logical fallacies
The Problem with Science
No, I don’t hate science. It’s wonderful. Sorry if the title was misleading. I guess the problem isn’t with science, exactly. It’s with people’s application of science. Maybe it’s shortsighted of me to say this, but it seems like human knowledge is getting to be so vast in this “information age” that no one person can possibly hope to have a deep understanding in all the important subjects. I know that as our culture develops, our children are learning more and more, earlier and earlier, but this can’t go on forever. Sure, we can picture 1000 years from now having (relative to us) super-intelligent children who have an intuition for calculus at age 3. But I think that it’s obvious to most that our knowledge is growing faster than any evolutionary mechanism is keeping up with. At some point (which may already be here), there is a very real limit to how much one person can master. Will you be a Jack of all Trades, but a Master of None? Will you pick a path, stick with it, and have some authority on the subject?
Map of science
This is incredibly important to our society in the here and now, however. The latest buzz in the United States seems to be about the rise of the “nones”, those suave, smart (and might I say, good-looking?) people who claim no religion. The conflict between theists and anti-theists and/or atheists is growing extremely rapidly, probably because of the incredible communication power of the internet. Here’s how these two things are so intimately linked: the conflict of religion and science (Yes, there is one. Maybe not on every issue or with every person, but there is. Deal with it.) is being brought on just about every front. We have the creation debate which touches biology, evolutionary biology, geology, paleontology, cosmology, physics, particle physics, astronomy and dozens of sub-topics of those. We have debates about scriptural accuracy touching history, archaeology, anthropology, literature and dozens of foreign languages. We have moral debates and afterlife debates, proofs and disproofs of supernatural beings, and arguments about the meaning of life which touch all the spread out fingers of philosophy.
So are we to understand that this debate that is so easily characterized is so easily soluble? No, what it tends to come down to in individual debate is you and your opponent searching for the particular subject in which you each have an advantage of knowledge or experience. Then, you can rest in that comfortable space saying “They may have answers for somethings, but not this one, which proves my point.” If this scenario doesn’t play out, the usual alternative is an appeal to authority (yes it’s a fallacy, yes everyone does it once in a while). It seems reasonable to say that we can’t possibly know everything, so building on someone else’s conclusions makes sense. But it doesn’t play out this way. Theists get slammed for “not thinking for themselves,” and atheists get it back even worse since that’s supposed to be a tenet of the “atheist philosophy”.
What’s the solution? I don’t know. The sum of human knowledge is too vast and is growing all the time. An individual simply can’t keep up. That doesn’t mean that I plan on never drawing another conclusion again. It’s better to be as informed as possible and decide what that means than to be in a state of perpetual inaction and un-decidedness. But I do it knowing full well that the debate will almost certainly never be closed. Blogs full of ranting and railing against the other side for “ignoring the facts” and being ignorant (or stupid, as the blogger decides) are pointless and add to the noise that detracts from real discussion. It’s almost a certainty: the debate will go on. Fight for what’s right, but do it for yourself first. That’s the only person you’ve got a shot at convincing.
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Which came first – the heart or the blood?
I got an email from a reader recently that seemed like a good topic to really get into. Basically the question was this: Consider the human body. If we’re to believe that it evolved from very simplistic life, which evolved first – the blood or the heart?
There are two ways that I can see this argument going. The first is a sort of implied “god of the gaps” argument, where essentially we’re faced with a question that we don’t know the answer to (but in this case, I think we do) and that points us to the conclusion that God is responsible. I’m going to assume that perhaps the person asking did not mean this line of thought, because I don’t think it’s a valid argument. Even if this one isn’t unknown, there are certainly questions for which we don’t know the answer. But a lack of understanding on our part doesn’t imply God’s presence. It merely means that we don’t know, yet. Every age has had its questions, and we’ve developed an increasing understanding of the natural world. Marvel at lightning from the gods has turned into understanding of principles of electricity – lightning rods protect buildings, where a god throwing them would not behave so nicely. This understanding of electricity allows me to type these words right here. I don’t claim that we know everything, and maybe we can’t know everything (but then maybe we couldn’t know that we can’t know everything… and we start to get a little philosophical for this talk). But the point is that people in the past have made the mistake of thinking that there was no other explanation, and it’s just as fallacious today.
