Suppose materialism were true: then, as we’ve seen, my belief will be a neural structure that has both NP [neuro-physiological--Hallquist] properties and also a propositional content. It is by virtue of the NP properties, however, not the content, that the belief causes what it does cause. It is by virtue of those properties that the belief causes neural impulses to travel down the relevant efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, causing them to contract, and thus causing behavior. It isn’t by virtue of the content of this belief; the content of the belief is irrelevant to the causal power of the belief with respect to behavior (p. 336).

Plantinga argues that therefore, if materialism is true, then there’s no reason for evolution to produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms, and therefore it’s unlikely that evolution would produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms. This strikes me as utterly bizarre. As far as I can tell, it makes no more sense than saying that if materialism were true, it is by virtue of the arrangement of subatomic particles that our digestive system digests food, and therefore whether or not those particles are arranged into a stomach, intestines, etc. is irrelevant with respect to digestion, and therefore evolution is unlikely to produce those organs.

My guess is that that is what most non-eliminative materialists would say in response to Plantinga. In fact, hardcore non-reductive materialists like Hilary Putnam would say that the higher level explanation is crucial, and the lower level explanations aren’t even really explanations. Plantinga shows no curiosity about any of this; there’s not the slightest mention of how materialist philosophers might respond to his central claim. And that looks like a bigger problem than ignoring evolutionary biologists.

But… I recently (more recently than I read Plantinga’s book) re-read Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which talks about the cognitive revolution in psychology, which happened decades ago, and which in the mind of many psychologists has demystified things like beliefs and their relationship to the brain.

Because of this, I don’t think there’s any reason to see the relationship between the brain and beliefs as any less a scientific issue than the relationship between atoms and macroscopic objects. And it means that by ignoring what materialists might say about his argument, Plantinga isn’t just ignoring other philosophers, he’s also ignoring scientists. As I explained in my previous post, that really shouldn’t be acceptable anymore.

One thing Greta Christina did in criticizing DJ Grothe was refer back to a previous post she had written, Why “Yes, But” Is the Wrong Response to Misogyny. When I saw this post, I thought it was pretty obviously problematic, for reasons that don’t require any preamble to explain, so I want to talk about that now. Here’s the core of the post:

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it trivializes misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it conveys the message that whatever men want to talk about is more important than misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject to something that’s about them, it conveys the message that men are the ones who really matter, and that any harm done to men is always more important than misogyny.

And when the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it comes across as excusing misogyny. It doesn’t matter how many times you say, “Yes, of course, misogyny is terrible.” When you follow that with a “Yes, but…”, it comes across as an excuse. In many cases, it is an excuse. And it contributes to a culture that makes excuses for misogyny.

Whether this is right or not depends on what kinds of situations Greta is talking about. Situation 1 is where someone says, “this is an example of horrid misogyny” full stop, and someone else changes the subject. In that situation, the second person definitely seems like they’re trivializing misogyny. But then there’s situation 2, where someone says “this is an example of horrid misogyny, and also X” and someone takes exception to the “and also X.” It’s hard to see how a rule against taking exception to the “and also X”s in situation 2 could be justified.

For one thing, if such a rule ever truly came to be accepted in a particular community, it would invite abuse. People could cite instances of misogyny to push any crazy agenda and then invoke the rule to block criticism. But even without active abuse of the rule, there’s still the possibility of cases where the “and also X” is problematic in important ways, and it doesn’t necessarily trivialize misogyny to discuss that.

Now, Greta’s initial “yes, but” post was made in a context that made what she said sound pretty plausible. A 15 year old girl had made a short post on Reddit’s atheism community (known as r/atheism) with a picture of herself holding up a copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World with a message saying, basically, “look what my mom got me for Christmas!” The post got a lot of nice comments, but it also got quite a few nasty, sexual, harassing comments. Obviously that was horrible.

But even then, the “yes buts” weren’t directed only at people saying “that’s horrible.” Rebecca Waston’s post on the incident was titled, “Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists,” and ended with “Fuck you, r/atheism.” It’s not surprising to see pushback against this, especially from r/atheism users who didn’t contribute to the horribleness.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to say in Rebecca’s defense here (such as “it should be obvious from context that she didn’t mean all atheists,” “r/atheism really is especially bad,” that r/atheism’s moderators need to delete those kind of comments, etc.) The point is that it’s not reasonable to expect people to refrain from pushback as a matter of general principle, and the defensibility of Rebecca’s post doesn’t make “no yes buts” a good general principle.

The dustup with DJ is a pretty good example of why “no yes buts” is a problematic general principle. For starters, Greta doesn’t seem to be sticking to a strict “no yes buts” position. Instead, she says:

My problem is that — when weighing on the one hand, “Greta did something that in my opinion was unfair by quoting someone out of context,” and on the other hand, “Ryan publicly stated that he wanted to ‘slap the bitch’ and ‘kick her readers in the cunt’” — you seem to think that the former is of greater concern than the latter. You have certainly devoted significantly more space to discussing it. In the discussion on Stephanie’s blog, you devoted one sentence to saying that “there is never any defense for real or pretend threats of violence”… and 2,371 words discussing other matters, including 602 words (by a conservative count) justifying Ryan’s behavior, defending it, explaining the context for it, expressed a wish that people have sympathy for it, defending your own reaction to it, and blaming me for having instigated it.

