have been very kind to me (as well as some non-Christians, of course). So I'd formed a different view of the essentials: I had thought they were things like kindness and goodness, those things against which, as St Paul says, there is no law. But who am I to disagree with the former Archbishop of Canterbury?

I imagine Carey would say that if you can't spurn the gays or wear a silver ring to school, you can still be a Christian, but well, it just wouldn't be the same: hence the campaign's description of the heroes as "those who have suffered". It must have been awful for them.

The grand metanarrative

Some time ago, Weeping Cross (who is one of those moderate religionists of the sort that never gets enough publicity for condemning the extremists: glad to help) wrote that

the narrative of persecution is a terribly comforting one for many modern Christians, and is to a great degree generated by them. It's a way of taking cultural marginalisation and making it a sign that they're getting something right: people don't like the truth, so the more truthful we are about the Gospel, the more disliked we will be.

Someone called JPea commented on Heresiarch's latest, informing us that all this is part of the cosmic battle between good and evil which will soon culminate in the kind of end of series finale where they blow the entire special effects budget. Luckily, Rev Cross was around to tell them not to be so silly: "Try looking at what's actually happening and not trying to fit it into a grand metanarrative."

I'm not sure that's a realistic instruction for most of the Not Ashamed types: the whole point of that style of religion is to be part of the big story (I've just discovered Greta Christina had my idea first, curse her). The mundane facts that Christian observance is on the decline in this country and that more and more people won't put up with discrimination against gays must be invested with cosmic significance: there is a conspiracy of "strident" atheists and "politically correct" bureaucrats, with the Dark Lord behind it all. If the meteor that flew by last night wasn't a special signal to me on whether I should buy a new car, then how terribly shallow it all is.

Edited: One of my nice Christian friends didn't like the Advice Dog image which was attached to this posting, so I removed it.

Down at the Graun, they've been looking into those "traditionalists" in the Church of England, the ones who are involved in the most recent bout of the Interminable Anglican Sex Kerfuffle. Andrew Brown has discovered complementarianism, and he doesn't approve. He's found the Doctrinal Rectitude Trust's site, wherein he's learned that trustees sign various declarations of their doctrinal rectitude, annually (which seems a bit lax: I'd go for twice nightly, and three times on Saturdays). We've discussed the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy before, and the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was mentioned during the ComplementarianFail drama of 2009. It's the Danvers Statement which has Brown so exercised, and he quotes a few choice passages from it for your enjoyment.

Intelligent, willing submission

Now, my old church was a Reform one, so I remember a bit about this stuff. I've been sharing my memories of those halycon days of "intelligent, willing submission" here; wheeling out the inevitable Houseplants of Gor gag (and handcuffs) here (another commenter has actually read John Norman's books: fun times); making

simont's point about the failure mode of complementarianism here; and arguing that Christianity is not necessarily evil here.

Some of the reports I've seen about the Sex Kerfuffle have been theologically confused (not Brown's of course: he correctly identifies the Reform people as Calvinists). It's reported that the "traditionalists" might all defect to Rome: in Reform's case, this is about as likely as Ian Paisley getting all chummy with Jessel the Tri-felge Putenard. The traditionalists are two distinct groups, both of whom suspect that the other lot aren't really Christians, but who are prepared to make common cause over the vital issue of penises and the possession (bishops must have them) and disposition (they must not put them too near other men) of the same. It is the traditionalist Anglo-Catholics who might defect to Rome.

Disestablishmentarianism

The Graun's recent editorial warned that the church should either get with the programme or face disestablishment: "The Church of England now expects both the benefits of establishment and the cultural freedom of private religion. At the very least, a national church should not become disconnected from the best values of the country it serves."

The Graun seems to think that the established church should be what Andrew Rilstone describes as "the Church of Dumbledore", a sort of deistic religion whose purpose is to work for social goods, "baptising the dead and burying the sick". Rilstone originally wrote The Ballad of Reading Diocese the previous time a Kerfuffle over Jeffrey John arose, but it remains as relevant as it was then.

The National God Service, the Church of Dumbledore, seems to be one of those oddly British historical vestiges, like the monarchy. While I don't particularly see the point of it, it hardly seems worth the trouble of getting rid of it. A church which patronises women and views gay relationships as sinful, on the other hand, should go its own way: the state should have nothing to do with such an organisation. It's not clear to me who's currently winning: I'll watch developments with interest.

C. Michael Patton writes honestly about the day he lost his faith, and how it came back again. One paragraph of his struck me: "My new affair with atheism, carried with it the sudden burden of ultimate meaninglessness. People were no different than the rocks if there is no God. Not one thing has claim to be more value than another."

It's a popular line of thought, but so far as I can tell, not well founded. If you think Patton was right, you think that the statements:
1. There is no God.
2. People are of greater moral value than rocks.
are incompatible: if one is true, the other cannot be. But, on the face of it, I see no reason to think that. To make an argument, you'd need to introduce other, related, statements and back them up. (If you spend a lot of time debating this sort of stuff, you'll noticed I've taken a leaf from William Lane Craig's book. My response is pretty similar to his response to the logical Argument from Evil, where he points out that his opponents have just made statements without showing how the statements are logically related).

I mentioned this in the comments on Patton's post, and have been discussing it with The 27th Comrade. Comrade makes the weaker claim that "If God doesn't exist, it is not necessarily true that people are not rocks". He then goes on to claim that a person's value can only depend on a transcendent, immutable opinion; and that without God, there can be no objective moral values.

But I see no reason why, if there are moral facts independent of human opinions, they would be defined by the opinions of a (non-human) person. I also don't see how this makes values objective, since that word usually means "independent of anyone's opinion".

On the horns of a dilemma

At this point, I mentioned the Euthyphro dilemma (which I apparently introduced to William: I'm glad someone's learning something from my ramblings). If God sets what is moral by his opinions, they seem arbitrary: God could have made anything moral by fiat. If God's moral opinions reflect some other independent facts (as my opinion that "the sky is blue" does, say), while God may well know the facts better than we do, the facts would still be facts if he did not exist.

If you've had some evangelism training, you'll know there's a popular response to the dilemma, which is to say that goodness is part of God's essential nature: not external to him, but not something he chooses. Craig adds that we understand what words like "good" mean without reference to God; it is informative, rather than tautologous, to learn that "God is essentially good". But it seems then that any being which had the morally good properties God is claimed to have would be good, whether or not that being existed. As John D says, "All that Craig is doing is ascribing certain moral properties to God, but it is these moral properties that provide the foundation for morality, not God. He is talking about necessary moral truths, not necessary theistic truths. In other words, morality is still not 'up to God', it merely inheres in him."

Comrade seems to have got diverted by my examples of horrifying things God could have made good by fiat. I was unclear here, and unfortunately I chose as examples some of the horrifying things the Christian God actually does in the Bible, which Comrade then felt compelled to defend (I often run into this problem with theists: with hindsight, I should have avoided the sensitive subject of racism when talking to robhu about complementarianism, but I had trouble thinking of an example of discrimination which evangelicals don't already think is a good thing). But that wasn't my point, which was rather that, if morality is based solely on God's opinion, there's no reason to suppose that God's opinion is anything like what we mean by "good" (notice that Craig is cannier here).

Comrade asserts that (edited: if there is no God) we have no basis to judge anything that has evolved as wrong, referring to Orgel's Second Rule: "evolution is cleverer than you are". But again, I see no more reason to identify "what has evolved" with "good" than I do to identify "God's opinion" with "good". Evolution may be clever, but clever isn't the same as good.

The psychology of moral arguments

What I take from this is that some people want different things from moral values than I do. Some people just intuitively feel that if there isn't a God, they can't get those things. What they seem to want is:

Moral values must be "objective": this means they cannot be pure opinion, unless it's the opinion of someone they can always trust and who has much higher status than them.
Moral values must be unchanging.
Moral values must be "grounded": this word is often used. It's not clear what it means for morality to be grounded, but it gives us a strong visual image of grounded objects (at least, I assume you're also seeing a tree with an extensive root system underground), so suppose it does well as an intuition pump. God is supposed to be pretty solid, in non-physical sort of way: I hear he's a bit like a rock.

