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.

Greenwald makes the case in the United States today, rule of law is disappearing. Instead, we have what he calls “The Principle of Elite Immunity,”–the idea that political and business elites are never to be punished for their crimes, except perhaps if their crimes harm other elites. Greenwald blames the current mindset on Ford for pardoning Nixon and justifying the pardon on the grounds that prosecuting Nixon would be too divisive.

Now, personally, I don’t think the pardon of Nixon would have been such a bad thing if it had been a one-time thing and the country had gotten back on course afterwards. However, Greenwald convincingly argues that the Nixon pardon was the beginning of a pattern of bad excuses for forgiving any and all high-level wrong doing in this country. Thus, we get pardons for Iran-Contra criminals, Bill Clinton suppressing inquiry into Regan and Bush’s illegally providing of weapons to Iraq in spite of having promised investigations, and Obama’s failure to prosecute the crimes of the Bush administration.

It’s important to stress that the excuses really are ridiculous–read the book for the full recitation, but here’s one especially bad example, both in terms of the flimsiness of the rationale and the fact that it was given by a member of our government’s alleged watchdog, the media. When Bush pardoned Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger for multiple felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with Iran-Contra, Richard Cohen, on the grounds that Cohen had run into Weinberger quite a few times at Safeway, and he seemed like an OK guy to Cohen.

One of the strongest sections of the book is the coverage of the NSA wiretapping scandal and the decision to grant telecoms immunity for breaking the law on behalf of the Bush administration. Previously, I had known about the scandal, but had simply filed it away in my brain as one of the lesser crimes of the Bush administration. However, Greenwald explains how by granting the telecoms retroactive immunity for breaking the law, Democrats (and Congress was controlled by Democrats at the time) passed on a rare opportunity to get an actual investigation into Bush’s crimes.

Several other things stick out about the telecom immunity story. First, Congress’ actions can’t be defended on the grounds that the telecoms thought what they were doing was legal, because under the original law that was a valid defense. Second, the telecom immunity bill was written with heavy influence from corporate lobbyists, a troubling example of how, in Greenwald’s words, “major corporations literally write our nation’s laws.” Third, as a senator Obama went back on an initial promise to help block telecom immunity. Had I known that fact when Obama was elected, his other lapses in office would have surprised me less.

By comparison, the discussion of lawbreaking in relation to the 2008 financial crisis was a bit weak. It includes quotes from a number of authorities, including Alan Greenspan saying that much of what happened was “just plain fraud,” and cites one case where a former CEO was found to have committed fraud but was allowed to settle his case with a fine of $67, a fraction of the half-billion dollars he made while the fraud was going on. However, unlike most parts of the book, the laws that were supposedly broken are never explained clearly.

In fairness to Greenwald, part of his point is that the financial crisis was never thoroughly investigated, making it hard to know what crimes were or were not committed. Still, given all the anger at Wall Street right now, the book could have benefited a lot from more clarity on that point. Also, Greenwald’s focus on lawbreaking means that his mention of how lobbyists managed to get important regulations repealed doesn’t have a clear place in his narrative, and I wonder if that wasn’t the bigger problem (though it would still be a sign of how corrupt our government is).

Anyway, With Liberty and Justice for Some is an excellent book in spite of this complaint, and telecom immunity and the financial crisis are only two examples of the problems Greenwald covers. So go buy the book, even if you think you know all about these problems. Looking at any one incident in isolation, it’s tempting to say, “Okay, that was bad, but I’m sure it won’t happen again.” Greenwald, however, makes clear that we suffer from a recurring pattern of elites committing serious crimes and getting de facto immunity for doing so, a pattern that will likely continue until we do something to stop it.

Rather, it’s… well, it’s stuff like this post by Taner Edis, which says

I think the popularity of Harris should be embarrassing for nonbelievers. This mainly because a common response to public criticism of religion is is that the critic has misunderstood religion in general, or is ignorant of the specific traditions criticized. In Harris’s case, the accusations are correct. And since Harris is in a position where he legitimately represents the attitudes of many nonbelievers in the US, it may well be fair to say that American nonbelief often proceeds from a misunderstanding of religion…

…I have found myself in situations where I have had to ask fellow academics not to dismiss what I call science-minded nonbelief out of hand, just because its most public representatives include very visible scholarly disasters such as Harris.)

So, let me revisit the case where Harris annoys me the most—when he portrays Islam as an essentially violent religion by quoting violent passages from the Quran.

First of all, even trying something like this betrays unfamiliarity with the scientific and scholarly literature on religion in general….

When I first started reading Edis’ criticisms of Harris regarding Islam, I was inclined to take them seriously. After all, Edis was born in Turkey, and has had a lot more first-hand experience with Islam than I have. But after hearing a lot of this and similarly-flavored criticism of Harris, it occurred to me that it might actually be worth reading the offending passages of The End of Faith. Now that I’ve re-read large chunks of the book, I’m convinced that this sort of criticism is mostly reading things into the text that aren’t there.