Those priorities are, in my opinion, exactly backwards. If you’d spent one sentence saying, “Yes, I think Greta’s behavior was unfair,” and then spent the rest of your comments on the topic saying that obviously the important issue here was threats of violence, specifically gender-based, sexualized threats of violence against a female writer and her readers… we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Though it’s a little unclear, this makes it sound like her position is that it’s okay to say “yes but” as long as you don’t dedicate too many sentences to the “but.” The underlying idea is that how much attention you devote to different issues reflects how important you think those different issues are. However, while importance is one factor people use to decide how much attention to pay to different things, it’s only one of many. This makes the whole idea of criticizing someone based on how many sentences they devoted to different points a little strange.

For one thing: when you agree, all you have to say is “I agree.” You can elaborate, but it isn’t always necessary, and it would be a waste of time to rehash absolutely everything the person you’re agreeing with said. But when you say “I think you’re being unfair,” it’s natural for people to expect a somewhat detailed explanation of why you think they’re being unfair. In fact, I think if anything DJ could be faulted for not explaining himself enough.

Furthermore, part of DJ “defending his own reaction” here was DJ responding to some not very nice comments about himself, in particular “DJ Grothe has a problem, an ongoing problem with a pattern, and that problem is him” (from Stephanie Zvan). Had DJ followed Greta’s suggestion in the second paragraph quoted above, he wouldn’t have been able to respond, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to not defend themselves against such remarks. (Maybe Greta didn’t mean to suggest that, and she was just giving one example of one thing DJ could have done instead, but if so, it’s not a very helpful example.)

But maybe Greta didn’t mean to say that “we wouldn’t be having this conversation” if only DJ had distributed his sentences differently. She certainly does make other criticisms of DJ, and I’ll talk about them in later posts.

Part of the problem with the DJ/Greta dustup is that it was spawned by something that happened on Greta’s Facebook page. Facebook does not make it easy to permalink to old threads, so basically nobody has the context for this unless you’re both (1) friends with Greta on Facebook (2) patient enough to scroll through all the stuff on her page to find something that happened more than a month ago. So I’ve decided to go ahead and make screen caps of the thing. Not whole threads, but I’ve tried to get everything relevant and then some (especially in the case of the second thread).

You can discuss this now or ignore it; I’ll be giving my own commentary later.

So I was actually kind of happy to see that Steve Hayes of Triablogue had responded to my review of Craig Keener’s book Miracles. But then I read it, and… it’s totally full o’ fail. Yet I feel like commenting on a few parts anyways:

(1) Hayes quotes me as calling Keener’s thesis “weasly,” and then calls this a “conspiratorial interpretation” while ignoring my more detailed explanation of what’s wrong with Keener’s thesis. To recap: the “primary thesis” is poorly-chosen because it’s too trivial to be worth devoting a two-volume set to, and his “secondary thesis” is problematic because it’s vague, and seems to provide Keener with an excuse for spending a lot of time accusing people of being closed-minded, instead of doing what he should be doing, which is arguing that miracles actually occur.

I suppose I could have spent a little more time on this last problem, for the sake of making things clear. In particular, I neglected to quote some of the more blatant ad hominems, such as, “skeptics ‘have laid out the rules of the game in such a way that they cannot possibly lose’” (p. 703). This quote, along with much of Keener’s discussion of such important issues medical documentation, misdiagnosis, and scientific study of prayer (quoted in my original review), is located in a chapter titled “Biased Standards?” which implies that the key issue with respect to these things is not the quality (or weakness) of the evidence, but whether skeptics are closed-minded.

(2) Hayes quotes me as saying

The fact that the only prayers God “answers” are prayers for things that have a chance of happening anyway is powerful evidence that God never actually answers prayers… Deep down, most of them have to know that prayer doesn’t really ever work, which is why they only pray for things that have a chance of happening anyway.

Then he complains a lot about it, but never answers two key questions: why do believers rarely pray for limbs to regenerate, and why are the prayers for limb regeneration that people do make so rarely answered? And while I’m on the subject: Hayes complains that I’m “leaving myself an out” by pointing out that a leg regrowth story might be a lie. But does he seriously think it’s unreasonable to be skeptical of the story from Pat Robertson’s book?

(3) Hayes writes, “In the nature of the case, most odds-beating recoveries will also happen after medical treatment. Is it just coincidental that the cure follows the treatment?” My answer: In some cases, yes. In other cases, no. But the reason we know that some medical treatments really work is not because of Keener-style collections of stories of people who received medical treatment and then recovered. We know this because we’ve done scientific studies of the effectiveness of many medical treatments, and in many cases the results came back positive.