The other path that this question could follow is a sort of key idea to intelligent design – irreducible complexity. I don’t claim to know all the ins-and-outs of intelligent design, but from my understanding this is the main idea of irreducible complexity can be thought of like this: Consider that you have a watch. It has hundreds of working pieces that all fit together very nicely (like the human body). However, if you were to remove even one of these components, the whole thing would fail. It’s said that we can find a point in biological life where you can’t ‘build it up’ from individual pieces because you need all of the pieces to come together and work at once.
One unfortunate problem with irreducible complexity is that it doesn’t stand unless there are examples. It merely says “there exists in nature an irreducibly complex system,” and there’s not a clean way to show this to be false. So, we’re given an example of something irreducibly complex, and even showing why it is not proves only that this example is not valid. Then we wait for the next example. There’s no such thing as a counter example without examining every biological system to some arbitrary detail.
But what choice have we here. It’s the same as saying, “You can’t know that God doesn’t exist because you haven’t looked everywhere he could exist.” Well, fine, but if you give me an example of where you think he might be, I’ll tell you why I don’t agree.
As for the heart/blood question, I think the simplest answer is “the blood”, but only in a vague way because blood has changed too. Most organisms need a way to move things around – nutrients, waste, etc. In especially small organisms, this obviously doesn’t need to be very sophisticated. Diffusion, where concentrations of a substance tend to find a state of equilibrium within their boundary, could account for a very small organism getting nutrients to all it’s parts, or allowing waste out. But even very simple organisms also have muscle-like functions that serve to move the ‘carrier substance’ (that only vaguely resembles blood) around. As these organisms grow in size, only then does a specialized heart begin to develop, which may not have resembled our 4-chambered heart for thousands of iterations. There has also been some real study of this progression. I have not read this entire article (you’ll need an account if you want to), but the abstract is helpful on its own anyway. In any case, our vantage point is that our body seems to work exactly right, but this isn’t insightful. It only means that our heart is the one that works for us, right now, where we are. If it didn’t work for us right now, it would have evolved differently, to fit those requirements. And the ones that didn’t would die out or find a different role to fit into some other survival spot.
This also brings up an interesting point that my fiance and I have discussed many times. People often see evolution as some sort of slow march toward a goal, or like the evolution posters show with an ape that slowly morphs into common-day man. It’s a misleading way to think about it, and I think it causes some misconceptions when taken to the simplest interpretation. First, species either survive or they don’t, and the ones that survive happen to continue on their line. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t species that failed, or that there is a single line of lineage. It’s more like a gigantic tree, with branches here or there, this branch going off and creating many branches of its own, that branch going off and stopping. We may be able to trace back the path that we evolved from to some extent, but that is not the whole story. Second, evolution does not have a goal in mind. It is not the case that you can look at some creature and say that it is 5 million years behind us. That species is evolved to fit its particular spot in the ecosystem. Crocodiles may not be on the path to being able to fly, and dogs may never evolve to talk to us, because that might not have anything to do with their survival, which is all that really matters.
To think of evolution as a straight line from a single cell to some final ‘perfect’ evolved form is incorrect. All species wouldn’t evolve to be the same, because there would be no balance, no niche for each species to survive in. If everything was trying to be the same, there would be that much more competition for survival in that area. And we can’t view evolution with a magnifying glass. It works on large scales, letting the stuff that doesn’t work die off and the stuff that does fit keep going. It only looks like everything fits perfectly because we don’t get to see the countless number of things that didn’t.
More (dis)Proof of God
Being somewhat of a math-head, I tend to like proofs. When done well, they’re inescapable. However, philosophical proofs almost invariably leave me unsatisfied (yes, on both sides of the God-debate). But I still like pointing out where they are lacking, because it keeps people from touting them as actual proof. It’s almost funny when a theist comes with the idea that atheists just want logical proof or evidence, and they must not have heard this perfect argument yet. It’s not that we haven’t heard it; it’s that it isn’t nearly as convincing as you think. So, cue phase two of my commentary on the usual suspects in the ‘Proof for God’.
