A Debate on God's Existence

 Between Richard Swinburne and Peter Millican. 

I met Swinburne at Notre Dame in 1990. I remember him telling me he thought my rebuttal to Mackie on miracles was decisive. 

Here. 

Religion, Morality, and Kitty Wells

A redated post/ 

Country music, as most of us know, is  the most theology-laden form of popular music. The lyrics of this song, sung by Kitty Wells in the early 60s, illustrates, I believe, something interesting about the effect of religion on morality. It is a song of a woman who supposes herself to have been a wrongly deserted wife whose husband has given her divorce papers, all legal and proper. However, she asks whether "God is satisfied" with his actions, telling him that he will be called to account for what he has done by God, and implies that his lawyer won't do him any good when he stands before God and must be held accountable for his actions.

Your lawyer called and said he had the papers all prepared
To sign my name was all I had to do
He saw the judge, now he seen me, there's only one thing left
Will your lawyer talk to God for you?
Will your lawyer talk to God and plead your case up on high
And defend the way you broke my heart in two?
Manmade laws to set you free on earth but is God satisfied
Will your lawyer talk to God for you?
We all face that final judgment and it's very strict they say
When your time comes, I wonder what you'll do
Will you bow your head in shame or will you turn your head away
Or will your lawyer talk to God for you?
Will your lawyer talk to God and plead your case up on high
And defend the way you broke my heart in two?
Manmade laws to set you free on earth but is God satisfied
Will your lawyer talk to God for you?

I am not saying anything about the morality of divorce in general. Clearly, it is evident that at least some people desert marriages without adequate moral justification, and the law, as we currently conceive it, cannot prevent them from doing so. I bring these lyrics up because it seems to make nonsense of the popular idea that somehow religious belief, or lack of same, isn't a game-changer when it comes to morality. Assuming atheism, this appeal would be plain nonsense. Again, I am not arguing that no one can follow a moral code without a belief in God. But I think we must admit the force of this sort of consideration, and face that fact that many people, over the centuries, have turned away from a wrongful act because they believed that God would hold them accountable if they performed that action. I am thinking primarily here of the accountability and shame for these actions, as opposed, say punishment in hell. If someone can't see the moral force of this sort of thing, then I would have to say there is a screw loose somewhere.

God is not Tinkerbell

Some people seem to have the strange idea that God really exists for the people who believe in God, but does not exist for atheists. No side is in error, reality is just what you believe.

This makes no sense to me.

C. S. Lewis rejects idealism

A tutor must make things clear. Now the Absolute cannot be made clear. Do you mean Nobody-knows-what, or do you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) a Person? After all, did Hegel and Bradley and all the rest of them ever do more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley? I thought not. And didn't Berkeley's "God" do all the same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had at least some notion of what we meant by Him? I thought He did. So I was driven back into something like Berkeleyanism; but Berkeleyanism with a few top dressings of my own. I distinguished this philosophical "God" very sharply (or so I said) from "the God of popular religion." There was, I explained, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him. For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more "meet" Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. I didn't call Him "God" either; I called Him "Spirit." One fights for one's remaining comforts.

Surprisingness and evidence for supernatural occurrences

From my paper "Miracles and the Case for Theism."

It is true that in order for miraculous occurrences to play a role
in a case for theism, it must be the case that such events contradict
naturalistic expectations. But it does not follow that, from the point
of view of naturalism, these events have to be maximally improbable.
Other events that contradict naturalistic expectations to a greater degree
can be passed off as mere anomalies because no plausible theistic
explanation is available to tempt the naturalist to alter his beliefs about
the way the world works. Paul Horwich gives an account of what it is
for an event to be surprising that may shed some light on this matter.
He claims that it is necessary to distinguish between unlikely events
and surprising events, since many unlikely events do not surprise us.
If I were to flip a coin 100 times and get heads every time it would
surprise me, even though any other sequence of heads and tails would
be equally unlikely. What distinguishes surprising events from other
unlikely events is the presence of an alternative account of the circumstances
under which the event occurred, an account not previously
accepted, that would diminish the improbability of the event in
question. Thus in the coin-tossing case the possibility that the coin
might not be fair causes me to wonder if the world is in fact the way
I, who am accustomed to coins being fair, previously thought it to be.
This explains why it would not be surprising if Jones were to win a
lottery amongst a billion people, but it would be surprising if Smith
were to win three lotteries amongst a thousand people, even though it
is more probable that Smith should win his three thousand-person
lotteries than that Jones should win a billion-person lottery. This is
because the Smith case gives me reason to change my background
assumption about the fairness of the lotteries in a way that the Jones
case does not. Thus surprisingness, for Horwich, does not vary with
improbability, it varies with the degree to which events force us to
change our hypotheses about how things happen in the world. 21 In
cases where there is evidence that a miracle has occurred, it is the
combination of natural improbability and the availability of supernatural
explanation that makes the evidence surprising from the point
of view of naturalism, not the improbability alone. So perhaps we can
attribute Mackie's insistence that miracles are maximally improbable
for atheists to the fact that good evidence for miracles would be maximally
surprising for atheists; for persons with a naturalistic bent the
acceptance of miracles requires a thorough revision of their view of
the world. (Miracles would also surprise theists, if they were not expecting
God to act in the way he did and would find it necessary to
change their view about what God is like). However, as Horwich has
shown, surprisingness is not strictly a function of improbability; therefore
Mackie is mistaken in assuming that since miracles are maximally
surprising they must also be maximally improbable.  