(4) Another thing Hayes says is, “If Hallquist rejects methodological naturalism, then he has no right to tilt the board against miracles. In that event there’s no antecedent presumption to the contrary which the evidence must overcome.” This is just bizarre. If I reject one rationale for being skeptical of miracles, then I can’t be skeptical of miracles?

Here’s a simple explanation of why I’m skeptical of miracles: If someone tells me they took a ride on an airplane, under normal circumstances I’ll believe them, because I have lots of reason to think airplanes are real. (Among other things, I have memories of riding in them.) However, if someone tells me they took a ride on an extraterrestrial spacecraft, I’m going to be skeptical unless they can give me some very good evidence, because I’ve never seen any good evidence that any human has ever ridden in an extraterrestrial spacecraft. This has nothing to do with “naturalism,” since extraterrestrial spacecraft aren’t supernatural.

Similarly, if a friend tells me they got sick, took some penicillin, and got better, I’ll figure the penicillin probably contributed to their getting better, because I know there’s good evidence that penicillin helps fight infections. However, if a friend tells me they got sick, prayed, and got better, I’ll think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the prayer helped except maybe in a psychosomatic way, because there’s no good evidence for the efficacy of prayer. In other words, it’s totally normal to use what you know about the world in general to evaluate reports about specific occasions. This should not be hard to understand.

(5) There’s all kinds of other things I can talk about, but I don’t care, because everything else in the post is even sillier than what I’ve talked about so far.

However, while there’s a whole lot I have to say about this, I don’t want this to consume my life for any length of time, even on the scale of days. So I’m going to say what I have to say a little bit at a time, starting with just quoting the stuff DJ said that I think is especially important:

I do believe that much atheist and skeptic blogging engages in far too much in-group/out-group categorizing, us vs. them thinking. If the consequence of sharing these opinions means that you or others do not want to attend TAM under my leadership, I’d be baffled. People of good will should be able to disagree about things without such a reaction.

[snip]

I have to say I find this whole discussion of how horrible it is to some that I commented in disagreement on blog posts or liked FB statuses (of CFI Michigan regarding their defense of a speaker on their program, etc.) to be unsettling. I debate ideas professionally, and often they concern central beliefs that are controversial. Unfortunately, nothing in this blog post approaches debating an idea, nor is there much actual criticism of ideas. Instead, there is deceptive and dishonest tarring-and-feathering. I reserve the right to express my opinions, even if I am the ceo and president of a nonprofit foundation, and I hope that others can disagree with them in emotionally and intellectually mature ways. You may think I’m wrong in my view that Christina behaved unfairly. But that is a far cry from saying that I am a misogynist or that women should boycott TAM or that “D.J. Grothe has a problem and that problem is him.” Such overwrought rhetoric isn’t how the good guys debate issues honestly.

[snip]

I think as skeptics, it behooves us to be a bit more generous with others in disagreement, to be slower to vilify, and to engage in less scorched-earthing. I know it may be good for blog hits, but it is bad for skepticism and in my view, is antithetical to our values.

Having quoted this, a whole bunch of caveats. First, there is one thing I’ve just quoted that I don’t agree with. I think DJ correctly identifies a problem with in-group/out-group categorizing, us vs. them thinking, and vilification. However, I don’t think this is the result of people trying to generate “blog hits.” The problems he identifies also exist on internet forums where no one is worrying about generating traffic.

Second, I haven’t given any context for things I’ve just quoted, and I want to be up-front about that. My goal is not to have people read those quotes and think Greta must be wrong because what DJ said was so obviously reasonable. If you want to get into this fiasco without waiting for my other posts, go have a look at the two discussion threads I’ve linked to, both the criticisms that have been made of DJ and his responses.

Third, part of the reason I care about this is because Greta is a strong candidate for my favorite writer on the planet. Seriously, she’s the only person where I’ll automatically read just about anything she writes, just based on the byline. In future posts I’ll be talking about things Greta has said that are, in my opinion, extremely foolish, but I’m suppressing the tiny, childish part of me that wants to react to this by saying, “nooo now I can’t like Greta any more.” The current draft of the book I’m working on quotes and recommends some extremely awesome things she’s written, and it’s not like I’ll be cutting any of that out.

Fourth, I recognize that so far I’m just saying what I think in very vague terms, and not explaining exactly what I think or why. I’m posting anyway because I have too much to say for one blog post, even a very long blog post, and I have to start somewhere. But if you want to flame me over this, I won’t think less of you, because hey, you don’t yet know why I’m writing this crap.

Modern miracle stories

For a while now I’ve been quite aware that there are a lot of Christians who like to tell miracle stories about things that allegedly happened very recently. These are not all friend-of-a-friend type stories. Sometimes it’s things people claim to have seen themselves, or that someone they know very well has seen. So for example, a year or two ago I was listing to an interview with Evangelical biblical scholar Mike Licona, and about a third of the way through the interview Licona trots out this story that supposedly happened to an unnamed Yale-educated friend of his that involves an encounter with a demon while he was in China.