After the last case of nature imitating art, Gordon Brown's gaffe reminded me of that moment on Yes, Prime Minister when Sir Humphrey learns an important lesson: the microphone is always live, just as the gun is always loaded.

I don't know whether Mrs Duffy is a bigot. As Bernard Woolley might say, that's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I engage in open discussion on immigration; you are a bigot; he's being charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act. Andrew Rilstone says she's read too much of the Nasty Press, and that Brown is himself too used to pandering to them, in public at least, both sentiments which seem fair enough, to me.

Justice and Laws

There's a lot of blogging going on about the failure of yet another legal case where a Christian claimed they'd been discriminated against when they were sacked for discriminating against gays. Gary McFarlane, a relationship counsellor, was sacked by Relate for refusing to give therapy to homosexual couples. Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, intervened in the case. He submitted a witness statement in which he called for special, religiously sensitive, courts to hear cases like McFarlane's; said that Christians were being equated with bigots (that word again); and warned of "civil unrest" if things carried on (for an example of civil unrest organised by the Church of England, see Eddie Izzard's Cake or death sketch).

It's worth reading the full text of the judgement by the excellently named Lord Justice Laws. After giving his legal opinion, the judge addresses Lord Carey's statement. He rejects Carey's claim that the law says Christians are bigots, distinguishing discriminatory outcomes from malevolent intentions. He goes on:

The general law may of course protect a particular social or moral position which is espoused by Christianity, not because of its religious imprimatur, but on the footing that in reason its merits commend themselves. So it is with core provisions of the criminal law: the prohibition of violence and dishonesty. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, stretching over many centuries, has no doubt exerted a profound influence upon the judgment of lawmakers as to the objective merits of this or that social policy. And the liturgy and practice of the established Church are to some extent prescribed by law. But the conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. It imposes compulsory law, not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion. This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society. Therefore it lies only in the heart of the believer, who is alone bound by it. No one else is or can be so bound, unless by his own free choice he accepts its claims.

This debate is usually framed as Christians vs atheists and secularists. Indeed, Carey is still fulminating, fellow bishop Cranmer rumbles about establishment, and the Christian Legal Centre appears to think it's a good idea for the courts to take a position on the veracity of the Bible (let me know how that one works out for you, guys). But not all Christians are with Carey and the CLC: some Christians call out Carey for bringing Christianity into disrepute, and some recognise that claiming persecution has become a cottage industry for Christians in the UK. See also How to spot a fundamentalist Christian lobby group in your news, where you're encouraged to spot a pattern developing.

The Evangelical Alliance would like these cases to stay out of the courts. A common response to this sort of case is to ask whether some accommodation could be made to the discriminatory Christians: perhaps those who objected to dealing with gay couples could be excused such duties? That seems reasonable to an extent, but Lord Justice Laws makes it clear that there is no legal obligation on employers here. It would be churlish to object to employers freely choosing to make such arrangements, so long as they do not inconvenience co-workers who do not discriminate in this way, but it seems hard to argue that employers have a moral obligation to do so, either: co-workers would probably feel a bit like the elder brother in Prodigal Son parable, and might ask why should someone behaving badly get equal pay and more flexibility about their work then someone willing to do the entire job. More generally, if society has decided that such discrimination is wrong, why should those doing wrong get special treatment? What do you think, readers?

Edited to add: some more discussion of the McFarlane case is happening over on andrewducker's post about it.

... since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. -- St Paul, Epistle to the Romans

Suppose the existence and fine-tuning of the universe are best explained by a creator. Well, OK, but what sort of creator? Looking for the best explanation for things is clearly a reliable way to proceed: once we've settled the question of design by this method, we had better follow where it leads.

For if the Law was not ordained by the perfect God himself, as we have already taught you, nor by the devil, a statement one cannot possibly make, the legislator must be some one other than these two. In fact, he is the demiurge and maker of this universe and everything in it; and because he is essentially different from these two and is between them, he is rightly given the name, intermediate. -- Ptolemy's Letter to Flora

What goes for the Law goes for the world too: it's a mixed up sort of place, containing both good things and bad things. While other explanations are possible (just as, say, it is possible, though of course unlikely, that the universe somehow arose without a creator), Ptolemy's explanation seems the best one: the creator is not perfect. Not evil either, though, just... middle of the road. Doing the best they can, perhaps.

Is it impossible for someone to create universes if they aren't perfectly good? Could even a very technically skilled person be a bit of a dick? It seems odd, then, to suppose that the creator has the traditional attributes of omnipotence, perfect goodness, and so on.

... as this goodness is not antecedently established, but must be inferred from the phenomena, there can be no grounds for such an inference, while there are so many ills in the universe, and while these ills might so easily have been remedied, as far as human understanding can be allowed to judge on such a subject. I am Sceptic enough to allow, that the bad appearances, notwithstanding all my reasonings, may be compatible with such attributes as you suppose; but surely they can never prove these attributes. -- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume

There's an argument, which you may occasionally hear made by William Lane Craig, that we're not a position to know that the creator doesn't have sufficiently good reasons for allowing bad stuff to happen: he (according to Craig, the creator is a "he") is said to move in mysterious ways, after all. Unfortunately, as John D relates, this makes it hard to see why we should intervene if we see someone suffering: who are we to say what good may come of it? Moreover, if our understanding of bad and good outcomes is so suspect, how are we then in a position to know that the creator is good?

He may be fully convinced of the narrow limits of his understanding; but this will not help him in forming an inference concerning the goodness of superior powers, since he must form that inference from what he knows, not from what he is ignorant of. The more you exaggerate his weakness and ignorance, the more diffident you render him, and give him the greater suspicion that such subjects are beyond the reach of his faculties. -- Dialogues, again

Perhaps someone could appeal to a sacred book to show that the creator is good. Still, these things seem open to interpretation: we'd best leave Craig and Ptolemy to argue about the details of their shared scriptures. In any case, we'd need convincing that the book was a reliable source on the subject.

Perhaps, in the absence of external evidence, someone could come to a strong inner conviction that the creator is perfectly good. But it seems this sort of confidence can cut both ways. As Chris Hallquist writes, "If there is any actual case where we are confident that divine inaction is incompatible with perfection, then we must conclude that God does not exist." (It seems that "God does not exist" might be a little hasty here, but we'd best leave Hallquist to argue with Ptolemy on that score).

Given all this, it seems odd to me that so many people confidently assert that the creator is good. We rightly prefer to believe that our instruments are broken than that we have disproved the Law of Gravitation, but it's interesting to test our limits: if you are such a person, is there any such case you can imagine which would convince you to change your position? If not, why do you trouble yourself with evidence about the creator's moral character either way? It would seem better to just accept that some people have one conviction about the creator, and some another. On the other hand, if we do look to the evidence, it seems that what we observe is best explained by a creator who is imperfect, and possibly indifferent.

Georges Rey's Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception ties together a lot of things I've been thinking about on this blog. Rey writes that:

I find myself taking seriously the following hypothesis, which (for lack of a better name) I call meta-atheism: Despite appearances, many Western adults who've been exposed to standard science and sincerely claim to believe in God are self-deceived; at some level they believe the claim is false.

How wude

This looks like an atheist version of a Christian argument (which originated with St Paul): the Christian claims it's obvious that God exists, deep down everyone knows it, and if you claim not to, you're deceiving yourself because you don't want to admit to your own sinfulness and God's moral authority. If you sign up to a scheme like this, and you view your opponent's arguments as mere evidence of their self-deception, you're engaging in logical rudeness.

That said, there are some differences between Rey's version and the Christian one, which boil down the way Rey is less insufferable about it all (Rey says that meta-atheism doesn't entail atheism, he does engage with Christian apologists in his paper, he admits he might be wrong, he doesn't think believers are evil or stupid, and so on). So, assuming we're mollified a bit by some counterbalancing logical politeness, what's the argument for meta-atheism? Rey has 11 points which he thinks count as evidence. A couple seemed particularly relevant to my interests, so I'll concentrate on those.