Last time, I discussed the ‘prime mover‘ argument, specifically the formulation put forth by Aquinas, since his annoys me more than most (it’s the way he asserts the Christian god at the end that does it, I think). But I got an interesting comment that reminds me why mathematical proofs are so satisfying to me. The commenter mentioned the idea, “What’s infinity times zero?” So what does math have to say about this? My response was this:
Strictly math-speaking, you simply cannot do that operation because infinity is not a number. It’s tantamount to saying “what is zero times chair?” Infinity is a tricky thing to get a hold of anyway. For example, there are an infinite number of integers. This is a class of infinity called “countably infinite”. But there’s another class called “uncountably infinite”, for example the real numbers. Take my set of numbers here (1.2, 1.22, 1.222, 1.2222, …) You can see how I’m constructing them. I could continue this series forever, always increasing and never reach 1.3. You could not assign an integer in a 1:1 fashion to the real numbers. So is uncountably infinite greater than countably infinite? They’re both infinity…
But it’s even more fun, because I can illustrate a good (dis)proof and play with infinity at the same time. I’m disproving this claim “Infinity is a number”, and using the common understanding of a number as an element of an ordered set that behaves under the usual arithmetic (+-*/). Also, I’m using the understanding that <inf> + x = <inf> (ie, adding anything to infinity is still infinity).
So, if <inf> is a number that behaves like a number,
<inf>/<inf> = 1
(<inf>/<inf>) + <inf> = 1 + <inf>
(<inf>/<inf>) + <inf> = <inf>
<inf> / <inf> = 0
1 = 0
See how satisfying that is? I made a claim, if infinity is a number, then the following must be true… 1=0. One very much does not equal zero, so our premise is false. Now let’s take a look at another proof for God. It’s the standard Ontological Argument (meaning a priori, quite a claim), put forth (I believe originally) by St. Anselm. It roughly follows this path:
- God, by definition is the greatest being imaginable. You cannot imagine anything greater.
- A being that exists is greater than a being that does not exist
- Therefore, God must exist
Now see how unstatisfying that is? It kind of ties in with another of Aquinas’ proofs (number 4) . His follows this logic:
- Things that exist have certain qualities to greater or lesser degrees
- greater and lesser are relative terms, which relate to the maximum
- Something must have the maximum possible of every quality
- That’s God.
One criticism of this I’ve read is that he says nothing that proves that one single object must have the maximum possible of all qualities, but I think this is too easily dismissed. Let’s just add a step, 2.5 that says “One quality you can have is having qualities”.
There, fixed, right? No, they’re both still very flawed. In the first proof, we make no distinction between imagining something and existence when it is actually a very deep divide. How about this?
- I can imagine no greater proof than the proof against God’s existence.
- A real proof is greater than an imaginary proof.
- Lucky me, it’s real and I’m almost done writing it.
- Therefore, no God.
It’s exactly the same as our infinity proof. I said “If your proof is true, then so is mine, so God exists and God does not exist.” A logical contradiction, therefore our assumptions were wrong. The proof cannot be valid.
The problem that arises from Aquinas’ proof is that he does not prove that because we can determine relative relationships between qualities two things possess, we know that something must have to have the extreme of this quality. He says ‘maximum’ and uses it as ‘infinite’. In his text, he uses concepts like goodness, truth, and nobility. But we are not required to believe in an infinitely good being. His proof merely says that for us to use goodness in a relative way, there must be a ‘most good’ and a ‘least good’. We can conceive of infinite goodness, but it is not required to relate the relative goodness between two real objects. We need only something with some amount of goodness as a reference point, and say that there exists something with more good than anything else that exists (but that my not be infinite goodness).
Again this will tie into our discussion of infinity (see what I did there). There are numbers that are greater and lesser than others. For instance 2 < 3. 15,204 > -10. We know their relative “greatness”, and we can conceive of the idea that there is a “greatest”. We call this concept infinity. But infinity is not a number, and the fact that we can use the idea of a “greatest number” does not mean that there is one. In fact, I can prove there is not.
For an arbitrarily large number x,
x < x+1
But since x is arbitrarily large, there can be no largest number.
Now if they would just actually define “God” we could find a similar argument and be done with it….