Now Mike Licona is one of those evangelicals who claims that the resurrection of Jesus can be shown to have happened with historical evidence (in fact, the resurrection of Jesus was the main topic of the interview). But my reaction to hearing that in the interview was to think that these modern reports of the supernatural are way, way more interesting than the alleged evidence for Jesus’s resurrection, because with these modern stories there is, at least in principle, the possibility that you could go track down the witnesses, do a real investigation, and potentially—if the thing really happened—get together quite a bit of documentation (and if it didn’t happen, uncover reasons not to take the story at face value).

Now based on what I know about the history of paranormal investigation and some of the adventures of the Society for Psychical Research, I’d quite confidently predict that if Christians ever did that kind of investigation, they’d eventually realize that they’re not going to find good evidence for supernatural phenomenon with those kinds of stories. Still, you could do an interesting investigation.

Enter Craig Keener. The main thing he does in Miracles is collect lots and lots of stories of seemingly miraculous happenings, most of them healings. He doesn’t really try to do any in-depth investigation of the stories he reports, but he’s up-front about that. He talks about his limitations, like a lack of funding for investigation, lack of time off from his teaching duties, and his own lack of medical knowledge, and suggests that maybe in the future other people will be able to build on his work and do an investigation that doesn’t suffer from those limitations. I think that if Keener’s book inspires other evangelical Christians to spend some real time and effort scrutinizing these kinds of stories, then the book will have done some good.

But now the bad. The problems with Keener’s book begin on the very first page when he states the book’s thesis:

The book’s primary thesis is simply that eyewitnesses do offer miracle claims, a thesis simple enough but one sometimes neglected when some scholars approach accounts in the Gospels. The secondary thesis is that supernatural explanations, while not suitable in every case, should be welcome on the scholarly table along with other explanations often discussed (p. 1)

This is what I call a weaselly thesis statement because it clearly says much less than what Keener wants to say. It lets him that hint at some very controversial claims, but because he’s officially only defending these seemingly banal claims, it gets him off the hook from really having to defend his views. So the primary thesis is something that I agree with and I agreed with before I even began reading the book, and it’s really the kind of thing you would defend the an article, not a two-volume set.

And the role of the secondary thesis, in practice, ends up being to allow Keener to spend a lot of time making ad hominem attacks against those big nasty skeptics who want supernatural explanations off the table and then Keener can fight the good fight to have the explanations on the table. (Whatever that means—part of the problem here is that “on the table” is vague, so it’s not even clear with thesis is.)

Regrown limbs

Now when I accused Keener of making ad hominem attacks, what do I mean that? Ad hominem is a phrase that I think is that horridly overused for any time someone is mean to someone else. But I mean it in the strict sense of substituting attacks on a person’s character for arguments in a situation where the person’s character is irrelevant.

So for example, let’s look at the issue of claims of regrown limbs. There’s a website called WhyWon’tGodHealAmputees.com, (formerly known as WhyDoesGodHateAmputees.com) that makes an argument:

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident…

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once — he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.

And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen…

What are we seeing here? It is not that God sometimes answers the prayers of amputees, and sometimes does not. Instead, in this situation there is a very clear line. God never answers the prayers of amputees. It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.(LINK)

What’s the point of this thought experiment?

How do we know, for sure, that God does not answer prayers?… we simply pray and watch what happens. What we find is that nothing happens. No matter how many people pray, no matter how often they pray, no matter how sincerely they pray, no matter how worthy the prayer, nothing ever happens. If we pray for anything that is impossible — for example, regenerating an amputated limb or moving Mt. Everest to Newark, NJ — it never happens. We all know that. If we pray for anything that is possible, the results of the prayer will unfold in exact accord with the normal laws of probability. In every situation where we statistically analyze the effects of prayers, looking at both the success AND the failure of prayer, we find that prayer has zero effect. Prayers for amputees never work. Medical prayers never work. Prayers for “good people” never work. Battlefield prayers never work. That happens, always, because God is imaginary. Every time a Christian says, “The Lord answered my prayer,” what we are seeing instead is a simple coincidence or the natural effects of self-talk.(LINK)

Now I have to admit that my gut reaction to this argument is that this is a horribly unsophisticated argument. But I think the truth is that this is an argument that any idiot can see is correct, and the part of me that instinctively dislikes this argument is the part of me that’s terrified of being mistaken for any idiot. The fact that the only prayers God “answers” are prayers for things that have a chance of happening anyway is powerful evidence that God never actually answers prayers

If you wanted to be a little more charitable towards the “this argument is so unsophisticated” line, you might say that religious people must have good responses to obvious arguments like this one, or else there wouldn’t be any religious people, but I don’t think that’s true. I think most religious people are just good at not thinking too hard about problems for their religious beliefs like this one. Deep down, most of them have to know that prayer doesn’t really ever work, which is why they only pray for things that have a chance of happening anyway. This is a good example of how religious people compartmentalize.