Why Francis Collins believes in God

The head of the Human Genome Project.

Evolution and its impact on Christian theism

There are two aspects of evolution that raise issues for religion. One is the obvious conflict between the theory of evolution and the traditional literal reading of Genesis. If, as traditionalists assert, the Bible gives us a comprehensive genealogy of the human race, then the age of not only "the earth" but also the heavens can at least approximately be calculated, and it comes to about 4004 B. C. (at least, that is what Bishop Ussher thought). That, of course, conflicts with evolution, but it also conflicts with garden-variety astronomy, which teaches that distant stars can be a million light years away. This site attempts to answer that question on behalf of the traditional reading of Genesis.  But such a reading of Genesis was rejected not merely by moderns who have been shown the problems with this by modern science. It was rejected by St. Augustine, hardly someone running scared from modern science.

The other, and more serious issue, is that evolution attempts to provide an explanation of speciation which replaces design with a trial and error process without design. At least in theory, you should be able to get to any level of sophistication in the engineering of the human body through genetic replication, natural selection, and, of course, enough time. So we can't go as easily as believers would like from what looks like the tremendous engineering of the human body to an intelligent designer, much less a creator. What looked to even our eighteenth century forbears like overwhelming reason to believe that there was an intelligence behind our universe (even for deists, who claimed that God created and designed the universe, but did not interfere in its operation, and did not incarnate himself as Christ to save the world). Even Hume, depending on how you read him, seems to cave in to a very denatured form of the design argument at the end of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But ever since Darwin, the sledding has been tougher for arguments from design to a Designer of the world. Some of the most popular forms of the design argument today make an end run around evolution, and look at the cosmic constants in place at the Big Bang, which, by definition cannot be products of an evolutionary process. 

Induction and a mentalistic universe

Doctor Logic: Expectation assumes induction. If I give up induction as a principle of reason, I wouldn't expect anything at all. I certainly couldn't expect that God would keep things regular because that would involve induction somewhere along the line.

VR: My expectation that God would keep things regular is a direct inference from the immediate knowledge I have of my own mind (about the only thing, perhaps, that I have immediate knowledge about). I know what it is to have a mind. And a mind that prefers disorder to order is simply not a mind. Hence there is something incoherent about the idea of a disordered and chaotic universe that was made by a mind, but there is nothing incoherent about the idea of a chaotic universe that was not made by a mind.

Deconversion, Skepticism, and the intellectual Mount Olympus

As someone who abandoned Christian soteriological exclusivism in 1974, and as someone who has at least universalist sympathies, I can assure you that the fear of hell is not keeping me in the fold. Conversions and deconversions are difficult and life-changing experiences. It's funny, when I talk about Lewis's experience as the most reluctant convert in all England, (you know the passage in Surprised by Joy, surely), people point out quite correctly that however thought-out that experience might have been, it provides no guarantee that he reasoned correctly. And the same observation must be made of your leaving the fold. (Of course, some people go further and say that Lewis was really converted by wishful thinking despite the fact that he said he was accepting something he very much did NOT prefer to be true. And of course, I could use exactly the same tactic on your deconversion.)

I don't think I have a naive view of human cognitive powers. What the sciences tell us is that it is very difficult to be rational. What I deny is that there is some position of "skepticism" that is some intellectual Mount Olympus from which we can escape our tendency toward bias. Leaving the fold doesn't cure it.  Getting an Outsider Test diploma doesn't cure it. What we have to do is make a lifelong effort to think well, and that remains difficult whether you are a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or an atheist.

One way of expressing my doubts about the outsider test is just to deny that there really is an outside. There is none. Wherever you go, there you are. We can imagine ourselves having different intellectual predispositions from what we have and then looking at the evidence to see if we would be persuaded by that evidence if we were differently predisposed. That's an interesting and worthwhile procedure, but hardly an experimentum crucis for religious beliefs.

