Atheism and Theism are not worldviews …

So, there’s been a debate (re)started over what it means to be an atheist, and if a specifically atheist identity can go beyond the mere lack of belief in gods. Which is what P.Z. Myers titles his latest post on the subject, where he goes after a set of Twitter comments by Russell Blackford on the subject.

Myers assembles Blackford’s tweets into a paragraph like this:

Just to be clear. My stance as a pro-feminist man does NOT follow from the fact that I am an atheist. Even if I became a philosophical deist overnight, I would maintain the same stance. Let’s not oversellMere atheism what mere atheism entails. None of which is to deny that actual religions can be used to provide false rationales for some abhorrent views.

Myers starts his reply this way:

That’s a bit of a mess, so let’s unpack it. I find interesting because my pro-feminist stance does follow from the fact that I am an atheist; perhaps we ought to recognize that there is more than one way to be an atheist, something I’ve been saying for a long time, and apparently Blackford and I are very different kinds of atheist.

Casting this as being able to be different kinds of atheist is quite revealing. The underlying argument throughout all of this has been that certain things follow from atheism, or at least from atheism for certain individuals. But if Myers is going to concede that there can be different types of atheists that can all legitimately be called atheists, then it seems that it doesn’t really follow from atheism qua atheism, but instead from your other beliefs and your worldview in general. Which would be what those who talk about “mere atheism” are trying to argue.

This becomes clearer when Myers talks about how these things follow from his atheism, as he repeats what he’s said before:

In my case, the absence of a god invalidates all truth claims by revelation and all the traditional authority of holy books. It creates an epistemic gap, which I suppose someone could fill with just about anything: whim, utility, emotional needs, dice-rolling, whatever. I have no idea how Blackford explains cause and reason, but I know how I do: by an acceptance of natural causes which can be examined empirically and by experiment…by science. I also concede that where I can’t apply science in evaluating human motives, I use empathy and the principle of equating another’s condition with my own.

My atheism entails using those methods to resolve ethical decisions, for instance. That’s my toolkit. My atheism has stripped me of the tools of dogma and authoritarianism (and good riddance).

…

But then, I don’t need any other mechanism — it seems to me that science and love of my fellow human beings is more than sufficient argument to guide the entirety of my life. And those are necessary axioms that I am compelled to accept by my atheism, even if there could exist alternate axioms that would also fill the gap left by the absence of gods.

So what he’s really saying here is this: When I become an atheist, I have to give up the worldview I had that depended on it. At that point, I need to adopt a new worldview, and thus have a new basis for my worldview. Once I have that worldview, then I can go on acting in the world according to that worldview. So, becoming an atheist has forced me to change my worldview, and this is the worldview I ended up with. Thus, my worldview follows from my atheism.

In a sense, this is correct, in that if someone had a worldview that relied on a God existing and then came to believe that no gods exist, then one would have to — to be rational — abandon that worldview and build a new one. This, of course, would only happen for people who started with a religious worldview and then became atheists, as people who never had a religious worldview would have developed a worldview that didn’t depend on a belief in God at all — even if they did believe in God.

However, where it goes wrong is that it implies that the worldview that Myers adopts is, in fact, derived from atheism. It isn’t. Myers could have built his new worldview on dogmatism and authoritarianism (and some might accuse him of having done just that) and still claimed to derive it from atheism in just the same way as he claims to have derived his undogmatic and anti-authoritarian from atheism. His view, therefore, is consistent with atheism, but not derived from it. In fact, it would probably be more reasonable to say that his atheism likely followed from those values, rather than the converse. Note that Myers concedes here that this is the case and that there are other axioms he could use to fill that gap, but these are the ones he chose. Saying that he is compelled by his atheism is just false; interpreting him as charitably as possible, it sounds like it is more empathy and naturalism that does that, not atheism.

And the reason for this is clear: atheism and theism are, at their heart, beliefs (or lack of beliefs) about a specific proposition: There exists a god. They aren’t worldviews in and of themselves, and as such can’t be used to replace a worldview. If you say that you’re an atheist, no one can say anything else about you other than that you lack a belief in gods; if you say that you’re a theist, all someone can say is that you believe in one or more gods. They can’t say anything about your other views. Does it mean that you’re a feminist, or a misogynist, or a liberal, or a conservative, or a moral relativist or a deontologist or a consequentiast or someone who is interested in socal justice or anything else? No. Not at all. Those follow from your worldview, and atheism and theism are not worldviews. If you are an atheist, you don’t even have to be a naturalist, as you can accept that some supernatural things exist … just not gods.

The issue, then, with the people like Myers who are advocating for atheism to be something more is that they want to turn atheism into a worldview. But if you do that, then you’re going to have to insist that people who call themselves atheist accept certain things, things beyond just lacking a belief in gods. And this worries those who don’t consider atheism to be a worldview. It’s one thing when the things that people are saying are part of atheism are just obvious facts, but if you hold a more radical view — Myers, for example, is on the far end of the liberal scale, it seems to me — then you would be saying that things follow from atheism that other atheists disagree with. If Myers wants to represent atheism a certain way, then it would mean that he would represent atheism as being something that a lot of atheists don’t accept, not merely as part of atheism but even as part of their worldview. Now, Myers can claim that he is just speaking for himself … but then he has no reason to object to the “merely atheists” who say that atheism just is that. Myers can easily claim that he has an atheistic worldview, where his lack of belief in gods plays a much stronger role in justifying and defining his worldview than it might in others while still accepting that atheism itself is indeed just that “mere lack of belief”.

That he seems resistant to doing that seems like he’s after the former more than the latter. And that’s precisely what the “mere atheists” don’t want to happen.

Atheist Virtues …

Alain de Botton is an atheist who wants to maintain the more, well, I guess “spiritual” is a decent word for it, attributes of religion and how they build a community in a form that is atheistic and so doesn’t rely on a belief in any god at all. Most of the New Atheists have basically mocked him for this. His most recent move is to define a set of virtues for the modern — and presumably atheist — era. Both Stephanie Zvan and Russell Blackford have commented on them.