That's just too silly

One was what Rey calls "detail resistance": the way believers find it odd or even silly to investigate the mechanics of God's supposed actions. As I've mentioned previously, one of the final straws for me, before I stopped going to church, was an argument I was involved in on uk.religion.christian, on the details of how God acts today (yet another rehearsal of the argument that caused me to write this essay, as it happened). During the argument, I realised that I somehow found the discussion itself silly. I started to wonder what was going on in my head, and things unravelled from there.

Likewise, Christians who think God caused the Big Bang would find it silly to look for details of God's involvement in black holes. This feeling of silliness is a clue: Rey observes that "this resistance to detail is strikingly similar to the same resistance one encounters in dealing with fiction. It seems as silly to ask the kind of detailed questions about God as it does for someone to ask for details about fictional characters, e.g.: What did Hamlet have for breakfast?"

Invisible dragons

Rey also mentions "betrayal by reactions and behaviour". Christians would respond that of course, they're not perfect, but what Rey has in mind is not moral failings. Rather, it's the sort of thing Hume refers to: though people make protestations of faith, "nature is too hard for all their endeavours, and suffers not the obscure, glimmering light, afforded in those shadowy regions, to equal the strong impressions, made by common sense and by experience".

We've been here before: Rey is thinking about how someone who anticipated-as-if a religion was true would behave, and comparing that with how most believers actually behave. Previously, we've mentioned that it's odd that believers already know the ways in which tests for God will fail: if you're a Christian, you've got an idea of which prayers are realistic, a strange proposition, when you think about it. And if you're an atheist and feel like stumping a Christian, ask them what sin is committed by parents who pray for healing rather than taking their dying kid to a doctor.

This round of bad arguments is about science. Before I start, I'll acknowledge my debt to Jeffrey L. Kasser's lectures, though, of course, any mistakes in applying them to the question of science and religion are my own.

Most people recognise science's effectiveness at modelling the world, and theists are no exception. Some theists disagree with well established conclusions of science (for example, evolution). Some theists go along with the folk in liberal arts faculties who, in Kasser's phrase, think science is a particularly dull literary genre. I'm not going to talk about either of these sorts of people. This post is about theists who claim their religion is compatible with, but has gone "beyond", science. Their claims usually rely on making true, but uninteresting, arguments, in the hope that the hearer slides to a stronger conclusion than the arguments warrant.

Science has not explained X, therefore God did it

This is the God of the gaps argument. Right now, popular choices for X are abiogenesis, consciousness, and altruism. To take that last example, Francis Collins argues that the theory of evolution has no explanation for pure altruism, and, following C.S. Lewis's Argument from Morality in Mere Christianity, claims that the Christian God must be responsible. As the former director of the Human Genome Project, Collins's opinions carry weight, but, poking around with Google Scholar, I found no evidence that he has contributed his criticisms to the peer reviewed literature on the evolution of altruism. Even if he had written a good paper on that subject, more is needed before we accept that the best alternative explanation is a particular god. As Gert Korthof's review of Collins's book puts it "Collins fails to demonstrate a. the failure of Darwinism to explain the Moral Law (true altruism) b. the divine origin of the Moral Law c. b follows from a."

Science cannot investigate/explain/prove everything

There's a bad argument from atheists which leads to confusion here. Some atheists seem to use "science" to mean "anything for which there's good evidence", but the theists, quite sensibly, use it to mean "that stuff scientists do". If the theist faces an atheist who says "your religion is invalid because it cannot be established by science", it's legitimate for the theist to dispute that statement by talking about other, non-scientific, forms of evidence which most people accept.

There are some things we do not use science to investigate, because they seem a poor fit for scientific investigation. To use one of Kasser's examples, we wouldn't get into a scientific investigation of the "universal law" that "all the beer in my fridge is American", even if that is a statement which has the form of a scientific law ("all copper conducts electricity"). I prefer to distinguish scientific evidence from other rational evidence (though I think these forms of evidence have something in common which is not shared by religious "ways of knowing"): Eliezer Yudkowsky's article on the subject describes what I mean.

So, the theists are at least partially right, but notice that none of this says much to convince us that there's a God. When they try to do that, theists typically say that science or other rational evidence will get you some way towards theism (though, I'd say, not all that far), but then add that some "other way of knowing" or "faith" is required in addition. But if the theist claims they have another "way of knowing", they must demonstrate its reliability, rather than merely knocking existing ways of knowing.

Science cannot prove your wife loves you, but you believe that, don't you?

A specific case of the "science cannot explain everything" argument, this particular example gets its own section because it's regularly trotted out by people who ought to know better (for example, John Lennox in his debate with Richard Dawkins). Again, this is one is true, but uninteresting. It's not the job of science to prove my wife loves me, just as it's not the job of science to explore my fridge looking for American beer. Nevertheless, assuming I'm not actually a stalker, I have sufficient rational evidence that my wife loves me, and I don't have to invoke any special ways of knowing to get it.

Next time

Next time, we'll look at claims that science arose from theism, and talk about reductionism and butter.

As a toxic neo-atheist fundamentalist neo-rationalist sceptic, it was difficult to know what to hope for in all the kerfuffle about the Equality Bill: is it better that the government narrows the scope for discrimination against homosexuals by religious organisations, or better that the church publicly admits it's so important for it to discriminate that it'll use the votes of the bishops in the House of Lords to accomplish it? Which will bring in the Kingdom of Dawkins sooner? It's so hard to tell.

The only winning move is not to play

The story so far: the Government wanted to specify the scope of the religious exemption from the Bill's provisions, after the European Commission said the existing exemptions were too broad and might result in legal action from the EU. The Government told the churches that their somewhat cosy position would not change and that the new wording was merely clarifying it, but the churches weren't taken in: there were petitions organised by charming characters, everyone got terribly excited, and there was an amendment proposed in the House of Lords to strike out the more specific language. As Andrew Brown's blog posting has it "Eight serving bishops and Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, voted for the decisive amendment which was carried by five votes". Eight bishops and five votes, you say?

Brown says this may be a pyrrhic victory for the church, as its actions have shown it's out of touch with Radio 4 listeners and other worthy types. If you were Rowan Williams (you remember, Rowan Williams), you'd probably be wondering how long the forces of antidisestablishmentarianism will be able to hold out against the floccinaucinihilipilification of the Christian heritage of this country.

Decorate the church with swords, or pictures of knights, or flaming torches

It's not just Radio 4 listeners the church has to worry about. Over at the Times, Ruth Gledhill wonders why men don't go to church. She quotes from this painfully awful advice from a Christian charity on how to make the church attractive to men: "Men appreciate 'professionalism'... things done well. For instance, if you use a drama make sure it is good, otherwise men will find it embarrassing" (women are, of course, undiscriminating); "does the church always need to be decorated with flowers? ... How would it go down to decorate with swords, or pictures of knights, or flaming torches?" How would it go down, readers?

Gledhill has a serious point, which is that the church is undergoing the evaporative cooling of group beliefs: society is getting more socially liberal, and those left in the church less so, because those who do have liberal beliefs cannot stand to stay in the church. Though Gledhill has some anecdotes about thriving liberal churches, she doesn't back this up with data.

Luckily, someone else has gathered a whole load of data. According to the Guardian, the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey by the National Centre for Social Research showed that "36% of people thought sexual relations between two adults of the same sex were 'always or mostly' wrong, down from 62% in 1983" (detailed numbers are here, if anyone wants to play with them). Gledhill links to the chapter on religion from the survey, which makes interesting reading: between 1983 and 2008, the percentage of the sample describing themselves some sort of Christian fell from 66% to 50%. "No religion" rose from 31% to 43%. The percentage describing themselves as "Church of England" fell from 40% to 23%. In 2008, 62% said they never attended religious services.

We'll nae be fooled again

As Brown says, there's a tension between the government's role in promoting libertarian freedom and promoting social goods. There is an argument for freedom of association, but the question is where to draw the line. My preference would be to allow the exceptions the church wants, on the condition that organisations making use of them will not receive public money or tax exemptions (such as charitable status). The church is dwindling, and out of step with society: the rest of us should not have to pay for it.

Anyone for another petition?

To give the impression that I'm fair and balanced, this time round I'm looking at a bad argument which is usually used by atheists.