As far as I can tell, Harris’ big points in The End of Faith are first, that because it’s normal to base your actions on your beliefs, it’s really important for people’s beliefs to be grounded in reality, and second, that if you want to be a “moderate” Christian, Jew, or Muslim, you’re going to have to ignore significant chunks of what you’re holy book says. What Harris doesn’t do, though, is make the sort of claim Edis is criticizing him for, that any religion is “essentially” anything.

This is an important point. Edis makes a big deal about how the relationship between the text of the Quran and what actual Muslims believe is complicated. Harris never says otherwise. Harris isn’t saying that there are no moderate Muslims, but that moderate Muslims have to ignore some of what the Quran says, and can’t legitimately claim to represent “true” Islam. That actually requires relationship between text and beliefs to be at least a bit complicated. Furthermore, my impression is that Edis denies there is a “true” Islam. So it’s not clear that Edis and Harris disagree about anything.

When it comes to many of the things Harris has caught flak for from liberals–war, torture, and so on–I think the problem is that Harris provides an unusually frank discussion of questions where he fears we have no good options. As Harris himself notes, it’s quite likely that our brains just didn’t evolve to think well about many of these questions. So no surprise that Harris’ frankness would make some people uncomfortable, and mistake “all the options may be horrible” for “Yay! Let’s do something horrible!”

I do think, though, that Harris says one incredibly foolish thing in this area, when he says that “We are now living in a world that can no longer tolerate well-armed, malevolent regimes.” Counter-intuitive though this may be, we are actually living in a world that sometimes must tolerate well-armed, malevolent regimes.

For example, from what I can tell a lot of experts think war with North Korea would mean a lot of dead civilians in Seoul. To be charitable to Harris, maybe a war with North Korea wouldn’t be as bad as I think, or maybe there’s an interpretation of Harris’ statement that doesn’t require that war. But I’m skeptical that there’s a reading of Harris’ statement that wouldn’t require us to do something catastrophically foolish in some not-too-far-out situation.

Other than that, the biggest complaint I had on re-reading The End of Faith is that in a few places, Harris will carelessly use muddle-headed tropes that are easily turned back on him. In particular, there’s this quote:

Once a person believes–really believes–that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves my be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is incompatible with tolerance in this one.

Harris gets something importantly right here, that the belief that infidels are damned is very dangerous. But the way says it is just begging to have believers complaining about atheists being so certain and intolerant.

The right response to this sort of criticism is that it’s the content of the beliefs that matters, not the level of certainty with which they’re held. Better to be certain the Earth revolves around the Sun, than think that God probably wants you to kill infidels. And “tolerance,” sadly, has become a meaningless feel-good word that Harris would’ve been wise to avoid.

Consider this an open thread, especially for airing your likes/dislikes of The End of Faith.

Love Wins

“God loves us.God offers us everlasting life by grace, freely, through no merit on our part.”

Unless you do not respond the right way.

Then God will torture you forever.

In hell.”

Huh?

The book created quite a stir in the Evangelical world when it was released, even making the cover of TIME back in April. Bell’s book got the reaction it did because it’s attack on the doctrine of Hell doesn’t come from an atheist academic like Dawkins or Dennett. It comes from a pastor. And not a pastor in one of those mainline denominations that’s bleeding members, relying on donations from little old ladies to stay afloat. Bell is the leader of Mars Hill, a megachurch that attracts 10,000 parishioners a week.

Bell is also a major figure of the “emerging church movement,” a movement which has a lot of appeal for young Evangelicals. In spite of having been written by a fundamentalist, this description jibes with my perceptions of the movement.

This is a book for people like Bell, people who grew up in an evangelical environment and don’t want to leave it completely, but want to change it, grow up out of it, and transcend it. The emerging church is not an evangelistic strategy. It is the last rung for evangelicals falling off the ladder into liberalism or unbelief.

*snip*

Love Wins has ignited such a firestorm of controversy because it’s the current fissure point for a larger fault-line. As younger generations come up against an increasingly hostile cultural environment, they are breaking in one of two directions—back to robust orthodoxy (often Reformed) or back to liberalism. The neo-evangelical consensus is cracking up. Love Wins is simply one of many tremors.

The bit about “falling off the ladder into unbelief” may be a bit much (though I’d certainly like to believe it!), but certainly the emerging church movement definitely appeals to people who think of themselves as evangelicals, but are drawn to a more liberal version of Christianity. Critics of fundamentalist Christianity should applaud this. People like Rob Bell may have some beliefs that are misguided or even silly, but there’s a world of difference between that and the odious dogmas advocated by the like likes of William Lane Craig.

Aside from agreeing with much of Bell’s message, I also enjoyed his book’s style. It reads like it was written by a preacher, in the best possible way. It reads like it was written by someone who’s made a living out of speaking to people week after week, and been very successful at it. It also reads like it was written by someone who’s used being listened to. Too often, I think, atheists get used to having people not listen, so we put too much energy into arguing with people who will never change their mind. Bell, though, just makes his points and doesn’t worry that some won’t agree.