What comes out in both posts and annoys me is a worry that these things aren’t virtues because there are cases where you shouldn’t engage in them. Zvan, for example, makes this the heart of her criticism of “Resilience”:

Look, resilience has distinct advantages in a lot of situations. Being broken by the small things isn’t anything anyone looks for. Being stopped by every trifle doesn’t get you very far. But sometimes quitting really is the best solution to a problem. Do you want to keep beating your head against an abusive “friendship” trying to get it to change? Is that a virtue?

There are times when treating resilience as a virtue is dangerous. There are times when it’s too much. Then, calling it a virtue is an active harm.

Blackford also hints at this as an issue, but as you might expect has read Aristotle and so grasps the way around the problem:

In some cases, I think that impatience, of a kind, might be a virtue – if it means, for example, impatience with bullshit. Aristotle would probably say that the trick is actually to be patient at the right time, with the right people, for the right reasons, and so on (and similarly to be impatient at the right time, etc.).

What annoys me is that this is somehow raised as an objection against de Botton, who never actually implies that considering these things as virtues means considering them as virtues even when the reason they are a virtue isn’t in play in a situation. Something like Aristotle’s “moderation” idea should always be in play when considering why a virtue is a virtue, because at the very least virtue should never, ever require you to act like an idiot in order to act virtuously. Two of the original Virtue Theories — Aristotle and the Stoics — both insisted that that wasn’t the case: Aristotle with his idea that the moderate is the virtue, and the Stoics with their idea that virtue was defined by doing what is the rational thing to do. It’s become a throwaway, strawman point to talk about the virtuous having to act on that virtue even when it doesn’t make sense to do so, but Virtue Theories don’t rquire people to become “Lawful Stupid”, following the letter of a definition of a virtue while ignoring the reasons that thing is called a virtue in the first place. Resilience, for example, is defined by de Botton as this:

Keeping going even when things are looking dark; accepting that reversals are normal; remembering that human nature is, in the end, tough. Not frightening others with your fears.

But where does this imply that you keep going even when there is no hope of being successful? Where does this imply that you don’t try to avoid or reverse reversals? Where does this imply that you don’t recognize when things are too tough? Where does this imply that you don’t frighten others when they need to be frightened? Again, there is no reason to assume that de Botton’s virtues imply that you should be an idiot in service to virtue, and so it is indicative that one of the first criticisms against anyone who advances virtues is “Well, in this case you shouldn’t act what you call ‘virtuously’ because it won’t give you what you think the virtue will give you.” The reply to that is “Duh! Virtues are defined in relation to a purpose, and if in a case you wouldn’t fulfill the purpose then, well, acting that way isn’t a virtue.”

Zvan relates Virtue to Sin:

Elevating resilience to the level of a virtue does more than just change it from a tool into a fetish. It also casts lapses in resilience as lapses in virtue–sins. This does what religion all too often does, forces people to choose between what is good for them in any one situation and avoiding sin/maintaining virtue.

Which is precisely why this annoys me, because both Virtue and Sin relate to an overall principle or idea of what is good for people. Thus, neither can indeed actually clash with what is good for a person because if the action would lead to what is considered the overall good for a person, then it is virtuous/not sinful even if a strict definition of the virtues or sins might suggest that, and if it would not lead to that overall good for the person then it is not virtuous/is a sin no matter how closely it might resemble one of those virtues or not be considered a sin by strict definition. So what we see here is precisely the wrong sort of objection to a Virtue or Sin Theory, where she attacks it based on an idea of “good” that isn’t the one being used. In this case, it seems — especially with the link to religious sin — that she’s using the idea of personal pleasure/pain as her good, and saying that in some cases you might end up more miserable if you try to be Resilient, so that forces you away from doing what is really good for you. Now, it is possible that de Botton wants a sort of “happiness” justification for his virtues, but then being Resilient when it won’t bring happiness, even long term, wouldn’t be a virtue for him. For religions and for the Stoics, being “happy” isn’t what is good for people, and so simply clashing with happiness is not in any way making it so that someone is choosing what is not good for them. In short, avoiding sin/maintaining virtue always is what is good for a person in all situations … it’s just what is thought of as “good for a person” varies.

Zvan then moves on to talk about the capacity to be Resilient:

That isn’t merely a situational problem either. Resilience has been a hot topic in psychology for at least a couple of decades. We know that resilience can be a powerful thing, so we’ve studied how people can have more of it. The factors that increase resilience are largely beyond anyone’s control. How you are raised, how much trauma you’ve experienced when you encounter a bad situation, how well others support you–these aren’t choices that people make.

Under those circumstances, raising resilience to the level of a virtue as de Botton does is cruelty. We’ve had enough of religions setting arbitrary standards that people can’t meet just by trying, haven’t we?

And the problem here is that it seems to be based on a notion that if you are to be expected to meet the demands of virtue or religion, you should be able to do so by simply trying really hard at it in specific situations. It should never be the case that some people will just naturally have more ability to do it, and so that while it just comes easy to some people others have to struggle with it, and even work to develop it. There is, of course, the reasonable expectation that if we are going to demand virtue from someone they have to be reasonably able to actually do it, but the cases where that might be an issue are cases like the kleptomaniac, not the cases she cites. All of the cases she described are, in fact, controllable at least with respect to whether or not one faces them with Resilience … even if one needs therapy or training in order to get to that point. While one cannot control how one was raised, one can train out the things they were taught or adopted from their upbringing and train in new behaviours and beliefs. One can try to train out or train down the reaction one has had to trauma. One can either build a supportive network or train themselves to rely less on the support of others. While one can say that these aren’t really choices that people make, how one reacts to them and what one does in response to them are, and that is what people are responsible for. No one ever promised that acting virtuously is or ought to be easy, and to become a virtuous person may indeed require a lot of work, and work outside of merely reacting to the situations that you are put in. You may well have to prepare a lot to be Resilient in situations where others are just naturally Resilient. I don’t see why having to put in that strong effort would be unreasonable; you don’t get anything good without expecting to have to work at it.

Zvan also goes after, surprise, surprise, “Politeness”:

Politeness is a set of behaviors that serve a purpose. de Botton is close on that purpose, though I think he’s going a bit grand with “civilization”. Few rules of politeness are that universal. Still, politeness is that set of behaviors that allow a society to function without constantly haggling about how it should be done. It’s a codified nonverbal and verbal language that tells you where you stand in a transaction.