There's a scene The West Wing where President Bartlet tears a strip off an evangelical Christian talk radio host. In the scene (you can see it on YouTube, or read a transcript), the evangelical tells Bartlett that the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. Bartlet then launches into a series of rhetorical questions, asking how he should carry out other Old Testament rules which we'd now find ridiculous, if not downright evil: "My chief of staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police?"

Let's call this the Barlet gambit: the President's argument seems to be that it's inconsistent for evangelicals to say "homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so", because they're not also keeping these other rules which are also found in the Bible. The gambit is a favourite with people who argue with evangelicals about homosexuality: sometimes they even quote Bartlet.

Unfortunately, the Bartlet gambit fails as an argument.

What's wrong with it

Evangelical Christians have reasons why they're not keeping the Old Testament laws despite regarding the Old Testament as scripture. The question comes up in the New Testament itself, once we reach the Acts of the Apostles, where we read of the first non-Jews converting to Christianity (up to that point in the story, what will later become Christianity is still a movement within Judaism, although a few Gentiles are impressed with Jesus in the gospels). The Council of Jerusalem ruled that Gentile Christians are allowed to eat shrimp and wear mixed fibres and, luckily for penis owners, don't have to be circumcised.

So, according to Acts (which, like the rest of the Bible, is inerrant, remember), Christians sorted this stuff out in the first century AD. They aren't going to worry about atheists calling them hypocrites for wearing cotton/polyester blend while "hating the sin and loving the sinner".

Perhaps Barlet is specifically objecting to the evangelical's use of Leviticus, which does put homosexuality on a par with things which aren't kosher, rather than with things which are morally evil. Alas, even without Leviticus, there are other Bible passages which can be pressed into service against the gay, and you can rely on evangelicals to know most of them, because the issue has become a defining feature of evangelicalism. We could argue that these passages don't apply to modern committed homosexual partnerships, but evangelicals don't find these arguments impressive.

What to do instead

In the UK, many rank-and-file evangelicals are educated professionals. They didn't get into religion to give gays a hard time, and, unless they've completely disappeared up their own sub-culture, they tend to be a bit embarrassed by the anti-gay stuff. Still, because it's "what the Bible says", they feel they're obliged to go along with it anyway, even if the Guardian wouldn't approve (the evangelical jargon phrase for that sort of thing is that it's a "hard teaching" where you'll just have to "trust God").

If I were a gifted orator like Barlet, I think I'd appeal to their sense of justice. Is there perhaps something odd about the way churches accept straight couples who are openly in their second or later marriage (something about which Jesus had some strong words to say), but wouldn't be happy with an openly gay couple? Some hypocrisy there, maybe?

Or we might try empathy. There's the problem that, as Valerie Tarico says, evangelicalism "can re-direct our mother-bear instincts away from protecting vulnerable individuals and toward protecting the ideology itself. Believers may come to feel more protective of their religion than they are of actual human beings." Still, it might be worth a go: is it fair to say that gay people cannot form committed romantic relationships? Imagine yourself in their shoes. If you obey the evangelical rules, it seems rather a lonely place.

There's an awful lot of nonsense talked about religion and atheism, from both sides of the fence. Today, I'm looking at a specific set of theist (usually Christian) arguments, namely, those related to "worldviews". Fear not, though, theism fans: this is the start of a series on bad arguments, and the atheists have it coming too...

Note: the section titles here are links which should take you straight back to the section. So if you find someone playing "Spot the Worldview" online, you can link them straight to this page to show them the error of their ways.

Slightly less difficult

As I've mentioned before, talk of worldviews became fashionable among evangelicals when I was an undergraduate. Back then, one of the big evangelistic events the Christian Union organised was called Paradigm Shift, a term borrowed from Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As part of our evangelism training, we read Nick Pollard's book, Evangelism made slightly less difficult, which was about helping people to see the flaws in worldviews other than Christianity (Pollard writes about this approach here).

There were some good things about this approach. Engaging with the arguments of people who disagree with you is better than writing those arguments off as a smokescreen put up by evasive sinners. It's more realistic than the major alternative approach, which was (and still is) treating Two Ways to Live as inherently magical, so that the most important thing was to "proclaim" it to non-Christians as often as possible. Still, worldview talk can go wrong. Here are some ways I've seen that happen:

Worldview X is false, therefore my preferred rival, Y, is true

This is an example of the false dilemma fallacy. As gareth_rees says, theists may assume (but not show) that the worldview they're proposing does better than a major rival, and spend all their time attacking the rival. In creationists' attempts to disprove evolution, there's an implicit assumption that if evolution fails, the Christian God is the next preferred explanation. Similarly, much apologetical effort is directed against materialism or physicalism, when it is perfectly possible to be an atheist and believe in ghosts, say. Matt McCormick's useful article, Know Your Godless Heathen Positions, makes clear the distinctions between a number of possible positions (atheism, materialism, naturalism, and so on).

This is not a fallacy if an atheist is, say, a committed materialist who won't accept religion for that reason. In that case, a theist would need to clear the ground by arguing against materialism. The fallacy occurs when, having cleared the ground, the theist fails to build their own argument.

Spot the Worldview

We all have views about how the world is, but many theists assume that all atheists bought a well-known brand that's available in bulk (as Christianity itself is, albeit in a variety of sizes, colours and flavours). A while back, on this thread, many theists seemed to assume that all atheists would be strict materialists. That's not how I'd describe myself: I'd say I'm a provisional materialist, at best.

Sometimes, theists assume they can argue against these atheist brands merely by mentioning their names and saying that everybody knows brand X is inferior. For example, you might be in the middle of talking about Dawkins's books when a theist tells you that "Richard Dawkins is a logical positivist, and positivism has been debunked". This doesn't work on it's own: first they have to show that Dawkins is a logical positivist (he's not, he's a scientific realist), then they have to give some argument against positivism, and lastly show it's relevant to an argument about whether his books are any good.

Everything is a faith position, atheism is a religion

Evangelical Christians like to argue (wrongly) that "everyone worships something". This translates into worldview talk as statements like "everything is a faith position: I have faith in God, you have faith in human reason/science/the Conservative Party". You might hear the theist make a statement like "atheism is a religion". What could they mean by this?

They might mean that everyone has to start by assuming some stuff (that they're not in the Matrix, say, or that scientists aren't just making their results up), assuming stuff you can't show is "faith", therefore everyone has "faith", and therefore Christian faith is as justified as any other. This goes wrong in a couple of ways: firstly, it assumes that all such assumptions are equally reasonable. They aren't: for example, they can be differentiated by how easily we could tell if they were wrong. Edited: Chris Hallquist puts it better than I did, when he says that "belief in the Christian God isn’t very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threatened by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn’t accept without evidence–namely, the beliefs of other religions. That kind of response is very hard to reject without special pleading on behalf of Christianity, and doesn’t involve commitment to any potentially troublesome epistemic principles."

Secondly, this use of "faith" isn't how many Christians like to use the word. According to Christians, faith means putting your trust in a person. Christianity transplants notions of loyalty to friends onto loyalty to worldviews. With the exception of those of us who worship at the Church of Dawkins, atheism isn't about loyalty to or trust in a person, nor is steadfastness in a particular atheist view seen as a virtue (quite the reverse, as far as I'm concerned).

They might mean that there are atheists who, for example, organise into groups to further their aims, or raise funds for the cause. As Poke argues, even atheists may feel they should not organise into groups because "that's what religion does". The atheists should recognise that doing the opposite of what mistaken people do doesn't make you correct. The theists should recognise that forming into groups and raising money is not what makes something a religion.

Finally, they might mean that atheists imitate the worst features of religion. This could be true: both religious and non-religious groups may fall into uncritical supercriticality, the idea that it's wrong to criticise any argument that supports your position. It would be right for a theist to criticise an atheist group which fell into this trap, but not all of them do so.

A couple of the blogs I read recently had discussions on the resurrection of Jesus: Common Sense Atheism and Parchment and Pen.

