I’m sick and tired of the way that extremist conservative claims about history – such that Abraham Lincoln actually existed – are taken seriously, but serious, well-thought-out, well evidenced and reasonable claims – like the claim that Richard Carrier does not exist – are demonised. This is manifestly unfair. As Tim McGrew has recently shown, pure Bayesian probability gives us excellent reasons to doubt this strong claim:
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What should we make of the often heard reference to “religious terrorism,” coupled with the innuendo that religion is a uniquely dangerous influence when it comes to just how far people will go in the name of their God, even to the point of outright terrorism?

I know, finding rhetorically cute but terribly skewed and misleading comments on religion from the late Christopher Hitchens is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. It was his forte after all. But because it does dovetail nicely with the issue that caught my eye today, here’s a memorable gem from his book God is not Great:

A week before the events of September 11, 2001, I was on a panel with Dennis Prager, who is one of America’s better-known religious broadcasters. He challenged me in public to answer what he called a “straight yes/no question,” and I happily agreed. Very well, he said. I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching. Now—would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just coming from a prayer meeting? As the reader will see, this is not a question to which a yes/no answer can be given. But I was able to answer it as if it were not hypothetical. “Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

Yes, it’s a case of thinking quickly on his feet, and yes the examples he cites are probably fair game, given the actual scenarios he describes from the 1970s and 80s, and yes it’s made all the more punchy by the Sesame Street style “things that start with the letter B” approach, and there’s a rhetorically powerful (but terribly misleading) effect being elicited in the reader along the lines of “Wow, and that’s just the letter B! And there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, so that’s six times twenty-six…”

It’s a popular card to play. When you aren’t in the mood for offering arguments for the truth or falsehood of religious beliefs, just go all anti-realist and appeal to the harm done by adherents of religious beliefs (because you know, that tells us which ones are true of course). But it’s a very risky card to play. And I’m not even talking about the obvious: That one-off, large-scale atrocities were worse under secular regimes than under religious ones. We know that. But set aside the errors of the past, give everyone a blank slate, and ask: What’s going on in the world today? I’m not doing any of this to bash or malign any group of people (other, I guess, than those who make inappropriate generalisations about religion and extremism or violence). But I do want to draw attention to a couple of things: First, the fast and loose way that some people are inclined to use (and interpret) the word “religion,” and secondly, the way that this simple religious/non-religious categorisation doesn’t make the non-religious looks squeaky clean. Let me be clear. I do not endorse the tactic of besmirching a general outlook based on the misdeeds of its less sociable adherents (that’s a mild way of describing them). But given that this is a tactic that is used against religion as a blanket category far too often, it seems appropriate to draw on the empirical data to see if it tells us anything relevant (as one should assume that it would).
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“Ah, those silly creationists are at it again. Every real scientist knows that evolution is fact, and then these people with no real experience in science come along and bumble through the issues without understanding them at all. And as for those geographers! I have no real time for geography myself, but pah! Everyone knows the earth is flat!”

Ironic, right? Anyone who would say this is playing by an obvious double standard, and they would look a bit silly, to put things mildly. They would be doing the very thing they complain about others doing. Just imagine my surprise then when I read through Lawrence’s Krauss’s reflections (I think after reading it you might be justified in calling it a bit of an outburst) on his debate with William Lane Craig.
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Is atheism or theism more natural for human beings?

According to online author Tim Covell, “Everyone is born atheist. Religion is learned.” Over at the “rational response squad” you’re treated to the claim that “Many people don’t know it but everyone is born an Atheist, it’s not until a child has religious beliefs Pushed on them with out any evidence to support them that they “think” their [sic] a Theist.” David McAfee makes the same claim: “Now, the way I see it, everybody is born an atheist and, without submersion into religion as a child, we would most likely maintain that position…”  These are just examples. There are plenty more out there in the non-peer-reviewed pool of “intellectual diversity” that is the internet.

Now, there’s at least some truth here. Newborns don’t have a lot by way of beliefs. They’re an ignorant sort, you could say, so the fact that they don’t overtly believe in God, or stars, or carrots, or causation, or planets etc, really isn’t very interesting. However, when people call themselves atheists, they don’t usually mean to convey their ignorance. It’s hardly fair game to point out what babies don’t know as grounds for any claims about what’s natural for intellectually developed adults to believe. To simply talk about what babies actually know is one thing – and something pretty uninteresting at that. What is more interesting is to talk about the kind of beliefs that babies – unaided by religious education – naturally form as their minds develop. It is here that comments like those above are quickly culled from the pool of those that can now make it to the level of scientific respectability. They are wrong – children are not natural atheists after all.
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I know, I recently blogged on the Reason Rally when I became aware of it, commenting on the gratuitous practice of assuming that to advocate an atheist or non-theist outlook is ipso facto to advocate reason and rationality. But today something else caught my eye, prompting a question: How much would you pay for one of the best seats in the house at the Reason Rally?