Now, here’s what Keener says about regrown limbs, and this is where the ad hominems come in:

Some skeptics about healing argue (beyond the evidence) that almost anything can be psychosomatic, whereas clearly organic restorations of limbs are never reported. Certainly there are not many such reports (including the Bible), but they do appear occasionally; in one extraordinary report, for example, a leg severed beneath the knee grew back. [A footnote cites a book by televangelist Pat Robertson--Hallquist] Elsewhere, useless or shriveled limbs have become functional and filled out miraculously quickly. Those committed to disbelief that such miracles can happen will, of course, dismiss such claims; but while the rareness of such claims (hence limited possible analogies) does invite caution, one might also get the impression that some skeptics’ demands for particular kinds of evidence become stricter whenever evidence of the demanded sort appears. (p. 747)

Now Keener is completely missing the point here. The significance of the regrown limb issue is that if regrown limbs happened, they’d avoid a lot of problems you get with other kinds of healing claims. You eliminate the possibility that it could be a coincidence you, elliminate the possibility that maybe the doctors made a mistake. If someone’s leg really regrew it’d be pretty easy to document conclusively, if it happened under the right circumstances. If the limb regrows almost instantaneously, it’s going be hard to be mistaken about witnessing that.

So we shouldn’t expect false reports of regrowing limbs to happen very often. It’s going be hard to get away with making up a story like that, and we should expect that to deter people from making up stories about regrowing limbs. However, people do sometimes tell outrageous lies. So the fact that there is a story of a regrowing limb in a book by Pat Robertson doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t change the fact that the lack of evidence of regrowing limbs is suspicious, and the fact that skeptics aren’t impressed by such stories isn’t evidence of closed-mindedness.

Science!

Now that I’ve talked about an example of a claim that people rarely make, let’s look at a claim that’s more typical of claims people do make:

Even solid medical documentation is not adequate by itself to surmount strongly held presuppositions, because one may insist in every case (even if there are thousands of them) that another explanation is possible. My colleague in Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Itapson, was told that his third child had “the death chromosome” and would likely die before birth if not aborted. The family prayed, and the boy is now nine years old. Because 1 percent of those with this chromosome are known to live beyond infancy, one cannot prove beyond any doubt that prayer is the factor that helped him to live so long; yet I am prepared to grant that likelihood in view of the significant number of extraordinary answers to prayer in Emmanuel’s circle, including one mentioned in chapter 9 and another in chapter 12 (p. 666–I did not notice this page number until after choosing the quote).

The first thing to notice about this is that this story is evidently being filtered through people who don’t have a lot of medical knowledge. The “death chromosome” presumably refers to a lethal chromosomal abnormality, but since there are many lethal chromosomal abnormalities, there’s no such thing as “the” death chromosome. Either someone misunderstood the doctor, or the doctor was dumbing down the diagnosis for the benefit of the parents. But whatever the case, it makes this story a little harder to evaluate.

More importantly, the way Keener introduces this case suggests he thinks it illustrates how unreasonable skeptics are. That’s frankly ridiculous. In fact, setting aside for a moment the other “extraordinary answers to prayer,” this case doesn’t provide any evidence at all for the efficacy of prayer. By definition, for every 100 times someone is faced with 100 to 1 odds, one person will beat the odds. In more religious parts of the world, including the United States, I’m sure that most people, maybe an overwhelming majority of people, pray when they or their children are faced with a serious illness. In that case, most odds-beating recoveries will happen after prayer. Because stories like this aren’t surprising even if you don’t think miracles happen, these stories aren’t evidence of anything miraculous.

This is why science is neat. At the most basic level, when we’re talking about the scientific study of prayer, we’re talking about checking to see if prayer leads to beating the odds more often than not praying. We’re also checking for things like bias among people recording the data and the placebo effect. (The placebo effect is when something that wouldn’t normally do anything, like a sugar pill, leads to people doing better merely because they think they’re getting treated.)

What about the fact that this guy’s circle of friends supposedly has had a whole bunch of remarkable recoveries? Is that evidence of something supernatural? Again, no. The problem with saying “Oh it looks like we’ve got this really improbable cluster of cases,” without doing rigorous statistical analysis, is that humans are really bad at eyeballing probability. We have a tendency to see patterns in randomness, and we even sometimes judge rigged events as more random than really random ones. To give just one of many examples, psychologist Steven Pinker describes one experiment which found that “people think that genuine sequences of coin flips (like TTHHTHTTTT) are fixed, because they have more long runs of heads or tails than their intuitions allow, and they think that sequences that were jiggered to avoid long runs (like HTHTTHTHHT) are fair” (Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, p. 204).

This is something that’s actually not all that surprising, once you think about what randomness means. Random doesn’t mean being distributed evenly. There’s nothing about randomness that prevents events of a certain kind from clumping together just by chance, so it’s going to happen some of the time. Yes in some cases it’s going to be tempting to say “this clump is just too improbable to have happened by chance,” but except in the very most extreme of cases it’s just not something you can say without careful statistical analysis.