The wrong kind of God

In the comment thread over at Comment Sense Atheism, I wondered about the role of natural theology (that is, stuff like the Kalam Cosmological Argument) in preparing the ground for belief in the resurrection. When William Lane Craig debated against Bart Ehrman, Craig said "That Jesus rose naturally from the dead is fantastically improbable. But I see no reason whatsoever to think that it is improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead." According to Ayer (that is, the commenter over at Common Sense Atheism, not the logical positivist), "Natural theology shows the existence of the monotheistic God; the resurrection, in its religio-historical context, shows that that monotheistic God is the one described by Jesus and the disciples, whose redemptive purpose is laid out in the Bible."

There's an unwarranted assumption here. Suppose we grant, for the sake of argument, that the Kalam argument is valid. This gets us as far as deism. To get to Christianity, we need the resurrection, as Ayer says. But if God didn't do it, the resurrection is fantastically improbable, which I think means the New Testament evidence alone shouldn't convince us unless we assume that God is the sort of god who might raise Jesus from the dead. But why should we assume that? Remember, we need that assumption to bolster the NT evidence sufficiently for us to believe it, but the only available "evidence" that God is that sort of god is the resurrection itself, the very thing we're seeking to prove. I've not seen an argument from Craig (or any other apologist) which avoids this apparent circularity.

Simple explanations

So we're stuck with being deists, which is a bit boring: as far as I know, they don't have any choons. Perhaps we might instead argue that the New Testament evidence is sufficient on its own: it shows Jesus rose, and hence (if we're feeling charitable about it) that there's a god of the right sort, Christianity is true, greatest hits of Charles Wesley here we come.

This was what the Parchment and Pen posting was about. C Michael Patton argues that alternative explanations are less simple than just accepting that Jesus rose from the dead. There was a thread on the local newsgroup, cam.misc, where another Christian made the same argument.

I remembered that Heinlein once said the simplest explanation is always "The lady down the street is a witch; she did it." What's wrong with that explanation? It hides complexity behind language, as Alex Selby explains. I ended up saying that the Christian account is "simpler" in some sense, but not in a sense that lends it credibility. In this sense, the "simplest" explanation for what you see in Derren Brown's stage shows is that mind reading really works and he's a master at it: all that other stuff he does to achieve the effects is extremely convoluted in comparison. Alex doesn't think we should describe that sense as simple. I can see his point, and perhaps I should have said that the Christian account feels simpler, rather than that it is.

At this point, a popular apologetic move is to accuse your opponent of assuming naturalism, materialism, scientism and other bad -isms (remember: if you have no other arguments, you can always play Spot The Worldview). I'm not sure whether that's a valid move. I think you'd need an argument that using this informational Occam's Razor won't do the job in the case of non-material stuff, which again, I haven't seen anyone attempt.

The talk to CUAAS was surprisingly well attended, given I spoke at the same time as Jo Brand, who I met on my way to the loos (we exchanged nods, as one speaker at the Cambridge Union does to another: it is not the done thing to make much of these things). I'm not sure how many CICCU people turned up, since they didn't make themselves known to me (apparently one woman was frantically making notes during my sermon, a well known evangelical habit, so I suspect there were a few). I spoke too fast, but people in Cambridge hear fast, so that's probably OK.

Below, you can find my notes, with some hyperlinks to expand on the things I said. ( Read more... )

There was a question and answer session afterwards. I remember some questions along the lines of:( Read more... )

Thanks to CUAAS for inviting me and giving me pizza. I had fun, and I hope my listeners did too.

Edited: Rave reviews continue to pour in. Well, William liked it, anyway, and has some observations on "atheist societies" to boot.

Friends have been playing with Spotify, which it turns out has a whole load of Matt Redman songs (imagine U2 singing about how Jesus is their boyfriend, and you've got it). I heard Redman at Soul Survivor when I went, many years ago. Though the charismatic services were a little bit scary at first, the whole thing fired me up to the extent that I alarmed my parents on my return by saying I was thinking of training for the ministry (I could have been the next John W. Loftus). At one of those services, I ended up wondering whether I should ask for prayer for healing. Looking back, I can perhaps understand how the Neumanns thought it was better to pray than phone an ambulance. The question of what, if anything, God is up to these days is a tricky one, and it's easy to get it wrong.

Praise the Prophets

A while ago, the Word of Dawkins came unto me, and the Spirit of Rationality rested upon me, and I spake forth, saying: "most believers already know what excuses to make for the apparent absence of dragons or gods, even as they claim belief in them, so they're keeping a map of the real world somewhere. The believers without the map are the ones other believers regard either as shiny-eyed lunatics, like the folk who don't go to doctors because God will heal them." Prophetic, no? (You may say that I'd read about similar cases in the past, but I think you're bringing a question-begging assumption of metaphysical naturalism to my text).

Rowan Williams has a map. He recently told everyone not to expect God to do much about global warming (by the way, Newsarse's version of the story is good fun). Likewise, in the Neumanns' situation, most Christians would call a doctor. So, I don't think God is going to stop global warming or heal diabetics (much less amputees), and, for the most part, Christians don't either. Of course, I don't attempt to excuse the absence of the dragon by telling the story of the man on the roof of his house in the flood. But when you consider what we anticipate will happen, we're not so very different after all.

Wasted youth

When I was a Christian, it seemed there was an unspoken understanding on these matters. God made all that is, seen and unseen; Jesus did all those miracles you read about in the New Testament; the statistical likelihood was that Jesus would, in the fullness of time, come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and bring fresh supplies of lemon-soaked paper napkins. God could do anything. Still, right now, you were more likely to see answers to prayer about work stress and for courage to evangelise your friends than answers to prayers for people to be healed of cancer. Or at least, it was best not to be too surprised that prayers for the big stuff might be "answered in a different way". (That is, if someone dies, they don't have cancer any more. No, really, this is not a joke). There were people who asked annoying questions about why God didn't do more, dissatisfied customers if you will, but I just found them irritating. God obviously existed, so why couldn't they just realise that?

The Neumanns did without this tacit understanding, which is unfortunate because having the understanding means you have the map: it's what allows Christians to get along in polite society without, say, being jailed for killing their children. Rather, just as Elijah did, the Neumanns anticipated-as-if God would act. They believed Biblical promises on prayer, as reiterated by their supporters here and here.

So what went wrong? Well, regular readers will know that God isn't real, though Christians can hardly say so. The usual excuse won't do, alas: it can't be that the Neumanns lacked faith. A family with sufficient faith to gather to pray around their ailing child as she lies on her deathbed is surely an example for Christians everywhere, even the ones who believe in doctors. Likewise, even if God has provided doctors, it seems mean-spirited for God to penalise the Neumanns for not using them: which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? We must look for better excuses.

Things not seen

Perhaps those Bible verses aren't intended to be the promises they seem to be (though they seem pretty clear to me, so if you encounter this argument, I hope you will chastise the person making it for twisting the Scriptures). Perhaps, as the Neumanns apparently believe, God foreknew that the kid would eventually turn away from Jesus, and took her home early to prevent it (though I'm disappointed by their liberalism, in that after their child died, they didn't slit the throats of the local pastors and turn instead to Baal, Satan or Dawkins, which would have been a more biblical response). Still, both these explanations are at least possible, and if the maintenance of your belief is itself a virtue, that possibility should suffice. As recent convert Sam Harris says:

These people [that is, neo-militant rationalist atheists like Jerry Coyne] are simply obsessed with finding the best explanation for the patterns we witness in natural world. But faith teaches us that the best, alas, is often the enemy of the good. For instance, given that viruses outnumber animals by ten to one, and given that a single virus like smallpox killed 500 million human beings in the 20th century (many of them children), people like Coyne ask whether these data are best explained by the existence of an all knowing, all powerful, and all loving God who views humanity as His most cherished creation. Wrong question Coyne! You see, the wise have learned to ask, along with Miller, whether it is merely possible, given these facts, that a mysterious God with an inscrutable Will could have created the world. Surely it is! And the heart rejoices...
Of course, one mustn't carry this sublime inquiry too far. Some have asked whether it is possible that a mysterious God with an inscrutable Will works only on Tuesdays or whether He might be especially fond of soft cheese. There is no denying that such revelations, too, are possible - and may be forthcoming. But they do not conduce to joy, chastity, homophobia, or any other terrestrial virtue - and that is the point. Men like Coyne and Dennett miss these theological nuances. Indeed, one fears that these are the very nuances they were born to miss.