…

Sometimes we need to haggle over how things are done in a particular society. Societies contain injustices. They can head in a direction that is doomed to failure or even catastrophe. Sometimes there is simply a better way. Sometimes there is virtue in the haggling.

We can’t do that, however, when politeness–separate from the specifics of its function–becomes a virtue. Then the slowing down, even if we gain insights we wouldn’t moving at full speed, becomes the sin. Agitation becomes the sin. Negotiation on how we are treated becomes the sin.

I disagree with this definition of “Politeness”. I would argue that Politeness is indeed a set of social rules and behaviours that are intended to demonstrate reasonable respect. You thus can and should haggling and negotiate Politely. Politeness doesn’t stop you from getting what you want or need, or talking about injustice or trying to head off disaster, but is instead basically a reminder that in your words and actions you always have to treat the other people not merely as means to your end, but as ends in themselves. Or, basically, as people with their own beliefs and desires, and their own goals. It’s always seemed an odd assertion to me that the “anti-accommodationists” have always seen the calls for Politeness as calls to stop disagreeing, as opposed to as calls to treat their opponents as reasonable people who are expressing the beliefs they actually hold. The insistence on calling “lying” saying something that you think is false that they clearly think is true is clearly, to me, Impolite, as is ignoring what a person says their beliefs are and translating them based on what others believe into something you think fits better, because both stop treating the other person as a person deserving of reasonable respect and intellectual charity and turns them into a punching bag for your own beliefs.

So, my challenge on this one is this: do you not think that you can negotiate or disagree Politely? If you can’t, why not? I’ve seen many people who disagree with me Politely on a number of issues, even really important ones, so why can’t you even achieve a modicum of Politeness?

Zvan continues:

This simple list also doesn’t even begin to address the virtues inherent in the “negative” emotions. There are none without uses. Fear is critical in good decision-making, even if it shouldn’t be allowed to rule us. Anger has accomplished much that is good. Even jealously tells us something about our own needs and desires that we can put to good use. Where do we give these useful negatives their due if we raise one set of traits and tools above the others?

Virtues aren’t mere tools, no matter how much Zvan wants to cast it that way. That emotions can be useful doesn’t make them virtuous because it doesn’t make them inherently good, meaning that they aim at the ultimate good for people. A Virtue Theory can give them their due without elevating them to Virtues by evaluating their use at providing the good, and thus judging them against the Virtues so that their entire value comes from how well they support the Virtues. Can it be reasonably argued that anger is good in and of itself? This is unlikely, since it reacts both to the good and to the bad. All emotions, I argue, are reactions that have to be conditioned to reflect the good, but are never good in and of themselves. One can argue that I could “save” anger and the emotions like I save Resilience and say that anger is not really anger unless it aims at the good … but anger and all emotions are actual reactions in us, and likely largely physical ones. Resilence, therefore, can be tied to behaviour and not to the specific reactions that produce it, but it is difficult to do that for anger. Thus, for the emotions, we must consider the physical reactions as what it means to be them, and then when we look at that we discover that they do not aim at the good and so are not themselves Virtues, although they can be of use in aiming at the good and thus in us becoming and remaining Virtuous. But being useful is not enough to be a Virtue.

I’ll end with Blackford, who ends up listing some that he thinks are missing:

But nor does his list contain distinctly opposed virtues, such as skepticism, anti-authoritarianism, sex-positivity, or enthusiasm for change. Surprisingly, the traditional virtue of courage does not appear on the list.

I thought that his version of “Confidence” could probably have taken the place “Courage” normally occupies, but that’s debatable. What I do want to focus on are the others, and question why they should be considered virtues at all. It seems trivially obvious that all of them can be quite problematic if overdone, but it isn’t clear that you can “moderate” them without making them meaningless. If we interpret “Skepticism” to be something like “Do not trust certain forms of evidence/arguments unless it is reasonable to trust them”, this sounds just like normal, everyday reasoning, the kind that most people engage in. If we interpret “anti-authoritarianism” to mean “Only trust reasonable authority”, then again it’s hard to see what special way of living this picks out. And the same applies to all of the other terms. If you try to interpret them “moderately”, it’s hard to see how they could apply to the debates we commonly have over them today, and if you leave them more specific to those debates it’s clear that they can fail to pick out the good.

You could argue that you can define them relative to the good the way I did for Resilience, but if we take “Increase the happiness of people” as our base good you can clearly see the issue. Would those advocating for Skepticism accept it meaning “Act skeptically unless it doesn’t make people more happy to be skeptical”? Would those advocating for Anti-authoritarianism accept it meaning “Act against authority unless it will make people happy to accept authority”. For Sex-positivity, you can see it being utterly meaningless to interpret it as “Think of sex positively unless it won’t make you happy to think that way”, and for Enthusiasm for Change it is equally meaningless to call it “Embrace change except where that would make people unhappy”.

So, then, these don’t see to be things that can be made into virtues, because defined broadly they are meaningless and defined narrowly we can easily see that they don’t always aim at the good. Only if you think of them as being the “moderate” versions can this argument even get off the ground … and then that ends up simply defining them to be the most reasonable positions instead of arguing for them being such, which is something that a lot of the New Atheist arguments end up being: broaden the definitions so much that there is no possible way that any reasonable position could oppose it and declare victory, ignoring that the opponents weren’t arguing about the broader definition in the first place. I’ve seen it with science, with natural and with skepticism, and I don’t want this overdefinition to get in the way of determining and asssesing virtue.

Spheres of Responsibilty and Hypocrisy …

So, a new story is making the rounds about what is claimed to be the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. The one’s over a lawsuit levelled at them because they didn’t perform a C-section on a woman who was having a heart attack to save her seven month old twins. The purported hypocrisy, however, comes in with the defense, where one of the legal defenses raised is that under the law in Colorado the foetus is not a person, and therefore under the law in Colorado they cannot be held legally responsible for “Wrongful Death” because it has been clearly determined that that only applies to persons, and a foetus is not one. Of course, this contradicts the Catholic Church’s stance that foetuses are persons and that they should be considered such under the law, and so leads to suggestions that they consider it a person until someone wants to hold them accountable for what they do to one, at which point they deny it.