For example, the first chapter is dedicated to tweaking the noses of those who think they know Ghandi is roasting in Hell right now. Bell gives us a nice litany of Bible verses that say conflicting things about what you have to do to be saved:

• Be “born again” (John 3)
• Be “worthy of taking part in the age to come” (Luke 20)
• Forgive others (Matthew 6)
• Do God’s will (Matthew 7)
• Stand firm til the end (Matthew 10)

In addition to these, Bell cites verses saying you can get forgiven because of other people’s faith (Mark 2), that women will be saved by bearing children (I Timothy 2), and that actually all of Israel will be saved (Romans 11). Bell doesn’t engage with the rationalizations about what the Bible “really means” so popular among fundamentalists. Instead, he just lays out things in the Bible most of his readers have probably never thought about before, with the question, “which is it?”

For this, and similar material through the rest of the book, I applaud Bell. But it’s also the source of my biggest complaint about the book. Bell seems to think, like many Christians, that he has “true Christianity” figured out: Jesus really just wanted us to be good to each other, to love each other. The very last page of the book is actually dedicated to bringing attention to campaigns to alleviate poverty, promote justice and human rights, and cut down on the number of nukes in the world. That’s a telling indication of where Bell’s priorities are, and I think he basically has his priorities straight.

But how can Bell honestly believe he got that set of priorities from the Jesus, Christianity, or the Bible? When the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Bible are–as Bell himself admits–so contradictory, where on Earth does Bell get his confidence about what Jesus would have really wanted? Or that Jesus was even that great of a dude? Truth is, like every other Christian in the world, Bell gets his values elsewhere, then convinces himself they’re what Jesus wants.

Plenty of Christians aren’t fundamentalists; they’re comfortable with there being a few errors in their Bible. And mostly, I’m inclined to side with them. Where I say “hold on,” though, is when you start to look at problems, contradictions, in the big stuff. Like contradictory being attributed to Jesus about salvation. Once you face up to that, you should realize that you have no business claiming to know “true Christianity.” I wish the Rob Bells of the world would learn to take their values and hold onto them without any of the religious baggage.

At the end of his chapter on Plantinga, Gutting makes a claim that he spends most of the rest of the book elaborating:

Plantinga’s transformation of the philosophy of religion makes fully explicit the role of convictions in philosophical inquiry. Convictions are basic beliefs with two distinctive features. First, unlike standard examples of basic beliefs, they are neither self-evident (obvious to anyone who understands them) nor incorrigible reports of inner experience but substantive, controversial claims that are central in our conceptions of ourselves and have a guiding role in our lives. Second, although they are basic beliefs and so not justified by evidence or argument in any ordinary sense, our commitment to them is not just a matter of their seeming obviously true when we think about them. Rather, they strike us as arising naturally out of experiences we have had, have maintained themselves in the face of various challenges, and are central for our way of life.

Subsequent chapters elaborate this with regards to free will, the mind-body problem, political philosophy, and philosophy of science.

Gutting’s claim about the importance of convictions is plausible in the case of political philosophy, but on the whole, his arguments for his view strike me as entirely unconvincing, based on a false dichotomy first introduced here:

The question we need to ask is, why do they [philosophers like Daniel Dennett] hold materialism to begin with? Do they have convincing philosophical arguments for it or do they hold it as a pre-philosophical conviction? (p. 130)

But there’s no reason to think a belief like materialism must be based either on convincing philosophical arguments or be a conviction. It might be neither.

I’m not a materialist (I basically agree with David Chalmers on consciousness), but consider one belief I do share with most modern materialists: “my digestive system is composed entirely of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and its behavior probably could, in principle, be predicted from knowing only the original arrangement of subatomic particles and the laws of physics.”

I believe this as a well-founded conjecture from what science has discovered so far, rather than anything that would normally be recognized as a philosophical argument. But it certainly isn’t central to my conception of myself or anything like that. That alone disqualifies it from being a “conviction,” if I understand how Gutting is defining that term.

I’m also not sure if it even counts as a basic belief. Gutting initially introduces the term as meaning “not held on the basis of sound argument.” If “sound” is understood in the technical sense often used by philosophers, then maybe my belief about my digestive system is a basic belief, because the standards for being “sound” in a philosophers sense are much stricter than the standards for being a well-founded conjecture.

On the other hand, I would say I can give an argument for my belief about the digestive system, even if it’s not “sound” and does not otherwise resemble typical philosophical arguments. Partly, I think Gutting may have just failed to consider that the category of “arguments” is fairly broad. He may be right that philosophers rarely produce the sorts of arguments they claim to be aiming for. That doesn’t mean, however, that other sorts of arguments couldn’t be given for some of their beliefs.