Failure of the Aquinas Proofs of God
Despite 12 years of Catholic school, the first time I really encountered Aquinas was in a Western Civilization course in college. I remembered reading his “proofs” of the existence of God and wondering if this was really a proof to anyone. As it turns out, his logic is trotted out all the time, and I’ve always found it thoroughly unconvincing. So I’d like to take some time to explain why. For some quick background, you can read up on them here. They’re in Article III.
There are 5 of these proofs, but I really will only spend any time on 2 of them. The last 3 are, even under his own admission, more convoluted and, to me, even harder to follow than the first (which I’m rejecting anyway). You will recognize the arguments in these proofs by the very common “first cause” argument. Really, I’m throwing the two together, because they’re pretty much the same. He simply uses motion specifically in the first, and more general cause/effect in the second. A brief summary of the argument is this: Things are currently in motion. For something to be in motion, it must be moved by something. That something must, in turn, be moved by something. This logic must continue until you reach a first mover, something that moves things, but is not moved itself. In more general terms, for something to be in effect, it must have a cause. There cannot be an infinite regression of causes, for that would mean there’s no first cause, therefore, there must be a first cause that is uncaused, with the kicker, “– and this all men know as God”.
Well, first of all all men do not know this as God. That’s quite a leap to make, even assuming I accept your logic before, which I don’t. So I understand what he’s thinking here. Let’s picture a ball in space moving along. For this ball to be moving, something else had to run into it to cause it to move. But that ball was moving already. In order for that to happen, something had to run into that ball, and so on. But this view of the natural world is outdated. Our understanding of the forces at work makes this not nearly as convincing as it was when he wrote it. For example, let’s consider gravity. Two objects, some distance apart, need no prior motion in order to fall together. Gravity acts upon them simply because they exist and nothing more. If the universe consisted of a bunch of static objects, the simple fact that gravity attracts all matter would cause them to move, and once the chain is started, we have no more need for the idea of God as the first cause.
The argument I anticipate at this point is that we haven’t explained where all this stuff came from. Sure, if it popped into existence all still, we can deduce that it would move, but what does it mean to pop into existence? First of all, I think it’s harder to imagine non-existence than people give credit to. What would it mean for nothing to exist? Not that there is a big empty universe (Really, not that. Quantum physics has some great results about how empty space really isn’t empty at all). The empty space wouldn’t exist. Time wouldn’t exist. What does that actually mean? I challenge you to explain it. If there were no existence at all, we couldn’t ask the question “What if nothing existed?” So why is it so hard to accept an infinite past? To claim that God created everything out of nothing is really just claiming that there is some other plane of existence that we don’t comprehend. It actually solves nothing, because we would just redefine “existence” to that new thing we discovered, and ask the same question.
The other real problem with these kinds of questions is the extremely unintuitive nature of time. Time and space are completely interwoven. We talk about the theory of the big bang, and how everything was scrunched down so small and exploded. But to talk like this conversationally is a little misleading. The fantastic density at this moment just “before” the big bang would have rendered time and space completely meaningless. They would both have been stretched and warped more than any black hole in existence now. And the way that such high gravitational force warps space and time, nothing can escape. This means that absolutely all information is lost once it falls into this gravitational well. Everything. We can’t “look deeper” and glean information from before the big bang.
And here’s my point. What does “infinitely old” really mean when old is just a time-relative term, and time is so dubious? It’s not the flat line extending infinitely into the past and future that it seems to us in our day to day lives. There was no “moment of creation”, because moments can’t mean anything without existence. We don’t have the tools to comprehend all of the universe, but that’s ok. We make progress all the time. Nothing yet has said that we can’t understand, just that we don’t yet. God isn’t necessary, just convenient. Give us some time: we’ve had a good history of figuring things out.
Follow up to atheist morals
I just read a painful post about A Christian Analysis of Atheism. I don’t know what I might have expected with a title like that, but the ideas in this misguided commentary make me cringe. I’m embarrassed for both of us. You because you don’t understand a lot of things, and me because we aren’t explaining it well (apparently).