Perhaps God is not deceased, but merely pining for the fjords. This, too, is possible. And the heart rejoices...

Some theists are not far from the Republic of Heaven, it seems. Even now, I have hopes that they may turn to rationality.

First, there's Terry Eagleton, who said in an interview in New Humanist that "If Dawkins has emancipated people, freed them from the religious closet as it were, then all credit to him. Loath as I might be to compare Dawkins to Jesus Christ, in this he resembles the heroic figure in the New Testament who comes to sweep away all the fetishism and sickness and cynicism of the neurotic religionists."

Secondly, Richard Morgan (a Christian re-convert who was formerly a regular over at Dawkins's site) has suggested that New Atheism may all be part of God's plan. I have encouraged Richard to return to Dawkins in this thread. I said:

I wonder just how many de-converts who return to Christianity were ever really atheists at all. I mean, they may have looked like atheists, but were they proper atheists, like I myself am? How could they have been? Remember, posting on the Dawkins site doesn't make you an atheist any more than going to McDonalds makes you a hamburger.

It is clear to me that these people never really had a personal relationship with Dawkins (by which I mean they read his books and sort of felt they must be true: obviously one should not be atheologically naive enough to expect any sort of clear two-way communication in a personal relationship. I did once email him, and I have every confidence he read it, plus I once got a comment on my blog and an email from Jerry Coyne, which is practically as good, surely?)

Speaking of atheological naivete, these people's ignorance of atheism is shocking: they formerly believed in a caricatured Dawkins who advocated biological determinism and "scientism"; and they departed from orthodoxy in their concentration on Dawkins to the exclusion of the other Three Persons of the Horsemen. Doubtless some of this reflects the parlous state of teaching in atheist communities other than the ones I'm in, but I think these people have some responsibility to educate themselves. Had they even read more sophisticated atheological works? Are they familiar with Dennett on belief, Hume on miracles and on design, or Loftus on "the outsider test"? Surely not.

Richard, even now it is not too late for you. Just screw up your face and try harder, dammit.

If you've been moved by what you've heard here, there'll be someone waiting in the comments section at the end to engage in rational debate with you. Thanks.

Prompted by Rowan Williams saying that neo-atheist fundamentalists aren't attacking the religion ++Rowan actually believes in, the Barefoot Bum has a good bit on the role of the term "faith" in discussions with believers.

Getting killed on the next zebra crossing

The argument goes something like this: religious faith is sometimes taken by atheists to mean "belief without evidence" (Dawkins says as much in The God Delusion, for example). "Ah, no," say believers, "that's not what faith means, our belief is based on the evidence". There follows an interlude for examination of this evidence, which turns out not to be so impressive. "Did we say based on? We meant compatible with," say the believers. "That's not good enough", says the Bum, "all sorts of things are compatible with the evidence if you're prepared to add ad hoc stuff to shore up the core beliefs you really don't want to get rid of, but then those core beliefs are held without regard to evidence". "But," say believers, "you yourself have some core beliefs you hold without regard to evidence". "Well," says the Bum, "I don't think so, but anyway, you've just conceded that I was right about faith, haven't you?" "Oh dear," say the believers, "we hadn't thought of that", and promptly disappear in a puff of logic.

Six impossible things before breakfast

The believers' final attempt to parry the Bum is similar to an apologetic argument I've seen, whereby the believer says "If you have an unevidenced belief that your senses aren't under the control of the Matrix or of a cartesiandaemon, why not round it off by believing in my religion?" This is an odd argument: the believer mentions beliefs you might doubt if you're a radical sceptic (you'll recall that you risk becoming a radical sceptic if you're a university-educated Catholic), but which most people accept because it's impractical not to. It turns out that belief in gods is something we can get by without. (On a related note, the folks over at Iron Chariots have a reasonable article on the proposition that atheism is based on faith).

Edited: Chris Hallquist puts it better than I did, when he says that "belief in the Christian God isn’t very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threatened by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn’t accept without evidence–namely, the beliefs of other religions. That kind of response is very hard to reject without special pleading on behalf of Christianity, and doesn’t involve commitment to any potentially troublesome epistemic principles."

Three parts of faith

There's another thing missing from the popular atheist definition of faith. At least for Christians, faith has an element of trust as well as acceptance of facts. After all, even the demons believe.

Over at Parchment and Pen, C. Michael Patton separates faith into three parts: content (faith in what?), assent (affirmation that the content is true) and trust (the part that the demons lack). Patton blames the lack of assent (which requires an examination of the evidence) for the loss of faith of the ex-Christians he's encountered. He goes so far as to say that the statement "You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart" is stupid. Patton seems quite different from other Christians, who say that the main reason they believe is the internal feeling of God's presence, what they call the witness of the Holy Spirit. One can perhaps forgive atheists for using "faith" in a way Christians don't like if the Christians themselves aren't sure what it's about.

The virtue of faith

A thought which should occur to anyone who reads Less Wrong: you can make people reluctant to give up religious faith by making them think that having faith is virtuous. And this is what we find: in Christian philosophy, the theological virtue of "faith" is holding on to belief in the face of doubt. But hang on, where is the virtue in this? Chopping and changing all the time would be impractical, but it's hard to see why it's wrong. I suppose that conceiving of a religion as a relationship with God makes faith seem virtuous, because then we apply our notions of faithfulness within a human relationship. But these notions do not apply to facts about the world (even the demons believe), and to think that they do is to fall victim to a cognitive trick (since if the facts of religion are not correct, maybe there's no-one to have a relationship with). Rather, say:

If the sky is blue
I desire to believe "the sky is blue".
If the sky is not blue
I desire to believe "the sky is not blue".

Following on from his review of two books by theistic evolutionists, Jerry Coyne recently wrote an article criticising the US National Academy of Sciences for saying that evolution and Christianity are compatible. Richard Hoppe at Panda's Thumb disagrees with Coyne, but P Z Myers supports him. Atheist fight!

Is evolution compatible with Christianity? Well, yes and no. I was a Christian who believed in evolution. This means not having good answers to some stuff Christians might care about: was the Fall a real event, and if not, where does original sin come from? Did physical death really enter the world through sin? If, as Christians usually argue as part of their theodicy on natural disasters, creation itself was corrupted in the Fall (whatever the Fall was), how exactly does that work? If you're a Christian who accepts evolution, you don't need atheists to ask these awkward questions, your creationist brothers (and sisters) will do a much better job of it.

But that doesn't show incompatibility. If you keep running into these problems and have to keep adding ad hoc patches to your theory, you should consider discarding it, but there are things I don't have good answers to as an atheist, and that hasn't stopped me being one.

I was a student of science who was a Christian. That seems to be where the real problem lies. Theistic evolutionists tend to say stuff like "Evolution could have been the way God did it" or "Maybe God nudges electrons from time to time". They might make a wider point about "other ways of knowing". At some point, someone is probably going to say "well, Science cannot prove your wife loves you, but you believe that, don't you?"

The Less Wrong crowd recently discussed whether their community is and should be welcoming to theists. Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted is a good post which deserves reading on its own merits, but I was particularly interested in Eliezer Yudkowsky's comment about compartmentalising rationality.

If Wednesday [the child of Mormons mentioned in the article] can partition, that puts an upper bound on her ability as a rationalist; it means she doesn't get on a deep level why the rules are what they are. She doesn't get, say, that the laws regarding evidence are not social customs that can be different from one place to another, but, rather, manifestations of the principle that you have to walk through a city in order to draw an accurate map of it.

Sam Harris mocks this compartmentalisation in his satirical response to Coyne's critics (the paragraphs following "Finally, Kenneth Miller, arrives" are the key ones). Science is one manifestation of the principle that you draw a map by walking the streets, not by sitting in your room and thinking hard about it. There are other legitimate forms of cartography, such as the one you apply when you conclude that someone loves you (assuming you're not actually a stalker). Perhaps, like the Tube map, they're not doing quite the same precise measurement as you'd expect from science, but they make useful maps.