Similarly with my beliefs about the general reliability of science. I certainly don’t have a conventional philosophical argument for them. Rather, my beliefs come from things like knowing enough about the history of science to have an idea of science’s track record, and reading arguments between mainstream scientists and representatives of various fringe ideas (parapsychology, creationism, etc.)

I’ve consistently found that mainstream scientists tend to have vastly more plausible interpretations of the evidence, and in many cases (creationism especially) the representatives of the fringe ideas seem incapable of getting their facts straight. That’s a good reason to put a lot more faith in mainstream scientists than in their critics.

That’s nothing to send in to Mind, but that doesn’t mean my views should be classed as “convictions” in Gutting’s special sense. And in any case, I am completely unable to see that his claims about “convictions” deserve to be counted as items of philosophical knowledge.

I’ll get straight to the point, though: the careful discussion of the first few chapters vanishes when Gutting starts talking about Plantinga. Gutting was remarkably cautious about the supposed accomplishments of Quine, Kripke, and Gettier. With Plantinga, though, his attitude becomes uncritical acceptance. He not only insists Plantinga was right about his major claims, but that Plantinga’s claims deserve to be counted as items of philosophical “knowledge.”

One of the claims is one I’ve discussed here, the claim that Plantinga decisively refuted J. L. Mackie’s version of the problem of evil. Here’s Mackie’s argument, from the 1955 paper “Evil and Omnipotence”:

In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions…

However, the contradiction does not arise immediately; to show it we need some additional premises, or perhaps some quasi-logical rules connecting the terms ‘good’, ‘evil’, and ‘omnipotent’. These additional principles are that good is opposed to evil, in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can, and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. From these it follows that a good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely, and then the propositions that a good omnipotent thing exists, and that evil exists, are incompatible.

The initial thought in Plantinga’s response to Mackie was not new. Plantinga argued that “omnipotence” need not include the ability to do what is literally impossible, and it is impossible to determine a person’s actions and at the same time allow them free will. Plantinga then develops the point this way: true, God had many different options when it came to how to create the world, and God would have been able to see how people would act given each possible set-up for the world.

But, Plantinga says, that it’s possible that when God was creating the world, he foresaw that no matter how he created it, as long as he allowed for there to be free will, people would make some wrong choices, and wrong choices are a kind of evil. So maybe God couldn’t create free will without allowing evil, but it’s possible that God decided free will was valuable enough to allow evil for the sake of it. So there’s no impossibility of God and evil co-existing, because God might have allowed evil for the sake of free will.

In his original paper, Mackie had not addressed this exact response, but he was perfectly well aware that some theologians had attempted to solve the problem of evil by appeal to free will, and countered that that response depended on a confused conception of free will. Mackie’s point can be refined by saying that the free will defense depends on a libertarian view of free will, which says that being free is incompatible with being determined. However, the most widely-held view among contemporary philosophers is the compatiblist view of free will, which says that being free is compatible with determinism. If the compatibilists are right, Plantinga’s argument doesn’t work.

I’m a recent convert to the compatibilist view of free will, and hopefully I’ll remember to do a post explaining why at some point. But for now, I want to look at Gutting’s response to this problem:

Plantinga’s discussion is specifically directed at contemporary analytic philosophers, such as J. L. Mackie, who maintained that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of the Christian God, that a contradiction can be deduced from the assumption that both evil and the Christian God exist. If so, the undeniable existence of evil proves that God does not exist. Responding to this strong version of the problem requires only a proof that a world with both God and evil is logically possible, not that it is actual or even probable. Accordingly, a defense against the objection may appeal to the most outlandish assumptions as long as they are logically possible. This immediately allows Plantinga, in formulating a free will defense, to avoid complex issues about the nature of freedom.

I agree that if Mackie is read as asserting a formal contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evil, he’s in trouble. But that’s an absurd reading of the debate. It’s not the reading Plantinga himself used in his best known work on the problem of evil. In Nature of Necessity, for example, he says:

Presumably the atheologian—he who offers arguments against the existence of God—never meant to hold that there was a formal contradiction here; he meant instead that the conjunction of these two propositions is necessarily false, false in every possible world. (p. 165)

So if the compatibilist view of free will is necessarily true and Plantinga’s libertarian view necessarily false (as I’m inclined to think they are), bringing in libertarian free will is of no help to Plantinga. Also, as David Lewis pointed out, simply looking for formal consistency would make Plantinga’s free will defense completely unnecessary, because you might as well “reconcile” God and evil by appealing to absurd moral views, such as the view that:

We are partly right, partly wrong in our catalogue of values. The best things in life include love, joy, knowledge, vigour, despair, malice, betrayal, torture, . . . . God in His infinite love provides all His children with an abundance of good things. Different ones of us get different gifts, all of them very good. So some are blessed with joy and knowledge, some with vigour and malice, some with torture and despair. God permits evil-doing as a means for delivering some of the goods, just as He permits beneficence as a means for delivering others.

Obviously, such “solutions” to the problem of evil do not accomplish much of anything.