This reminded me of a recent post I made about atheists and morals. This is, apparently, what some Christians think of when they hear the term “atheist”:
According to Chuck Colson in Against The Night: Living In The New Dark Ages, in the arena where relativism reigns supreme in opposition to the law of God, there is no legitimate ground in which one can exclude the arguments and proposals of Nazis, serial killers, and pedophiles (47). From today’s headlines, the nation is coming to realize in the most brutal of ways that these ideas do not confine themselves to academic journals or newspaper opinion pages. And in the case of school shootings such as Columbine High, this radical antipathy towards God can in fact turn deadly.
If the lawlessness of atheism can wreak havoc upon individual lives, just imagine its affects (sic) magnified across entire societies. The major dictatorships of the twentieth century testify to this blood-soaked historical truth. Founded upon assorted atheistic ideologies, these totalitarian regimes promised secular heavens on earth but instead dragged their nations down to the very borders of hell.
Unfettered by eternal external standards, those holding the reins of power in such societies had nothing to hamper the implementation of their most extreme policy whims, not even the value of innocent human lives.
Oh no. Really? The “lawlessness of atheism”? I get so tired of this argument. There is no lawlessness necessitated by atheism. Read that past post of mine for more of that. Atrocities have been committed in the name of many things, including CHRISTIANITY. Some people may try to blame the religion for them, but in general, I do not. It’s the people using what they can to rationalize what they want, nothing more. Blaming atheism for the Columbine shooting? I seem to remember that they picked that day to coincide with Hitler’s birthday (and lest we forget, he made numerous mentions of his Christian beliefs and motivations). So just drop it! Atheism is not about abandoning morality because you don’t have to answer to anyone. Would Mr. Meekins go on a shooting rampage if he wasn’t worried that he would be punished by an invisible man in the sky? Let’s hope not.
But my main point is this: Atheism is not inconsistent with morality, and it’s completely orthogonal. The discussion of belief in a god has nothing to do with if we lose our morality or not. It’s a complete non sequitur. Saying, “Christianity must be true, otherwise people will kill each other” is not arguing any point of truth about Christianity, it’s appealing to the emotions of listeners who don’t really want to die.
And I’m not done with this commentary. He wants to bring up science, so I’m happy to oblige.
The Laws of Thermodynamics declare that, left to themselves, systems degrade to the maximum level of entropy; or in laymen’s terms, things wear out. Employing this principle, one is forced to conclude that, if the universe is an infinitely-old closed system those like Sagan claim it to be, then the universe would have already wound down in eons past. Therefore, the universe must have had a beginning. And since something finite cannot come from nothing, the hypothesis of a divine creator provides the most plausible alternative.
Now, my thermodynamics is a little rusty, but if I remember from college, thermodynamics deals very heavily in probabilities. That is to say, all of the molecules of air in this room could rush to one corner all of a sudden, but that isn’t very likely. The laws of thermodynamics make predictions based on the fact that, over time, things tend to follow certain rules, because the probabilities of them not doing so are so small. But IF the universe is an infinitely-old closed system, you would need zero probability for an event before you could say it won’t ever happen. Don’t underestimate infinity, it’s quite a long time. I’m not claiming that this is true, but consider the possibility. Some 13.5 billion years ago was the last time that all the matter in the universe happened to get to a state that it was crunched down together so tightly and exploded. Can you say with certainty that this hasn’t happened before, or will again? In another 20 billion years? 20 billion billion? (20 billion billion)^(20 billion billion)?
One more comment on the cosmological argument in general, while we’re talking science and math. The argument is more or less a failure of semantics. We start with a premise: everything in motion has a cause. So, that cause must then have a cause, and so forth until we get to a “First Cause”, which must be God. There is a fallacy here that is less than obvious: you can’t use a timeline argument to discuss something that is not temporal. Give it some time to roll around in your brain. If you want to ask “What happened before time began?” you have already used language to make any answer meaningless. What does “before time began” mean? You’re asking what temporal relation something had when there was no measure of time at all. Time is a tricky thing to think about, but watch out for this mistake. “Before time” is meaningless.
It’s too bad so many people misunderstand these things. But I’ll keep doing my part, one post at a time.
Intelligent Design: What has history taught us?