Recall the original point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, before it developed into a cod-religion for annoying Christians with, like the worship of Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUHHH). The FSM's inventor used it to point out that if you're going to say your god created the universe because you sat your room and had a strong inner conviction about it, on your own argument, the FSM revealed to me as a Pastafarian is as legitimate as the creator your conviction revealed to you. This point is not lessened if you say your god sometimes happens to do stuff in a way which isn't directly incompatible with known science.

Perhaps theism isn't incompatible with evolution, but it is incompatible with good cartography.

Even the atheists agree: William Craig thrashed Christopher Hitchens in their recent debate. In The West Wing, we see Bartlet preparing for a debate as real politicians do, by practising against someone playing his opposition, presumably having studied the other guy first. Craig is formidable, but his arguments don't change, so it's odd that his opponents apparently don't take advantage of knowing what he's going to say. Transcripts and audio of his previous debates are available, and his arguments are also in his book, Reasonable Faith. Chris Hallquist responded convincingly to the arguments in Reasonable Faith: a review like that should be a starting point for anyone debating with Craig.

Anyhoo, Hallquist's review of Craig's book brought back some memories of my time in evangelicalism, specifically about how I was taught to do evangelism. (Reminder: Evangelicalism is a particular subset of Christianity, emphasising the inerrancy of the Bible and the need for personal repentance and faith; people who believe in evangelicalism are evangelicals. Evangelism is the process of making converts; people who try to make converts are evangelists. Clear? Then off we go.)

When I tap on the dashboard, I want you to recite "Two Ways to Live" as quickly and as safely as possible

Sometimes non-Christians are disturbed to learn that evangelicals commonly receive training in evangelism, as if such training were somehow cheating. But there's nothing inherently sinister about wanting to be better at evangelism, especially if you value the sort of propositional consistency I've mentioned previously: evangelicals who evangelise are anticipating-as-if there's a Hell, rather than merely speaking-as-if they believe it (I've previously mentioned an evangelical evangelist who definitely anticipates-as-if there's a Hell).

The training provided to a typical church-goer doesn't cover spanking ill-prepared atheists in formal debates, but rather the every-day evangelism which is the responsibility of every Christian. It might start off with overcoming the British reticence about religion to get Christians to casually mention to friends and colleagues what they do on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. The church itself would put on fun events (film screenings, dinner parties, Ceroc nights) to which you could bring non-Christian friends, and there'd be a "short talk about Jesus" in the middle. Once people know you're a Christian, you might get to talk to them about it, so the training goes on to having conversations about Christianity with non-Christians, maybe learning some sort of salvation schema like Two Ways to Live and some answers to common questions.

What kicked off memories of this was Hallquist's review of Chapter 1 of Craig's book. I remember being told to try to move the conversation away from issues like theodicy or the reliability of the Bible, to personal issues of sin and repentance. If you watch the BBC documentary on Deborah Drapper, you'll see her doing this several times, using Ray Comfort's Are you a good person? script. If you'd like to see Christopher Hitchens win for a change, you can also listen to an unfortunate Christian trying the script on him.

Bad faith

The advice to move the argument to personal issues reflects the common evangelical belief that philosophical debates and requests for evidence are a smokescreen: the non-Christian knows there's a God really but just doesn't want to worship him. One Biblical source for this belief is this passage in the Apostle Paul's letter to the church in Rome, where Paul says that God's nature is clear from creation, so that people who don't worship him have no excuse (verse 20).

Hallquist quotes Craig:

[W]hen a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God. -- William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, my hyperlink

Craig advises Christians to ask objectors "If I answered that objection, would you then really be ready to become a Christian?" This is something like the rationalist technique of getting to the core of disagreements by asking "Is that your true rejection?" (see also The Least Convenient Possible World). However, Craig departs from the rationalist use of this technique in that he seems to argue it cannot legitimately be applied in reverse ("If I substantiated that objection, would you be ready to leave Christianity?"). He also takes the stance that non-Christians are culpably arguing in bad faith.

Hallquist's review does a better job of arguing against Craig than I can, so you should read that if you come across assertions that Christianity is evidenced by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, or indeed, if you should happen to get into a debate with William Lane Craig. Rather, as is traditional, let's end by drawing out some practical applications, and then go in peace.

Evangelism training

One of the less memorable new phrases invented by Neal Stephenson in Anathem is Hypotrochian Transquaestiation, which means "to change the subject in such a way as to assert, implicitly, that a controversial point has already been settled one way or the other". Watch out for this, for example, in the switch from discussion of the existence of God to whether you are a good person.
Cognitive biases exist, and seeking a person's true rejection is a useful technique if the debate seems to be going nowhere. However, it cuts both ways, so...
Beware of your conversational role. If you've accepted a passive role as potential buyer and the evangelist's active role as sales-person, there are thoughts which won't occur to you (like the seeking the evangelist's true rejection).
If you're aiming for dialogue rather than the buyer role, it's probably not worth discussing things with someone who sees every argument you raise as evidence of your culpable self-deception. Craig's position on an atheist's motivations together with his experience of the witness of the Holy Spirit serve as a fully general counterargument to anything the atheist says (but note that knowing Craig is in possession of this argument doesn't itself invalidate his specific arguments). If you find yourself in conversation with an evangelical evangelist, it is worth asking whether they agree with Craig.
- One exception where it would be worth arguing is if there are people watching, as in a public debate, online, or if you found yourself at one of those evangelistic dinner parties.

A while back Andrew Brown over at the Grauniad posted a list of the 6 Points of New Atheism. There was a bit of a bun-fight among the atheists about this, because, though Brown's an atheist, he was criticising Dawkins Our Leader. It got even more fun when Dawkins turned up in the comments. (My own contribution was to treat the 6 Points as one of those internet quiz memes: I score 2.5/6 for New Atheism, which makes me slightly more Old Skool than New, I suppose). It's a bit like that Southpark episode where the Unified Atheist League fights the Allied Atheist Allegiance. What's the fuss about? Here's part of it.

Most Christians say God is omniscient and omnipresent. Yet the Christian woman whom Yellow blogged about, the one who wrote to a Christian problem page with her self-pleasuring problem, clearly doesn't really believe God is present and watching her all the time. But she at least believes that believing those things is virtuous for a Christian. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this latter sort of faith belief in belief.

This doesn't just apply to religion.

palmer1984 posted a poll which suggest similar things apply to moral beliefs. It is virtuous to say that we should care for people in other countries as much as we do for those in our own, but most people don't really believe it.

Some people, especially those with a scientific education (or a certain sort of evangelical Christian background), think of belief as affirmation of a set of propositions. To those people, it's obvious that these propositions should not be internally contradictory or conflict with reality. But, as Saunt Yudkowsky observes "it is a physical fact that you can write "The sky is green!" next to a picture of a blue sky without the paper bursting into flames". The same applies inside our heads. Dr Vilayanur Ramachandan's fascinating experiments on anosognosia patients seem to show that explaining why a belief is valid and changing your beliefs are separate systems in the brain.

I take Yudkowsky's point that speaking of belief doesn't capture the psychology here precisely because "beliefs" are often taken to be propositional sentences, but our brains don't deal in those much. Instead of talking about what someone "really believes", I suppose he'd prefer to say that the woman speaks-as-if she believes God is omnipotent and omnipresent, but, at least in some instances, behaves-as-if God is not.

Brown says he's annoyed with neo-atheist rationalist fundamentalist sceptics because neo-atheists think that all brains work like theirs or can be convinced to do so, but that thinking is wildly optimistic. This is the point of Brown's Freud vs God post, which you should all go and read. See you in 5 minutes.

Back? Brown's getting this stuff from Dennett and from anthropologists who study religion, such as Pascal Boyer. Boyer details his views over at a sceptics' website, where he tells sceptics off for their narrow understanding of religion. Another anthropologist, Scott Atran, does a similar thing on edge.org, responding to Sam Harris and others in the wake of the Beyond Belief conference back in 2006.