Gutting also uses an out-of-context quote from Mackie to claim that Mackie accepted Plantinga’s argument as successful:

Plantinga’s free will defense has been generally accepted as a successful response to the claim that God’s existence and the existence of evil are logically inconsistent. J. L. Mackie himself acknowledged that “since this defence is formally possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another.” (pp. 110-111)

The problem is that if you trace down the original quote from Mackie’s book The Miracle of Theism, he wasn’t talking about Plantinga’s argument at all. Rather, he was referring to a general greater-goods defense (the idea that God allows evil for the sake of some greater good), which he had already complimented as “particularly subtle” in the 1955 paper. What Mackie actually said about Plantinga in The Miracle of Theism was quite critical. Here is his final verdict on attempts to reconcile God and evil:

In short, all forms of the free will defense fail, and since this defense alone had any chance of success there is no plausible theodicy on offer. We cannot, indeed, take the problem of evil as a conclusive disproof of traditional theism, because, as we have seen, there is some flexibility in its doctrines, and in particular in the additional premisses needed to make to make the problem explicit. There may be some way of adjusting these which avoids an internal contradiction without giving up anything essential to theism. But none has yet been clearly presented, and there is a strong presumption that theism cannot be made coherent without a serious change in at least one of its central doctrines. (p. 176)

Does this sound like Mackie accepted that he had been refuted?

Bad as all of this is, the discussion of the problem of evil gets even worse in the last chapter, where Gutting says:

Consider a standard atheistic argument from evil: An all-good being would have wanted to prevent the Holocaust, and an all-powerful being would have been able to do so; therefore, since the Holocaust did occur, there is no being that is both all-good and all-powerful – hence no God in the traditional sense. No one familiar with Plantinga’s free will defense can think that there is a compelling case for the initial premise of this argument. It is logically possible that an all-good being would permit the Holocaust for the sake of avoiding even greater evils and that even an all-powerful being could not have prevented the Holocaust and avoided greater evils. The argument as formulated is demonstrably inadequate, and anyone who rejects the existence of God on the basis of this argument has been misled. (p.232)

This is a giant non-sequitur: the fact that it is logically possible that something is false does not mean a compelling case for it has not been made, or that the contrary view is remotely plausible. And it’s especially difficult to see how Plantinga did anything to touch versions of the problem of evil based on specific evils like the Holocaust. For reasons I’ve explained here, when the problem of evil is put that way, I think it’s a very powerful argument, even though I’m “familiar with Plantinga’s free will defense” and can’t see that I’ve been “misled.”

Remember that Plantinga argued that possibly, God had no way to allow free will while ensuring that no one ever did wrong. Surely, though he still could have allowed free will while preventing the Holocaust. For example, he might have created a world with free will, not intervened for several thousand years, allowing people to make various bad choices, and then miraculously intervened to prevent all the horrors of the Holocaust from occurring.

Gutting also has a discussion of Plantinga’s book Warranted Christian Belief, but that discussion is, if anything, even more uncritical. Here, not only can I not see any good reasons to think Plantinga’s arguments are conclusive, I can’t even see why Gutting would think so.

I find the situation a bit embarrassing. Based on my personal contact with Gutting, I don’t think he should be dismissed as just a hack apologist, but that’s what he sounds like in the parts of What Philosophers Know that deal with religion. The most I can think to say in his defense is this: he isn’t really doing anything any worse than the philosophers who’ve said that Quine refuted the analytic-synthetic distinction.

If it’s not any worse intellectually, though, it’s certainly more frustrating. I know there are smart, sincere inquirers who’ve gotten into philosophy of religion, but bought into unsupported assertions about what Plantinga has supposedly proved, just because the people who are most involved in the discussion insist on this so loudly. My hope with this post is that those folk will read it and learn to take the things philosophers say with a grain of salt.

Science can determine moral values if we accept three assumptions.

1) Ethics is about the conscious states of organisms. (okay)
2) Conscious states of organisms are within the realm of science. (okay)
3) Ethics is about maximizing the well being of conscious organisms. (hmmmm)

I think you’ll see why I dislike even having to question this last assumption, since generally I agree with it. But is this statement itself something that can be determined by science or not? And if it is, can science determine the specific nuances that go into it?

More specifically, Harris says that ethics is about the well-being of conscious creatures, and that science can study well-being. I don’t think either of these claims are crazy or obviously confused or require some special source of philosophical insight not normally needed in the sciences.