I don't think you even understand the function of the Bayesian models that I use. I would never say, in any non-relative sense, that the Resurrection is 94% probable. I think that rationality is a matter of adjusting our current beliefs based on evidence, and so the Bayesian model just tells you what to do in the light of evidence. It allows me to "map" how people with different fundamental beliefs can be influenced by evidence and can adjust our beliefs in the light of that evidence. It also explains how reasonable people can disagree about religion without either side being open to charges of irrationality. That doesn't look like a game to me. You have a better model? Tell me about it.

I've always been aware of human irrationality. It's just that when atheists tell me that it all lies on the side of the believer, I consider THAT to be psychologically naive.

Burden, Burden, who's got the burden

This is Raply McInerny's essay arguing that, contrary to popular opinion, the burden of proof is really on the atheist.

I know Keith Parsons responded to this, and I linked to him earlier. But I would like some responses to this essay, first. 

The Outsider Test, Onions, and Inconvenient Truths

The outsider test is kind of like an onion. On the outer layer, there is a legitimate appeal to be fair to opposing views, to counteract bias, etc. At that level it operates as a kind of golden rule for beliefs. So it is sometimes helpful to imagine yourself as an outsider to your religion, treating it with the same kind of skepticism with which you treat other religion.

But if it is restricted to religions, then people who are not within a religion get an automatic pass, since it isn't hard for an atheist to say he is just as skeptical of Christianity as of Islam, since he believes both to be false and delusional. Should atheism get a free pass here? I know a lot of Christians who work very hard at coming to terms with the "inconvenient truths" for the Christian belief system. If you go to a Society of Christian Philosophers meeting, the best-attended session is always the session on the problem of evil. And then I see atheists treating their own view like a slam-dunk, as if there are no inconvenient truths for their world-view. You get the argument that their position is different because it is a non-belief, rather like not collecting stamps. You get the argument that allegiance to science somehow gives them a free pass. It is like pulling teeth to get some people to realize that confirmation bias doesn't stop once you go out the church door and shake the dust off your feet.

And, you get the argument that we can judge who has "really" taken the outsider test, based on whether the one claiming to take the test has reached the same conclusions about religion that the atheist has reached. They say, "This is the conclusion I have reached, I consider it to be true, so if someone comes to an opposing position, it MUST be because of insider bias, of a failure to REALLY take the outsider test." This in the area of biblical scholarship, where there is little consensus, and a lot of presuppositional issues to deal with as well as evidential issues. Here Tim McGrew's distinction between the heuristic and diagnostic uses of the outsider test is important. It isn't the test I object to as the way it ends up being construed, and the idea that atheists can look at their own answer key to test whether someone has really taken the test or not.

I have never seen an overall superiority of atheists to theists in the area of maintaining that constant struggle to come to terms with the inconvenient truths for their own philosophies. If anything, it has always looked to be to be the other way around.

I realize this is not really an answer to the specifics of Arizona Atheists's response to me. I will get to that, I hope, in the next day or two.

God, the external world, and the burden of proof

Atheist: I'm not making a claim that something exists. You are. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.

VR: I claim that the physical world exists. You deny it, and say that it is an illusion. Gosh, it looks like I've got the burden of proof. What am I going to do? Kick a stone?

God, Cause and Effect, and Natural Belief

One reason people offer for believing in God is it natural to do so. David Hume argued that if you had to prove the legitimacy of the principle of cause and effect, you could never do so without begging the question (that is, assuming what you're trying to prove). But since it comes naturally to us, and is practically useful, we have no reason do be skeptical of cause and effect. Others have argued that belief in God comes naturally to us, and even though perhaps we can't prove that God exists, it is sufficiently natural that we ought to continue to believe it until someone proves to us the contrary. 

What are the bad arguments for your position?

I thought I would redate this one.

If you believe in God, do you believe that there are any bad arguments for theism? I certainly do. The ontological argument just seems to me like one huge mistake. And there are others that I have doubts about, such as the Thomistic cosmological argument.

If you are an atheist, what arguments do you think are bad arguments for atheism?

If you are a theist and you like all the arguments for theism, or if you are an atheist and think all the arguments for atheism are good, then it makes me a tad suspicious that you might be an ideologue, not really thinking but just reacting.

Theism, atheism, and non-rational motivations

Victor wrote: "And none of us is intellectually pure, in that, emotional reasons are always going to be present no matter what we believe, so long as we care about what we believe."




Ken: I'm a sinner. I don't ever think that any other atheists have any huge advantage in the objectivity department. One can always cite some sources of bias for the opposition. This doesn't mean atheists can't have an edge in objectivity.



A case can be made that the emotional motivations of Christians are stronger than that of atheists and agnostics, so while there is no question about the lack of objectivity of both sides, there remains the question of the degree of which our respective beliefs are determined by our emotions.



On the non-theist side we have elitism, desire for a carefree, sinful lifestyle, and sometimes peer pressure, other times the desire to be different, with the latter conflicting influences depending on the circumstances (such as conforming to a nonconformist ingroup).