(Note that this organization doesn’t seem to be officially affiliated with the Church, and this isn’t yet explicitly a decision advanced or advocated by the Church).

At first skimming and first thought, I was fairly neutral on this, but on reflection I think that the position here is actually completely right, and it all comes down to the fact that the counter-argument is being made in a legal context, and not a moral one. Essentially, what’s happening is this: they are being taken to court to be held legally responsible for their actions in that matter. They are not, in this case, being held morally responsible for their actions. And the law in Colorado is exactly as cited above: foetuses aren’t persons, and you can only be held legally responsible for Wrongful Death if a person has died. So, in terms of how this shakes out:

1) Regardless of the organizations stance on whether or not they would want to pursue this line of argumentation, the law firm they hired would have to because it’s actually the law. They would be a very terrible law firm if they allowed their clients to accept legal responsibility for something that, by the law, they are not actually legally responsible for, and any judge that didn’t call them out for malpractice would also be a very poor judge.

2) Their views on their moral responsibility in this case are irrelevant to whether or not they should accept legal responsibility, because legal responsibility does not reflect moral responsibility. So there’s no hypocrisy in saying “Yes, we think that morally a foetus is a person and so we have moral responsibility, but by the law we don’t have legal responsibility, and that’s what we’re arguing over here”.

3) That they want there to be that legal responsibility does not, in fact, change the fact that the law does not give them that legal responsibility. This can also lead to a bit of a smug sense of satisfaction knowing that if the people who want to hold them responsible here had just changed the law to what the Church wanted, they could hold them responsible … but since they didn’t, they can’t. In fact, at this point it would look like those who are charging them with hypocrisy are the hypocrites, wanting the law to allow the direct killing of foetuses in the case of abortion but when the Church simply asks that the laws they support be applied to all people equally they turn around and insist that they, who oppose the law, should therefore not share its protections.

This is a bit of a reverse is/ought fallacy, which is the argument that if you think that a law ought to be a certain way then you must be treated as if it is a certain way. But that’s false, and again this is all about how the law really is, not about how they want it to be.

Now, that “moral responsibility” part is really important, because I do think that they need to examine what happened and find out why they didn’t try the C-section to save the twins’ lives. Even without the Catholic morality in the mix, it would seem that even basic medical procedures would demand that they give it a shot. So they really do need to find out why it happened, figure out how to ensure it won’t happen again, and give restitution for their likely moral lapse. None of that means that they are legally responsible for a Wrongful Death if the legal defense is right, and that does not mean that they need not fight against being held legally responsible for what they are not, in fact, legally responsible for by appealing to the actual laws, even if they wish the laws were different.

More additions to my reading list …

So, I’ve added more books to my reading list.

I had the Hadot and Chase book on Marcus Aurelius recommended to me over on Unequally Yoked (which is also examining humanism at the moment) and was looking for the copy of Marcus Aurelius that I was sure I had but couldn’t find, and the one there had 10 reviews that were all 5 star, so I picked that up. While I was there, I picked up the Kaufmann book because Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution is True was promoting it as an excellent counter to theology, and while I couldn’t find “Faith of the Heretic” this one was available, at least for now. So, despite its age, I’ll give it a try and see if its counters really work. And while I was getting the commentary on Aurelius, I picked up one on Plotinus out of general interest.

Now all I have to do is find a spot in my schedule to do the reading and comment on them. Next up is the work of Edward Feser, but I still have to comment on Plantinga and Dennett.

Would you commit genocide if you thought it was the right thing to do?

Almost a year ago, Adam Lee raised a challenge to theists based on the interaction of God and Abraham over the sacrifice of Isaac:

Going further with this, I have a question for every religious believer, based on the Abraham episode: Do you believe that violence in God’s name is wrong, or do you merely believe he hasn’t personally told you to do violence? If God appeared to you and spoke to you, commanding you to commit a violent act – to murder a child, say – how would you respond?

My reply was to return this challenge:

Before I answer your question, I need you to answer this one for me:

If you truly believed with the certainty you expressed in an earlier post about your principles that it would be moral to kill an innocent being EDIT ( in a particular case; it’s not likely to be a general rule) /EDIT, would you do it?

As far as I can recall, I have never seen a credible answer to my question, or even a credible attempt at one.

And this is important, because it seems to me that the whole “empathy-based morality” philosophy is leading at least the Gnu Atheists to answering that question with a resounding “No!”, which I find very, very frightening.

We can, for example, point to Sam Harris’ comments on Divine Command Theory in his debate with William Lane Craig:

Ok, well here we’re being offered—I’m glad he raised the issue of psychopathy—we are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is, it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God’s will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can s—can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they’re praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.

Which Chris Hallquist seems to agree with, and refers to in a more recent post:

I almost have a hard time believing Randal is serious here. When he talks about “adherence to a divine command theory of meta-ethics,” what he means is believing that blowing up a bus full of children is right if that’s what God told you to do. That may not be explicitly listed in the Psychopathy Checklist, but neither are things like actually blowing up a bus full of children. And being willing to approve of such an act just because you think God approves certainly sounds like something that would require a shocking degree of callousness and lack of empathy.

Yet as Harris says in the debate, “this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.” The horror here is in the fact that there may people with a perfectly normal helping of empathy, who would normally never think of hurting a child, but who would approve of blowing up a bus full of children if they thought God wanted it.

This quote isn’t a smoking gun, but it seems to very strongly imply that he thinks that the hurting of children is wrong in and of itself and that empathy should stop you from doing that.

And then there’s Jen McCreight from a few months back:

The reason this statement is so repugnant to liberals is that we base our system of morals on minimizing harm. Oddly I saw no blogs explaining this, probably because Warren’s source of morality isn’t exactly a secret. But I think it’s important to emphasize how repugnant it is to base your system of ethics on some random old book instead of the well being of others. Punching someone in the face causes harm; gay sex does not.