The anthropologists say that religious beliefs should not be understood as propositional statements about the world, however much they resemble them. What of God's omnipresence and omniscience? One thing religious people do with this belief is check whether an action is morally right by imagining what their model of God would think of it. This might be done retrospectively, if a religious context provokes thoughts of God. They certainly don't anticipate-as-if God is in the room and watching.

Brown has linked the ideas of the anthropologists with the observation that most people don't try to formulate coherent propositions on anything, including religion. I don't know whether the anthropologists would agree with this, I'd need to read more of their stuff to tell. It's clear that most religious people do try to draw a map of the real world. As Yudkowsky illustrates with his dragon-believer example, most believers already know what excuses to make for the apparent absence of dragons or gods, even as they claim belief in them, so they're keeping a map of the real world somewhere. The believers without the map are the ones other believers regard either as shiny-eyed lunatics, like the folk who don't go to doctors because God will heal them; or as heroes of the faith for showing such belief, like the monks and martyrs. I'd paraphrase Brown's argument as "most people don't see the virtue of having one map for all occasions, or of being able to articulate it".

Of course, if you're a religious believer, you might find the anthropologists' approach a little patronising. Some of you seem to have beliefs which are propositions about how the world is. As I said over on

robhu's journal a while back, Dawkins at least does believers the courtesy of taking them at their word. What do you think?

I'm talking about doubt in a few places at the moment. The feeds of my comments don't cover stuff outside LJ (I was using CoComment, but decided that was too risky), so here's where the action is:

Over at Hermant the Friendly Atheist's place, top Christian evangelist Lee Strobel turns the tables on us, and invites other Christian authors to ask atheists hard questions about atheism. You can see my responses over there. Greta Christina has some good thoughts on the questions.

The most interesting questions were Plantinga's stuff on whether having brains which evolved means we can't trust them, and Mike Licona's question: what would make you doubt your atheism?

Lily the Peaceful Atheist (by the way, what's with all these atheists being nice and fluffy? I want to be a fundamentalist atheist rationalist neo-humanistic secular militant like my hero, Richard Dawkins) talks about doubting atheism in a two part posting (part 1, part 2). She's not impressed with Strobel and friends, but rather, talks about the "emotional doubts" of the ex-Christian: the fear of death, and the feelings evoked by Christian music. I understand those sorts of feelings, having had them myself. Still, I'm enough of a scientist (and enough of an evangelical) to want facts rather than emotion.

I said that I ought to be able to doubt atheism, and also other long held beliefs. The problem with saying "I want to doubt" is that it's a noble statement, but if that's all it is, it's useless. As

gjm11 says, half the problem is knowing what to doubt. With that in mind, I thought I'd ask you lot:

What should I doubt?
This doesn't have to be religion/atheism, of course, although you're welcome to suggest that if you like (<evil grin>).

Here's a list of stuff I think about religion, philosophy, science and politics, so you can tell me where you think I could be wrong. Anonymous comments are allowed edited: but please sign yourself with some kind of nickname so I can tell you apart from other anonymous commenters.

( Stuff I think. Prepare to be alienated. )

So, fire away :-)

One of my friends did that "grab the nearest book to you and post the Nth sentence on page M" meme. I grabbed the nearest book (Keller's The Reason for God) and her sentence was the same as mine! This is clearly a sign from God that I should finish my review of the book (the first part of my review is already generating a lot of discussion in the comments). So, here goes. As in the previous part, we're following the book's chapters.

Intermission

( Read more... )

I'm a bit of an amateur too, as it happens, so I'll leave the epistemology there, and refer you to the professionals, or at least, the professionals in training: Chris Hallquist's review concentrates specifically on the philosophical problems with Keller's book. Let's look at some of Keller's specific arguments.

The Reasons for Faith

The Clues of God

This chapter deals with hints that God exists, as Keller correctly points out that this is a necessary pre-cursor to Christianity. He deals in clues, as he accepts that these arguments are not conclusive, although he thinks some of them are strong. Let's look at Keller's clues:

( Read more... )

The knowledge of God

Keller argues that we already know God exists, deep down. Not, as the New Testament says, from what has been made, but, as C.S. Lewis's New New Testament says, from our moral sense.

( Read more... )

The problem of sin

Keller identifies sin as placing something other than God at the centre of our lives. Keller claims that anything other than God placed there will ultimately let us down, and the worship of these things may even lead to harming ourselves or others. Keller talks about identity, and how investing our identity in something leads us to despise people with a different identity (whether it is politics, race, or interestingly, religion).

( Read more... )

Religion and the Gospel

Keller says that Christianity is not a religion. What he means is that Christianity says you're not saved by doing the right thing and earning merit with God. The nice thing about this chapter is that Keller speaks to people who've experienced what he calls Pharisaiac Christianity (recall that in the New Testament, the Pharisees are the self-righteous hypocrites, possibly because they were engaged in founding modern Judaism to the exclusion of Christians at the time the gospels were written).

( Read more... )

The Resurrection

Keller says that the Resurrection is pretty much the only explanation for the beginnings of Christianity. Drawing on N.T. Wright's work, he argues that people in the 1st century weren't simpletons who believed in any old nonsense, that the resurrection of the body of a single person was something neither Jews or Pagans believed could happen, that nothing else can account for the sudden change of the disciples from a frightened rabble into bold preachers.

Finally, we've found a chapter about evidence, but it's not evidence most of us are qualified to judge. Convincing people that the Resurrection happened is a popular apologetic technique among evangelicals, yet according to the Christians who commented on the first part of this review, God doesn't require us to become experts in ancient literature. But how else can someone judge this evidence? We can look to other experts rather than becoming experts ourselves, I suppose, but they disagree, so I don't think the evidence can be as clear cut as Keller says.

gjm11 tells a parable which points out the problems with Keller's argument which are apparent even to non-experts.

And the rest

I'm afraid I got bored at this point. The rest of the book is an explanation of orthodox Christian doctrines without much evidence in, er, evidence, followed by an altar call. So, Jesus's death on the Cross is necessary for forgiveness because we all recognise that forgiveness costs the forgiver; the Trinity makes the statement that God is love meaningful, and never mind that the Bible is equivocal on it and it's impossible to talk about without committing some heresy or other. Finally, if you want to know more, why not go to church?

Summing up

The second half of the book is mostly a statement of what Keller considers Christianity is, without much evidence that it's true. Elsewhere,

robhu said that he thought that, though rational arguments have a role, the main way that people come to Christianity was to hear the good news about Jesus (what Christians call the "gospel") and respond to it, so that his main evangelistic method as a Christian was to present the gospel.

The gospel as evangelicals understand it is composed of factual claims. A bare presentation of the gospel (which is quite similar to Keller's book, since it turns out that he spends most of the second half of his book saying what Christianity is) asks people to accept those factual claims based not on good evidence, but on an inner conviction, a feeling that the claims are right. To the extent that someone does this, they've abandoned even the everyday rationality which we use to judge other claims (that Daz washes whiter, or that the used car had one careful owner). Clearly this works on some people (including me, at one point), but I suspect it's because rationality is a discipline that most people don't learn, or even see the value of applying to religion. As far as I'm concerned, Keller fails to offer good reasons for God.

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February 2025

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Page Summary

A great cloud of witlessness: the Not Ashamed campaign
Reform and the Interminable Anglican Sex Kerfuffle
Q: When is a person like a rock? A: When there's no God
Brown, Bishops, Bigots, Justice, Laws
Is the Creator good?
Georges Rey: Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception
Bad arguments about religion: part 3: Science cannot prove your wife loves you, Francis Collins, etc
Bishops gone wild: special Equality Bill edition PLUS "Why men don't go to church"
Bad arguments about religion: part 2: homosexuality and mixed fibres: the Bartlet gambit
Bad arguments about religion: part 1: worldviews
Evidence that doesn't demand anything very much
Losing My Religion or The Truth About CICCU: talk to CUAAS
Pining for the fjords or I Was A Twentysomething Matt Redman Fan
Dawkins: a bit like Jesus
What is faith?
Religion and cartography or I Was a Teenage Theistic Evolutionist
Evangelism training or I Was a Teenage Evangelical
Belief in cats
On doubt
The Reason for God: part 2

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