No, I’m not surprised. But it’s certainly worth pointing out, because this kind of “missing the forest for the trees” is a common mistake. This commentary comes from an intelligent design writer who begs the very apt question, “What has history taught us?” Feel free to read through to see his view on abiogenesis, but it boils down to this: We’ve seen in history that abiogenesis doesn’t really seem probable, and scientists haven’t come up with any proof, so abandon the idea. So first of all, I’d like to make a quick point about an intelligent design advocate missing the point of the scientific process (the one actually used, not the rigid sequence taught to 6th graders to get them used to the idea). Putting forth an idea for something we hope to discover, what he calls “philosophical faith”, has nothing to do with faith. Science makes progress like this: observe, attempt to explain, use explaination to predict, look for prediction, reformulate theory, repeat. It has nothing to do with any kind of faith. The whole point is that you try to explain it the best you can, and when you get more information, you use that to help your explanation. The fact that an idea has been around for some time without evidence either way does not mean abandon it for religious based theories.
But what makes me almost laugh about this commentary is the way he seems to bring up a good point, and ignore the elephant in the room. Exactly what has history taught us about religiously backed explanations for natural phenomena? I’ll tell you: in every instance, EVERY single instance, the religious explanation has been shown to be wrong. It is a crutch during times that we didn’t have the knowledge to actually explain it. Ancient people cowering at the lightning, thinking that Zeus was angry with them look pretty silly to us today don’t they? How can you ask the question “What has history taught us?” and igonore the obvious end to your question? History has taught us that when we think we know, we don’t. The difference between science (real science, not intelligent design) and religion is that science expects to be wrong and has mechanisms to absorb new information and evolve (pun intended). Religion fights it with all its might. Whether it’s today, next year or in 500 years, this one will too. The evidence will pile up until it is overwhelming and we will come up with something new. The common component is science, humming along in the background, making itself better and better all the time. You can try to fight it, or you can swallow your pride and let go of outdated superstitions.
Learn from history: you’re fighting a losing battle.
Re: Atheist Fundamentalism
This comes from an editorial page from a Texas news station, so I shouldn’t be all that surprised. But the sentiments here are not as uncommon as they should be. Rod Dreher writes a collumn entitled, Against Atheist Fundamentalism.
First things first, I’m willing to criticize some atheists he mentions in his post, the Texas Church of Freethought. Now, I don’t claim to know very much about this group, but my first impression is that they are trying to do some ok things in exactly the wrong way. From their home page:
We are a rational approach to religion, offering atheists, agnostics, humanists, and freethinkers all the social, emotional and inspirational benefits of traditional faith-based churches, but without appealing to tradition or superstition.
Guys, atheism is not a religion (which I’m sure they know), and calling yourselves a “Church” is going to hurt your cause more than help it. The article’s writer even says “Texas is so religious even the atheists go to church.” I don’t necessarily think that what they’re doing is that bad, but they open up atheism to so much trouble by calling it a church. Atheism is not about faith.
But let’s get back to the real issue, misrepresenting atheists. Let me pick a gem from his article, and we can all see what boils my blood here. Yes, people apparently still think like this:
Unfortunately, militant atheism in power has repeated all the crimes of religious regimes and, absent ethical restraints, made them vastly worse. Though their ideologies despised Christianity, both the communists and the Nazis justified their own monstrosities as “scientific.”
Oh no. Please, no. We need to squash this one once and for all, but it just will not happen. The Hitler Historical Museum quotes a speech he made on April 12, 1922 saying:
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
We need to stop equating Nazism with atheism. It’s a false analogy, and I suspect it began because there’s such a stigma against nazism that mentioning it in the same sentence, even if shown to be false, casts a shadow that is hard to step out of.
Mr. Dreher would like us to accept that religion and science don’t have to be mutually exclusive and, indeed, can each learn from the other. I don’t whole heartedly disagree with that statement, just the second half. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but they do not share any common ground. I know that it’s difficult when the “sphere” of science seems to overstep the line in the sand that religion has made, but we have to understand that science itself is impartial. It’s not trying to step on the toes of what religion claims to know; it just goes where the evidence leads. And if new evidence arises, science takes it in stride. Science can’t learn from religion, not because, as Dreher quotes a speaker, “scientists [have] nothing to learn from religious people, who by definition believed absurd things”. The reason is that the things they believe are not in the same realm. Science builds on itself; each new piece of information must be incorporated and reviewed, tested and retested, peer reviewed and scrutinized. There are few assumptions that science relies on, and the fewer the better. Asking science to just take a little religious wisdom doesn’t make sense, because religious beliefs aren’t purely rational. Notice I didn’t say absurd, stupid, mindless, etc. They are just based on different premises: religious belief is never built from the ground up on rationalism.