Putting aside that his is based on some random old book just like my morality is based on the random old books of Kant and Seneca, she sets up the idea that it’s based on minimizing harm, and finds his view relating punching someone or committing adultery repugnant because it isn’t based on the “minimize harm” argument, but is instead based on a completely different moral base completely. And the problem here is one that I’ve talked about before: minimizing harm can lead to some very repugnant decisions. And it is McCreight’s comments that, to me, highlight just how important the questions of “Would you commit genocide if you thought it was the morally right thing to do?” or “Would you kill children if you thought it was the morally right thing to do?” are, because if there are cases where the “minimize harm” morality would demand things that most people would find at least very, very difficult then I really want to know whether they will go with their morality, or their empathy.

So, that’s my challenge to, well, everyone who has any kind of defined moral system: Would you commit genocide if your moral code said that was the right thing to do? I don’t want to hear answers like “But my moral code wouldn’t say that!” because those are the equivalent of saying “But God would never ask me to do that!”. I’m interested it what you would do if your empathy and morality clashed, not whether you think that’s actually possible.

And the world of popular culture has given us a plethora of potential examples:

In the Marvel Comics miniseries Secret Wars II, the Beyonder has come to Earth. In his first contact with Earth, he kidnapped groups of heroes and villains and put them against each other in a war to examine Good and Evil. On coming to Earth, he clashes with various groups and kills off the New Mutants, and gives Pheonix incredible power to see if she’d use it to destroy the universe (and was disappointed when she didn’t). At the end of the series, he decides that he really, really wants to try being human and creates a machine to do it. Using it to become truly human, he discovers that enemies like Mephisto won’t let him be, so he recreates the machine so that he would be human but would still keep his power. It is during this transformation — and while he is still a baby — that the heroes come across him. This is their only chance to stop the Beyonder and keep him from doing what he has done in the past, but it would involve killing a baby. The heroes have problems with this … but the Molecule Man does it, believing it the right thing to do because it would minimize harm, as it trades one life — even that of a baby — for the many that might suffer or die at the hands of the rather unstable Beyonder. Was he right to do so? (This is similar to the “Would you kill Adolf Hitler as a baby to prevent the Holocaust?” question, which as alluded to when Pheonix was pondering killing everyone in the universe to stop the Beyonder by Magneto).

In the Wing Commander game “Heart of the Tiger”, the Terrans (read: humans) are fighting the Kilrathi, and are losing. The Kilrathi exterminate and enslave their conquered populations. Both Admiral Tolwyn and James Taggart invent devices that will destroy the Kilrathi homeworld, and Taggart’s device — the Templor Bomb — is deployed against it and destroys the planet, the royal family, and a host of innocents. Was it right to drop that bomb? (This is similar to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, except that in this case the humans are clearly on the ropes and are facing slaughter themselves).

In “Angel”, Jasmine brings peace to the world, at the cost of people losing a significant but not overwhelming part of their free will and her having to kill a small number of people in order to feed. Angel stops her. Was he right to do so?

So, there’s really no excuse for not being able to answer this really important question, summarized really as: would you do something that you found personally heinous or disturbing if you thought it was the morally right thing to do?

Shifting and Refining …

So, today, Jerry Coyne in a post on Kloor, again, say this:

My one comment: it’s crucial in these arguments to define “compatibility”, and it makes a big difference whether you conceive of science/faith compatibility as “the ability to do both or accept both at the same time” (the common argument), or—as I do—”the comparative ability of science and religion, using their respective philosophies and methodologies, to discern (as they claim to be able) the truth about the universe.”

There is a lot in here to unpack. The first is that this seems to be an example of Coyne, well, being Coyne, as he admits that the common definition of compatibility here is that you can do both or accept both, while he is using a different one. Now, to me, the common definition boils down to this: can you have a consistent worldview that contains both? And this is what I mean when I say that science and religion are compatible, and it seems to me that this is what most accomodationists mean when they say that science and religion are compatible … or, at least, that they aren’t incompatible (since most of them are replying to those who say science and religion are incompatible). And I translate Coyne’s definition thusly, from a comment at his site:

If what you mean when you say “science and religion are incompatible” is “science is really good at figuring out the truth about the physical universe; religion, not so much” then I think you’ll find that most of the accomodationists you deride wouldn’t disagree with you … especially the atheists. However, saying that science is really good at what it does — and likely, like Wolverine, the best there is at what it does — doesn’t impact the stance that you can have a consistent worldview that contains both scientific views and religious views.

The idea here is that science has a field — I called it the physical universe — and that it is the best there is — the most reliable and the best for figuring out those sorts of truths — at it. Note that this in and of itself doesn’t require that science be the only way of knowing anything of interest, or that all claims are scientific, or even that you can’t have another way of knowing that can get you some of the same facts that science does (just not as good). So, for example, I think that everyday reasoning can get us a lot of the same facts as science, but it isn’t as reliable a way of knowing (it gets things wrong more often). But it is still reliable enough to be considered reliable, and has enough justification to get us knowledge, and is used because it trades off getting things wrong more often versus making decisions faster. I also think that philosophy is a way of knowing that gets us conceptual truths, but that science’s field is generally this world and that you can’t easily get conceptual truths by looking at this world (or the physical universe, if you want to call it that), due to this whole accidental/essential property thing that, really, I don’t want to get into here.

But, suffice it to say, other than a debate over what counts as science’s field and if there’s anything beyond that, or if there’s any reason to use another method even if it gives the same information that science will, I think that I accept his definition of incompatibility, and that it has nothing to do with what I mean when I say that science and religion are compatible. Thus, Coyne is being Coyne in understanding that there is a common definition of a term — which he explicitly mentions here — and then going ahead and using a different definition … and then trying to criticize others based on his definition and not the common one, which I pointed out further on in that comment:

Quite literally, you and accomodationists are not talking about the same thing when you use the same words. And by moving to the definition you give, it really sounds like you are conceding their position, but perhaps saying that it isn’t an interesting compatibility (like Dennett). Since most accomodationists, then, would concede you your incompatibility but say the same thing about it, there is no clash at all; you are vigorously agreeing about the claims put forward, but are disagreeing about something else: whether, for example, someone SHOULD still believe in religion or a specific religion, or whether someone should make their religious beliefs consistent with science or just drop them altogether. Which are interesting debates — they form the heart of all atheist/theist debates over the past several thousand years — but have nothing to do with accomodationism or compatibilism as ANYONE defines the terms, even you.