Furthermore, even in cases that seem extreme, what might be happening is that inaccurate reporting is taking events that were only somewhat improbable and blowing them up into something extremely improbable. There are a number of reasons that could happen. One of them is lack of medical knowledge, which I’ve already pointed out in the death chromosome story. And the point of taking a rigorous scientific approach is to avoid those kinds of problems.

Keener does discuss scientific studies of the efficacy of prayer briefly. He mentions studies with positive results, but does so only very briefly, vaguely saying in one case that “many have questioned the study” without discussing the criticisms or trying to determine whether the criticisms are valid. This reflects a general problem with the book: Keener’s approach to important questions is often to say, “some people say X, some people say otherwise, moving on…”

He does devote a paragraph to discussing the results of a 2006 prayer study funded by the John Templeton Foundation, a foundation that funds academic research related to religion. The study was the largest such study to date, and according to the authors it tried to make up for shortcomings in previous studies. It found no evidence of any benefit from prayer. Keener says a number of things to try to minimize this result, including asking, “Would God favor someone or not because they belonged to a control group?” (pp. 708-709).

Well maybe not. But you could also ask similar questions about prayer in general—why an omnipotent, omniscient God would need our input on how to run the universe. And whatever you think of those theological questions, they don’t negate the value of science, nor do they negate the problems with using collections of stories as proof of the supernatural.

Keener does at one point given very brief argument for why we can’t study the supernatural scientifically:

Since science depends on observation and experimentation, and since a “miracle is by definition an irreproducible” experience, even documented miracle cures by definition cannot fit precisely the expectations of science as it has been most narrowly defined. While affirming miracles, one scholar warns that “miracles cannot be investigated by the usual scientific methods since we cannot control the variables and perform experiments” (p. 608).

This is pretty clearly wrong. If God gave one man the power to work a certain limited kind of miracles at will, that would be reproducible, and subject to scientific experimentation. In particular, he could submit to a test under conditions designed to rule out fraud and delusion, and then we could see if he could still produce the apparent effects under those conditions. There are many people who would be happy to arrange such a test, including the James Randi Educational Foundation, which offers a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities under controlled test conditions.

You might want to argue that God would never grant miracle-working power in that manner, but consider this famous passage from the book of Exodus (Exodus 4:1-9):

1 Moses answered, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The LORD did not appear to you’?”

2 Then the LORD said to him, “What is that in your hand?”

“A staff,” he replied.

3 The LORD said, “Throw it on the ground.”

Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it. 4 Then the LORD said to him, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail.” So Moses reached out and took hold of the snake and it turned back into a staff in his hand. 5 “This,” said the LORD, “is so that they may believe that the LORD, the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has appeared to you.”

6 Then the LORD said, “Put your hand inside your cloak.” So Moses put his hand into his cloak, and when he took it out, the skin was leprous—it had become as white as snow.

7 “Now put it back into your cloak,” he said. So Moses put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored, like the rest of his flesh.

8 Then the LORD said, “If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first sign, they may believe the second. 9 But if they do not believe these two signs or listen to you, take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground. The water you take from the river will become blood on the ground.”

If you’re an orthodox Christian who thinks this story from Exodus really happened, as far as I can tell the only thing you can say here is that the reason God doesn’t empower prophets in this manner today is that he doesn’t want to make the evidence for miracles too clear.

I’ve actually heard Christians say something like this. What they’ll say is that God has given us clear enough evidence, but he’s avoided giving us too much so that closed-minded skeptics can continue being closed-minded (because we all know that skeptics are wicked and need to be set up to be punished for their wickedness). There are two problems with this. First of all I don’t think the premise that skeptics are typically closed-minded and wicked is really true. But perhaps more importantly, I just don’t think explanations that suppose that the universe is in some way conspiring to avoid giving us very good evidence are generally the best explanations.

For example, you can say that the reason people who claim to be psychic are never able to demonstrate under controlled test conditions that are designed to rule out cheating is that the presence of skeptics somehow disrupts psychic powers, but I think the more plausible explanation is that nobody really has psychic powers and precautions against cheating are doing exactly what they’re supposed. Or, a UFO organization once claimed that 2% of Americans have been abducted by aliens. In response, Carl Sagan quipped, “It’s surprising that more of the neighbors haven’t noticed” You could suppose that the aliens have various kinds of super-technology that allows them to hide almost all of the evidence, but a better explanation is that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are suffering from hallucinations, false memories and so on (see The Demon Haunted World, pp. 64, 181). Likewise, I think the best explanation for the lack of evidence for miracles is that there aren’t any.

So it can’t be disputed that the evidence for miracles is less than perfect. That’s enough to disprove Keener’s insinuation that skeptics of miracles wouldn’t be persuaded by any evidence. The vast majority of skeptics would have no trouble believing in the power of prayer if there were as much evidence for it as there is for the power of penicillin. But there isn’t.