One criticism here is that disagreement over these claims, or over what “well-being” is, undermines the possibility of a science of ethics. This was one of Simon Blackburn’s criticisms, which Brian Leiter touted as showing “why Sam Harris is so confused,” but in The Moral Landscape, Harris does a very good job of addressing criticisms like this. Here, Harris is rebutting moral relativism, but his point applies just as much to the claim that ethics lies outside science:

What if certain people insist that their “values” or “morality” have nothing to do with well-being? Or, more realistically, what if their conception of well-being is so idiosyncratic and circumscribed as to be hostile, in principle, to the well-being of all others?…

We should observe the double standard in place regarding the significance of consensus: those who do not share our scientific goals have no influence on scientific discourse whatsoever; but, for some reason, people who do not share our moral goals render us incapable of ever speaking about moral truth…

It seems clear that the Catholic Church is as misguided in speaking about the “moral” peril of contraception, for instance, as it would be speaking about the “physics” of Transubstantiation. In both domains, it is true to say that the Church is grotesquely confused about which things in this world are worth paying attention to. (pp. 34-35)

Harris could, if he wanted to, borrow from what Kripke and Putnam have said about “natural kind terms”: it may not be obvious what does and does not count as water, but we settle such questions by pointing to our paradigm cases of water and studying them. When we find out that what water is is H2O, we conclude that a superficially similar substance with a different chemical formula isn’t water.

I’m not saying Harris had to take this approach, and I hope for his sake he doesn’t, since I’m personally skeptical of Kripke and Putnam’s philosophy of language. What I do think is that thinking about the Kripke-Putnam view of terms like “water” shows that it isn’t crazy or obviously confused to think that well-being is as much a subject matter for science as chemistry, or that it doesn’t require any mysterious philosophical insight to see that ethics is about well-being.

I think where Harris gets in trouble, though, is situations where we must choose whose well-being we try to improve (or, have the opportunity to help some people at the expense of others.) Harris makes perfectly clear that he is aware of such moral dilemmas, and understands their importance to an extent, but he doesn’t seem to see how they threaten his claim that science can determine values. He says:

Such puzzles merely suggest that certain moral questions could be difficult or impossible to answer in practice; they do not suggest that morality depends upon something other than the consequences of our actions and intentions. (p. 72)

The trouble is that the category “moral questions” includes not just questions about what consequences our actions will have, but questions about how to weigh the consequences of our actions. Questions like “Are we, as Peter Singer claims, under an obligation to make considerable personal sacrifices to save the lives of people in the Third World?” or “Would it be right to create a world of universal happiness at the cost of torturing to death one baby?”

If Harris claims science can answer all our moral questions, it had better be able to answer questions like those. I cannot see how it could, and while that is not a conclusive argument that it can’t, Harris doesn’t even give a general sense of how it could, and until someone does, I’m skeptical.

Harris seems to have made a subtle mistake here, thinking, in effect, that it was enough to have the first two points listed in Greg’s review to make ethical questions scientific questions. The thought is, “Ethical questions are questions about well-being, and questions about well-being are scientific questions, so ethical questions are just scientific questions.” But even if many questions about well-being (what is it, how do we attain it) are scientific questions, that does not mean questions like “what should we do when the needs of two or more people conflict?” are scientific questions.

If Harris is making this mistake, I don’t claim to know why he makes it. The snark that Harris just doesn’t know any philosophy (“I suggest that Harris would benefit from reading about it” – Massimo Pigliucci) is simply false. Harris did his bachelors in philosophy, and emphasizes in a footnote that he’s read quite a bit of the philosophical literature but just doesn’t think discussing it all would’ve made for a good book. When professional philosophers suggest that Harris is an ignoramus, it’s another embarrassing example of how they’re often too ready to dismiss outsiders.

Still, I do think Harris’ thesis in The Moral Landscape, that science can determines values, rests on a mistake: failing to see the significance of some of the most difficult moral questions we face.

I’m going to focus on what may be the most often heard criticisms of Dawkins: his ignorance. In a sense this is obviously right: Dawkins is an expert on biology, not religion. I would even agree that it shows in some ways in The God Delusion. The discussion of Aquinas’ Five Ways and the ontological argument feels cribbed from a undergraduate philosophy textbook. His discussion is also far from systematic: there’s a nice swipe at Richard Swinburne’s position on the problem of evil, but it isn’t part of a discussion of the problem of evil; rather, it’s part of a series of swipes at Richard Swinburne. He even lets on that he feels out of his depth: he suspects Stephen Urwin’s 67% chance of God wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, but Dawkins doesn’t trust his judgment enough to ignore Unwin entirely.

In spite of these complaints, I’m glad Dawkins’ book was published, if only because the works of Bertrand Russell weren’t going to make the best seller lists any time this century. As Jason Rosenouse put it:

And I suspect that Dawkins’ intention in writing this book had little to do with a desire to put shiny new ideas down on paper for the first time. Probably his reasons were more prosaic: He has a view of this subject that is not well-represented in mass-market literature, especially in this country, and he has the clout and the recognizability to actually get such a book published.

Now, while I would agree with Dawkins’ self-appointed opponents if all they were claiming was, “Dawkins isn’t an expert, and it shows,” they don’t stop there. Rather… well, I’m not always sure what’s beneath the rhetoric of some of Dawkins’ critics, but the thought seems to be something like “Dawkins is a Very Bad Man for writing about religion as a non-expert.”