Coyne replied to my comment, with a comment that seems a bit, well, odd:

They don’t give a definition; I do. And no, most accommodationists wouldn’t agree with me even under my definition, because they think that religion is a valid way of knowing things about the physical universe.

And how you think I concede their position is beyond me.

You should read the theologians on ways of knowing before you claim that accommodationists agree with me. They sure as hell don’t–even under my definition. See John Haught, John Polkinghorne, and so on and so on.

First, most of them do give a definition; most of them are quite clear, at least it seems to me, that they are using the common definition and Plantinga is explicit about it, so explicit that in the debate with Dennett it was conceded by Dennett. Coyne can argue that they go beyond that, and make claims that require a stronger definition, but that’s hardly a claim that they don’t make it clear what definition they’re using.

Second, if as Coyne concedes that definition is the common one, then they — and I — don’t have to define it. We can just use the common definition and assume that everyone understands what is mean. It’s only if you want to use a definition that is not the common that you’d then have to be clear about it, and make absolutely certain that everyone is clear on that and that you only criticize based on claims made that contradict that one, and not the common one … which Coyne, even here, isn’t exactly careful to do.

Third, in response to the claim that religion says things about the physical universe, the problem here is that that was my very loose translation, and there’s a lot of work to do to figure out how to translate “universe” or, more accurately, to define what science’s main field is. Is the Resurrection supposed to be a fact about the physical universe, for example? Well, since it’s supposed to happen in this one, so that might count. But given the nature of it and the available evidence, it’s not likely to be settled experimentally, or through the accrual of scientific evidence (although it’s possible that it could be disconfirmed that way). So what we’d have is a claim that resurrecting someone from the dead after three days violates a scientific law, and so can’t happen, at best. But, the Resurrection is associated with a purported supernatural entity who in theory can suspend those laws at will. Nope, not something that science can decide, methinks, and so it then might not be a scientific proposition, and so not part of the scientific field … which allows, then, for us to accept Coyne’s definition while still preserving the claims, propositions and methods for religion and theology.

Fourth, I claim that it seems like Coyne concedes the common definition because he shifts the discussion from the common definition to his … without arguing against the common definition. If Coyne doesn’t think that science and religion can be made compatible according to the common definition, then there’s no reason for him to introduce his definition. He should instead argue for why he thinks that even under the common definition science and religion are not compatible. So, perhaps I was being too charitable in interpreting him as conceding that point once he shifted the argument, but let me be charitable again and suggest that perhaps the things that the accomodationists need require a stronger form of compatibility than that … but it is still unclear that they need his view of compatibility.

Fifth, I answer his claim about the theologians in a reply on his site:

… but to me under your definition the question to ask is “If science had a proven scientific fact that conflicted with their religious beliefs, would these theologians argue that that scientific fact should not be considered one on the basis of religion?”

All atheist accomodationists, clearly, wouldn’t.

Haught wouldn’t. He talks clearly about levels of explanation and by definition a fact at another level of explanation isn’t contradictable by another one (er, more or less, since the facts at all levels have to be consistent in some sense).

Plantinga is clear that he accepts all scientific facts, but not all of the metaphysical/philosophical conclusions that people take from those facts. His book — which I just read — is all about separating out the actual scientific facts from those other sorts of commitments.

Given what Polkinghorne says about natural theology and how he has adapted his views in reaction to scientific facts, it is unlikely that he would do that as well.

All of this is independent of whether they think that religion can produce some knowledge claims. And I really don’t want to start talking about ways of knowing because that would get really, really long.

So, most of them, under my view of Coyne’s definition and what it actually entails, wouldn’t in fact disagree with him. Coyne replied:

64% of Americans would reject the fact if it contravened their faith; that’s the result of a Time magazine poll. The question is whether these theologians accept as facts things that science wouldn’t, because there is no evidence.

First, those 64% of Americans are not, in fact, the theologians he cited, so I assume that I’ve made my case. And, in fact, we don’t know if they are accomodationists at all; under both definitions, they likely aren’t. So I’m having a really hard time seeing how that’s really relevant to the question he asked me and that I answered.

Second, it is not a commitment, as I have already said, of his view that you accept that science is the only way of knowing, or that you only accept as fact things that are scientific facts. As I said in my comment reply, that gets into ways of knowing, which is a massive epistemological debate. A debate that I think Coyne is not only losing, but has already lost. Again, I accept things as known facts that science won’t accept, such as that you cannot derive an ought from an is. Now, note, for me this is using the narrower definition of science, meaning the things you’d find in a Faculty of Science at a reputable university. If Coyne wants to broaden science as well — and he does — then my reply is that, basically, we have the same thing all over again. Which, in a nutshell, is this:

Under Coyne’s, um, non-standard definitions, I will concede his points but wonder why he uses the words he does if they aren’t meant to refer to the standard definitions, which Coyne seems to concede are reasonable because he chooses his battlegrounds to avoid challenging them.

I think this is Coyne doing philosophy really, really badly, and refining his positions and definitions without properly re-examining the conflicts that started the debate. I could accuse him of “moving the goalposts”, but I think that implies some sort of dishonest debating tactics and I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I think that Coyne is refining his positions as he goes along from vaguely defined strong ones to more reasonable and better defined ones. You can see that with his definition of “science” because he had to include fields that he needed to produce knowledge without allowing religion in. But he didn’t bother to update the conflict, and so he gets charged with scientism for talking in some cases like it’s the formal sciences and formal scientific method, while on the other hand having to lump those fields into something called “science” to maintain his original view on science versus religion. The same thing can be said here, because it was not too long ago that Coyne talked like he was using the common definition of “compatible”:

Jerry Coyne responded to Massimo Pigliucci’s characterisation of Coyne’s view philosophical consistency as naive thus:

What I mean by “philosophical consistency” is that one’s philosophies are consistent. In the case of a scientist, one’s scientific philosophy is that you don’t accept the existence of things for which there is no evidence. In the case of a religious person, your philosophy requires you to believe in things for which there is either no evidence or counterevidence. It’s just that simple.