Misdiagnosis

Another problem with stories of miraculous healings is the problem with doctors making mistakes. Consider this story:

In 2006, I interviewed Dr. Douglass Norwood; during the time of most of the testimonies he recounted, he was a Moravian pastor. He mentioned several dramatic healings but explained two in the greatest detail. The first case, which took place in Suriname, I have recounted earlier. The other case, more relevant for this chapter, involved his wife, Sarah. Her neck was broken and her spinal cord severed in a car crash on December 14, 1982; she remained paralyzed at the Rusk Institute for six months. Despite the medical impossibility of her walking with a severed spinal cord, she began walking within twenty-four hours of being “anointed with oil,” leading to a number of conversions among the hospital staff. Doug notes that the healing is only 90 percent complete, though it is a medical miracle; she walks with considerable effort and requires medicines, but that she walks at all still astonishes those who examine her (p. 438-439).

I picked up this story because it’s listed on a table at the end of the book as one where Keener had personally talked to the guy who supposedly witnessed this, and it was also listed as a case that Keener was especially confident was really miraculous. Personally, I just don’t see it. Given that the woman in this story could only walk “with considerable effort,” I don’t understand the mindset of someone who would look at this and say “this is an amazing miracle.” My guess is that what happened is that this woman really was badly injured and she just wasn’t quite as badly injured as the doctors initially thought. There’s nothing difficult to explain here.

Now Keener, once again has something to say about the issue of doctors making mistakes and once again it involves an ad hominem:

Those who question supernatural healings often attribute the more convincing cases to an initial misdiagnosis. Although genuine misdiagnosis does occur at times, this approach sometimes has been used as a means to explain away extranormal healings retroactively, and sometimes the initial evidence is too firm to aver a misdiagnosis… To simply dismiss every cure as a case of prior misdiagnosis is to allow one’s presuppositions to determine the outcome, especially when it involves many cases and the prior diagnoses involve multiple physicians. One healing evangelist reasonably complains that if critics really believe that so many hundreds of healing cases result from initial misdiagnosis, they should be raising an outcry against such widespread misdiagnosis instead of divine healing.

And once again this is all beside the point. The issue is not whether skeptics are closed-minded, the issue is that if the case is going to be touted as powerful evidence of miraculous healing, it needs to be possible to show with some degree of certainty that the doctors didn’t make a mistake. Keener claims that misdiagnosis can sometimes be ruled out, but he supports this claim with just a footnote. As happens all too often in the book, there’s no discussion of an absolutely central claim.

On top of that, there’s other silly rhetoric here. The thing about dismissing every cure as a case of misdiagnosis misses the point because a possible explanation doesn’t need to explain every case to be a serious concern. This is just like how there’s no single cause of UFO sightings that turn out not to be extraterrestrial spacecraft. Also, the complaint about hundreds of misdiagnoses is silly because in a world where millions upon millions of people seek medical care every year, a few hundred mistakes isn’t all that much. Doctors aren’t perfect.

A final point

I don’t know if you’re getting sick of this post by now, but I am, so one last point: Keener tries to explain the lack of medical documentation for alleged miraculous healings by proposing that God has seen fit to mainly work healing miracles in the context of missionary efforts in the Third World, and that makes them difficult to document (see i.e. p. 662-704-705). Again, while this is a possible explanation, I don’t think it’s the best explanation. Alleged miracles not happening under circumstances where they can be well documented is just what we would expect if no miracles were happening all.

Basically the book starts off with three chapters of preliminaries talking about the sort of silly knee-jerk reactions that people have to criticism of religion, talking about why it’s okay to criticize religion, talking about the differences between what most religious people believe and what left-wing theologians believe, stuff like that. And then I have five chapters talking about the truth of religion, arguments for the existence of God, arguments against the existence of God, stuff like that.

Essentially that’s what I that written so far and the plan was to make the last chapter to chapter about the moral side of religion and the harm that religion does. But I’ve sort of got writer’s block on this chapter because I’m not sure how to make it interesting. Because I’m not sure there’s anything interesting that can be said in defense of the moral side of religion.

So, for example, I think Plantinga’s ontological argument isn’t it all a good argument in the sense that I don’t think it does anything for the credibility of theism. But it’s an interesting argument insofar as there’s an interesting explanation of why it’s a bad argument, and I can write 2500 words about it and not feel like I’m wasting my reader’s time. But I’m not sure there are any comparably interesting defenses of moral side of religion.

Perhaps a better way to explain it is that William Lane Craig’s arguments for the existence of God are terrible arguments, but when you put him up on stage against an opponent he can use all his rhetorical prowess and high school debate team skills to impress the audience. But Craig rarely does debates on things like the morality of hell, and he probably would never agree to a debate on a topic like, say, “resolved, that the Bible is full of immoral teachings” because any halfway competent opponent would win in spite of Craig’s debating skills. That’s an indicator that the question of the morality of many religious teachings is one-sided, in a way that the argument over the existence of God is not one-sided.