On the Christian side, the most obvious are the self-preservation imperative (cultural or personal), widespread indoctrination, desire for good fortune, moral security, moral certainty and conformity.



Of course the more particular motivations of non-theists may also account for their relative scarcity, assuming all other things being equal such as reasoning ability. But if we could distill the objective out of the subjective, we may find that atheism is the modestly more pure position as an initial, very simple assumption.

VR: I suppose we can start analyzing this by looking at non-truth-tracking causes for beliefs. Believing, religiously, what one is raised to believe, for example, doesn't appear to be truth-tracking, since clearly we people are raised to believe various things, and the likelihood of coming with falsehoods just picking your beliefs that way seems rather high. Believing what you wish to believe is in general not truth-tracking, your wishes and your fears come true, for the most parts, in equal proportions.

But how many people in our society have strong Christian upbringings? I don't think most people in America are raised by dedicated Christians. Sure, there are high polling numbers for theism on Gallup surveys, but most households, I think, do not provide anything like a strong indoctrination into Christianity. I grew up in a United Methodist church, but I also spent most of my academic career in atmospheres which were hostile to Christianity.

Also, when you start reflecting on your beliefs, your non-rational reasons for believing somethings start making you suspicious, as opposed to supporting your beliefs. Insofar as I felt myself wanting to believe that Christianity is true, it was a source of doubt rather than faith. I had, after all, read Russell, who told me it was "pusillanimous and sniveling" to give in to the will to believe.

And these non-rational factors are so variable from person to person. While many people fear extinction, C. S. Lewis claimed to have no such fear. He wrote:

"And it remains true that I have, almost all of my life, been quite unable to feel that horror of nonentity, of annhilation, which, say Dr. Johnson felt so strongly. I felt it for the first time only in 1947. But that was after I had long been reconverted and thus begun to know what life really is and what would be lost by missing it."
(Surprised by Joy, Harcourt Brace and Company, p. 117.)

Now, I suppose a skeptic could sit here and play Freud, and argue that this was a piece of disingenuous subtle propaganda to make us think he was really persuaded by argument to believe, when really he wished his way back to Christianity. But on what possible evidence? And couldn't we play that game with everyone, if we some particular theory of why people believe, or why people disbelieve? If I hold the thesis that everyone who rejects Christianity does so out of a desire to engage in sexual conduct that Christianity proscribes, surely I could follow Freud in finding sexual motivations where none appear to be on the face of things.

So, I think we have reason to be aware of the non-rational motivations that might be moving us toward belief or unbelief. But this probably is not going to give us much of an argument one way or another. If anything, I could make the case that the Christian philosophers I know tend to be more conscious of their own intellectual frailties, than most atheist philosophers I know.

An Internet Infidels' Review of Dawes' Theism and Explanation

Concerning an issue that I find very interesting.

Wood and Loftus are at it again

I'm going to listen to this as soon as I get a little time. David said he used some of my arguments.

Kelly Clark and Brian Leiter on anti-theistic bias in philosophy departments

Towards the end of this thread, Christian philosopher Kelly Clark raises the question of anti-theistic bias in getting philosophy jobs. This is of interest to me, because I never got a permanent philosophy position back when I was job-hunting. I think it didn't help me, back then, to have my CV covered with paper presentations at the Society of Christian Philosophers and references to C. S. Lewis in those presented papers and in my dissertation description. (Of course, every person's job search experience is different, and many factors are involved). If I had it to do over again, I probably would have done it with a lower Christian profile.

Many secular philosophy departments have plenty of people in them who not only think theism is false, but think of it as a philosophical nonstarter and evidence of some sort of failing in a philosopher. They believe, with Russell, that it is not only false, it does harm. They might recognize that Plantinga is really, really smart, but kind of weird because he's a theist. Do they have an obligation to help to create an open intellectual atmosphere in their universities?

People like Dawkins walk a fine line. They feel they ought to talk about religion, yet long for the day when it can be dismissed with a horse laugh.

Gosh. Is my argument really that strong???

The theist in this debate presents the argument from reason, and the atheist.....forfeits!

If God used an evolutionary process to create us, why did he do it that way?

An interesting question relating the argument from evil to evolution. This is a common argument against forms of theism that accept at least large chunks of evolutionary biology:

Using an evolutionary process over a long time, as opposed to custom-creating everything in six days, seems to leave us with a world that has a lot of suffering in it that would not have otherwise have been there.
Further, one of the reasons that is most frequently offered for believing in evolution is that we have various features that are less than optimal. Our backs tend to hurt because standing straight is a relatively new development in our evolution, and somewhat unnatural. But if God had custom-made us, he would have given us stronger backs that don't get sore so easily. Why didn't God do that?

What is the best theistic response to this objection?