…

[f]urther inconsistency comes from the fact that science and faith find out things in different ways: scientific knowledge is attained through observation, experimentation, and agreement among practitioners. “Religious knowledge” (and I put it in quotes because it’s an oxymoron) comes from dogma, authority, and personal revelation. This leads to the final inconsistency: the stuff that religion “finds out” contradicts what science finds out.

These all seem to be of the “you can’t hold both at the same time” variety. As the debate as gone on, you can see that Coyne is focusing on what is indeed his best argument: that science is much more successful than religion is at finding out how the world works. It’s even the backbone of another argument he makes about why we should assume metaphysical naturalism: science has been so successful using methodological naturalism doesn’t that imply metaphysical naturalism? (Hint: It doesn’t, at least not strongly enough to justify metaphysical naturalism). So, then, for him, the compatibilism and accomodationism debate is now all about this, and the debate over success, so much so that he makes a definition out of it … except that to his opponents at best that definition is a good argument, and at worst is totally irrelevant to the debate, as no one challenges science’s success. So, again, Coyne drifts in his positions but it isn’t clear that as he does so that he’s still debating the same arguments anymore, and that there’s still even anything interesting to debate with at least some of his opponents.

In my discussion on Coyne’s debate with John Haught, I pointed out that a lot of things were said but that there was no clash, and particularly that Coyne — despite having prepared for Haught — didn’t actually address the position that Haught was advocating, and so there was no clash between them; they were literally talking about two different things. Ultimately, it is this refining of definitions without refining his full positions that causes this; at the end of the day, Coyne tends to fall into making passionate arguments that, as they progress, end up with the two sides completely talking past each other … with Coyne, at least, still thinking that they are talking about the same thing, somehow.

Sophisticated Theology: Meaning and Truth

So, in a burst of theological examination, I finished both “Where the Conflict Lies” by Plantinga and “Science and Religion: Are They in Conflict?” where Dennett and Plantinga go at each other. To be frank, I fail to see why people think that Dennett refuted Plantinga there, since he seems to spend little time talking about the things that Plantinga said or what Plantinga considered important. I hope to talk about both books more in the near future, but I want to highlight something here that Dennett said:

As I have said, our brains are syntactic engines, not semantic engines, which, like perpetual motion machines, are impossible. But syntactic machines can be designed to track truth, and that is just what evolution has done. A useful comparison might be with a hand calculator.

(pg 34)

Now, here’s where this goes wrong. What it means to be “semantic” is, basically, to relate to meaning. The semantic properties of a sentence, for example, track its meaning while the syntactic properties track its general form. So, if the brain is a syntactic and not semantic engine, then it does not track meaning. And if it doesn’t know what the things it is working on mean, then how can it be deriving true statements? Basically, no semantics, no meaning … and no meaning, no truth.

Thus, this counter — if it is the only way to have our natural cognitive abilities evolve — supports Plantinga’s point, because if the brain is manipulating syntactic symbols without knowing what they mean — because it isn’t doing anything semantically — then any link it has to “truth” is merely accidental. The only want to get non-accidental truth is to base your calculations on what the symbols and the syntax mean or represent, and not on the symbols or representations themselves. Effectively, for Dennett the brain would be like someone who memorized the times table up to 10 by doing nothing more than memorizing how those symbols join together, and so they can see that “2×2=4″ because it recognizes the symbols “2″, “x”, “4″ and “=” but they have no idea that they are, in fact doing multiplication or, possibly, even that they are doing mathematics at all.

Or rather like a hand calculator.

And if this is the case, then any belief formed by our cognitive faculties links to truth only by accident, if it does it at all. And this, then, would undercut our warrant for thinking that our cognitive faculties — and, by extension, the things produced by them — are reliable. Which means that even the proposition that they seem to work and therefore produce truth would be unreliable, but we couldn’t appeal to any method to save them. That, I think, would be bad … and it all follows from something that Dennett says.

Sophisticated Theology: Final Thoughts on Polkinghorne

So, I finished reading “The Polkinghorne Reader”, and overall it was a decent book. It lost me a bit in some of the later stages, especially since it seemed that I needed to know more about both science and theology to not only understand what Polkinghorne was concerned about, but to even care about what Polkinghorne was talking about. For the most part, a lot of the concerns raised are things that don’t really bother me one way or the other, although I think that there are ways to solve the problem. It’s also not written for the average reader, as even I struggled with some parts and I know something about the issues.

A few comments:

1) Polkinghorne talks a lot about how we should do scriptural interpretation, and at one point he talks about how we can — and potentially ought to — take events that made sense in context in the Old Testament (say) and translate them to having new meaning related to the current context. I think that this is risky, as it implies that that event or passage should have events that make sense across contexts. But there’s really no reason to assume that. If something really seems to, it wouldn’t be smart to ignore that, but how do you easily tell when you’re adding meaning to it or reading what it has? At the very least, we shouldn’t really expect this to occur.

2) Contrary to assertions from a few incompatibilists, Polkinghorne is clear about the relation between normal, experiential religion and theology. Theology cannot strongly conflict with experiential religion; in some sense, the religion described by theology must align with that that the ordinary religious person experiences. But it is not bound by it, and so does not have to accept the naive interpretations of that experience by ordinary or folk religion. Thus, if it conflicts with those interpretations it must have a reason for it, but is allowed to say that the interpretations are uneducated, in much the same way as science cannot simply dismiss common sense experience without reason. Thus, if someone is interested in whether or not God exists, or if religion is true, one cannot split religion and theology and say that they are interested in the former; if they do that, then they are not interested in the truth of the proposition, but in something else entirely.

This is a book that I might have to revisit, since there’s a lot there but I’m not at the theological level to care enough to get through it yet.

Coda for Catholics …

Adam Lee has put up another few examples of why he thinks Catholics should quit the Catholic Church. Since I commented on the first set, I consider it only fair to comment on this one.