Equating science and religion to us taking a cue from the Eskimos about using all parts of the animals we kill is just silly. Science isn’t saying “don’t use all parts of the animal”. Science is saying “the reason that we should use all parts doesn’t seem to be because they gave themselves to us for nourishment.” It’s explaining our world the best that we know how currently. Religion can take it personally if it would like, but don’t drag science down too. It’s just too impartial to play the blame game.
Oh, and Rod: Don’t for a second act like kids “sitting around the campfire, learning from grown-ups that the world is disenchanted after all” is in on any comparable level with kids going to evangelical bible camps, being broken down with criticism, encouraged into trances and “speaking in tongues”, and taught to laugh at science. A camp where kids are told that they can examine the world for themselves is far from a bad thing.
Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof
Over the course of my daily net-wandering, I came across this post, entitled “Proving God exists doesn’t work“. I don’t want to pick apart this post in too much detail, but I think that it’s important to point out what is a common misconception about the burden of proof argument. First, let me detail a few refutations of this atheistic stance that I’ve come across:
- You can’t see germs/wind/mother’s love, but you believe in that, therefore, God.
- With proof, there is no need for faith, which is the strongest acceptance of God (or variations)
- God could prove it, but he wouldn’t do so
- God is unknowable, so proof is out of the question
- We have the bible. QED.
I’ll begin at the top. Aside from emotional arguments (mother’s love, etc.) we can see those things. It’s not a valid argument to pick a sense and an object that is undetectable by that sense and equate it to God. I can’t see the wind, but I can feel it. I can see the leaves moving in a breeze. And when it comes to the appeal to emotion found by asking you to prove that your mother loved you, or some equally specious example, it is really nothing more than a sucker punch. It’s like if you argue the point, you’re agreeing that your mother didn’t love you, because you can’t quantify/touch/see it. The mother was real, and the experiences that led you to believe that she deeply loved you were real.
The need for faith: This one is a dodge, pure and simple. It basically says that this particular subject doesn’t apply to your argument, so drop it.
God can, but wont: He won’t? He used to prove himself all the time. What happened to the fun God that would create a son, send him down and perform miracles? Or talk out of a burning bush? Or… It seems that God’s presence in the world decreases as our understanding of how things work increases. Not to mention this little mind puzzle: If people were to accept God, they would be saved. God loves all of us infinitely. He could easily prove himself to every person on the planet, but leave the free will of choosing to follow him still in their hands. But he doesn’t, so some souls suffer for eternity.
God is unknowable: Then why are we even talking about this? This seems to be a backed-into-a-corner argument. When there aren’t any more convincing answers, pull out the unknowable argument and we’re stuck. Not because there was a crushing argument, but because there’s no argument to make with this. It’s as if we had this conversation:
Him: I believe in God.
Me: I do not.
Him: Banana pudding.
Me: …
Bible is proof: No, it isn’t. This has been thrown around for a long time, but it still comes up for some reason. The key point here is that the bible is only an authority if you’ve already accepted it as an authority. The circular logic is sound, as long as you’re in the loop. But I am not, and you need to show me why to take it seriously before I will take it seriously.
I have digressed somewhat from my original intent, so I’m sorry. The point that I want to make is that saying that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim isn’t really about asking you for proof of God’s existence. It’s really about highlighting the disparity between how Christians think about everything else in their lives, and how they think about God. I’m not looking for airtight evidence that God exists; I’m asking you to consider that this subject is no different to me than any other. I can parade a list of fictional things that I don’t believe in because there is no evidence (God, the tooth fairy, Bigfoot, unicorns, vampires), and in all but one case you will probably agree with me, but you treat religious belief differently. And once that happens we’re not able to discuss it. We’ve accepted different premises, and our arguments will be meaningless to each other from now on.