One version of the complaint works like this: “I think Dawkins should have talked about X, and surely he would have talked about X if he knew what he were talking about, so the lack of a discussion of X in The God Delusion makes the book worthless.” This complaint quickly veers into self-parody:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? (from Terry Eagleton)

But there are plenty of books on religion written by experts that don’t discuss these things, for the simple reason that one can never discuss everything. The “you left out X” criticisms only make sense if there’s a specific reason why X is highly relevant to the discussion (which Eagleton doesn’t provide). Indeed, I’m certain that there are respected scholars of religion who haven’t read Erigena on subjectivity either, simply because they aren’t specialists in the history of theology of that period.

The less-obviously-laughable version of the “Dawkins is ignorant” line goes like this: because of his ignorance, he make arguments based on a misunderstanding of the views he’s attacking. If that claim were right, it would be a serious criticism of Dawkins. However, I’m convinced that criticisms of this sort are rarely if ever right. It’s important that atheists say so. The Courtier’s Reply is a perfectly fair response to the likes of Eagleton, but I think its overuse gives the false impression that critics are generally right about Dawkins’ ignorance.

And not only do I think these criticisms are wrong, many of them are absurd on their face. Think of the people who say, “Dawkins doesn’t realize that sophisticated theologians nowadays don’t think God has anything to do with the physical world.” The truth is that in The God Delusion, Dawkins makes perfectly clear that he knows some people claim this, and makes the compelling counterpoint that Richard Swinburne, widely regarded as a sophisticated religious thinker, does think God can act on the physical world (cf. the people who think they can refute Dawkins’ criticisms of Gould simply by quoting Gould).

Another oft-heard criticism of Dawkins’ “Ultimate Boeing 747″ argument is that Dawkins is ignorant of the fact that God is simple. In spite of the large number of apparently smart people who take this claim seriously, I think this criticism is just as bad as the “sophisticated theology” line. Truth is, anyone who’s read Dawkins carefully knows he’s perfectly aware that many theologians have claimed God is simple. He just doesn’t find the claim plausible. He says why right in the chapter on “Why there almost certainly is no God,” towards the end of the section headed “The anthropic principle: cosmological version.” His criticisms of the claim may not be compelling, but it’s just false that he’s unaware of it.

The irony here is that when critics claim Dawkins misrepresents theology by ignoring the doctrine of divine simplicity, it’s the critics who are misrepresenting Dawkins (hence the title of this post). In fact, while Dawkins is no expert on medieval theology, in general he shows that he knows perfectly well what people in sophisticated British circles have to say in defense of religion. I wish his defenders would say this more often.

(Note: I’m curious to know what other points readers know of where Dawkins has been accused of ignorance. I know Aquinas’ five ways is one, which I may address in another post. But what else is there?)
(Second note: I say “British circles” because The God Delusion is a very Anglo-centric book. I don’t know why I don’t hear people comment on this more often.)

Some Christians who lack Barna’s “Biblical worldview” have thought long and hard about all of the more controversial Christian doctrines, and only then made up their minds about which ones they can accept and which ones they have to modify. But I suspect most of them aren’t like that. Rather, they hear some things and say they believe them because they’re supposed to, never hear about other things, and hear about some things but reject them because they understand that the American mainstream thinks them icky. In other words, their thinking about the religious beliefs that they claim to be serious about tends to be pretty fuzzy.

These facts worry those conservatives who’ve paid attention to them. Last month, for example, one got CNN.com to publish an article warning parents that their teens may be “fake Christians,” adherents of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a term invented several years previous to describe the wishy-washiness (from the conservative point of view). Roughly, the complaint is that many self-described Christians think that all God really wants is for us to be happy nice people.

Most atheists will rejoice at these findings. If all religious believers in the U.S. dropped Biblical inerrancy, creationism, the belief that non-believers are damned, and screwy ideas about sex, PZ Myers might be able to call it a day. However, while Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may not not be as morally pernicious as many of the things Evangelicals believe, the worried conservatives who coined the term may be onto something.

Consider the Bruce Almighty, the Jim Carrey movie that came out in 2003. Early in the movie, we see Carrey’s character (Bruce) bickering with his girlfriend over whether he’ll donate blood. Then he gets fired from his job as a news anchorman, and curses God. God (played by Morgan Freeman) appears to him and announces he’s giving Bruce all his power, with obvious ha-ha-you-won’t-be-able-to-do-better implications. Bruce uses this power to make his girlfriend’s boobs bigger, get re-hired as an anchorman, and land headline-grabbing stories. Then he decides he needs to be altruistic, so he answers everyone’s prayers. This results in a lottery jackpot having to be split so many different ways that each winner only gets a few dollars. There’s a break up, a near-death experience, a revelation that Bruce’s girlfriend just wants him to be a better person, and finally, a momentous decision by Bruce to help promote a blood drive.