The first issue is this:

First of all, via WWJTD?, this jaw-dropping story: Pope Benedict met with and personally blessed Rebecca Kadaga, the speaker of the Ugandan Parliament, who’s one of the most fervent advocates of that country’s atrocious “Kill the Gays” bill.

Now, this is the one I have the most trouble with, but it’s also the most unclear. It seems from reading around that he didn’t bless her because of that stance, and I personally find that sort of bill to be UnCatholic. So, if he had blessed her as a specific person based on that stance, that would be a problem. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. What seems to be the case is that she was chosen to lead a specific delegation to a specific event, she presented something on behalf of that delegation, and he blessed her on behalf of that entire delegation. At which point, one might worry about the PR impact, as people might be taking it the way Lee is, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as bad as Lee and some other atheists are making it out to be. Again, it seems they are taking it as a personal endorsement, and I don’t see it as being that. That being said, it might indicate that the Pope needs to be clear about what the Church’s position on bills like that one is, which doesn’t seem to be clearly stated, although I admit that I haven’t really been looking for it either.

The second one is this:

Next up, the Catholic bishops of Poland have blasted a government decision to sign an international convention combating violence against women.

Well, yes, but they did it because it contained this:

The bishops’ objections are apparently motivated, among other things, by language which calls for signatories to fight “prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men”.

So, the Church might think that it doesn’t have practices based on the inferiority of women, but that it has stereotyped roles is probably true. But this is a values clash: it seemed to them that the convention imposed a specific set of values, and ones that they disagreed with (read the linked article from Daylight Atheism if you want to see the full details). And one of the issues with a lot of these conventions is that they indeed presume a set of values that have not been proven true or necessarily good:

It’s a basic fact that violence against women is rooted in patriarchal worldviews which mandate strict gender roles and treat women as inferior and subservient. The way to reduce violence is to abolish these harmful and sexist ideas, just like the way to stop racially motivated violence is to teach and promote the idea of equality between the races. None of this should be the least bit controversial.

The former is certainly controversial; there is little reason to think that having gender roles will necessarily mandate or support violence against women (in fact, in some cultures it in theory would have impeded it as it made it a major social faux pas to every commit violence against women). The latter about treating them as inferior and subservient has a stronger link … but we may not know what that means all the time, particularly in the Catholic tradition. That the main way to reduce violence against women is to abolish those ideas instead of promoting the idea that violence itself is unacceptable is, in fact, highly controversial, and bringing up studies that say that as a society does this the violence drops runs into massive issues with confounds (ie that the changing and attitudes and the drop in violence are both effects, and that it isn’t the case that one causes the other). In fact, even there one may say that campaigns to reduce violence against women change the attitudes. At any rate, this is a clash of values and a clash over methodology, and that’s nothing to quit anything over.

The last one is this:

Lastly, if your jaw can drop any further, this story ought to do it: the church is still paying to defend convicted (not accused) child molesters:

So … Lee would want the Church to not support them in legal cases simply because they were convicted once? Where will their representation come from if they don’t? Should they be unrepresented? The Church’s response is this:

…The order’s executive officer for professional standards, Brother Brian Brandon, confirmed that the order had funded Best and Dowlan’s defences, and said that the order had a broad policy of funding the defences of brothers charged in relation to child sex abuse.

When it was put to him that it was not appropriate for the order to continue funding its members’ legal defences after they had been convicted, he said: “Well, that’s one perspective.”

Lee’s argument is this:

There may, perhaps, be Catholic parishioners who are OK with putting money in the collection plate each week, knowing that it will go to pay the legal bills of clergy members accused of raping children. Perhaps. But how many Catholics, I wonder, want to give money to the church so that it can be used to defend already convicted and imprisoned pedophiles when they’re brought up on additional charges?

I, for one, am completely in favour of the Church living up to its obligations, and rather wish that they’d done so — or defined it more clearly — in the other instances of the pedophile case. This is, in fact, debatable about where the obligations stop. Again, Lee doesn’t like it personally, but then he can go and argue over it and try to convince the Church to change the policy, or at least to convince Catholics to argue for that, instead of trying to convince Catholics that they should stop being Catholics.

As a reminder, here are my four categories from the previous post:

1) The Catholic Church has handled the pedophilia scandal badly (1 – 5, 19, 30 – 39, 48)

2) Lee disagrees with their positions and values (6 – 18, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 44 – 47, 50)

3) Lee thinks they interfere too much in government and society based on those values that he thinks wrong (8, 9, 14 – 16, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 41)

4) Simple gripes (23, 40, 42, 43, 49)

The third one is clearly 1. The second one is clearly 2. And the first one is probably 4. So, three more reasons where he might have found one more actual reason, by his standards.

Sophisticated Theology: Theological Method

As I work through “The Polkinghorne Reader”, I was reminded of the comments of people like Jerry Coyne and Eric MacDonald that theology is “just making stuff up”, and am reminded of how MacDonald struggled through a couple of books on theological method because he just couldn’t find anything that really talked about it.

So, in the interest of starting at the beginning, in the reader Polkinghorne summarizes what J.R. Carnes has said about what theology should ascribe to in its methodology:

1 Coherence. The discourse must hang together. The ultimate achievement of this would be total consistency, but because of the considerations we have been discussing, theology may have to be content to live with some degree of paradox (just as science had to live for a while with the unresolved conflict between the wave and particle natures of light until it found the higher rationality of quantum field theory).

2 Economy. Theology is not wantonly to multiply entities and explanations. This criterion might be thought to give preference to monotheism over polytheism.

3 Adequacy. Theology must be sufficiently rich in concepts to be able to discuss all its matters of concern.

4 Existential relevance. There must be an interpretive scheme which links theology with the actual content of religious experience.

[pg 83 - 84]

He also discusses natural theology:

Natural theology may be defined as the search for the knowledge of God by the exercise of reason and the inspection of the world.

[pg 94]

So, here’s the challenge to all those who deride theology. Put aside that some theologians may not hold to these standards, and some of the niggling details (like, perhaps, what the matters of concern for theology are). If theology is held to these standards, and if people practiced natural theology as defined here, what would be wrong with theology as a field? What is wrong with these specific standards as an academic practice for an academic field?