So when Dawkins says that the God of the Old Testament is a homophobic, misogynistic, genocidal, bully and so on and so forth, that’s something that’s just obvious anyone who’s actually read the Old Testament. That’s a paragraph that all of Dawkins’ critics cite as evidence of what a terrible person Dawkins is, but their attempts to explain what is wrong with that statement are just absolutely pathetic. For example, Alastair McGrath says well, that’s not the God I believe in or anyone I know believes in, which may be true but it’s still the God described in the Old Testament.

Or you have Alvin Plantinga who makes the really insulting claim that the fact that Dawkins would dare say such a thing about God (or the God of the Old Testament, rather) indicates that Dawkins’ book contains no “evenhanded than thoughtful commentary,” even though Plantinga ought to know the basis for Dawkins statement. And instead of actually trying to rebut it he just dismisses it, which I think is a much more serious indicator of a lack of thoughtful commentary.

When Christians aren’t talking about what a big meanie Richard Dawkins is, the usual approach to talking about the Old Testament seems to be to go on and on about context. (I won’t get into what Jews say, they have somewhat different strategies.) Both conservative Christians and liberal Christians do this, and it’s just an evasion. The Old Testament, remember, contain commandments to kill men for having gay sex, commandments to kill people for blasphemy or for trying to get you to worship other gods. It even contains a part where Moses has a man killed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath of all things. It contains commandments to exterminate entire tribes.

Lots of awful stuff. Stuff that is on the face of it horrendously immoral. And when Christians talk about the context of the Old Testament, they never actually get around to explaining why that should stop us from thinking that these things in the Old Testament are horrendously immoral.

Similarly, there are verses in the New Testament, which taken together seem to suggest that anyone who does not believe in Christianity will be punished forever in hell. I called the Old Testament horrendously immoral; this goes beyond horrendously immoral. In fact I don’t even think there are words in the English language to express how evil this doctrine is, except perhaps, for “hellish.”

Some Evangelical Christians address this problem by saying, no, this misinterpretation of the Bible and try to interpret the Bible in a way that allows some non-Christians to go to heaven or even allows everybody to go to heaven. There are a serious Evangelical Christians who seriously argue that the Bible teaches that, and part of me says fair enough, because I think the Bible contradicts itself on what you have to do to get salvation.

However, a lot of Evangelical leaders think the all non-Christians go to hell thing is nonnegotiable. How they deal with the problem of hell is first of all, the avoid talking about it. Second of all if they do have to talk about it, they downplay it. One thing they’ll say is that hell isn’t literal flames hell is just separation from God.

Of course this doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it might even be a blessing in disguise since a lot of times the God of Evangelical Christianity he sounds like a bit of a weirdo, who I might want to stay far, far away from, if, for example, he’s really that obsessed with getting people to believe things for which there is very little evidence.

On the other hand, if you ask the “hell is separation from God” folks, “how bad is hell?” they’ll tell you that hell is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. So if the belief is also that all non-Christians go to hell, that’s still saying that all non-Christians (if they die without coming to the truth and accepting Jesus as their Savior) will meet the worst fate imaginable. It’s saying that all of Hitler’s victims, with the exception of minority of converts to Christianity, all of them once they were killed in the Holocaust then went on to a fate even worse than Holocaust, ordained for them by the Evangelical Christian God. Good news indeed.

So there’s just no good defense of these doctrines. The other defensive strategy is that oh well we should ignore these doctrines because of the overriding message of love that is the true core of Christianity. This is very popular among liberal Christians, but surprisingly you also hear it sometimes from Christians who claim to be Evangelicals, claim to believe everything in the Bible.

My response to that is that, well, it’s true the Bible talks about love, but in so far as a particular biblical author combines talk about love with these horrible teachings and that’s evidence that that particular author did not really understand love. If a modern cult leader who advocated both stoning gays to death and also said some nice things about love, we wouldn’t think that the nice things about love overrode the horrible things about stoning gays to death.

Maybe the reason some Christians are so impressed the idea of a message of love and the Bible is they are under the impression that without the Bible, people wouldn’t know to love each other, which is maybe understandable if your moral education has been totally limited to the Bible. But once you know even a tiny little bit about ethical traditions outside of religion it becomes totally obvious that that’s false. For example, just look at Stoic teachings about the brotherhood of all men which, predate Jesus.

So that’s my stream of consciousness thoughts about the moral side of religion. I could go on, I’ve got more to say, but I’m not sure I have a book chapter worth of things to say. I think it’s a very important point and I don’t want to sell it short in the book, so give me advice on this one. When I talk about the moral side of religion, what should I be talking about? Yes, I can talk about the lie that Hitler was an atheist, and I can talk about communism, and I can talk about the Inquisition, and I can talk about the horrible treatment of women in Muslim countries today, but I think those issues are as straightforward and can probably be dealt with just as briefly as the things I’ve been talking about this post.

So what do I do to fill this chapter I’m trying to write?

Until then: anyone else read the book? Thoughts on it? Things you’d especially like me to cover? If you haven’t read it, but have read about it, are there parts you’re especially curious about based on what you’ve heard second-hand? And is there anything related to modern miracle claims, but not specifically related to Keener’s book, that you would like me to discuss?