On a moment’s reflection, it’s obvious that Bruce Almighty has a profoundly distorted set of values. It’s a world where a selfishness means wanting fame and a big-breasted girlfriend, where lacking these things is the worst misfortune that ever happens to anyone, and where being a good person means being the kind of guy that women who look like Jennifer Aniston would agree isn’t an asshole. It never occurs to Bruce to create for himself a tropical island filled with naked women, nor does he ever think “I’ll start off my good deeds with the cancer patients.” In other words, Bruce Almighty is a movie with a weirdly shrunken moral imagination.

Appallingly, while Bruce Almighty may not have been hailed as a master piece, some people still appear to have actually liked it. If memory serves, it was even used by my parents’ church as part of a “God in the movies” series. This suggests that many people see nothing wrong with a fairly obnoxious form of the “God just wants us to be happy nice people” view.

In a way this isn’t surprising. That people have obnoxious notions of what constitutes a nice person is old news, and the true cynic might claim to have expected that many people would never think to go beyond certain stereotyped behavior of the 21st-century U.S. middle class. The real puzzle is why people feel the need to bring God into it.

Perhaps due to reading too much Robin Hanson, my mind immediately leaps to a signaling explanation. Perhaps declaring a nebulous belief in God has been arbitrarily settled upon by some people as a way of signaling “I may be mainly interested in advancing my career, by I make token concessions to niceness like helping with blood drives!”

But explanations that don’t rely on the ideas of obscure economists aren’t hard to find. If you have a shrunken moral imagination to start with, I suppose it isn’t hard to worry that, unless people are told that God (played by Morgan Freeman) is on the side of niceness, people might fail to make important token concessions to that principle. I suspect that was the main thing going through the writers’ head when they wrote the script.

Also, invoking God is a good way to insulate yourself from mockery. It’s all too easy to mock ambiguously Buddhist hipsters for their ideas of what makes a good person. Once a person’s ideas of niceness are backed up by God, though, mockery is dangerous, because only vehement people would mock another person’s religious beliefs. Looking at it another way, we may frown on women who bitch to their friends about what an asshole their boyfriend is, but we are kinder to a woman that looks like Jennifer Aniston who kneels by her bed, praying to God for her boyfriend to be less of an asshole.

None of these attitudes are as pernicious are as pernicious as, say, religiously rationalized homophobia. But when we encounter the sort of attitudes expressed in Bruce Almighty, or other silly attitudes found among the fuzzier religious believers (like the narcissistic tendency to attribute every bit of good luck to God), we should still be willing to take the time to point and laugh.

Like Luke Muehlhauser (author of the current “most helpful review”), I’m an atheist with a big interest in philosophy of religion. I’m ambivalent about his comment that this is the best defense of theism ever assembled, but at least it’s the best that’s been assembled in some time. But it’s not as good as one would have hoped, given the page count and, especially, the price tag.

The problem with the book is that over half the essays included in it discuss many important parts of their arguments in great detail, but have one crucial step in the argument which gets minimal defense, and pretty obviously should have gotten more in order to make the argument convincing.

Consider the chapter on William Lane Craig’s kalam cosmological argument. The basic argument says that everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, so the universe has a cause, and then further arguments are given to show that the cause is God. When I first read this argument in the 2nd edition of Craig’s book Reasonable Faith, I thought this last step, showing that the cause is God, was the weakest point in Craig’s presentation. It’s also this point that got the least attention in the Blackwell Companion: roughly three pages out of a one hundred page article. This is barely more space than was given to this crucial step in the argument in the latest edition of Reasonable Faith, even though as a whole the Reasonable Faith discussion is less than half the length of the Blackwell Companion discussion.

Someone seriously interested in Craig’s arguments should certainly read the Blackwell Companion article if they can, because it’s the most detailed presentation of the kalam argument argument Craig has produced in years. However, one would have hoped that in a 100-page essay he would had a reasonably thorough defense of each of the argument’s steps rather than just most of them. Over half the chapters are like this: not completely terrible, but not as good as they should have been given the space the authors had to work with.

I also have a hard time seeing some of the most respected historical defenders of theism, particularly Thomas Aquinas and Samuel Clarke, making the kinds of poorly thought-out presentations found in the Blackwell Companion. That’s why I’m reluctant to call this the GREATEST DEFENSE OF THEISM EVAR, though I recognize the advantages of some of the arguments in the Blackwell Companion over those of Aquinas and Clarke.

A few days from now I plan on writing a post at my blog (The Uncredible Hallq, Google it) explaining some of the weaknesses of the arguments for those interested in a discussion of that, but here I’m keeping my comments focused on advice for people thinking of buying/borrowing the book. My final verdict is if you’re in acquisitions at a university library, you should certainly buy this for your library, and people with a serious interest in philosophy of religion should take a look at this book if they can do so for free. But individuals who can’t get it for free probably have better things to spend their money on, and won’t really be missing all that much.

Actually, the arguments of Aquinas and Clarke are kinda silly, they both rely on the principle that causes resemble their effects. So really there isn’t much in the way of good arguments for the existence of God out there.