Fifty dollars? One hundred dollars? What about two hundred dollars? Or five hundred?
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There have been rallies in the past of people who would have been happy to see this or that (or all) religions purged from society. Such gatherings, thankfully, have seen a change in tone and tactic over the years. What is being billed as “the largest secular event in world history,” the “Reason Rally” will be held in Washington DC on 24 March this year.

In spite of how often I have been assured by atheists (those denying God’s existence) and agnostics (those simply not affirming God’s existence or nonexistence) that nonbelievers (and atheists in particular) are not a monolith, not part of a movement, not followers of a religion etc, this huge rally, the largest of its kind ever, has been organised with “the intent to unify, energize, and embolden secular people nationwide” and to “give secular Americans an opportunity to unite under a banner of reason and community at a level of impact that has never been seen before.” For those who want to convince the world that atheists don’t belong to anything, the job just got harder!

The list of headline speakers includes comedians, lobbyists, singers, TV show hosts and renowned zoologist (and above all, outspoken atheist) Richard Dawkins, among others.
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Here it is, the last podcast episode for 2011. This time I’m looking at “the “evil god challenge” as posed by Stephen Law in a fairly recent article by that name. Isn’t the evidence for a good God really no better or worse than the evidence that an evil god? In short, no. Here I explain why I think (as I suspect many may think) that the evil god challenges has major philosophical shortcomings, in spite of being an argument worthy of our attention.

Episode 045: What if God Were Really Bad? [ 58:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’m a moral realist. That means that I think there really are some moral facts. It is wrong to do some things, and it is right to do some things, and this isn’t just a vent of emotion or an expression of my will, it’s really true. Stephen Law is also a moral realist, but if I’m reading him rightly in his debate with William Lane Craig on the existence of God or in his more recent discussion with me on the Unbelievable radio show where I discussed the moral argument for theism, he’d sooner give up moral realism than accept theism.

An argument I sketched in that discussion was that the best way to explain moral facts is by reference to God. Although he does currently believe in moral facts, he noted that they may not be there after all, so maybe there’s no reason to invoke God as an explanation. After all, he said, we can come up with an evolutionary explanation of why we would believe in moral facts whether they really existed or not. Law wants to be careful here. At the time I raised the concern that this may just be a case of the genetic fallacy, offering an explanation of where a belief came from as though this showed or suggested that the belief is false. But this isn’t what Law means to say, he replied. The point is not that the existence of an evolutionary account of why moral beliefs exist shows that those beliefs are false. That would indeed be the genetic fallacy at work. No, the point is that whether those beliefs are true or false, there exists the same evolutionary account for why we hold them – and that account is unaffected by their truth or falsehood. There is thus no particular reason to think that the evolutionary processes that brought them into being is likely to produce true-belief forming processes.

While this line of argument does not purport to show that the moral beliefs we hold aren’t true, it’s meant to cast doubt on the probability that the process that gave rise to these beliefs (or at least the process that gave rise to the relevant belief forming processes) is likely to result in either true beliefs or reliable belief forming faculties. It’s best to think in terms of the latter, if only because it’s downright bizarre to think that evolution forms beliefs. It plainly doesn’t, but it does form mechanisms or processes that creatures use to form beliefs.

So what should we make of this? Can we give an evolutionary account of why we would believe in moral facts, an account that is blind to the actual existence of those facts? Secondly, if we could give an account like this, would it undermine the probability that the processes that form those beliefs are reliable? I will give two answers: Yes, it is trivially true that we can give an account like this, and no, the fact that we can do so should not undermine our confidence in the belief form process that forms moral beliefs. In doing so I will be drawing on an argument by Alvin Plantinga, namely the “evolutionary argument against naturalism.” While I am inclined to think that argument is unsound, many of the insights that it draws attention to are true nonetheless.
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Next week it will be my pleasure to have my third discussion on the Unbelievable radio show with host Justin Brierley. My partner in conversation will be Stephen Law, who teaches philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London.

Although the only public comments I have made about Stephen at this blog have been for the sake of disagreeing with him, the fact is that I like reading what he has to say – however mistaken I might think he is. Yes he has creativity and style, something lacked by plenty of  academics, but unlike other vocal critics of religion like P Z Meyers, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, Stephen Law usually knows what he’s talking about as far as philosophy goes (I say usually because it does seem to me that philosophy of religion is not his strength, and this is the subject area of his “Evil-God Challenge.”). Law’s “Evil-God Challenge” should be read by anyone who wants to philosophically defend the Christian faith. That being said, the central point of the article, that theistic arguments are just as compatible with a malevolent deity as they are with the God of Christianity, is false. I think first year students in philosophy of religion who want to defend the Christian faith should – before being allowed to progress to the second year – be able to explain why the evil God challenge fails. If they’re not sure how they would do it, they should make sure they listen to the discussion on Unbelievable!

Glenn Peoples

Hat tip to Peter Byron who made this.